In India, if you go to any tourist place and look like a tourist, taxi cab drivers will approach you asking if you want to hire them for sightseeing.
Most tourists who are out for sightseeing and don’t have a driver already will hire either the first, second, or third guy who approaches them.
The taxi guy who never approaches tourists gets far fewer tourists than the guy who does.
There is a huge multi-million dollar sales lesson here.
You have to be out there MARKETING yourself.
It doesn’t matter what you’re selling – copywriting services, web design, lead gen, etc. if you aren’t reaching out to potential customers, you are getting far fewer customers than the people who are.
You have to be your own biggest salesman because other people do not care about you or your products as much as you do.
Don’t be afraid to make pitches, send cold emails/DMs, run ads, make marketing posts, and ask people to buy what you’re selling.
If you are too afraid to market yourself, you don’t deserve to call yourself a businessman.
Even large established companies like Nike, Apple, Amazon, and Tesla run ads and ask people to come to their stores and buy their products. And here you are, too afraid to send 10-20 cold emails a day pitching people to buy your web design and copywriting services.
Cold emailing people and asking them to buy your product works.
It works for taxi cab drivers and it works on the internet. In fact, most of the customers for one of my companies (Copyright Samurai) came from sending LOTS of cold emails and DMs.
When I say lots of cold emails and DMs, I mean a number more than you think. Take whatever number you’re thinking and multiply it by 10. Then you’re probably closer.
If we were too afraid to burn through lots of domains by sending cold emails, that company would have gotten nowhere.
By telling people that their business has a piracy problem and then telling people to buy our service, we got them to turn from people we did not know into customers.
In life, you get what you ask for.
Asking doesn’t guarantee getting, but not-asking guarantees not-getting.
I will give you a super simple example. The Art of X is one of the highest rated products on Gumroad.
We have dozens of full text reviews, multiple video reviews, and nearly 400 people have rated the product 5 stars.
How?
The answer is simple. Every time someone DMs me to tell me how much they liked the guide, I ASK THEM to leave me a review.
There are people with more sales than me and bigger followings than me selling products on Gumroad. But I have more ratings simply because I ask people to go and rate my products.
If they face any problems with the products or have questions, I answer them myself. I do it myself because I want to know what the problems are so I can address them in the product itself (I update my products very regularly).
Now, I don’t always get a review just because I asked, but I often do. But if I didn’t ask, I’d get far less than that.
Don’t ask, don’t get. If you do not ask for reviews, you do not get them. Ask and you shall have a higher chance to get.
Whiners vs Winners
Asking for stuff is a key difference between whiners and winners.
Yes, you must have a good product too but if you aren’t asking for stuff, you aren’t getting stuff either.
This applies to everything. A dad-bod guy who asks out a lot of women will get more dates than a fit guy who never asks out women and waits for women to approach him.
Of course you ideally want to be both high value (fit/quality product/etc.) and aggressive with selling yourself. My point is, asking for what you want makes a HUGE difference in the bottom line.
This is why when whiners say “making money is hard” they are actually telling everyone that they are lazy losers. All you needed to do was learn a skill and send out lots of pitches to prospective customers, but instead they chose to watch funny videos and jerk off to porn.
You are either doing the selling yourself or working for someone who is doing the selling.
How do you think your employer makes money? He does it by selling.
Job workers and other wage slaves never understand this concept. They are used to getting a salary and buying things. They never make anything that they sell themselves.
Many of them actually consider sales to be a dirty word, even though sales is exactly how their employer makes money and pays their monthly soul rental (aka salary).
They think that success is just supposed to come easily on a platter without doing lots of real work and sales effort, and without opening yourself up for people to reject you.
It is the ultimate form of CONSUMER MENTALITY.
You are used to buying things instead of making them – but you can’t buy success. It’s not something you can order from a restaurant. It doesn’t work that way.
You have to make your own success – you have to build something worth 10x the price and sell it aggressively.
You can get knowledge from books and courses, find good teachers, get the best mentors, but like they say – the horse must drink the water by itself. The most you can do is is take it to the lake.
Unless you have double digit IQ, this should make it very clear what you need to do if you want to be successful in any business and life in general – improve the product and lots of pitches.
If you’re not selling, then you’re going to be forced to work for an employer who is doing the selling and paying you a trickle of the money in the form of a salary.
In an internet connected world, living like a wage slave is a choice you make. 100 years ago if you were born poor, you were destined to die poor. Not anymore. The internet makes business much cheaper and easier than before.
You have equal opportunity to become free and be successful. Just not equal results because the world isn’t that commie and crazy yet.
Don’t get outhustled by a cab driver making 20+ pitches a day.
Unlike him, you can speak English so if you give up your weird notions about why “it’s so hard” and just shut up and make 20+ pitches a day, you will make a LOT of money.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman