My thoughts on why indie hackers should try direct sales and forget about marketing.
My thoughts on why indie hackers should try direct sales and forget about marketing. Inspired by @csallen. https://blog.louisnicholls.com/advice/sales-marketing/
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This is one of the best posts. Its really good advice. Thanks
This is a really good article and, while I was already thinking along these lines, I'm now convinced I need to put most of my effort into sales and very little into marketing over the next few months. Once I know enough about my customers, then I can build a fancy landing page.
Thank you very much for sharing! :)
Hey @louisswiss great article and you nailed it. Another indirect benefit of sales I've found is that doing sales is hard and along the journey of the startup, the sales task helps us gain more confidence generally and get the courage to face the troubles which come their way. Most successful founders have originally done sales or at least spoken to potential/early customers.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
-- Peter Drucker
I would argue at least against 2 points: that sales are faster and more effective.
This is not true or can't be applied to many businesses.
I believe that direct sales must be used only if your product is expensive. Really expensive (like starts from $10,000) - in this situation using direct sales is absolutely reasonable. If your product is just $10, or $100, or even $1000 it's just a waste of time. Nobody wanders suburb selling shampoos or cheap vacuum cleaners, especially nowadays.
Another argument is people hate what somebody sells something to them. I'm talking about potential customers. Nowadays when there are so many choices available nobody likes sales persons insisting to buy from them. People rather surf the Internet first, read some articles from them (content marketing!), compare features and prices, and only after that make a decision.
In the article I'm talking about early stage businesses. Where the founder is trying to make their first few sales (in the post I say first 10-20 customers I think).
As for the rest of the comment, I think you're going wrong in part due to a misunderstanding of what your goals should be as an early stage founder, and in part due to a misunderstanding of how direct sales should work.
Don't worry though, these are common mistakes - especially amongst first time founders and developers. You may be neither, but I'll explain for the benefit of the many indie hackers who do fit that description...
So the mistake you're making here is to think that the main goal of an early founder should be to make money (perhaps in a scalable way).
But your main goals are actually a) to understand the value of your product/the problem to your customer, and b) understand how to handle any objections they may have to buying your product.
In other words, you're selling to learn.
If you're starting a shampoo or vacuum cleaner business with no industry experience, you absolutely should go door to door for the first 20 sales! How else are you going to work out what problems they have with their hair/household dust that their current shampoo/vacuum cleaner does a bad job of solving?
It's funny. A lot of people think this is true. And there definitely are some (but very, very few) people out there who do just genuinely hate having a human involved in any purchasing decision.
But generally, if you've built a valuable product and made sure the person you're selling it to will actually be better off if they buy that product, then people actually enjoy being sold to.
A good sale leaves both parties with a warm feeling in their stomachs.
Look - this is really important.
Understanding why you should do sales not marketing when you're starting a new project makes it much more likely that you will build a strong business and a product people actually want.
If you honestly don't understand how/why that's the case, it's okay. You can shoot me an email and I'll find a few minutes to explain it on a call.
I'd like to help you (and I'm being deadly serious - it will help you).
If, however, you're less interested in learning/helping fellow indie hackers and more interested in pushing some ill-conceived, flawed and incorrect notion that 'sales is always bad' (and my gut tells me this is more likely the case), then do me and everyone else here a favour and keep it to yourself please :)
My offer to give you a quick primer on where you're going wrong still stands (also to anyone else reading this who is confused). I'm happy to help.