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Goes into good details about the tactics used to come up with an idea and then recruit the first few customers. After signing up $5k/month revenue it meant he n
by PhilWright 8y ago
Goes into good details about the tactics used to come up with an idea and then recruit the first few customers. After signing up $5k/month revenue it meant he needed to generate 5,000 leads per month for those customers. That is the hard bit, how did he do that on a side project? He says that the income was passive, so how did he generate 5,000 targeted leads passively? That is the magic, not the ability to recruit some customers.
- mike2477 8y agoHey there! Author of the post here -- we sold leads for $1 but our cost was $.30 and completely outsourced so I didn't have to do it.
- TeeJay942 8y agoHe said that as a salesperson himself, he outsourced this work to VAs. I assume he continued to do so for this side project.
- PhilWright 8y agoAha, so he is performing arbitrage. Charge customers a $1 for something he can buy for much less than a $1. I wonder if the recursion works, use the virtual assistants to bring in leads to also get his own customers.
- wtracy 8y agoTo be fair, it sounds like he put in work up front vetting and training the VAs.
- hudibras 8y agoTrue, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to tell us about the "secret sauce," especially since he's sold the company.
- mike2477 8y agoHappy to share the "secret sauce" if helpful. Planning to go into how I scaled ops and automated stuff in the next post. But fire away any questions you have now and happy to share. All about transparency!
- fossuser 8y agoReplying for mike2477 who wrote the article and responded to this post, but his comments are dead. Mike - it looks like you got shadow banned, but it’s not clear why? Maybe dang can help.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoHow does one see shadow banned posts?
- graeme 8y agoIn your profile there is a "showdead" option
- newppc 8y agoMaybe shadow banned because the story is 4 years old, and has been repeated word for word already? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mike2477&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mike2477&sort=byPopularity&pre... https://upupgrow.com/how-i-built-a-5000-per-month-side-project/ https://upupgrow.com/how-i-built-a-5000-per-month-side-proje... https://getsimpledata.com/blog/sales-best-practices/2015828how-i-built-a-5k-mrr-side-project-in-5-months/ https://getsimpledata.com/blog/sales-best-practices/2015828h... Great story, but may be one reason.
- csa 8y agoI vouched for the dead comments. The story might need to have a missing date on it (4 years old?), but the two comments that the author of the post made don’t seem to violate the terms or spirit of HN rules. If someone can show me how the rules were broken in his comments, I will gladly unvouch.
- kokokokoko 8y agoBased on when this product was created, I can almost guarantee they are just manually scraping LinkedIn (plus a few other places - Facebook, twitter, Bloomberg, maybe even Pitchbook). There are custom Google search portals you can use to search LinkedIn via keyword that not everyone knows about. From there one can use a bunch of services that will provide you (mostly)valid emails at various companies. I imagine he made a quick set of tutorials for his outsourced contractors and had his virtual assistant he found on oDesk do the hiring and setting up of those contractors. This quote from the article is wild: "Customers have to train their team and the billing is variable so your cost per lead ranges from $.50 to $5" You can beat that number paying people $20/hr to do this stuff, let alone exploiting people out in the Philippines on I'm sure the not livable wages he's paying them(Aka the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies). Sigh... you know we're at the end of the cycle when it's just a bunch of outsourcers with marketing backgrounds.
- hnzix 8y ago> the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies Let's say a knowledge worker in a developing country could survive on $1 USD a day, adjusting food and rent to local cost. If a local white collar job paid them $5 a day, and a remote "exploiting" job paid them $15 a day, but an American could earn $50 a day for the same task, is this really a moral hazard?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hawkice 8y agoNo, ya see, it's wrong to pay people in poorer countries less because now you're talking to a poor person. If you hire an American, you never even spoke to a poor person, so it isn't your fault. If that sounds like a fever dream, you aren't alone, but it's my best guess at understanding what's happening. Obviously, my complete lack of employing people in central Africa is why they are all middle class Americans now, so I'm doing my part.
- 8y ago
- asimjalis 8y agoIt was a lead gen tool. He could have used the tool to generate leads for the tool.