Nicely done. We're more of a boutique shop building custom machine learning products for large enterprise in the mid six-figure range, slowly moving into abstracting many of what we learned into our internal ML platform[0].
Many good points about picking sectors and roles. We built for many sectors and roles, but repeat business is important as we end up developing a relation with our clients and they come to us with many other problems.
I tweeted about what worked for us[1] and been musing on turning that and other tweets and replies in here into posts. Again, congrats. This feels nice.
Nice too peek behind the curtain and see some of the effort and thought going into the ‘cold emails’. As a recipient of several thousand in my work email over the years, as an IT contact, I often wonder who’s writing them, and if I was on a list or directly targeted. Although I can offer my anecdote as a lead about the two I have responded to- 1) sent on New Year’s Day offering basketball tickets to a suite for a meet and greet, and 2) a $50 Amazon gift card for doing a 5 minute survey.
FWIW this sort of email triggers my immediate shutdown reactions in several ways: use of "Hey" greeting from some unknown non-friend, general (albeit here not total) avoidance of first-person pronouns[1], phony-baloney specificity in time and duration for an initial meeting.
[1] "Saw your email," "Would love to hear more"--no, avoiding "I" does not make the writer appear stronger.
Well done, and thanks for sharing your insight. Small gripe, I found this line in your article's opening remarks a unnecessary - "If that doesn't ring a bell, then please ignore this and go about your life a few million poorer."
A bit of feedback on your landing page:
Something about "hyperlocal incentivization" caught my eye and I was thoroughly confused. Then read the whole paragraph and actually laughed out loud.
The next thing I did was actually look at the products, because you'd got me in a good mood.
If one has to explain a joke then either they're bad at it, it's a bad joke or they have the wrong audience....I'll leave the conclusion as to which is it to the readers :)
The article is about making money (even from the title)..the commented upon line is insinuating that if you think the article isn't for you (ie you just randomly stumbled upon it), then you obviously are not interested in making money...sarcasm :)
Oh for sure, I grew up poor and am now on the other side. But that’s not what the author is talking about. He’s condescending to people that are making $250k/year for ”leaving millions” on the table. At $250k/year you don’t have to care about money a whole lot, and you can make that being a developer.
The article is actually useful, despite the annoying introduction line of `a few million poorer`. People could stop reading the article for whatever reasons.
Certainly not. I'm just saying that sales is probably a bigger factor than you think. I'm going to assume that you're an engineer. Tech alone doesn't make a business successful. More so than not it makes a business fail. I agree that the statement "Everything about a startup is sales" is exaggerated. Although, I will say that good sales outweighs good tech the majority of the time. It baffles me that people don't recognize that.
I was replying to his condescending assumption, “ I'm going to assume that you're an engineer”
Sales is important, it’s not the only thing.
BTW, most startups are miny cults where employees are suckered into taking a pay cut to “change the world with disruptive blah blah blah”, and as you can see from the author of this post, the founders are just trying to line their pockets.
Yes, startups are definitely like that. I was lucky to not work in those kinds of startups.
What happened all the time is that I would look at competition and be surprised by their success. Their product would be extremely bad compared to ours.
I would be surprised by the amount of missing features (that they still listed in their product sheets). They would close million dollar deals promising features that they barely or never delivered.
But checking out their team, they would all be very experienced salesmen.
The article is just an excuse to sell their services. But agreed it's pretty vague.
Also, the tone/bitchiness of the comments for the article are truly the worst I've ever read on HN in a long while. Raise the tone or just take it somewhere else.
I agree with classics2. Also, I'd suggest adding samples of everything for which Forward offers a service-- when I click 'whitepaper' for example, I'd like to see info about past examples of whitepapers or demos of whitepaper.
I don't mind paying for expert advice,but I need to confirm if the person is expert or not. your website have no data/proof showing expertise related track records. I suggest you to add case studies(if any) and more free insightful content which will support your claims.if you are new find clients you may already know, and later publish your findings.
for real example, I have really fair understanding of tech, grocery store management, accounts and in-corporation regulations(for india),a good knowledge about construction materials, adhesives and civil work. I want to start as an advisor for tech startups and a civil construction & adhesive consultation. I have good track of cases where my advice saved 10s thousands from my advice, I can easily start here with some good testimonials from famous clients.
on other side, for tech startups I must start from scratch.
But an ARR of 2 million is an order of magnitude more than the thousands you charged for saving your client 10s. This is about building a value driver instead of preventing a cost driver.
that advice needed one site visit with 5 minute of inspections. and those thousands usd[10k usd=7.2Lac INR,more than average software developers pay per year in India] in Indian labour will cost 10 times if it was in USA. Every dollar saved is an asset in balance-sheet.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 92.4 ms ] threadMany good points about picking sectors and roles. We built for many sectors and roles, but repeat business is important as we end up developing a relation with our clients and they come to us with many other problems.
I tweeted about what worked for us[1] and been musing on turning that and other tweets and replies in here into posts. Again, congrats. This feels nice.
- [0]: https://iko.ai
- [1]: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...
Email me with any questions: chris at laskie.co
could you drop one in the comments here?
Greeting SNIP Relevance CTA
Hey Bold,
Saw your HN question about an example of an "ice cold polar bear kind of email."
I write emails like this all day for companies like Boldslogan. Would be happy to walk your through it in 10 or 12 minutes.
Zoom on Tuesday or Wed?
C
[1] "Saw your email," "Would love to hear more"--no, avoiding "I" does not make the writer appear stronger.
The next thing I did was actually look at the products, because you'd got me in a good mood.
Brilliant piece of copy.
This line is distasteful and detracts from the rest of what you wrote.
The article is about making money (even from the title)..the commented upon line is insinuating that if you think the article isn't for you (ie you just randomly stumbled upon it), then you obviously are not interested in making money...sarcasm :)
No it’s not, unless you’re selling snake oil.
Just one typo I believe, at the end of https://laskie.co/playbooks/bootstrapping-b2b-sales/cold-ema..., should be `same for emails` instead of `same for calls`.
Haha, nope.
Sales is important, it’s not the only thing.
BTW, most startups are miny cults where employees are suckered into taking a pay cut to “change the world with disruptive blah blah blah”, and as you can see from the author of this post, the founders are just trying to line their pockets.
What happened all the time is that I would look at competition and be surprised by their success. Their product would be extremely bad compared to ours.
I would be surprised by the amount of missing features (that they still listed in their product sheets). They would close million dollar deals promising features that they barely or never delivered.
But checking out their team, they would all be very experienced salesmen.
Brilliant.
Also, the tone/bitchiness of the comments for the article are truly the worst I've ever read on HN in a long while. Raise the tone or just take it somewhere else.
and, I think you're the one acting bitchy.
for real example, I have really fair understanding of tech, grocery store management, accounts and in-corporation regulations(for india),a good knowledge about construction materials, adhesives and civil work. I want to start as an advisor for tech startups and a civil construction & adhesive consultation. I have good track of cases where my advice saved 10s thousands from my advice, I can easily start here with some good testimonials from famous clients. on other side, for tech startups I must start from scratch.