Chapter 1: Why is securing sales more important than building products?
You need sales before you have operations. I'll break that down in this video.
Chapter 2: How can founders effectively sell ideas before product development?
My name is Steven Pope.
Chapter 3: What strategies can be used to find potential buyers?
I'm the founder of My Amazon Guy.
Chapter 4: Why should services be sold before they are delivered?
And sales is far more important than having a deliverable product. For example, you could spend two or three years building a SaaS product. It's pretty fun and common to be a SaaS pro on LinkedIn right now.
Chapter 5: What is lean entrepreneurship and how does it work?
But the problem is, is that after you build that product, nobody wants to buy it.
Chapter 6: How can feedback shape your product or service offering?
And you just wasted two to three years.
Chapter 7: What are the benefits of honest beta launches and refunds?
Now, transversely, if you were to sell the concept of your delivery before they use the product, you can then take that money and go hire somebody to build it and do it overnight.
Chapter 8: How can selling before building help entrepreneurs reduce risk?
And especially with AI today, there's all kinds of businesses that are popping up. And you can build a website with AI, you can build a software with AI, you can solve a very specific problem with AI. Now, these typical deliveries are often not great, but they're good enough. And so if you are trying to sell something, especially if it's to a rich person, it's going to be a pretty niche problem.
And you don't know if somebody's going to buy your niche product when you first start building it. So my recommendation is to pick up the phone, just like Cartman and South Park did in whatever random episode I'm thinking about, and start selling what you don't have yet. If nobody buys it, guess what? You just saved yourself a year of dev work.
Even if you don't sell a software, a year of building and trying to build something that somebody wants to buy. But if on those first 20 phone calls, three people buy, whether it's a $20 delivery or a $500 delivery, you now know there's demand. And if you don't have the ability to sell something, then you're not going to get off the ground ever. Every founder needs to be good at sales.
They need to be able to sell a concept. They need to be able to collect payment for a good or a service. This is why I think your chicken and egg question on build or sell first is without a doubt, sell first. So I'll break this down a little bit, give some examples and tell some stories as we go about talking about this.
And I can't believe I'm going to do this, but I'm going to play a South Park clip. Hello, is this University of Colorado Biology Department? Great. I understand you're currently doing research on stem cells. Who? Because I'm currently in possession of some aborted fetuses. This is ridiculous. How much do you pay? On South Park. No, no, come on.
I got a guy in Cleveland who's going to give me $80 a pound right now. How about $100? Are you breaking my box? I think about it. Buzz Nod Medical Group. Yeah, I called earlier about the stem cells and the fetuses. Yeah, it's pretty raw. Okay. Hi, Randy. Yeah. Oh, yes. They've been kept in a cool temperature. Yeah. These are primo fetuses, Randy.
So the point of me showing this clip is Cartman has no possession of this item, but he starts doing cold calls. And if we're going to give Cartman credit for anything in South Park, that dude can sell stuff. And so he ends up making some deals, and he ends up not ever delivering the product. But that's another story. And that's another problem in another video to deal with.
So picking up the phone, just like Cartman did... And going through the white pages, yellow pages, Google pages, whether you have Zoom info, Apollo, or whatever you're using to find information. But let's say you're a solopreneur, side hustle in the concept. You're probably just going to Google it at first.
Maybe use some AI to say, build me a contact list of 10 people who would buy XYZ product, where you might find these people, where they might hang out, or some public probable information. and start picking up that phone and calling. And you don't have to call people you don't know at first. You could call warm contacts.
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