What are the things you should NOT DO, once you start gaining some success & traction?
I've been running cryptojobslist.com for a few months now, and it's been growing 46% on average monthly. With that ton of attention comes in — people start asking for your time, both customers, "partners" and random people as well. Sometimes it's hard to say NO to people, to events, to conferences — since you don't know who'll bring value and who won't. And I also don't want to seem like an a**hole by declining everyone.
What are the top things that you found very tempting to do, while scaling up your business, but end up to have low ROI and a complete waste of time?
Some of the more common ones I've seen:
Great list, I have made more than a few of those mistakes ;)
when is too early to hire?
when is too late to hire?
I wish I was confident enough of the right answer that I could tell you :)
Demos. They just wasted my time. Once I stop giving them and focused on low-touch sales my MRR grew +10% every month(on top of 15% I already had).
For a $100/month product, even if is B2B, doing demos is a waste of time. Doesn't matter if your clients ask for it, many of them are just used to demos, but if you are a very small company with a low price point and limited resources, demos can waste 50% of your time when you can use it for more productive activities.
Completely agree with this.
Work sales on a high priced B2B product that goes through regulation by many department and CAA's.
but...
Demo's build relationships. If they aren't serious, it wastes time.
Best thing to do is create an automated webinar for lead gen.
Email Signup > Link to Demo/'Live' Webinar > Statement to ask for questions via email after > Warm prospects trickle in educated on your product.
Spot on! Thanks for sharing your experience.
Yeah, for $100/month, cost of sales should be kept to a minimum. And time is your most valuable/expensive resource. In one of my previous startups, I feel I wasted too much time on demos and meetings even though i was charging $900/month.
I'm getting a sence that doing face-to-face sales and demos only make sense when you are charging $10k+ a month. Thoughts?
Don't buy e-mail lists. Ending up in a situation where all your e-mails are going automatically to spam is definitely not somewhere you want to be.
Exactly that, give more of your time to people.
I wouldn't think about measuring them in advance what their ROI might be, for a few reasons.
But with all those points in mind, I would still follow my gut of where you want to be and who you want to spend your time with. If you are in a positive mindset that presence's ROI will be higher, no matter the circumstance.