[elt]

Any advice I can offer are things that seemed to work for me. I got "lucky" and struck gold on my first idea/project (consistently making high six figures over seven years running). I have tried other projects but none were nearly as successful.

1) Find your competitive advantage. I happened to work in a niche industry and learned it inside and out. I became somewhat of a "domain expert". I used that to my advantage and built my product to serve that niche. What can you do better than most people? What do you know inside and out?

2) Serve businesses, not people. People will do anything to not pay. They tend to have more charge backs and most of the "system abuse" I deal with are small time freelancers trying to squeeze my product's free offering. Don't offer too much for free. Don't be a charity. Serve businesses, they pay money.

3) Don't be afraid of competitors. My largest customers are in fact competitors that leverage my service to better their own service.

4) Don't charge too little. When I first started, my offering was incredibly cheap ($9 per-month). It certainly helped bring attention to my offering and I got a lot of customers for it, but they were cheap customers (see point #2 above). Today my lowest offering is $39 per-month and I seem to have weeded out most of the bad apples (though some still get through).

5) Reach out to customers directly. Don't rely on ads, social media posts or other fluff. I haven't done a single ad or social media post (I don't even have social media profiles). What I did do was directly email/message potential customers.

[b0afc375b5]

If I may ask, for point #5, do you mean cold emailing here? If so, how do you differentiate your email with that of other generic cold emails? Or do you just email people you already know?

[elt]

It really depends on your customer. In my case, I did cold emailing. I was able to narrow down my customer by their job title/role and knew exactly who to email.

I don't really buy into gimmicks or tricks to differentiate my emails. You can read a lot of "tricks" out there, but they come across as inauthentic to me and that isn't how I wanted to establish a business relationship.

The thing I did was send very targeted emails (to people I honestly believed would benefit from my service) and every email was personalized (and I don't mean using a template and swapping out variables). I sent each and every email from scratch, one at a time.

I did read a few books on sales outreach and prospecting ("Predictable Revenue" and "Predictable Prospecting"). They were helpful and I did pick up a few ideas from them, but I mainly took the knowledge and paved my own prospecting/outreach strategy from it.

With that being said, I haven't done any outreach in over three years. All of my customers come to me, mainly referred to my service by existing customers. Or customers that leave a company and advocate for my service at their new company.

[b0afc375b5]

Got it, thanks for the reply!

[vladsanchez]

Mind sharing your url? I'm interested b/c I'm in your industry: ETL/Data Transformations.

Thanks in advance.

[elt]

I assume you read my submissions and came to that conclusion-- but my service isn't in the ETL industry (although I do process very large amounts of data).

I don't really share my service publicly and maintain a high level of privacy (hence no social media, etc).

[vladsanchez]

I concluded your line of business based on your name/handle: "ELT"

LOL ;)

I value your protectionism yet I hoped to receive constructive feedback. I was only interested about your tech stack, marketing and processes b/c I'm prospecting to become a creator too perhaps in a different niche but definitely ETL-based.

Thanks.

[duncan_idaho]

Sounds like you're scared of competitors =)

[marcosdumay]

Well, "don't be scared of competitors" doesn't mean you should help them.

[cinntaile]

Why would he help kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?