Pivoting from product to tech-enabled productized service and growing to $50k/mo

Ryan Doyle built a product, got backed by Y Combinator's Calm Fund, and then pivoted into a tech-enabled service. Today, Sales.co is making $50k/mo.

Here's Ryan on how he did it. 👇

Moving back to the farm

I graduated from college and took a sales job with a tech company in Palo Alto. I knew that I wanted to build a company of my own, so I started building software on nights and weekends in 2020.

I just always liked building things. I grew up on a farm, and I liked being able to create and then see what I created. When I got into college, I played with entrepreneurship a bit and decided I might have the right disposition for it. I was curious enough to want to try things and stupid enough not to care about too many of the risks.

I think, overall, I looked at the path that was expected of me and saw that I could either go build something for somebody else and be a part of that journey, or focus on building a skill set and a base of assets that I controlled. I figured I'd rather take the risk of going out and learning this stuff myself.

So, I quit my sales job and moved back to my family's farm to build the tools that I wished I had as a salesman.

One eventually caught on. It was called Magic Sales Bot, and it was the first cold email writer built with GPT. It got backed by Y Combinator's Calm Fund, and that grew into what is now Sales.co, a lead generation service that we fulfill with the software we're building.

Building the "product"

Initially, it was a pure service. I really advocate for starting with services.

People are building all these different things without knowing what outcome they're actually trying to create for businesses. But when you go service-first and try selling that service, you really figure out what problems people actually have and what they're willing to pay you for. And from there, you'll find out what product to build.

So that's what went into building the initial product —  working with a dozen different B2B companies and figuring out the commonalities between them all. And then building the infrastructure between them.

My partner, Jakob, and I built a lot of the infrastructure starting in Airtable with Python and JavaScript automations on top of that. And that has really never stopped. It's just become different layers of automation — things that we would do manually in the early days that we now automate through code that we've written.

And then, when we became the managers of this system, we started building automations into those levels as well. It never stops because as soon as we started doing really well with one service, we started branching out to other services.

As far as stack, Jakob's a big Python guy. I'm a big JavaScript guy. I like to do most of my backend work in Node and my frontend work in Next.js, but our website is just simple HTML. We've got a MongoDB database that we run all of our millions of cold emails' worth of data out of, and we've built all our own cold email infrastructure in Python on top of that.

Productized services

We run on a monthly subscription. We have businesses put the $3,000-$30,000 monthly subscription on a credit card.

It's just month-to-month. They put a dollar down to start, and we onboard them over the course of a week. Once they're ready, they see everything that we have prepared for them, and we begin their subscription in this way. It's really lowered the risk for them while providing an easy way to do cash collection for us.

Growth via dogfood

Cold email, cold email, cold email. That's how we grow.

Obviously, an advantage is being able to send thousands and thousands of cold emails a day — and do it well.

Any idea that we want to try, we can test on the market quite easily. That's something that, usually, only someone with an audience can do. And no one's really thinking of this. Or, if they are thinking of it, they're thinking about how hard it is or that it won't work instead of just trying.

Other marketing tactics we've tried:

• Ads: This does well, but the leads are less qualified.

• Partnerships: We reached out to other agencies and resellers but again, lower quality.

• SEO: We started with programmatic SEO, with some success. We're leaning more into long term seo now

Beating a dead horse

Not to beat a dead horse, but here's my advice: Start as a service and then build your software around that.

If I had to start over, I would start with services instead of even going the Magic Sales Bot route. I suppose it was necessary. It helped me realize that I'm not the next Pieter Levels. And it also helped me find my niche.

It's the right niche for me. I've got the people skills for it. I've got the intuition for it. And it is fun in its own way.

What's next?

From here, world domination.

Generate cash to buy software businesses.

Use my hacking skills to bless the world in excess of how God has blessed me.

In no particular order.

You can learn more at Sales.co, CommunityMentions.com, JakobGreenfeld.com, and RpDoyle.com.