Got our first customer
by Daoud ClarkeWe got our first customer for our data science consultancy DataPastry (https://datapastry.com)!
We did four months of outreach on LinkedIn using LeadCookie (https://www.leadcookie.com/). We ended up having over a dozen video calls, and only one lead to a sale. My co-founder and I are both data scientists with zero experience in sales, so it's been a steep learning curve.
We read a ton on sales and marketing, and Jake from LeadCookie was a huge support and inspiration for us.
We started off targeting founders of startups, but we found that often founders don't know what data science is and expected us to do everything relating to data, including data engineering and analysis.
When we started targeting CTOs of slightly larger companies, we found their expectations where much more in line with our expertise.
Our first client turned out to be slightly different to what we were expecting. Instead of doing the data science work ourselves, we ended up advising and mentoring their development team who were already doing data science work. This worked really well as they were keen to upskill the team, and it was more cost effective than hiring a full time data scientist.
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Nice! As a technical co-founder in the same space, reading your post was not too far from reading an autobiography. Midnight Mechanism has technical founders with little experience in sales, too, and we found developing a consistent sales process to be quite challenging.
This worked really well as they were keen to upskill the team, and it was more cost effective than hiring a full time data scientist.
"More cost effective than hiring a full-time employee" is an angle we've tried, but it can be difficult to convince some orgs of that. The trick is to find organizations at a size large enough to have the budget for DS work, and small enough that they don't have a dedicated DS department. It's a tricky tightrope to walk, for sure.
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Thanks Justin! Great to see someone doing something similar but a few steps ahead of us.
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