Anybody here selling services (and not products?)
Hi guys,
I'm fairly new in this community. I come from the tech industry, having been worked in tech startups for about 15 years as a product designer. I quit my job 6 or so years ago and started a company in an industry I never knew anything about: professional translation services.
This proved to be a real mistake. We didn't make any sale, and spent about 2 years working in the wrong things. But over the months, we managed to overcome this and created a sales system that is the basis for our growth, reaching about 50% of growth YoY in revenue. Today we are one of the fastest growing translation companies in Europe, with a completely distributed team.
It sounds very easy now but we had faced many, many difficult problems, and are still facing them. In the beginning our biggest problem was how to make the first sale, and now, our biggest problem is how to get payments from overdue invoices and manage the growth with "style". Go figure!
I would love to share bits of our journey for those interested in it. We do sell services (translation and localization services), and not a product, so I'm not sure if my experience would help here.
Is somebody else selling services in the community? And, what would you like to hear from me? My skills mainly developed around sales, strategy and finance/cash management.
People sell services here, though many aspire to the holy grail of SaaS. I do think more indie hackers should start out with services and work towards SaaS, as it can take so long to get SaaS's off the ground.
There's the Freelancers and Productized Services groups, for example.
Thanks!
Thank you Rosie for the Information, very helpful :)
Hi Rodrigo! You might be what I was looking for. So very similar case as you.
I went from Software Engineering to Marketing in a blimp. So far I'm happy with what I've learned and the methodology we taught, our service is 1-on-1 coaching for Social Media particularly for Twitter.
I know for a fact, people and companies need our product. But I'm having the toughest time doing sales, since it's only a couple months so far, I'm tranquil, confident and optimistic but if you could speed up the process for us, we would be really appreciated!
"1-on-1 coaching for Social Media particularly for Twitter."
Who's buying your service? Marketing Managers?
At the moment the best leads come from consulting firms that do not offer Marketing services. They get a commission and we get referred to their customers (small businesses).
Interesting! I do not know exactly what your service does... and unfortunately I can't offer any advice until I know it 100%. Otherwise I will be giving you useless advice. Do you have a budget for this? I'm happy to consult and give you a direction.
Nice post Rodrigo!!
Hi Rodrigo, since I am sure many of us (me included) are at a stage where we trying to get our first users, I would appreciate if you can tell us what mistakes you did at the beginning and your strategy that got you your first 50-100 users.
The very big mistake is that we spent about 2 years working on things that we "thought" would sell, but never actually sold.
This was also part of the second mistake: we didn't know what we wanted to do, because, we didn't know anything about the industry.
We did everything wrong... :D
I'm writing a say of essays that I will publish on my site and the first one is "Always work in an industry you are familiar with"... go figure!
The strategy: the only way to grow in a predictable way is by sales. What's your product? How do you reach your customers? It's constantly thinking about how to get more customers and money to the company. Obsessively.
I'm sure all of us does most things wrongs at the beginning :D
Please post your article when you do release it.
@kikiriki congrats for building the company.
Can you share your views on cold email? Is it worth of doing so? What is best way to do?
Hi!
Lets first never call it "cold email" because it sounds bad :D we call it Outbound Prospecting and for us is a very important part of our sales / biz dev strategy.
To put it simple is the only thing that made our company resurrect when we were doing $0
It's direct, fast and very predictable.
But you need to be constant, pay attention to the metrics and be very precise. It's not mass mailing or spamming, its carefully selecting potential clients that could buy what you have. Metrics is key for us and it should be for any sales leader.
The best: read Predictable Revenue. It will be high-level at first, but will give you an idea to later think on the tools to frame the sales system (where to get leads, and etc.).
Hi Rodrigo,
We sell services. We organize hackathons as a recruitment approach for tech companies to connect with diverse tech talent. These Equalithons (hackathons for equality) help underestimated tech innovators to "show" their skills and credentials by building social impact-driven solutions. I'd appreciate learning more about your journey.
Thanks!