Readit NewsI especially liked this picture I grabbed of someone who had his photo taken in the exact same spot for one of the earlier Apollo launches: https://imgur.com/a/xAqbTGL
* Closing in on $250k revenue
* 2 major clients, 4 smaller, short-term engagements
* 100% utilization rate (no downtime between clients)
* Successfully raised rates with all client projects (avg: 19% / engagement)
* Closed via a sales funnel of: 5 new prospect outreach / day, 2 proposal follow-ups / day, 1 existing (or prior) client referral / month
What worked:
* Networking aggressively (see sales funnel)
* Setting up a 3-prong presence of blog + personal site + consulting site
* Pruning and refining available code/assets for portfolio
* Pricing / week & value-based, fixed-cost pricing
* 100% money-back guarantee (no one has asked for it)
* Having an accountant
What did not work:
* Thorough proposal / contract documentation. I figured having detailed, in-depth scope of work showing I had knowledge of their industry, problems, etc, would help close deals. The teams that closed the fastest already knew they wanted to work with me, but the ones that weren't sold couldn't even be sold with excellent SOWs and proposal documentation.
* Having a lawyer. For a one-man consulting shop, you really don't need one. Most standard SOW/Contract/IP documents are easy enough to generate/find yourself.
* Toptal / Upwork / any of those race-to-the-bottom sites. There's great arbitrage if you're international like OP. But I'm in the US, and it's not worth the effort for US rates.
* Meetups. I just didn't invest time in them (yet). I think the next leap in rates will come from becoming more "well known" through blogging and speaking engagements, which this is a key area to invest in.
* All this "double your rate" business. Sure, I imagine this works if you're used to pulling in $50/hr, and I imagine Brennan Dunn and the sort are marketing themselves at more commoditized development. But trust me, people ran away when I doubled my rates. I had to find a sweet spot and build up my rates slowly per client rather than just assume I was wildly undervalued.
Great job, seems you're doing really well!
- If referred by foo.com OR came over with particular UTM params OR landed on /foo THEN change out testimonials to be able foo (using similar underlying tech that Optimizely, et al use)
or
- If visitor, who has opted in previously, has the "Customer" tag in the ESP/CRM that our customer has linked their site to, then ditch the signup form on the homepage and put a training video (or something)
It's basically a rules engine that looks at on-site behavior (pages viewed, referring domain, query string params, cookie data, etc) and allows you to combine that with ESP/CRM backend data (tags, custom fields, subscriber vs anonymous), and make content changes (replace text, hide an element, swap out an image, etc) as a result of a visitor belonging to a particular segment you've defined.
Trying to disguise bad faith marketing hacks like this as show hn type content hurts your business.
If you clicked through after the initial welcome page (that just overviews the tool) that's not a lead gen form. That's exactly what the tool advertises: a questionnaire for deconstructing your funnel value.
In fact, there's zero lead gen until the end – and that's entirely optional. There's no "put in your email address to get your numbers!" – we display it all anonymously. If you put in your email address, we send you an email course.
I'm not sure if you saw the same thing we built, or if I'm misreading your comment?
Presumably, a person’s mode of sharing should have zero impact on having a link to share.
$727k MRR
I love it. The car mostly drives itself between superchargers, and the SCs are usually next to coffee shops or restaurants. I don't mind getting up and stretching / having a drink every few hours.
But if minimizing recharging/refueling is your main priority, yeah, you can't beat ICE.
^^ - you're selling AR as well? Last presentation was showing that to be a profit machine? Would love to learn about the reasoning behind that decision!
Focusing on one thing is best. I recently sold my SaaS for the same reason — I wanted to eliminate needing to worry about it while working on growing my other (more profitable) business.
(Lastly, as things that probably make Patrick excited to get out of bed and work, I'm assuming Starfighter > AR.)
The idea of another 10+ hours baking in the Florida sun...
(But, seriously, no one there would have preferred an unsafe launch. For us, the booing was targeted toward high atmospheric winds!)