Alright, week 8.
Two months into doing this full-time.
I hit another wall, or maybe an obstacle? I don’t know yet.
For the past two months, a big part of finding clients has been outbound marketing. It is the modern version of door-knocking. Instead of physically walking up to someone’s house to ask if they are interested in what you are selling, you send a cold message in form of an email or DM.
It is also notorious place for spam and people bothering you with stuff that you really don’t want. But when outbound marketing works, it is a way to let people know you exist.
Well, I don’t want to spam people. I don’t even think it would work if I tried anyway. I can’t email 10,000 people asking, “Hey, do you need automation?” and expect everyone to come running to me with their automation needs.
So, I have been using AI to help me find and filter for companies and teams that I think might benefit from what I do. I look for signals on their website or someone’s profile, then write an email around what I can see and what I think I can help with.
Basically, I acknowledge the signal, tell them about my experience or something similar I have done before, then explain where I may be able to help. It is a bet that the signal points to a problem they have that I might be able to help with.
And I did get a few replies and meetings from it. It was enough to make me think it was semi-working.
I knew my reply rates were lower that usual, but I am only one person, so I don’t need that many clients in one go.
Looking at the numbers
I couldn’t put that feeling to rest. So, this week I decided to do a bit of a data dive. Now that I have been doing outreach for two months, I have some data to look back on.
I wanted to know whether it was actually working, so I pulled the data together and looked at it properly.
My reply rate was about 5%. These are replies not whether or not it led to projects.
It was abysmal.
I felt really shit when I saw it. I mean, I know I am new to this and the first few emails I sent were really clunky, but it still sucks. It felt like I wasted two months of my time just flailing around.
So, I stopped what I was doing, took a break and re-evaluated the whole thing.
I am not going to start spamming people as promising as the “marketing gurus” on outbound marketing makes it sound. And the idea of using signals still makes sense to me. I have to change how I am doing it. And I have to experiment more instead of sticking with one thing and hoping it will work.
This will be the third direction I have tried in two months now. Every time I think I understand outbound a little better, I find another mistake I have been making. Or that it’s a failed experiment.
It is depressing to look back and think the last two months could have gone differently if I had known then what I know now. Yeah, I know there’s a quote somewhere about hindsight and all that. But it doesn’t mean it still doesn’t suck.
Never have I been so envious of people that started their own business and it just worked from the start. For me, it feels like running one experiment after another until something works.
It is me saying to the market, “Here’s what I believe in. Do you think it works?” and the market telling me to shove it where the sun don’t shine.
I don’t know if the next version will work, but I guess that’s the process, ey?
Alright, thanks for reading.
Onward to week 9.
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