The best place to hire a not-expensive sales/marketing person?

Your budget is low. I have been searching for one year. I now understand the rates. And the money is the minor side of it. It is about the talent. The only way you get progress with the amount you can spend is drip marketing, and you need email list building. You can do this for $500-$1000 a month.

Hi Yura,

You might want to have a think about what kind of help you need exactly.

For example, you describe yourself as a tech guy building a side project. What is your biggest obstacle to making sales now?

• Lack of expertise (how to make sales)
• Lack of time to work on sales/marketing
• Lack of interest in working on sales/marketing

There isn't a 'wrong' answer, but it's important to know which problem you're trying to solve (and be upfront about it).

With remote working becoming more popular, the days of finding competent marketers willing to work for peanuts are long gone.

For $1k/month (full time) you're not going to find someone who'll get results for a SaaS app. Unless the steps are very, very repetitive and you know exactly what you're doing marketing/sales-wise.

If you can get someone interested in your project for the sake of the project (or because you're a nice guy), you could probably swing a decent marketer to work ~10 hours/week with you.

In your position, that's what I'd do.

You might be able to find someone here on IH. You'll want to go with someone who can point to similar success they've had in the past. You (presumably) don't have the marketing/sales experience yourself to be able to find a 'diamond in the rough'.

Good luck!

Hey! Wanted to do an update.

I was doing more research for the options after this post and found one more option I have tried. A guy from India is running a startup company which focuses on exactly what I wanted at that point of time, on getting first customers and figuring out the best target market. He spends hour or two every day on your project and helps a lot with defining a vision.

We were working on http://painlesstracker.com, it's a non-intrusive time tracker, which automatically tracks your activity on tasks. We have updated the landing page, defined pricing, key benefits, initial target audience. So far we got ~30 signups with ~5 users who actually are trying to use the app. With 0 effort from my side for outreach activities.
Of course, results can be better, but it's a still huge step from zero to one.

The website of the guy is https://www.tractionmate.com.

Hi Yura,

I read your latest post and I checkout your landing draft. I would say it’s more of a placeholder than a draft.

If you only have a draft which currently has no information about the time tracker, no cost, or product advantages I am not sure you are going to be taken seriously. I don’t know if any sales person or marketer that would do this for any amount of money as it exists.

My suggestions would be to contact an affiliate network. You can find a directory of them at offervault.com. Almost every affiliate network works on a performance basis . There few is a percentage of the sale. It starts at 30% and goes up from there depending on if you give them exclusive rights or your shop it around. You are going to want to contact several and explain to them that you are looking to release an application in the market that does... you are looking to test the market with an affiliate marketing company. We currently want to sell the product at “x” cost (one time or subscription ). My customer persona is ( who is your ideal customer) does your affiliate network reach that audience.

If so, you will want to ask them if they have sold anything similar and what they would suggest you do to make it appeal to their network. Most affiliate networks have a design team and will build marketing landing pages for the product so they can do A/B tests .

Your post indicated that you need 50 or so customers for data. If you need data only and you would be willing to give your product away for free to a limited number of users. There are at least 100 that I know without even thinking about to.

Here is one: go to stackcommerce.com and contact them about lisiting your product on their free section of stacksocial.com.

You can sell your product there as well but there is a 3 -6 month waiting list if they approve you as a product for sale.

You should take the $500-$1k that I saved you and put it into your UI/UX. That is the most important component to any SaaS. Get some inspiration at uplabs.com

Hope that helps.

A marketing person will be useless unless you can allocate them a decent budget to work with.

What are your current distribution channels for your product? You might be better learning how to do some online marketing yourself and then invest your $500-$1k into that.

You can easily hire some here - https://usercv.com/services

@Yura

Would you consider a trade? Marketing services for dev services?

I run marketing for a early-stage startup and I'd be happy to consider working with you on defined objectives.

What does your product do? I could possibly refer a few people if I knew. Although the budget is low.

I'll just say that it's going to be very difficult to hire ANYONE to understand & sell your product. Nobody knows your product like you do!

And at $1000/month, the best you're going to get is someone who will scrape the internet and send spammy emails to prospects.

Is there a reason you're not doing sales yourself, especially at these early stages?