Sales tips for early-stage indie hackers

Been listening to IndieHackers podcast's archive recently, found lots of good sales tips for early-stage founders on the podcast #119 with Steli Efti.

Here are the key takeaways for me

• Sales do not have to be sleazy, approach it like a result-driven communication
• Selling one customer at a time doesn’t scale, especially for IndieHackers with non-enterprise pricing. But in the early days, it's important to do sales since it's the most effective way to learn about your customer, create an ideal profile and understand what motivates them
• Those ~100 initial sales will help you to build the right features and understand how to scale your sales by creating marketing copy that attracts your ideal customers
• In most cases, you need to keep a balance between mass emailing and sending deep researched emails
• Mass emailing to thousands of users at once will give you a low response rate and eventually emails from your domain will land in the spam folder
• By sending only 3 deep researched emails to ideal customers will reduce your chances a lot
• Your research should be deep enough to attract your customers' attention but light enough that will allow you to send between 25-50 emails a day. This number should give you enough responses to be able to iterate based on the feedback
• Focus on the subject line first, if people don't open your email based on the subject line it doesn't matter what the email says

Full Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/MartyAghajanyan/status/1386723844484780032