£84 never felt so good: closed my first contract
by Elliot SerorYesterday, precisely 4 weeks after launching Outcode to address the trust crisis in freelancing, I closed my first contract.
This small validation feels really good as I was entering the Trough of Sorrow (https://bit.ly/2kYllhN) this week, after the excitement from a somewhat successful Product Hunt launch had worn off.
This means the growth game starts now ! I guess the goal is to try and grow that number by around 7%/week as of now.
A few things learning from my past 4 weeks:
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Minimal tech will do. After originally launching with a rather complex web app with whole platform side of things, I redid the site from scratch last week, making it a very simple landing page. Turns out it converts better.
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Intensely try out niches for a week at a time. Because it’s actually difficult to tell the difference between promising niches that take a bit of time to show some traction and niches that are not for you and on which you’re losing your time, the trick is to focus deeply on a single niche for 5-7 working days.
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Pick your favourite 2-3 marketing channels and stick to them. There’s no way you can do SEO, fb ads, google Adwords, cold emails and calls, social media presence, etc. and not go crazy, so just pick 2-3 of those. Fb ads and cold emails and calls personally suit me.
Thanks a lot for reading, hope to see you on Outcode.io !
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Looks very interesting. Do you intend to add python or golang to backend. I think they are also frequently used.
Best wishes
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Congrats!
How did you find the customer?
Among Fb ads, cold emails and calls which one do you do most?
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Thanks !
So this one was through fb ads. They're for really different things:
- fb is great to test numerous things and see how different messages/angles convert as for €6 I reach 7k people and have 20 clicks
- cold emails followed a few days later by a call work better for true B2B, and you can hope to get to chat a bit with the customer and really understand what they currently have, what they need and how they respond to your value proposition... overall it's more powerful for the client's perspective but a bigger investment on your side
I've done more fb ads until now, probably because it's more fun to design and deploy, and right now am forcing myself to do more cold calls to be more balanced...
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This comment was deleted a year ago.
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Thanks for the interest ! Please leave your email at https://outcode.io/freelancers. I'm pretty content with the devs I have right now (we a lot more demand from devs than from clients) but could always use a good front-end programmer ! :)
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