Even Dane Maxwell Would Be Amazed - Creating A SaaS Business with NO Money Like In The Foundation

[Harti]

Hey guys!
This progress thread here is all about building a SaaS business from scratch without investing own money and without coding it ourselves. Before I’ll start getting into it let me introduce myself and my friend that pursues the journey with me.

About us
My name is Harti, I am 18 years old and from Germany. Me and my friend Julian (@JayTrump ,17 years old) recently graduated from the german equivalent of an American college preparation school and now are able to choose the direction we want our lifes to go. Luckily I stumbled upon The Millionaire Fastlane months ago, read it and many more classics like Rich Dad Poor Dad and Think And Grow Rich.

This led us to the point that we saw no other possibility than to succeed in life and gain freedom by dismissing the Slowlane and joining the Fastlane.

I am extremely convinced that there is no better time for our journey than now - we have no bills to pay, no other obligations and much free time. Basically the only excuse left for us to give up would be that we don’t want it bad enough.


About The Foundation
For those of you that haven’t heard of it: The Foundation. To be honest I am not sure if I can give you an adequate summary of how incredibly awesome @D. Maxwell, his community and the mindset they teach is but the main thing I got out of it is this:

Success is the result of the correct mindset (thus the removal of limiting beliefs), maintaining good and healthy habits and most important execution.

Be an expert in the area of defining problems and put in other experts to solve them.
And finally (I think @IceCreamKid would agree): Stop focusing on yourself and start focusing on how you can help other people. To ensure an abundant life go out and love the hell out of them.

This list is just the tip of the iceberg - you can find so much value for FREE just in this forum it is not even funny. In order to get into the right mindset everytime I struggle I love reading the posts of @IceCreamKid , @zen******* and @JasonR . I found that the more I read them, the less they seem differentiate from each other. Success is replicable and The Foundation even enhances this through practical frameworks on how to create the SaaS business you want.

To make this clear: We are not affiliated with The Foundation nor have we had any personal contact with Dane Maxwell (unfortunately). The things we present you are publicy available or our personal opinions and conclusions.


About our process
Since Julian and I strongly believe that creating one business gives you the ability to create the next one we like taking notes on every bit of information we can find.

In order to understand the principles of The Foundation correctly and to get every important aspect which is available for free we started listening to and reading about every. single. interview. we could find featuring Dane Maxwell and his disciples.

We summarised the main points of everything we got our hands on and now we want to share it with you: CLICK ME.

This document is updated almost daily (unfortunately not finished translating) and we would love to hear feedback about this. The further we progress the better this is going to get. My personal goal is to give back as much value as possible and at the same time get back on the right track through your feedback if we drift away from it.

So this is it, thank you very much for reading up to this point. To make this whole thread even more valuable and interesting for you to read I will always try to outline the main points we learned from our current actions at the end of the posts and/or thoughts regarding to the process.

In the next post I will start by giving you our current status and the problems we are facing right now.
Harti

 

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[IceCreamKid]

A limiting belief that I have to reverse at the moment is my fear that the executives won’t take us seriously because of our age. I will think and write about this tomorrow and would appreciate feedback about that problem.

I once felt that people wouldn't take my seriously because I look like I'm 18. What turned things around is this...

I TOOK THE TIME TO SHOW THEM THAT I WANT TO UNDERSTAND THEM.

The bottom line is this: most people are angry, frustrated, upset, etc about something in their life so if you could be that ONE person who genuinely wants to know how they're feeling then they have a brief moment of, "Oh shit...I can drop all of my feelings onto this person? I love it!". You are suddenly seen as unique in their eyes because very few people want to understand how another person is feeling.

True story: At the C&B meetup in Texas I gave a presentation on my biz and laid out how anyone can replicate it in their local area. I briefly discussed one problem I was having. Hours after I gave my presentation, many guys went up to me and said, "You should expand your biz this way. You should do this. You should do that".

I have no intention of scaling the biz outside of California because I'm pretty happy with my current lifestyle, yet NO ONE took the time to UNDERSTAND that. They'd rather push their thoughts on me and tell me what I should do. Their intentions came from a good place though. =)

Anyway, one guy actually took a quirky angle. He asked, "So what exactly do you want out of your life?". BOOM. The guy wanted to understand me instead of force his beliefs down my throat. Instant genuine friendship. I'm pretty sure we're going to be doing some real estate deals in the future together.

People first, then money. It works. A lot of people miss this message in my posts because they're so focused on finding that ONE strategy. That ONE tactic. When you stop caring about money, it comes.

 

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[Harti]

To give you an overview on how we want to proceed we want to orient on The Foundation program which says:

Month 1: Finding a market and choosing a problem you want to solve.

Fortunately this is the part where the most information is available for members outside the program. This process is called Idea Extraction and Maxwell talks about this A LOT. I want to share with you the two most important quotes for me on this topic (you can find the rest inside the gdoc in the op):

There is always an unmet need in every market. You just have to dig long enough.

One of the things we like to talk about is selling insulin to a diabetic instead of sugar cookies. A diabetic will not go off insulin, but you know, if you're selling a sugar cookie, you're in risky territory.

The approach you have to take here is that you want to help companies by finding a real painful problem that costs them money and solve it cheaper.

Now immediately two questions came up to me: How do I choose the market and how do I find the problem?


Finding a market
The Foundation has criterias which the market needs to pass in order to be acceptable:

• There must be at least 5.000 - 10.000 companies in the niche

• The niche must already use software (or else the learning curve will be too sharp)

• The companies must be profit/growth oriented (so they are willing to invest in the software we are going to build), the $100.000 mark in revenue is given

• The companies can be contacted by E-Mail and phone

I think there are some more but this should be the most important.

After a lot of research Julian and I chose the logistics niche because the criterias are met and one special reason: Our list of companies in this niche in our area is so big that we have a lot of abundance when it comes to finding the problem. We can visit them and meet the people face to face instead of phoning. Through this we can build our idea extraction skill by trial and error in the real life without running out of companies.


Finding a problem - Idea Extraction
You should also really use google for that part because Maxwell explains it completely but basically you find problems by asking questions.

It's really simple. You ask questions like crazy until you understand the problem yourself. Which means you have them repeat themselves a lot.

The most important point is that you don't actually go through the entire list of questions when you talk to people. The most important thing to do is to dig after you get the initial answer. So what else, and tell me more, are for finding the gold.

He published a looong list of questions you can ask but in my opinion you won’t need that. What Julian and I are going to do mainly is this:

“What is the most important area in your business?”
“Do you associate any pain with that?”

Nearly everytime there should be a yes and then we proceed with the two gold shovels in the quote: “What else?” + “Tell me more.”

Do this until the problem gets really specific (they will want an All-In-One solution but thats not our aim) and let solutions arise in your head.
Today is Sunday, yesterday we completed out list with businesses in our area. Tomorrow we will start preparing E-Mails to set up phone calls / meetings.


Limiting Beliefs
A limiting belief that I have to reverse at the moment is my fear that the executives won’t take us seriously because of our age. I will think and write about this tomorrow and would appreciate feedback about that problem.

Harti

 

[Harti]

So we went on with our stuff. We cold called ~4 more companies, among this one we cold mailed on day 1. This is valuable: She said that she recently read an E-Mail about the same stuff that I did say but she deleted it directly because she is not in the position to answer this and their inbox is full of other important stuff.

This means if you cold mail keep in mind to write directly to the person that is responsible for your matter. If you are not sure about this tell them to just forward it to the correct person.

We came to the conclusion that cold mailing is not worth the time, we will proceed with calling.
For those of you who struggle with a high rejection rate: Just imagine that the only thing repeating in the other persons head is "what's in it for me?" and naturally you will be more friendly and more interesting for them. If you then go another step further and try to fix their problems you can bet you will get attention and quality answers.

Another thing was very interesting: One guy took his time and talked to me intensely. Since I was very present and wanted to understand his daily rhythm, his most important task and his problems we found something after like 5 minutes. I talked to him 5 more minutes in order to verify this is something that costs time and then offered him to call him back after thinking about a solution.

The next steps we'll do before calling him again are thinking about a solution (to be honest this seems quite simple, but not necessarily easy to implement), asking other companies about this and most importantly: validating if this is as painful as we think it is.

What I could have done better is not just hanging up after 10 minutes but going on digging even deeper. But I was so happy and felt so validated that my mind was like "fast, hang up before something bad happens!".

Harti

 

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[IceCreamKid]

To sum the week up we cold called 41 companies and wrote 47 cold mails.
We got 1 answer from the mails (2%) and had approximately 7 successful and very informative calls (17%).

Those numbers sound about right. The real ice cream is found from following up. If they don't respond to your initial email, continue following up throughout the week. By the 3rd or 4th follow up, your response rate should be around 20%. It varies based on your niche.

 

[Harti]

Guys, I got accepted in this years' Foundation class and I think this thread here was a major contribution to that. I am extremely excited and looking forward to it.

I will keep you updated as much as possible (/allowed), thank you all for your help.

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 4: Cold calling + insightful conversations

Today we shifted our work time from 3pm to 10am and worked until 1pm. Yesterday I found this thread by @MartinH which saved us TONS of time since he is basically on the same stuff that we are. Thank you Martin for your journal, I hope we can talk to you soon.
Additionally we had a 50 minute call with @GregH , an ex member of The Foundation and it was incredibly insightful! I wish I had hit the record button but that idea came to me after we hung up.

One of the many valuable things we got out of it was that we already have every bit of information we need. MJs book and the posts of IceCreamKid and zen******* deliver a great foundation for our journey regarding to the mindset.
The most important thing about our thinking is that we shouldn't focus our efforts on finding a problem that is solvable through software. Instead he talked about the philosophy every post of IceCreamKid is about - the focus must shift to listening to people with presence and an open mind. Stop thinking about a solution, it will come automatically once you digged deep enough.

Extremely motivated we started cold calling after our conversation with two things differently from yesterday:

1. We used another script - "I am an university student that writes a research paper about your industry..."
2. We didn't sell ourselves. Since we were "just students" it wouldn't have been appropriate to try to sell something. Instead we just listened to them.

Out of 5 calls we did in an hour we didn't get put off once. Instead, three of them told us to call later this day and we even had a 20 minute conversation with a CEO and gained more knowledge about the logistics industry.

We didn't find a level 4 problem or did good idea extraction but that's not bad. Through stuff like this we are building these skills now.
So we are going to do the three calls later and will see what's on their mind. In one hour I will talk to the IT consultant from yesterday.

It's not even 3pm and the day has already been extremely productive.
If you are on the correct road the only factor that determines how long you need to get to your destination is you. Take action and start running.

I will update the thread this evening after the other conversations.

Harti

 

[RoadTrip]

Can somebody drop some sentences, please? Do I just have to practice more? Is this industry just too big?

Keep practicing as you will never stop learning. Try to look back for a second at all the things you have learned by calling this industry: confidence in cold calling? idea extraction techniques? ability to notice needs? shortcuts for getting the owner on the phone?

You are making progress, adjusting by picking a new industry and moving on. I tried the logistics industry as well and dropped it pretty soon. Moved on and tried couple of other industries like plumbers, accounting offices, cleaning industry. In any industry I called I did found some problems, but they were either too complex to solve or too different from each other.

When you are deciding for a new industry, I suggest to take the following into account:

• Do you have any friends or relatives working in the industry
• Are you at least some passionate about the industry or can you get passionate about it? I understand some will say that once you get in the process of building a solution you will become passionate. But it makes it so much easier if you already like the industry from the beginning
• Is the industry not too complex: if you don't know anything about an industry, cleaning industry is easier to understand than accounting
• Is there enough money being made

It took me a long time to find a problem several companies are having. And I am still having doubts about continuing with this need or not because it does not seem like a real pain in the ***. I will let the market decide and am now in the process of testing the solution.

Therefore another suggestion I have is to really find a problem that hurts. I think that it is generally the first problem that comes to their mind. Then dig into that further. No matter what the problem is (staff too expensive, government regulations, etc.). Setting up a call might also help instead of cold calling because they will have time to think about their problem. I noticed that when asking problems through a cold call sometimes nothing pops op in their mind at that moment. But I already saw that you had a low response rate to your emails. Maybe it works better in the new industry you are picking.

You are taking real action which will pay off eventually. Keep trying, keep digging and you WILL find a problem.

Unfortunately, not a lot of the more experienced members are posting here so far. But you can find a lot of their mindset in the IceCreamKid thread about "the astonishing secrets zen******* never told you" thread.

Keep up the good work and keep us updated

 

[tafy]

Finding a need is difficult indeed isnt it?

It is even harder to make a product for an industry that you havent worked in or not passionate about

Where are you working now? Look for needs in your field of expertise first. Ask your boss about what he would like to see one day if technology allows it.

My example is hotels, the future guests can check in online and can use their mobiles to enter the room, pay their stay online and check out online, order room service etc.
Anyways lets look at your market of golf

So Golf... Online booking will become normal sooner or later like all industries. I would do this, as a startup you can disrupt the market easily.

Think of things that will save them money, your app could handle all membership and credit cards details. People can join online and renew their membership. You can bill monthly or yearly and send an invoice to their email. I bet this shit is costing them one staff for 2-3 days a week just for membership, invoicing, talking on the phone, chasing payments etc.

I bet they got one staff just handling bookings of tee offs, managing times available and taking phone calls and stuff. Your members will have card details already on account in the app so they can book and pay online easily, or get the playing time charged at the end of the month onto their card with invoice generated automatically

Think of your app as having one person doing both jobs so easily its a piece of cake. sell this to the golf courses. They will save 20k+ a year and your app will cost 1-2k a year.

 

[Tregan]

Harti,

The true test of an entrepreneur is to keep going when others have given up, to do the things others won't, even when it appears fruitless.

 

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[RoadTrip]

If somebody could recommend us a solution for our problem I would be very grateful.

Check out ToutApp, it's subscription based but works really well for this purpose. You can make templates, check response rate per template, check out who clicked on links in the email, etc. There are some free offers out there as well but I have not found them to work as well as ToutApp.

The next days we will start cold calling, instead of mailing. Do you have any advice? If not - we will try our best and keep you up to date!

I cold called about 400 companies in several industries in my country. I also sent a lot of emails but since it takes up so much of my time to find the correct email adddress (no info) and response rates were generally low, I started cold calling directly.

The cold calling works but takes many calls to finally find someone able to talk to you. I believe that out of every 10 calls I got one owner to take the time to talk to me. And that's mainly the smaller companies who you better not call because they are small for a reason. Fortunately, it seems that I have found a need now but still need to further validate this.

If I would need to do it all over again, I would definitely do it differently. So to save you all the trouble I have been through, I would suggest you to find the most succesful companies in your area through a Google search and contact them through email or LinkedIn. Once they reply, you setup a call and ask for references. This is very important since the succesful CEO's generally know more people with the same problem.

Good luck with your journey. Looking forward to the updates!

 

[RoadTrip]

Good job on the progress!

Based on my experience the best guys to talk to are either the CEO or some other employee dealing with the daily operations of the company (operations, business managers or in the logistics industry, the planning department). You best bet will remain the CEO because he will ultimately be the person suffering the most from the loss of money and time and will be the person paying for your solution. If he doesn't know the specifics, he will point you to the correct person in the organization to talk to.

IT has been specifically hired to solve IT problems so I don't think they will be very eager to tell you about their inability of identifying IT problems to solve ;-)

 

[Harti]

Day 6: It's Called Saturday Not "WastedDay" - How To Get Closer To Your Goals On Days That Seem Useless

(I started studying the subject of copywriting some days ago and decided to let in flow into my posts. Maybe improvements will be noticeable over time. )

So yeah, it's like the headline says: Even though cold calling is no option today I received the gift of additional 24 hours to get closer to my goals. A while ago I had promised myself I wouldn't waste one more day until I have achieved what I want.

Today I prepared and sent the E-Mail to the CEO that offered to meet us - I really hope he has time for us, getting his insights in the industry would dramatically accelerate our speed. Thinking about that made it clear to me that it should always be your focus to meet up with the people. Phoning is nice but not a way to understand the complex relations invaluable for your success.

To further improve our success rate on the phone I watched this video about getting past the gatekeeper - very recommendable - and read three more hours than usual (at the moment it's Felix Dennis - How To Get Rich).

And this is also my tip for days where you can not take action directly: Do it indirectly by educating and improving yourself on the areas you are working on.
It surely is nothing new but if I prevented one person from making an excuse today I'm happy.

Not that I would refuse a tip from you IceCreamKid but from the experience we got up to this point investing time in cold mailing feels wasted. It's totally like you said:

The real ice cream is found from following up

and I am confident we are going to accomplish that.

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 7: The ONE Thing You MUST Know To Succeed In A World Where Nobody Wants You To Step Up

So today is Sunday and again no day to cold call. I took some time and informed myself about techniques/services to make cold mailing more efficient. MailCheat(Chimp) looks like an awesome service for sending out newsletters but no way to simplify our more personal approach to cold mailing. If anybody could tell us how we can make the process easier after we fished the e-mails from the companies homepages we would be very grateful.
At the moment we are collecting the addresses + names on a spreadsheet, open the mail web interface and pasting the content + E-Mails and names inside.

I also opened George Leonard - Mastery again and thought about his idea of bad approaches to success coming from short term thinking. He characterizes three types of people that fail:

• The Dabbler. In this context you could compare him to the guy that has initial enthusiasm but in the end is jumping from opportunity to opportunity as soon as obstacles come up.
• The Obsessive. The guy that is extremely dedicated and takes massive action but can't stand the phases where he sees no results.
• The Hacker. He tries to skip the process - maybe he will see some results but they are based on a flawed foundation (probably his success is also highly dependent from other people).

Very glad I rediscovered that today. There will be phases where we won't see results but this is okay. It's part of the process.

Harti

 

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[Harti]

Day 9: More cold calling

Today I went on cold calling but didn't have a good conversation. I think it is because my commitment to this industry isn't there 100% anymore. Can somebody drop some sentences, please? Do I just have to practice more? Is this industry just too big?
In two days I'll have the meeting with the one CEO, idea extraction should work better live.

Fortunately I am probably able to talk to a fastlaner (sold his company for 20 mio €) in person in some weeks. Hope I will get some practical tips.

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 12: Illness + Reflection

Even though this is the first day we didn't do much I still want to post. At the moment I am sick because of an immunization and have fever so I was laying down since yesterday.. We reflected about the conversation and decided to change industry.
We collected a list of industries we have contacts in but there was no THIS IS IT moment. It's very annoying that the progress was stagnating so much the last days but not being 100% fit simply sucks.

At least I didn't stop reading and learning copywriting.

Tomorrow we attend an entrepreneur fair and listen to some speeches, I am looking forward to that.

The task for the next days is choosing an appropriate industry. The thing we learned up to this point is that choosing an extremely big one is not optimal for our aim.

To be honest some words of you would be nice, didn't hear anything from anybody in a time..

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 15: Ideas are everywhere!

Today I had an appointment with my doctor again and got into a conversation with her. She was talking about a new problem she has that was introduced through our bureaucratic state. I immediately started idea extraction and asked questions about it - the problem is extremely time-consuming and really painful. Unfortunately I had to go after talking for like 20 minutes because she had other clients waiting for her. I may be onto something, I'll definitely talk to her soon again about that.

When I was at home I created the list of the successful SaaS companies created in The Foundation. I couldn't find any specific trend - it really is all over the place - but the tendency is to go to smaller and more concrete niches than logistics.

The thing I learned today is really simple: Ideas are extremely abundant, everybody has problems. The thing that matters is enhancing your idea extraction skills and listening to the people. The more you hang around professionals, the more problems you will face.

Since I am 18 I haven't friends working (everybody just finished school) so I have to think about how I can maximize my time around them.

Additionally I set up my Xing profile today and will shoot a photo next week (a photographer friend of mine will be back from his vacation then) to make it more appealing. Until then I hopefully will have a niche and some people to add there.

The rest of the day and tomorrow will be dedicated to research.

Harti

 

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[Harti]

Day 16 + 17: Pattern Breaking

After the bad feeling of the last days I took some action that will get me in the right direction again.

I have two contacts in the golf niche and might be able to speak to the president of the local golf club. Wrote the person that could connect me to him. This niche seems extremely profit oriented to me and I like the idea of it.
Tomorrow I will contact the doc again and setup a meeting. Then I will head to the town and start observing and talking to the people I can find there. I think it will be interesting and open my mind a little bit more.

Even though my actions are not that big I finally want to break my pattern of stagnation and inactivity. I must do something that gets me closer to my goal.

And more importantly I need to find the reason why "working" alone paralyzes me - probably a limiting belief but I don't see it. Any ideas or comments on that?

Harti

 

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[Harti]

Thank you both @apprentice and @BlakeIC , really appreciate your posts.

I think it's normal to feel that way. A partner makes you feel more secure, like he's got your back.

That seems logical to me. I think it's the fear of failing that holds me back. If I f*ck it up now it is totally my fault and there is no one else to blame. Even though I knew this from the beginning it didn't feel like it emotionally.

This quote comes to my mind:

If you are going through hell, keep going.

Let's see what I can accomplish on this extremely hot day before going swimming.

Harti

 

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[Harti]

Thanks for the website @BlakeIC , checked it out and it overwhelmed me.

Rationally I know that there are unmet needs in every market (EVERYBODY has some problems) but I stagnate massively because I emotionally fear the same fate like in the logistics niche.. Another factor I spotted today is that I try to prevent cold calling and rejection due to my experience with the doctor (she was kind of amused that I want to help her - at the phone she was like "do your research and if you have some questions then I can help you.").. Don't know, I didn't feel taken seriously.

Tomorrow my friend will be back - he was in Berlin visiting some startups and stuff like that. Maybe this will accelerate some things..

Harti

 

[tafy]

Doctors tell people what to do all day every day, take this pill, dont smoke that, dont put that up there etc

So when you come along with "I want to help you speech" they are like WTF there is an alien in here

But seriously like the other posters said, Doctors dont know shit except helping patients and half the time they screw that up.

 

[Juhill]

Just something to look into. I golf and am in a league of about 40 guys. We play every week and have different games and formats all of the time. It used to take about an hour for all of the team captains to get together at the end of the night and figure out scoring, day game winners, etc... (while everyone else was enjoying frosty beverages...)

Then this year a new app showed up on the scene called Golfgamebook. Once you get everyone in the app you create games with different formats (skins, stableford, low net, etc...) and add the players. It incorporates handicaps as well for accurate net scoring. Usually one guy in each group tracks the scores for the guys in their group in the app. It has literally changed everything. We now have:

- easy score tracking for a large group of guys
- real-time stats and game watching so you can see where you are sitting in the middle of a round
- notifications if someone gets an eagle or birdie (I recommend turning most notifications off)
- you can watch games as a spectator if there is a local tournament or something going on
- track your putts to see where you are really adding strokes

The game creators also have a group of customers giving them ideas and suggestions for updates. They are super responsive and are constantly updating it.

Just sharing this info as this kind of problem solving is an area where you can find a great business. Hope it helps!

 

[Harti]

Day 3: Cold calling

This morning we were able to setup a phone call in about 3 weeks with the executive who answered us in the first place. Overall we are not very happy with the results - one answer from 47 sent mails is not much (2%) but we won't stop.

We followed the advice of @Senergia and created a list of the biggest companies nearby. After that we cold called 7 companies with a pre-made phone script. We talked to one IT consultant who understood what we asked for and we’ll talk to him tomorrow, again.

While calling we identified a problem we have: Since we are no experts in the industry and have nearly zero knowledge about it (what we know is that goods are transported from one place to another and some more superficial stuff) we didn’t know what to ask for. We had no starting point and the people we talked to couldn’t name problems by themselves - even after we digged deeper.

Where we also need help: We are not sure if we should talk to the CEO or the IT. We wanted to talk to the CEOs about three times but they don’t have time for us (which is kind of understandable).

The response rate is okay - it always depends on how good your human skills are. Like @Senergia said it is way better then cold mailing.

Harti

 

[Harti]

Thanks

Fortunately the IT consultant was very open to us and seemed happy about the call. He even could summarize our request in one sentence - better than we were able to: Removing stumbling blocks.
But this seems like a valuable lesson: You need someone on the phone who has an overview about the stuff going on.

There we face the problem that we sound like 18 on the phone (we recorded every call). This might be a limiting belief but it kind of feels like we are kids stealing the big CEO his time. Even though we call to help him in the end it's still like "We want something from you. Talk to us!"
@IceCreamKid , you already wrote something about this. Do you (or somebody else who is reading this) see some wrong thought patterns and stuff we could do differently?

Harti

 

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[Dillon Carter]

This is an amazing thread, I cannot wait to see how this turns out. Please keep us updated. I am going through your Doc now and it is very in-depth. Keep making progress

 

[RoadTrip]

What I could have done better is not just hanging up after 10 minutes but going on digging even deeper. But I was so happy and felt so validated that my mind was like "fast, hang up before something bad happens!".

The same happened to me initially but eventually you will get better. What I also highly suggest is that you learn the SPIN selling concept. It is based on building rapport and after that asking the correct questions so that the customer will recognize the impact of the problem himself.

Check out the following link on SPIN selling:

http://wolfram.org/writing/howto/sell/spin_selling.html

 

[Mr.International]

I love seeing people think outside the box at such a young age. Keep it up.

 

[Harti]

Day 5: Cold calling + MEETING & focusing on different problems

Today we also started working at 10am because we can not really do much on the weekend.
It has already been extremely successful because I was able to talk to a CEO for 20 minutes. He really gave us some insights into his company and the industry. In the end he even offered us to visit him - this is going to be our first in person meeting.

After that we cold called some other companies and found out that most of them are using really elaborated software to manage the transport to the customer (for those of you who forget - we are in the logistics niche). In the future we'll focus on backend problems instead of customer related stuff. What we found out is that there is nearly no standardization possible without sacrificing customer satisfaction. Automating supplier communication is not something the companies want. Thus the problem we found in the one company is invalid.

To sum the week up we cold called 41 companies and wrote 47 cold mails.
We got 1 answer from the mails (2%) and had approximately 7 successful and very informative calls (17%). This is why we recommend to cold call to save time and energy. PLUS the fact that cold calling improves your social skills and will help you in the future.

Our problem at the moment: It's hard to summarize the problems of the different companies and find out where these interleave because the logistics industry is very versatile. We are not sure on how to proceed. Some tips would be nice.

Harti & @JayTrump

 

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[ped89]

Nice thread, looking forward to seeing your progress.

Don't know how useful you will find this but here is what I did when I was going through IE to simplify it and get people on the phone.

Use a VA to find you email addresses, will save you a tonne of time to focus on the important job - connecting and talking to the decision maker.
You can get a good data entry/web researcher via odesk for $1 per hour when its a task this simple.

Have a link to your Linkedin Page at the bottom of your email so that they can see you're not a spammer.

Use Toutapp (as someone mentioned) to ease the process. You can also split test new subject lines, sending times and more importantly you can see when they opened and viewed your email. IF you want to be agressive when they open your email put the call through, less aggressive would be call them straight after they respond to your email (if they do).

If you're contacting businesses that have gatekeepers (receptionists etc.) then try calling before they get into work, or after they have left the office, usually 9-5 but the boss will often start earlier and finish later.

Looking forward to seeing more updates from you guys!

 

[Harti]

Use a VA to find you email addresses, will save you a tonne of time to focus on the important job - connecting and talking to the decision maker.
You can get a good data entry/web researcher via odesk for $1 per hour when its a task this simple.

Thought about using a VA for that, too. This would be a nice way to get introduced to outsourcing work. Is there a big difference between elance and odesk?

Use Toutapp (as someone mentioned) to ease the process.

Didn't forget about that post but I'd rather not pay $30 per month for a service like that in the beginning.

Thank you for your post, everything is appreciated!

Harti