2 builders who never spoke to each other

Accept a terrible hourly rate on early sales work

Manual selling and hand delivery pay badly per hour and are supposed to. They buy the first customers, the repeatable process and the credibility that switch on the channels that do scale, and at low revenue your time is not expensive enough for that trade to be wrong.

The method

1. 01

   Accept a dreadful effective hourly rate on manual unscalable work, because it is what opens up the channels that do scale.

2. 02

   Accept that early sales work will not scale, because it is what switches on the channels that do.

3. 03

   Do the unscalable customer work yourself at the start. Kahl personally talks Podscan clients through implementation knowing it could never work at hundreds of customers, because it is what produces the repeatable process you later automate.

4. 04

   At low revenue your hours are not too expensive to sell with: doubling a tiny MRR figure is worth days of founder time.

5. 05

   Sell in conversation because social convention forces the prospect to give you a reason for the no, whereas a visitor closing your sales page rejects you silently.

What it returned

• $5

  Barry calculated his rate at $5 an hour during this period; ConvertKit now does $29M a year

• $100

  Spending five hours to move from $100 to $200 MRR is worth it

• Airbnb founders photographing hosts' homes themselves and listing them cited as the same move at larger scale

Sources

• How Convert Kit grew from $1.5k to $100k MRRHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · 4/ Always ask for referrals · undated
• Direct Sales for Bootstrapped SaaS Startups: from $1,300 to $725,000 MRRNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · Do things that don’t scale · 2017-07-06
• Doing Things that Don’t Scale …Unintentionally – The Bootstrapped FounderArvid Kahl · thebootstrappedfounder.com · 2024-07-26