How ConvertKit Went From $1.5k to $100k MMR in 12 Months

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hey everyone welcome to the copy vlogger podcast my name is tim stodder thank you so much for joining me my co-host ethan brooks hello ethan great to talk to you hope you had a great week what's going on man happy saturday this time around we're recording a day later than normal we are we were both traveling probably crossed paths somewhere between well i guess there's the i-75 we both would have taken somewhere you went from austin up to connecticut's new england right you guys consider yourselves new englanders yeah and i am back in nashville after my glorious month in miami doing nothing but drinking cuban coffee and eating chicken empanadas and just sitting on the beach [Laughter] all right i wanted to start off this episode with a thank you just as we hit record we got a really kind word from john reagan i think that's how you say his last name you can follow him on twitter at john reagan r-a-g-o-n he's a member of the copyblogger academy and uh in regards to our last episode ethan he said this was such a clutch episode you guys brought great points on when and how referral programs actually help good tools and nothing without clear strategy so i think that is a compliment mostly to you ethan because you are breaking down louie's program and congratulations on doing a great job and john thank you so much for the kind words that really means a lot to us so thank you yeah thanks john all right i'm gonna kick this one off man let's just let's just dive right into it because last week there was something that i was excited to talk about but i just got too amped up about that outlier algorithm that uh that you and i spoke about but this week i also wanted to talk about this twitter thread that ethan put together so how convertkit went from 1500 mmr to 100k mmr in 12 months and you know what i didn't pull out the actual thread but i will find it now and the moral of the story for his thread is all about direct sales and i thought this was such a cool cool thing for nathan to talk about because so many people who are starting companies think content marketing and instagram and let me just get as much attention as possible to what i'm working on and my product but and you know me i'm a sales guy there is still just so much value into sitting down at your computer networking with people sending cold or warm emails finding a way to to make relationships and just telling people um about your product so i guess i should show this to you as well ethan so you can take a look at it but it's an amazing twitter thread by nathan barry who's the founder of convertkit and i'll just i'll read a couple points here i started convertkit with the goal of 5k in monthly revenue within 6 months initial traction came quickly but then stalled out at 2k a month and gradually declined to 1.5 k so this first tweet blew my mind because if anybody knows convertkit i think they're doing like 30 million a year right now nathan i was like 98 of the company you know like hardly any um venture i think actually uh convertkit put like a million dollars or excuse me i think um hubspot uh the ceo of hubspot i can't remember his name right now but i think he put a million dollars into convertkit last year and that's really nothing in comparison like they have very low funding very very bootstrapped an amazing and amazing product and nathan's just like a great a great founder and so the fact that he's saying that like he was struggling to hit 1.5 k a month in sales just totally uh humbled me a little bit like reminded me not to have that hero warship right everybody has to start somewhere but then i discovered the key direct sales here are 10 steps i followed to build an effective direct sales process i'm not going to read all of them i'll go through it briefly step one choose a niche you and i both really really agree on this step two create a list this is very very important because with direct sales i think one of the problems people make is just start emailing people and the way to do it is actually to breathe take a step back research people find out about them find out how you can provide value to them like what they're into what some of their hobbies are so that you can make like a warm connection and not come across as just another one of those terrible spam emails that we all get all the time number three ask about frustrations i don't know where number four is can i pause you for just a second so step two there was create a list as in this is like a list of people that you're going to reach out and talk to and just try to raise capital vc said the market was too narrow but i actually niched down further he's talking about how to niche down and he got very specific and then he found a bunch of people who represented the types of people who might buy his software that's the list that he's talking about and then he went and followed them all these are all like public facing people so it's not private citizens these are people who are building blogs and stuff in a particular space that was who he was targeting and so he went and he created this list that way and then he and then the ask about frustrations is reaching out to those people that he was following yeah exactly thanks for the check i should probably slow down on this a little bit so his actual tweet was when i tried to raise capital all the vc said our market was far too narrow but i actually niched down further i go to email marketing for professional paleo recipe bloggers who are women or men's fashion bloggers in nyc i got very specific this allowed me to use twitter google and quote top blogs and x category posts to compile a list of who to contact subscribe and this is the real important part subscribe to their newsletters follow them on twitter and interacted with their content so when i reached out they'd recognize me so again he didn't just start emailing people he didn't just try to get quote unquote coffee meetings with important people he took the time to build relationships with folks that he think might be a good fit for his product for convertkit and so i think it's easy for a lot of people to jump the gun and i mean i've done this you've done this everyone's done this you assume you have to go for volume when you're doing outreach because you assume it's going to have a really low response rate but you know i come from a community building background i've built professional communities in a couple of different industries everywhere from you know like five to ten thousand plus users and even in those pools where you have like five ten thousand people there are a handful who are really engaged with what you're doing and everybody on the team can name them so if you go to like the you know my team at trends right now and ask anybody that's involved in that product they'll who are the most involved people in our community there's a really good chance that at least two or three of the names that come out of that are going to be the same no matter who you ask and so it doesn't take much to get to the top of the of the radar like across a company if you're willing to just put that time in and engage inside their community in a way that's like helpful and organic i think a lot of people miss that totally agree that's so true isn't it i can do the same thing within the academy there's i think we have 1200 members now and there's probably like 40 or 50 that drive a majority of the engagement so i think again to nathan's point the interaction always exists within i mean i hate the word influencers but but let's just use that word right there's a there's a majority of people who have all like the social clout within communities or a minority of people excuse me and so if you can just navigate your way and build relationships with those people it's going to be very very effective for you for sure and yeah thanks for slowing me down i think this is actually worth going through in detail step three ask about frustrations i then email them directly rather than asking for them to buy or demo my product i'd ask about what was frustrating them about mailchimp aweber or whatever they were using the email was short personal and name dropped the most relevant customers so here's just an example of an email sarah is anything frustrating you with mailchimp the reason i ask is i run convertkit which is the email marketing platform for for professional bloggers we got a lot of great bloggers using us like katie and seth from wellness mama pat flynn from smart passive income and chris skillabo i'd love to hear more about how we can build it better to serve bloggers like you talk soon the responses poured in these bloggers were frustrated with not being able to segment their list which by the way is the best part about convertkit create opt-ins to give away a free guide or incentive creating automated email calls courses and more the exact things i was frustrated with that got me to start convertkit so he's doing like one-on-one product research he's like finding his product market fit directly through interaction with people yeah and i wanna take a second to just talk about how something like this might be applied to somebody who's trying to build like a content-based business yeah right because in his case he's building software but i actually think this process carries over so if you were to just follow what we've laid out so far what nathan's laid out so far you would be really clear about your niche and pick something that's super specific like what do you want to write topics on last week you talked about how you basically been like the country's leading expert in seo strategy for content related to addiction uh recovery programs and stuff like that right that's fairly specific be specific about your niche then identify who are the types of people that you should reach out or who are the types of people who are the people you could reach out to and i think what's unique about what nathan did that might carry over to the writing world is he was looking for people who are not just building in his space but were building in his space and had some verified use of like a competing product right so they're using mailchimp or something like that so he's not just picking random people he's picking people who are using a tool that is similar to convertkit that he can convert them on and so what would that be for writers i think it would be something like the first thing that comes to mind for me is like copy dot ai which is they might have changed their name at this point but it's like these automated writing services that are just cranking out copy maybe it's working maybe it's not i don't know is there anything else that comes to mind for you like if you were doing this for a content based business where would you look for the kind of the mirror images of your like potential clients totally i would look a lot at digital products that aren't sas related nathan it's important because we talk about this journey a lot and nathan like all of the best entrepreneurs i know started off as a freelancer and then built a company out of a specific skill and i think the majority of writers are at that like third stage where they know how to write well they know how to build an email list and they're probably creating like digital products to sell to their audience and i think that there's so many there's so many ways to format and present info products especially which you know we don't want to get into this but the way the education system is going right now and like it's just it's so so clear to me that digital certifications and educational products are just going to be like multi multi-billion dollar businesses and so yeah there's just a ton of room to build a business by selling your knowledge basically like naval ravicon says like sell your specific knowledge so to me when i think of content marketing obviously content marketing applies to a lot of different industries it applies to everything but for the most part the people that are interested in what we do with copyblogger and with trends in the hustle is they're looking to create an audience so that they can sell like a piece of themselves basically so that they can productize a thing that they know into a course or an ebook or a package or a membership or something along those lines and so what i would do is research how other people have packaged products especially educational products and courses well and maybe this is speaking very personally because i find it very very difficult to figure out how to present a curriculum for whatever this madness is that's packed inside my brain and i find that to be like a real real challenge it's like i know what i know how do i package this in a way so that the curriculum is like easily absorbed my sister who's a personal trainer she's building some really badass input products i know that she struggles with this it's just it's a hard thing and some people are kind of really good at it you know they just get like this is exactly the order to present this information but coming full circle i think that for quote unquote content marketers and people building personal brands and people building email lists and audiences the the biggest stopping block to monetize that is creating really really high level info products that present well and so that would be like my competitive advantage that i would be researching for i figured out like how did this person what did you like about this course you know like what was it about this information that was presented so well you know like why does trends have such a high retention rate compared to other memberships where people usually stay for like a month or two and then leave you know like those are the kind of things that i would want to learn as i'm asking about frustrations interesting okay so i i stopped you there that brings us all the way up to like three slash four and then number four so anybody watching the video um number three was asking about frustrations and so number five there's no four unless you deleted it so number five is is get on a call that lead that led naturally to a conversation about how i'd solved some of those same issues i'd offer a call to a give them some suggestions to improve things in their current tool and b show them what i built with convertkit i did hundreds of skype calls man i love this i love this so much it's too automated the internet and like this cool like the sexiness of of building a leveraged business right leverage is badass and i'm i'm an automation guy like i love it you know i love the autoresponders and i love the emails but there is just nothing we're people like we are emotional beings we're not logical beings like we are emotion first always and so the value of just doing a skype call listening to somebody trying to solve their problems even if it doesn't lead to a direct sale like that that reputation building and that relationship building not not for the sake of like being directly transactional you know but just for the sake of putting good vibes out there i don't even know how else to say it's just creating a like a better world around you it is so effective and i really wish more people did it yeah i uh i've seen a lot of people do [Music] this kind of process in order to get new ideas off the ground and also uh build their network in a new space you know like this exact same footprint so far could be used yes it can be very effective for direct selling software this can also be really good way of transitioning into a new field so if anyone's like stepping away from a job into whatever your side hustle is and you want to kind of develop that professional network literally steps one through five are a perfect way of doing that as well you know totally yeah completely agree all right so number six remove the biggest objection this was probably my favorite part because again just as a salesperson people's biggest hurdle is just going in for the close so many people spend so much time like talking and adding value and talking about their products and services and then when it comes down to it they're like scared to just ask for money and ask for the clothes and i get it it's very very nerve-wracking but it's it's it's like anything else once you do it a couple of times you realize it's not as scary as you think it is so so number six remove the biggest objection most early sales conversations ended with saying quote convertkit sounds great and i love what you're about but switching providers is so much work sorry it's not going to happen ouch just when i thought the conversation was going so well i tried to explain my way through it it's not that hard and you just have to blah blah blah but nothing worked on one call out of desperation i said i'll do it for you for free that worked they said uh okay let's do it what followed became our concierge migrations program there's there's a book um ah what is it called we were just talking about ramit sethi before we started recording and he has this guy that was very influential to him damn i cannot remember what the book is called i'll put it in the show notes and he has a philosophy about sales where it's just about risk because the the the risk is always on the person purchasing and so if as the seller you can remove all of the risk and take the risk away from them then there's no reason for them not to convert because there's nothing in it to lose and so i i love this i love finding the finding the risk and taking the burden of risk to to make it like a no-brainer for them to transition yeah that's a great point and i think we've talked about this in a past episode but like one of the really important parts of that is making sure that you're finding the real objection so when you say finding the risk it's like what is the thing that's actually stopping them because very often what you're going to hear at this stage of the process is something like well something like this maybe all it's too complicated or more likely to be like i gotta talk to my team or ah this just isn't like a priority for us right now something like that and if that's the truth that's fine you have to deal with that but a lot of times we're gonna give you kind of a smoke screen objection in order to avoid hurting your feelings and get them out of the conversation and stuff like that and so if you can find the real one and remove it but but i mean if you can find the real one to remove it that's great but you got to know that you're working with the real objection there yeah you're like a tim ferriss guy right what's he say ask why three times you know like if there's a column you say why and then they give you an answer and then you say why and you give an answer and you say why again like you always actually figure out what the root of any um problem or mental block or like fear of a decision is yeah well yeah there's there's uh there's that concept of like i think it's it's either three wise or five wise or something like that but for anybody thinking about that from a sales perspective you're gonna have to find a way to camouflage those y's if someone's just like no i don't want to buy this and you're like why maybe that'll work who knows maybe there's somebody out there making that work but that's a real good way to uh to get yourself beat up in person could you imagine i'll have to like just record a phone call or something i'm doing that why see like what happens i feel like it would probably have like a 50 success rate yeah maybe because someone will be just be so shocked it's like uh so this is such a random example but uh some so we we caught some guy like a year and a half ago trying to break into my car i walked out front and there was some dude in my car and the first thing he did is he said do you know where the closest mcdonald's is and i just completely froze and i said like no and then by the time i answered he got away so it might be one of those things where people are like ah and then they just like give you the answer that's hilarious there's that's perfect too i'm going to keep that in my arsenal for next time i break into a car speaking of tim ferriss there was a episode where he was talking to somebody i think it might have been derek sivers and they were talking about this mentalist and i forget what the frame of the conversation was but a story came up with this guy what's the word i'm looking for they're we're so kind of driven and oriented by what we perceive around us that when you throw somebody's perception of the situation off even just a little bit you can really throw them for a loop like the story you just told this guy he was mugged one time and like i think he was at gunpoint or knife point and instead of freaking out you just started talking like somebody said like you know give me your wall and he goes yeah my uncle had a wall like a little wall this high just like that and the guy's like yeah little wall lots of ducks you know right and left whoever he was interviewing i think it was derek sippers told it perfectly so for people who are interested you know it's a great interview go back and listen to it but the idea was that if you can change context like that hard left turn you can even de-escalate like these violent situations where people just they don't even know what to do anymore because they're so set in their pattern that when you break it it's like i don't even know what to do wow this is like a really great storyteller too i can imagine that being super super entertaining okay so we're on to number seven do anything to get the customer i'd get logging credentials to their site email provider and any plugins that i'd manually move everything over forms email sequences templates etc it was tedious and time consuming especially for only a 50 a month customer i remember watching netflix on one monitor while copying pasting and formatting long email sequences to the other my hourly rate was less than five dollars an hour for those early customers far from the 150 an hour i've been charging for design services but it was working to get momentum i love this i i really do i mean you and i both have like similar opinions on hustle culture right like hustle you know team no sleep is super toxic and super ineffective but i also think that there is just such an opportunity for everybody who's just willing to work a little bit harder because most people don't work that hard like they really don't most people just don't want to get up a little bit earlier and stay up a little bit later and it doesn't take 120 hours a week you know it takes just sacrificing going out for drinks with your friends on the weekends it takes not watching like the voice every night and copying and pacing for like an hour and a half you know and so i really really love this for two reasons one because nathan's a hard worker he did what he had to do to get the job done but also this last line but he was working to get momentum because i really really do think in business there's such a thing as as momentum like once the ball starts rolling down the hill you can just ride that wave yeah i was thinking about the whole hustle culture thing the other day and i think my opinions on this are fluid obviously i work for a company called the hustle so we hear both sides of the equation quite frequently and i do agree like you know beyond a certain point it's it's not productive to continue working hard but i also think that like to some degree that was the mindset that got me a lot of the things that i'm really grateful for today and so i think where i currently stand on it is like for anybody listening to this i would say don't ever let anybody shame you for your work ethic like it's become very trendy to hate on people who work hard or you know like to kind of rail back against the hustle culture fine let people do that but you know if you're like on a mission and this type of work makes sense to you like never ever ever let anybody say that you're doing something wrong by hustling but like you know realize there's there's trade-off and at a certain at a certain point you might be saying no to something that you wish you have said yes to down the line but this is the thing that nobody talks about i have yet to find a single person in this game who doesn't hustle and is successful like and i hate that i actually don't love that term for describing it but like even the happiest most fulfilled best most balanced people that you know they work really hard they just find a way to kind of incorporate it all into their day-to-day i have no i haven't met a single person who you know just kind of logs in checks the bank account make sure it's still growing and then like logs back out for the day it doesn't it's probably happening somewhere but i haven't seen it so for anybody out there who's like struggling with this or grinding or whatever just keep it up you know like that's how you that's kind of how you get there you just keep trying until finally something works and then you adjust along the way but don't feel bad because you're working hard in the meantime i think that's what he's getting here no question at all and this could be like a whole another podcast episode in fact i'd really love to talk about this to find like the balance of hard work and that point of um inefficiency you know where like your brain breaks down and there's a real scientific reason not to work that much because the the biggest caloric intake machine in your body is your brain right so like you just burn more calories thinking by far than anything else so from like a physiological standpoint yeah it doesn't make any sense but like you said i don't know a single person that i look up to or with anything really from a business standpoint from like a family standpoint you know the the men and women that i look up to in terms of like wow they they really have something that like i want to strive for like i i did a lot of thinking about the protestant work ethic because my my family is basically immigrants you know i'm the first full generation my father was the first person to be born in america from both sides of my family and my grandfather was catholic and my grandmother was protestant from my dad's side and so that's why they moved to america because they're from scotland and they weren't allowed to like have a relationship with each other and through that i learned a lot about this um this i guess it's history a philosophical concept that made america what it was and it's it's the protestant work ethic basically because um the pilgrims that came here the reason why they were persecuted was because protestantism believes that the path to salvation is through your work where catholicism catholicism believes that the path of salvation is like to get to the end of the life and then like repent on whatever you got where the protestants think like no like my work my day-to-day living is basically the way to live like quote your best life right and so it is that philosophy that made america the country that really was just willing to do like a little bit extra more and so there's like a huge huge argument to say that one of the reasons why this country has been so successful is straight up because we outworked everybody and until this day i just i've yet to see a really great replacement for just outworking people so you know we're getting like a little bit deep onto those concepts however nathan built probably a 30 million dollar company right now like he'll probably be a self-made billionaire and i think the whole entire thing started from copying and pasting people's email sequences so that they got an opportunity to log into convertkit and see that they liked it better than mailchimp or aweber and some other competitors so like we spent a lot of time on here but this number seven like do anything to get the customer right like do anything and it's just can't be it can't be overstated so i know i'm preaching a little bit but but man i just believe in this so much yeah well one of the other reasons that i think this is an important step that might not be sinking in with what nathan wrote is that i mean you don't have to do this forever right exactly this is yeah this is what you do uh early on and the insights that you glean from this lead to really important value props down the road and he said it himself like this became you know their concierge migration program yeah so eventually you know he's hiring for this they're creating systems and they're finding a way to make it economically viable and it's really important part of the business and it's scalable down the line it would be weird if he went out of his way today to get like some two-bit blogger on to copy blogger like literally volunteered to copy all his data over he's not going to do that today and you won't do it forever either but early on these high-touch manual labor like highly intensive interactions you'll learn a lot about your customer from them i'll i would be willing to bet anything that by doing those he probably was able to refine the copy or the um just the product because you see like exactly you see what data people need to put into it and like you know how much time that takes and what the hardest parts are you see that in a way that's more useful than if you're just talking to clients and hoping that they're going to get all the way through the product funnel on their own so yeah this is a really important step but you don't do it forever and that's also important to know by totally excellent all right moving on number eight create an echo chamber i noticed that every customer we landed made getting the next one a tiny bit easier well this is just exactly what you were just talking about more feedback references and names to drop in future emails once a fitness blogger said i feel like everyone on the internet is switching to convertkit since we had less than 5k in mmr that couldn't possibly be true but it seemed true for her i targeted any everyone in her niche and her mastermind group two had already switched and the other three were thinking about it big fish small pond that's how we built momentum i love this man i just want to pass it over to you because this is kind of a continuation of what you were talking about this reminds me of how tim ferriss markets books because uh one thing that he said publicly is that like you don't try to be everywhere for everyone but you you should try to be everywhere for a very specific type of person at a very specific time yeah you know and so when he sets up market like marketing campaigns they'll often take a user profile like you know somebody some guy like you or me you'll figure out okay well what are all the blogs that these guys read what are the newsletters that they read what are the podcasts that they're on etc it's not going to be that many right if you really know who your audience is because i don't know how many blogs could do you have time to read that day i don't have that much time and so if you hit like you know like the top one or two blogs top one or two podcasts top one or two newsletters all of a sudden it seems like this person is everywhere and really what it is is what nathan said just really knows that target audience and is able to create the illusion of being anywhere so i love this number nine ask for referrals oh this gets me so amped up so many people are just scared to ask like don't be scared to ask you're here to grow a business like you're here to get money in your bank account ask for referrals once a customer was set up and successful i'd ask who else i should talk to they'd always have at least one or two other bloggers to suggest those warm intros worked far better than cold outreach of course they did it's like a pass off like you have a what's the word authority being passed off by the person referring you soon referrals were driving as many calls as cold emails i mean it's pretty self-explanatory do you uh do you guys do this at either statsy or copyblogger actually i'm more interested in stazing since it's like service based yes absolutely and it's it's a perfect time to mention this because the last master class that i just did in wednesday it was about like closing deals because in copyblogger academy there's kind of there's one of two people people who are freelance writers that want to get clients and people who are like bloggers that want to sell digital products you know and so there's ways that we can serve both of them especially because the freelance writers you know like we talk about on this journey like eventually build a brand and figure out how to productize that knowledge and yeah i i i give the entire playbook man i do not hold back like to me there's no secrets it's all about execution and so i talk about my strategic partnership network there's a blog by david sax one of the best cs on the all in podcast and he's also one of the founders of paypal and he wrote a blog about how to create a sales program and and like the specific numbers of it and so i'll keep it all divisible by 10 because doing math live is like a terrible idea but he says he says that the commission should be 10 of their quota and their salary should be 10 of their quota so like if they're expected to hit a hundred thousand dollars in sales every year then their salary should be 10 000 and then their commission should be basically 10 which if they hit their quota turns into another 10 000 so in total 20 of the sales quota is what you're paying for the sales rep and so i've read that and i was thinking to myself like okay finally like i know how to price out building a sales team but then for some reason it just occurred to me that like i'm not selling a paypal i'm selling a service and service businesses especially in what we talk about with with niches are very like um like everybody knows each other like everybody goes to the same conferences and so i just figured why don't i take professionals in the industry and treat them like sales reps and then i don't have to pay for their salary and so we created a whole entire strategic pro strategic partnership program where we just give 10 referral fee to any deal that was passed off even if it's an email like even if all you did was just make an introduction and i did all the work and i and i closed it and i made that sale like i am privileged to and we automated it with the accountants and stuff like that too so the money part is really easy it just gets action to their bank accounts so yes like absolutely referrals are a huge part of how we generate sales especially because it's snowballs right like the the website and the content marketing and the high level email marketing stuff we do is is great for new business like that's how you build awareness but then you turn that awareness into trust and then you turn that trust into reputation basically and your reputation turns into your referral program because it's good for everybody you know like the strategic partner gets a little bit like free money in their bank account and we're super honest about it like i'm not trying to hide the fact that that we are incentivizing people but then it's great for the client because the client has already seen proof that like we know what we're doing and they get great results by working for us and obviously it's great for me because we get to build our company and i don't have to pay for a sales rep so like yeah referrals are huge all of that to say that referrals are a really really big part of like how i've generated our sales machine yeah that's fascinating what about a trial do you guys have a referral program that's a good question right i don't actually know the specifics of this um but a lowly writer uh which means yeah that place will fall apart without you ethan you're the glue you're the linchpin yeah yeah that's me yeah i'm the glue writer i think after we were acquired there was something that happened because we're publicly traded that affected how that worked but i don't uh i don't know i don't know right now i should probably figure that out i think what we have is like we have a referral program on the hustle and it gives out prizes and i think that's fine and the reason we may have had to end the one on trends is because it was straight cash referral and i think that might be that might get into some tricky legal area there for newsletters i think we talked about this in our last episode referral programs are like important but i don't know how much business they really drive uh for like a paid a paid newsletter it'd be really interesting to see that i've never seen those numbers for trends uh and i'm not sure if i've seen uh actually i haven't i haven't seen them for others i haven't seen the actual numbers but i did talk to this guy he runs the van trump report kevin van trump which is basically a paid newsletter all about agriculture industry it goes out to farmers and like commodities traders and stuff like that and what's really interesting about his is that the open rate on that newsletter is often above 100 it's like 120 130 percent yeah yeah so many people share it with with friends and stuff like that so if you have if you have like a newsletter like that and this is a couple hundred bucks a year uh it can be a really good way of of growing as well so for more on that i guess check out our last episode because we did a whole deep dive on referral programs but that's cool to hear that you guys use them so heavily over at stadzy cool all right and the last one number 10 be human i was always personal and human if someone didn't reply i never said you're harder to reach than the pope or did you get crushed by an elephant i don't know why that's so funny to me that's the only reason you wouldn't reply everyone is sick of that nonsense instead i'd say i'll follow up once more in two weeks and if i don't hear from you i'll assume it's not a good fit good move because sales isn't about convincing people to do something they don't want to do it's about aligning incentives but i'd still follow their content and gradually interact people would often come back a few months later and then hit a pain point or the timing was better the results i started at 1.5 k in december of 2015. by july 2016 i think he means it says by july 2015 but july 2016 six months after starting direct sales i completely turned around convert kids growth and hit 15k mmr one customer at a time what happened was the craziest period of my career not only was each sale getting easier because we had social proof but referrals were starting to come in influential bloggers like pat flynn and wellness mama switched i'm bridging through it a little bit now we wrote out an affiliate program to compensate these early promoters this is really clutch too convertkit has done really well with their affiliate program by the end of the year we hit 98k mmr the momentum was incredibly unscalable work that turned into very scalable growth this is exactly what you talked about before with manually like switching people over it's unscalable it's getting paid less than five dollars an hour and that momentum turned it into very scalable growth paul graham famously said do things that don't scale to get over the cold problems and start new products and kick start word of mouth gross do things that don't scale because that enables the channels that do scale today convertkit is the number one email marketing platform in the world for bloggers 29 million a year and it all started with a lot of cold emails and unscalable hustle i loved this i really did when i read it i really really enjoyed it it speaks to me as a hustler it speaks to me as somebody that appreciates people like having a vision and and just getting after it and uh and also i just think that for the people that listen to our podcast it's really really tangible and easy to follow advice that we can all use yeah this was great man thanks for bringing this up i thought we uh covered some interesting ground here uh i guess i'd be curious to hear what other people think of this how's that how this strikes them what like follow-up questions they have so for anybody listening i guess hit us up on twitter tell us what you think and let us know how you're implementing something like this you know for sure i totally agree i want to see how these scenarios from other people are landing because one of the things about advice is that it's so specific to the person like there's really no such thing as like generic business advice right because every business is different everybody has like different idiosyncratic problems that are only to them and so that's why i think what we're doing like i try to be as specific as possible and give like real detail-oriented advice that gives like tactics and strategies and not just some high-level esoteric thinking so i agree let us know how this is landing with you if it's helping you have you implemented any of this stuff i'd be really thrilled to hear it all right man is there anything else that you want to say no i think that's it so quick recap on this like basically be super clear about your niche figure out who specifically you can carry over to like your service or your product recognize that that probably won't scale early on but that's fine yeah offer to do things like reach out to them engage with them make sure you're a known part of their community because that's gonna give you an in we didn't mention this but that also probably makes the referral game a lot easier when you haven't just done like a service for them but they also know your name for a while and they've known it for like a little while reach out figure out what their pain points are and then do whatever it takes to get them over well thanks for everybody for listening if you would like please leave us a comment on itunes please subscribe on itunes and spotify it's the best thing you can do to support the show tell your friends and let us know what you think thanks everyone and we'll talk to you next week [Music] you