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Growing a $600,000/mo Business by Starting with Direct Sales with Nathan Barry of ConvertKit

Episode #008

Learn how Nathan Barry grew his business by teaching what he knew, taking advantage of big competitors, showing up every day for two years, and treating direct sales as the answer to everything. Brought to you by Vettery.

  1. 3

    Nathan, great interview. How did you get good at direct selling and can you recommend any resources for someone just starting out?

  2. 1

    What I learned from this cool ep :

    • Your whole situation and worldview can change based on the people you target, everyone is the highway 🛣 to boring and mediocre business.
    • When you are poor, cheap you are very nervous and stressed about what you build, you become so obsessed with building something people will 100% want and use, which is good.
    • Business at the beginning is hard work, this the only module that seems to work.
    • Do interviews with people from different industries, observe their workflow, if they do something hard and valuable in a way that sucks: using dump tech, or a weak staff then you have a business to build.
    • Big competition means big market, a lot of people are not served well.
    • When you tell people about your product, to check wether they are interested or not ask them to pay you money 💰 first upfront, that way you will validate that you will build something people want, and secondly you will have capital to build your business.
    • When you are competing with a big player do things they can’t do.
    • Dairy blogging, write daily posts about your progress.
    • Don’t waste time on things that will return no value, like a logo, name, ... you can do just fine in the first months/years.
    • Don’t be a full time content creator, the worst content come from people who create content for a living, great content comes from people who are doing great things and documenting the process trough their content.
    • How to build an audience?
      • Teach what you know
      • You have to be building something interesting, the worst content you can consume is from full time content creators, where content creation is the only thing they do in life, content creation is just a part time job.
      • Do it every day, document the process.
    • There’s a reaons why people love steve jobs, because we heared he’s story in a very beautful and cool way in books, articles, videos, movies, … we saw the process, we see hem as a human being, the struglle, … it’s too emotional, you need to tell stories.
    • Don’t go braod, go narrow, stay nich, and make a lot of people adopt to you, make them change, the opposite ususally doesn’t work.
    • You should start out with direct sales, because it’s one of the most effiencnt ways to learn about your costumers, when you know nothing about them, doing it online will be hard, you need to have conversations.
    • Content marketing advice :

    " Show up every single day for 2 years. "

  3. 2

    My main takeaways:

    • He went from $0 to ~$2,500/m in 6 months

    • He documented his entire journey on his blog

    • He was told that he should either quit the business, or give it full time efforts (not just the 10-20 hours he was initially giving it)

    • He grew the business using direct sales, referrals and affiliate marketing

    • Scratch your own itch (and chance is you'll be scratching it for others too)

    • He had an audience of 5,000 people already, and leveraged this

    • Don't be afraid of bigger competitors, it just demonstrates that there's a market there, so it's good.

    • Never enter a market where there are no competitors (you're defining the entire market), find existing markets with an existing problem

    • When interviewing ask questions don't make statements

    • There's a big difference between someone SAYING they'd buy and someone ACTUALLY buying (10 people said they'd preorder but only 1 actually preordered his product)

    • Don't make cheap tiers

    • You have to compete on a great user experience, and a phenomenal customer support, and cant do this PER user on cheap $0-$30 tiers (because it isn't financially smart)

    • He was pretty good at email marketing beforehand

    • He didnt have the reach or the scale, so he thinks that for where he was at, the $5,000/m goal was a bit too ambitious

    • Secrets to building an audience: 1. Teach everything you know - 2. Create everyday - 3. Show your working (document the process transparenty)

    • You want to do direct sales at the start at least, so you can HEAR why you're getting rejected

    • Show up on it EVERY DAY for two years.

    • The first TWO years of converkit, there was almost NO traction

    • He wrote 1000 words a day, every day, for 650 days in a row

  4. 2

    A+ interview. Great questions and flow. That was fantastic.

  5. 1

    Show up every day for 2 years! Absolutely love this quote.

  6. 1

    This was a fantastic interview! Very inspiring. Thank you so much for the podcast. I wonder how I managed to miss that indiehackers had a podcast :)