MrYoshi's Journey to Freedom

[MrYoshi]

Hello everyone,

I am going to use this thread to document my journey. I currently run a leads generation business in the SaaS market. I believe that my sales experience should be enough for me to get started and eventually build out a platform for us to compete with others in the same space.

It's been about two months so far and I've spoken to about 19 potential partners thus far, but no one is interested in paying for leads upfront besides a few. I noticed that many of them don't have a lot of employees so we are going to start reaching out to larger companies. I will continue to update this thread as I go. The biggest problem is that we've already met with multiple enterprise level clients, but haven't found partners to sell them to.

In my free time I'm also looking a bit into cryptocurrency but mostly focused on this. I'll figure out in the next month or so if I need to continue taking our current approach or become a digital agency.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

I've spoken to about 19 potential partners thus far, but no one is interested in paying for leads upfront

Anyway you can control the sales process so the lead is free? And when they close the lead, you get paid?

 

[MrYoshi]

Anyway you can control the sales process so the lead is free? And when they close the lead, you get paid?

That's an interesting approach, but we're not very experienced in pushing the sales cycle forward or doing any deep software implementations. However, we're really good at setting up meetings with VP-level decision makers and handing off warm leads. Another problem with that approach is that these sales cycles last anywhere from 6-24 months so it's not sustainable for us to wait for deals to close. Our vision for the company will only work if we can find initial pain points and hand off warm leads using an online platform. I think it's doable as I generated $8,000,000 worth of leads and $1,200,000 of revenue at my previous company.

We just need to find a SaaS niche and have one software vendor pay up front for leads. We can then move towards hiring/training more reps and slowly build our web platform. We pre-qualify everything and our lead notes average more than 1,000 words, but we haven't found the right partner yet. The toughest part about all of this is finding the balance between starting partnerships and setting up meetings. For example, I've already spoken with executives at Kraft Heinz, Unilever, Diageo, and others regarding a specific supply chain solution, but we had no partner in place to pay us haha. We ended up telling each client about the best software vendor anyways because we felt it was the right thing to do.

 

[MrYoshi]

I'm back from the holiday break and I am questioning whether or not I should return home for Christmas as my entire schedule is destroyed. I'm going to fix my routine, but it is extremely difficult to do work at my house as my cousins and family members are very distracting.

Update on lead generation business: I've come to realize that I made a huge mistake with my current partner. I went against my gut from the start of my business and it's come to bite me in the a$$. I really do believe in the vision for this company and I have multiple opportunities in front of me to make 15-20k in the next month, but this has been bothering me since I started the company. I'm going to continue to move forward because once we scale it out and start hiring he will have more of an advisory position, but we will see how things pan out. I would also just prefer to start my own company so I don't have to rely on anyone else, but he did put some time at the start of things. This is my first business so I felt the pressure after quitting my job. I thought partnering up with a few people would relieve some pressure, but I don't want to rely on any partners for help.

 

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[MrYoshi]

Well, I thought about it long and hard yesterday. I'm going to continue this business and do some cryptocurrency studying on the side. I will get the lead generation process down for any new customer and outsource the work to a few sales reps. We will then need a web developer/web designer because the real fun won't start until our platform is built out. I also got a meeting invite from a potential business partner that received 5 million in VC funding so I am trying to figure out if they want to hire me to join their sales team or if they're actually interested in what our company is doing in this space. Either way, I will try to build out this relationship because the initial plan did involve leveraging another company's review system or building out our own.

I will only be spending two hours a day learning about cryptocurrencies and technical analysis. I can only spend about 500-1k on this anyways.

Today's TDL:

• List build and include phone numbers for each contact
• Focus only on getting vendor partnerships and worry about getting them leads after
• Stay on pace to send over 150 personalized emails to different vendors/employees by Friday
• Check email sparingly as to not waste time.
• Get back into my morning routine quickly and plan to start working 70 hours a week and slowly bring that to 100 hours.
• Meal prep for the entire week
• Start watching DataDash videos on youtube in order to get a better understanding of how to trade smarter with cryptocurrencies.

 

[MrYoshi]

The call with the potential business partner went very well. They are looking to add another person to their sales force, but they might also allow me to work on my project on the side as well. As I mentioned above, I wanted to start a partnership with this company at some point in the future as they would fit within our platform. I might have to enter back into the slow lane, but what I'd learn from working at this company would be insanely useful. Gary V talks about working for someone else for free if you have to in order to learn as much as you can about that industry. I'm going to have to figure this out more, but I would be entering the slow lane again.