I will be your guinea pig! Watch me get my first customer for a new product. FIRST STEP: Building a Dream 100 List.
Hey fam, hope this post can inspire at least one person. Below is my journey during week 1 to getting my first customer.
(I tried to upload the images, video and audio but IndieHackers wasn't playing nicely... Sorry but I linked to the post with embedded screenshots and video at the end if interested).
Here is the story:
It's Wednesday night, 10pm. Suddenly a brilliant idea to get more clients hits me.
I run over to my desk and start writing up a Facebook post about it: [Image]
At the end of the post I offer the first person to land a client using my strategy two rewards:
1- A $25 Amazon gift card.
2- Introductions to more clients (via my email list).
10 minutes later, Justin Brooke drops this comment: [Image]
I’m thinking to myself: “Great idea JBizzle, but starting from 0 sounds like a shit ton of work.”
Then one hour later 34 people have reacted to the comment. - [Image]
Now I’m thinking to myself: “f**k I’m really going to have to do this now, aren’t I?”
I start writing down ideas for a service offer I’ll make.
Content promotion is a good starting spot. Everyone wants more traffic to their content.
Now I just need to focus on the biggest traffic multiplier to content. Content Multipliers, Social Media Multipliers, List Multipliers.
Yes List Multipliers, I grew the Sumo.com list to 10k/month in 5 months. I know a proven strategy to turn traffic into emails. How about --- I offer a performance based service that turns clients blog traffic into hyper-targeted leads. Bingo!
My new Three Jabs (3J) strategy is born: - [Image]
Screw $1k/mo. I think I can make $10k/mo profit with this one proven strategy.
The Dream 100 Hit List
I wake up late the next morning and eat some fried rice. I want to start emailing people, but let’s be realistic:
This strategy won’t work for everyone.
Actually it will, but if I want to charge based on performance (and have a shot at hitting $10k/mo with a handful of clients), I need to get clients with as much or more traffic than Sumo.
So, instead, I open up all the email database tools I know of. LeadFuze, BuiltWith, Datanyze, NerdyData. - [Image]
My first instinct is to search the databases by tech stack.
What tools would a site with 200k+ organic traffic use? Ahrefs, Clearscope, Moz Pro.
I try all of them. None of the email databases have niche SEO tools listed in their database. WTF!?!?
Late at night (because I live in China), I get on demo calls with US sales reps and tell them my list criteria:
I need a list of websites with blogs getting over 200k organic traffic per month.
They tell me to use keyword filters like “blog” to narrow my search down to websites with blogs, but none have a traffic filter… except one: - [Image]
Time to build my Dream 100 hit list!
The only problem?
Datanyze pricing starts at $600/mo. WTF Datanyze !?!?
I don’t really want to pay $600 to build a list of 100 people. 10 minutes later I find this thing called “SEMrush Rank” in the Domain Analytics section of SEMrush: - [Image]
Turns out I’ve hit the jackpot.
SEMrush Rank is amazing.
You pick a country and it spits back a list of sites ranked by the most organic traffic.
So I export the top 10,000 sites in the United States onto a CSV on my computer. - [Image]
These sites are my perfect audience.
They’ve spent years building strong organic traffic to their sites, and I’m about to spoon feed them a proven strategy to convert that traffic into hyper-targeted leads.
For example, the business pictured below hustled from Jan 2012 to Oct 2014 (34 months) to get their first 1,000 organic visitors. Now, 7+ years after site launch, they get 261k organic visitors a month: - [Image]
Getting the sites is only half the battle though.
I’ve also got to:
1- Find which sites run company blogs.
2- Get the names of decision makers and their emails.
To do it, I copy/paste the domains from my csv file into a Google sheet, and start manually doing it myself.
Starting from the bottom (SEMrush Rank 10,000) and working my way to the top.
Slam on my headphones and listen to Drake “Started From The Bottom,” whilst I lookup site after site after site after site after site. - [Video]
After four hours and 50 rows of data, I’m exhausted (and start to hate Drake).
So I type up the following message to my ex-Sumo co-worker, Magic Matt (who led Sumo’s SDR team):
Yo Magic, any chance you have a good source for a VA to find a list of 100 prospects?
Magic responds:
I've sourced all my VAs via Upwork, but there are these outsourced firms that do this kind of thing, like DataBees. Bar happens to be using them now at his new company in Denver. I hit up my homie Bar (ex-Sumo Head of Sales) and we jump on a quick 15-minute call.
Bar gives me the low-down on DataBees:
Bro, DataBees are great, but they have their pros and cons.
Cons:
They’re a bit more expensive than a full-time Philippines-based VA.
You have to give them very specific instructions.
Pros:
They manage your VA for you so it’s way more hands-off.
They have a whole team, so you can scale your leads up and down easy.
The lead data they get is accurate AF.
I was sold.
It’s midnight, so I quickly jump over to DataBee’s website and buy the one-week trial for $99. That gives me one full-time assistant for 40 hours. - [Image]
10am the next day I check my email for something from DataBees.
Nothing. F*&k. I need leads.
So I go back to their site and use the “Schedule a Call” widget on the bottom right of the site to book a time for 11pm that night (my time).
In the meantime I record a Loom video with specific instructions on exactly what I want my DataBee to do: - [Video]
On the call I send Joe from DataBee’s my Loom video and tell him to “make me honey". - [Audio]
Joe says his people will start building my list on Monday, and have my Dream 100 hit list done by the end of Wednesday.
I hit up my buddy Guillaume Moubeche from Lemlist, and tell him “I’m ready to make it rain.”
I’m now (2 days away) from cold emailing my way to $10k/mo.
For people who like to see the embedded screenshots/videos here is the blog post: https://contentmavericks.com/content-marketing-business/
