This week has been a slow one since the majority of my time has been spent understanding the many different ways that business can reach potential customers, and how to solicit business in an effective and repeatable way. A short episode this week but keep reading if these lessons would help you on your journey!
Not all businesses have a web presence, which to me is already very interesting (how are people finding them? do newspapers and billboards still exist?). However, those that do typically have a website with either a 'Contact Us' page, or an email somewhere to 'roger@greatbusiness.co.uk' or something like that (not sure if that's a real email, I just made it up). Conventional wisdom would be to write a short script which pulls email and contact pages from websites and send millions of emails out to all of them with a solid pitch.
The hard parts in this scenario are the actual sending of the emails (email and domain reputations exist, and outreach at this scale would likely result in spam triggers), and the solid pitch. If you follow me on social media you'll know I'm having some difficulty with the pitch part, and the email part a little bit but I'm not scaling that aggressively yet. Anyway, after discussions with the many wise intellectuals of reddit (half-joke, some of the comments and posts I've seen are actually very useful), it's clear that the cold email approach simply won't be effective outside of pitching very direct and well thought out solutions to problems, which unfortunately I do not yet have. Even then, response rates of this kind of marketing are abysmal, with a 1-5% response rate considered good in some circles. So, back to the drawing board but another lesson learned to save you some time!
On the social media side of things, there's a movement called 'building in public', which is the concept of continuously sharing what you're doing as a way to document your progress and learn from others on a similar path. In a sort of self-fulfilling way, this is itself a form of marketing, with creators banding together and users of those creator's projects also active in the community. This sort of organic cross-polination of ideas means that past a critical mass, say 30,000 followers, unless the product is complete dish water, it stands a chance of making at least some revenue. The question in my mind then is; should building an audience be the real goal here?
I'm not sure, after all, without a solid product what would an audience be watching? Unless entrepreneurial flailing is a form of edu-tainment? Anyway, I don't have an interesting takeaway here other than joining the build in public movement has been net positive so far, and if you're on the technical side or even the creative side (or something else entirely), then I would encourage you to do the same.
That's all for this week. I envisioned an existence free of meetings, emails, and talking to people after leaving London. But it turns out you have to do at least a little bit of that to pay for drinks. Anyway hope all is well on your end, next week I'll share the results of my ongoing outreach efforts while preparing to move apartments for the last time before leaving Vietnam (time flies!).
Thanks for reading,
Oliver
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