This one thing is JUST as important as solving a need

[Johnny boy]

The best business is a productocracy.

You solve a problem.

It's damn good.

People beat down your door to come buy it.

They tell their friends without prompting.

The local news does a story on you.

It goes viral.

Everyone wants it.

0 advertising, a billion in sales. You've bottled up the cure for cancer and sold it. The perfect business.

The problem is 99.9% of businesses do not fall into that category.

Many businesses that could be a productocracy are not realistically possible to start in your situation, with no money.

And to build up a productocracy in your situation, you better have a damn good idea, or bust your a$$ so incredibly hard that your value skews are enough to make it a productocracy, something so good people tell everyone about it.

Ideally, we'd have one. Realistically, I start off my business strategies a different way.

I don't think about a problem. There's a lot of problems. There's a lot of things you can do.

....

Running businesses and talking with other owners, we all run into the same problem...

"How do we get more leads? How do we get the word out about our stuff?"

It's the thing that everyone who runs an intelligent business has a problem with, getting more customers. The one-man shop "self employed" folks that can't take on any real number of customers are usually not intelligent businesses. I mean businesses that actually want to grow.

And it's the one thing I see new business owners overlook. They don't think about how to deliver their message to their potential customers. Almost all of these businesses fail because of one problem... they couldn't get enough people to give a shit.

And they aren't even starting unique businesses. They are doing things that other people are succeeding at. The difference is they don't know how to get customers.

So now... it's the one thing I look for FIRST.

"How am I going to get customers?"

The method, the targeting, the offer, the cost per lead and cost of acquisition, that's what I care about.

I work backwards.

Example:

I can send ringless voicemails for 1.2 cents.

What can I do with that?

I can scrape a list of thousands of lawn care companies (I have experience running one) using a tool called apify for free. I can send out voicemails and texts to all of them and say "hey, I saw your landscaping company and I grew one just like it. I had a lot of problems that I had to solve, things like employees, advertising, developing systems, a bunch of stuff. I want to give you a free ebook on how to do X, Y and Z and how to grow your company, it's totally free". Send that off as a lead magnet and use that to land a sales call to upsell other things like consulting, courses, etc.

So in one single day I could tell thousands of people about something highly targeted towards them that offers value. Oh, and it would cost me.... $12 per THOUSAND companies reached.

I could do many things with this.

I could scrape 50 thousand companies and filter for only ones that don't have a website for their listing. I could say "you don't have a website, I build the best websites for companies in your industry every day and it's a problem you need to fix if you want to succeed in business in 2023". Send that out to 2000 businesses before lunch.

This is just an example of ringless voicemails with scraping software. But it's how I approach business. I need a way to get in front of my audience and deliver what I want to sell.

The method, that's what matters. How you get attention on your offer.

Do you have an Instagram with 150 thousand niche engaged followers? You're sitting on gold. One post and you're in front of everyone, ready to buy your stuff.

I'm working on using software that scrapes every single user in a facebook group, searches them and sends them a DM. You think that will help as a local service business? Join a community group and run your system and get who knows how many people signed up all basically instantly for free. Rinse and repeat.

The method. Don't overlook it.

Technology is beautiful. It's leverage. You need to be creative in how you'll get your stuff in front of enough people for cheap. It's just as important as solving a need.

 

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[Movere]

I personally think, that this is as good as advice, that we don't make money, we take money from people and give them value, first you have to find who's money will be taken, than you can search for value, problems to solve and etc.
Forget the queue and focus on the message, I agree that finding customers and people that will actually buy your problem solving is as important as solving problems.
You have some really good point!

 

[JJHemingway]

Thank you for the advice!

Quick question. How do you avoid coming off as intrusive when you DM all these scraped users on facebook? Any examples of what you could say?

 

[Bekit]

Thank you for the advice!

Quick question. How do you avoid coming off as intrusive when you DM all these scraped users on facebook? Any examples of what you could say?

He literally gave an example of potential wording in the post.

I can send out voicemails and texts to all of them and say "hey, I saw your landscaping company and I grew one just like it. I had a lot of problems that I had to solve, things like employees, advertising, developing systems, a bunch of stuff. I want to give you a free ebook on how to do X, Y and Z and how to grow your company, it's totally free". Send that off as a lead magnet and use that to land a sales call to upsell other things like consulting, courses, etc.

I'm a copywriter, so I could go into depth on all the tactics to craft a message that people will engage with and respond to. But all that information is available and easy to find out there. I think there's a different, more important issue underneath this question.

If you are worried about coming off as intrusive, that's a limiting belief. You're talking yourself out of taking action. You're setting up a barrier that stops you from seeing how to move forward. You're putting an excuse ("I couldn't possibly be seen as intrusive") ahead of making fastlane money.

What if you didn't care if you came across as intrusive? @Johnny boy doesn't worry about things like that.

It's a numbers game.

Out of those 1000 voicemails, sure, some people will consider it intrusive. Oh well.

Other people will think it's a scam. Oh well.

Other people will fail to even listen to the voicemail. Oh well.

Maybe only 1% of those people take him up on the offer.

But keep in mind, that's 10 people! And he only spent $12 (and almost no time) to sift through all those "no's" to get those 10 "yes's."

That's a STEAL. It's scalable. And it really doesn't matter if 99% of people ignored the voicemail or thought it was intrusive or whatever. What matters is that you have a cheap, repeatable mechanism that allows you to pair hungry customers with an offer that makes sense to them.

When you do that over and over again, you make money.

 

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[JJHemingway]

He literally gave an example of potential wording in the post.

Whoops, silly me

 

[Johnny boy]

What if you didn't care if you came across as intrusive? @Johnny boy doesn't worry about things like that.

It pops into my head and then I think about how much more I want money than Debra to not be annoyed that I called her.

 

[WillHurtDontCare]

Great post.

I'll add another mass marketing strategy - email. It costs $1,000-$2,000 to run, but you can contact hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

1) BuiltWith Unlimited Monthly Subscription - BuiltWith Technology Lookup - $500 per month (but you can just get all the data that you want then cancel). You can search for keywords and get a list of every website that offers those keywords. You can also search for the tech that the website use, so if you want to find shopify stores search for websites using shopify, or if you want to find businesses generally, search for websites using stripe. You'll get a ton of info like email, phone number, website, business name, industry category, location, social media accounts, how old the website is, etc. You don't get names, but you can infer them from the emails. Note this won't be ZoomInfo quality data, but you can get millions of leads per month this way. Roughly 53% of the emails that I've pulled this way were valid per million verifier (see below)






2) Use The #1 Email Verification Service - MillionVerifier to validate the emails. A lot of those emails will be dead, so you want to check to see which ones are legit. You can buy 500,000 for $259 (they'll probably give you an extra 100,000 validations if they're running a deal).

3) Buy a bunch of domains on SquareSpace or GoDaddy. They range from $12-$60 depending on which domain you want (io is expensive - just buy .com, .org, .net, etc). Buy 20 of those domains for roughly $300.

4) Use Google Mail to link those domains and set up 2 accounts per domain. Google charges you $7.20 per month per account, and I'd say sign up 2 users per domain, so 20 * 2 * 7.20 = $288 per month. Also, look into configuring these emails properly - DMARC, SKIM, SPF, etc.

5) Sign up for an email sending tool. I use Smartlead | Unlimited Cold Emails And AI Warmups I use the pro plan which lets you send 150,000 emails per month for $79-99 (year vs monthly subscription) and you can buy more credits. You'll need to give you email accounts 2 weeks to warm up though. But once they are warmed up, you can send around 60 emails per day (maybe more, that's my conservative call). 60 * 40 = 2400 emails per day 72,000 emails per month (or around 50,000 if you just email on business days). Since 72,000 is less than the 150,000 max, you could try sending more emails, buy more domains, or send the cheaper plan.

Total cost: 500 + 259 + 300 + 288 + 99 = $1,446 upfront.

The first month you'd send out roughly 30K emails since you needed 2 weeks to warm up your emails, so you send 21 emails per dollar spent.

Month 2, you've cancelled BuiltWith because you got tens of millions of leads and you decided you'll take slightly outdated data, so it's $500 cheaper this month. You also haven't burned through your verification credits with million verifier, so it's another $259 cheaper this month. Your domains won't be renewed for 11 months, so it's another $300 cheaper this month, so your total cost is 288 + 99 which is 387. And now you're able to send out 72,000 per month, which amounts to 186 emails sent per dollar spent.

You can nitpick my math and I'm sure that people here can find better cost per impression / click, but this was a relative inexpensive way to contact hundreds of thousand of people.

P.S. @Johnny boy can you recommend a ringless dialer?

 

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[The One]

Great post.

I'll add another mass marketing strategy - email. It costs $1,000-$2,000 to run, but you can contact hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

1) BuiltWith Unlimited Monthly Subscription - BuiltWith Technology Lookup - $500 per month (but you can just get all the data that you want then cancel). You can search for keywords and get a list of every website that offers those keywords. You can also search for the tech that the website use, so if you want to find shopify stores search for websites using shopify, or if you want to find businesses generally, search for websites using stripe. You'll get a ton of info like email, phone number, website, business name, industry category, location, social media accounts, how old the website is, etc. You don't get names, but you can infer them from the emails. Note this won't be ZoomInfo quality data, but you can get millions of leads per month this way. Roughly 53% of the emails that I've pulled this way were valid per million verifier (see below)

View attachment 51953
View attachment 51954



2) Use The #1 Email Verification Service - MillionVerifier to validate the emails. A lot of those emails will be dead, so you want to check to see which ones are legit. You can buy 500,000 for $259 (they'll probably give you an extra 100,000 validations if they're running a deal).

3) Buy a bunch of domains on SquareSpace or GoDaddy. They range from $12-$60 depending on which domain you want (io is expensive - just buy .com, .org, .net, etc). Buy 20 of those domains for roughly $300.

4) Use Google Mail to link those domains and set up 2 accounts per domain. Google charges you $7.20 per month per account, and I'd say sign up 2 users per domain, so 20 * 2 * 7.20 = $288 per month. Also, look into configuring these emails properly - DMARC, SKIM, SPF, etc.

5) Sign up for an email sending tool. I use Smartlead | Unlimited Cold Emails And AI Warmups I use the pro plan which lets you send 150,000 emails per month for $79-99 (year vs monthly subscription) and you can buy more credits. You'll need to give you email accounts 2 weeks to warm up though. But once they are warmed up, you can send around 60 emails per day (maybe more, that's my conservative call). 60 * 40 = 2400 emails per day 72,000 emails per month (or around 50,000 if you just email on business days). Since 72,000 is less than the 150,000 max, you could try sending more emails, buy more domains, or send the cheaper plan.

Total cost: 500 + 259 + 300 + 288 + 99 = $1,446 upfront.

The first month you'd send out roughly 30K emails since you needed 2 weeks to warm up your emails, so you send 21 emails per dollar spent.

Month 2, you've cancelled BuiltWith because you got tens of millions of leads and you decided you'll take slightly outdated data, so it's $500 cheaper this month. You also haven't burned through your verification credits with million verifier, so it's another $259 cheaper this month. Your domains won't be renewed for 11 months, so it's another $300 cheaper this month, so your total cost is 288 + 99 which is 387. And now you're able to send out 72,000 per month, which amounts to 186 emails sent per dollar spent.

You can nitpick my math and I'm sure that people here can find better cost per impression / click, but this was a relative inexpensive way to contact hundreds of thousand of people.

P.S. @Johnny boy can you recommend a ringless dialer?

QS - can you not use a single software that does all of this in one? I've basically been doing what you have been doing. But, is there a software that does all of it in one go? Honestly, if it ain't - it's time for it to be made!

 

[WillHurtDontCare]

QS - can you not use a single software that does all of this in one? I've basically been doing what you have been doing. But, is there a software that does all of it in one go? Honestly, if it ain't - it's time for it to be made!

You can't do all of that with one tool, but you can use tools that do more of that in one. After you set up your domains with GoDaddy + Gmail, you can connect that account tools like apollo or ZoomInfo to verify and send emails. Though, apollo doesn't do a grab job with verification. And ZoomInfo is very expensive.