(in which we recognize the need for a dedicated sales agent)
Well, we’ve officially passed the “Collect Underpants” phase of the YouBots platform. Truth be told, we’ve also passed the “Profit” phase. Yay us, I suppose.
It’s been two weeks since we launched. We have a number of recurring paying customers, and 5x that many doing the one-week free trial. These are all good things.
The less-than-good thing is that our little team does not have a sales competency skill on our roster. We’re doing well in product, engineering, business development, branding, and marketing, but none of us come from a sales background.
I’m doing great personally converting sales when I show people what we’re doing and how it can help them. Some of these “sales presentations” (mostly just me chit-chatting on a video call with someone) last a grand total of 7 minutes before the person on the other side asks how they can pay us.
It’s both really rewarding and really weird. After spending my entire career marketing other people’s products where people had to be convinced to buy, having people ask to buy when I’m not even trying to sell is a bit of a surreal experience. I had something close to it when I was doing ISWU and Love Drop, but those were philanthropy projects.
In what may come as a major shock to all the business owners in the audience, having me just chatting with folks and accidentally selling the product is not something that scales. So this week I’m going to be looking for our first salesperson.
I think we’ll get plenty of individual customers coming in through podcast interviews, tech reviews, social media, web articles, etc. What I want the salesperson to do is start putting YouBots in front of potential customers with multiple locations. Think national franchises like Planet Fitness, where each location runs its own little business, but they all obtain some shared services from corporate. YouBots is a product that can serve in lieu of a dedicated marketing agency for every location, producing complex and detailed work completely customized to their needs.
We sell into a few of those, and then with those success cases we move on to the corporate office and give them a bulk discount to offer our platform to any of their franchisees. Something like that, anyway 🙂
There are thousands of potential opportunities like that for us in 2025 – we just have to find a few that are a good fit, and we’ll all be lighting our cigars with $100 bills by summertime.
I’m starting to talk to some people in my network to see how they recommend getting our first salesperson. This will make five permanent staffers on the team, and probably be the first and last big move for a while.
If you know of anyone, send ’em my way!
In the meantime, we’ll keep collecting those underpants . . .