This story is from many years ago, all the way back when I was about 22 years old.
I have a family friend who has epilepsy and scoliosis. It’s a birth defect.
He’s a nice and sweet guy but he’s not very smart and gets seizures too often (every hour or so) which makes me feel very sorry for him and I try to avoid meeting him when I can because I feel sad about his condition.
However when I do see him I am always really nice to him because he’s nice to me (funny how that works whether you are disabled or not).
Recently his father and sister helped him set up a sunglasses store and I went to check it out because his sister invited me to come.
Now, I know his sister likes me and sees me as a nice catch, but I have no interest in his sister so I wasn’t planning on going (She’s too skinny and not my type, and is a Jain and follows the Jain diet which I have no interest in being around… I like my high protein diet).
But there’s a restaurant right next to the sunglasses shop, and when I was in the area, she saw me, and waved me to come inside.
I am 99% certain the sister did this to everyone on the street and I was just another sucker… who just happened to know her. I am not the best reader of body language but I’ve been with enough women to know instantly know what’s going on.
She was wearing revealing clothing with lots of cleavage, something Jain people never do.
As I got closer and said her name, I could see a big flush of embarrassment on her face. In other words, she thought I was just a stranger and was trying to get people in the store with her body (i.e. catching suckers).
The moment she realized I was someone she knew, she was afraid for her reputation (something all women care about deeply).
I wasn’t going to miss out on seeing this chick in that outfit. So I pretend like I don’t notice the embarrassment on her face and in her voice and go in the store with her. (I have no apologies for being a red blooded man with a well functioning reproductive system.)
Anyway, the sister, the guy himself, and his dad are all there. The guy and his dad immediately starts pitching me sunglasses thinking that I came in as a customer (i.e. I was just another sucker).
I could have easily said “no I’m just here to say hello” but I wanted to support the dude (He’s a family friend + I always feel bad for him when I see him) so I agreed to purchase one.
They start by trying to sell me sunglasses that cost about 50,000 rupees ($700). Some company called Gay Ban or something.
I tell him point blank “I’m not as rich as you, I only have 5000 Rupees” (no need to be subtle or overly nice to people who push their boundaries – we are good people but not pushovers).
Eventually I find one I like that costs 3500 Rupees (~$50). I get it. They offer me a discount since I’m a family friend, I refuse because I want to support their new business.
End of story. But not really.
Ever since then, every single time I come across the guy or his father, I hear the same dialogue “Come to my store I’ll show you some sunglasses”.
They literally do not understand or care that I don’t actually wear sunglasses.
I like getting the sun and the only time I’ll put on sunglasses is when I’m hiking. And even for those I have a pair of Cat 3 and Cat 4 sunglasses that will probably last me for a long time.
I even explained this to both of them but their attempts at selling me never stop so eventually I just distanced myself from them. Any pity I had for the guy’s medical condition also disappeared.
They do not understand that I literally have no need for this product. I am a cold lead.
In fact I am worse than a cold lead – I actually think wearing sunglasses every day is bad for the eyes.
This is a big mistake a lot of new entrepreneurs make: They go after people who do not need the product.
If this guy was selling something I wanted or needed, I would be more than happy to purchase from them.
You gotta understand, if you want good results from marketing, your first step is to target people who want the product (or could have some use for it). Only then marketing work does its magic.
Now there’s a proverb in my country that says “You should be good enough to sell a comb to a bald man” but why would you waste your time selling combs to bald men?
It might be a good challenge for an expert salesmen but for a newbie to business, you should focus on selling to people who want the product.
Let’s say you sell copywriting or web design services.
How do you get clients?
The answer is super obvious, you first think “who needs this service the most but doesn’t already have it?”
- People selling something on Gumroad
- People selling something on Zylvie
- People selling something on Payhip
- People selling something on e-Junkie
Ok. Then you scroll their discover pages and look for people who are making sales.
As a rule of thumb, people who are not making sales from their business are not going to hire you. The people who make money are the people who are willing to spend money to improve their business.
That’s the ironic thing with things like training, design, and copywriting – the people who need them the most are the most hesitant to pay for it. Eh well, we just focus on the guys making money instead of complaining about this fact.
You send out a pitch to every single one of them. Customize it and make it detailed and interesting so they click it. An example of a good email pitch is below:
This way you actually reach out to people who have some sort of USE for whatever you’re selling.
You have to be smart because time is limited. You cannot sit and market to everybody.
This guy and his dad are wasting their time every time they pitch their sunglasses to me. They would have much better luck if they pitched people who actually wear sunglasses.
This is a lesson all the successful entrepreneurs manage to learn and all the failed entrepreneurs failed to learn.
When you start selling something (service, product – anything) you have to first think “who actually wants this”.
You are not Apple that you can make any random piece of garbage and lots of faggots and retards line up for 15 hours to be the first ones to buy it (Let’s be real, anyone who stands in a queue for 15 hours to buy a consumer product they can order online is either a faggot or a retard or both).
Repeat after me: You are not Apple.
You have to focus on having the customers first before you build the product. Always pick stuff that is high in demand.
Do not try to create demand. Leave that for the big guys.
Focus on selling stuff that already has demand. This is much easier to do online than offline.
If you want to sell sandwiches on the street, your first question should be “do I have a location where there are lots of hungry people”?
Unless you can get a place near a railway station or a college or somewhere lots of people move though, you’ll never actually make real money from a sandwich shop.
The same thing applies to any other business. You need to sell stuff that your prospects actually want, not try to shove sunglasses down the throats of people who aren’t into wearing them.
For 99% of you guys who haven’t even made $10,000 from the internet, you just need to pick any easy service based business like copywriting or web design or any other high demand service AND JUST GET STARTED.
I mean the first time I hired a copywriter, it was a guy who emailed me something like “I’ll fix up your landing page and improve your conversion rate by 1%. If it works you pay me $3500. If it doesn’t, don’t pay me anything.”
This wasn’t a product related to LMM, and a 1% increase in conversion rate would more than double my sales (I was only converting at 0.4% back then).
He did his thing and the new copy had a conversion rate of 0.65%. Not what I was promised but hey, I was now making 62.5% more sales (0.65/0.4-1) so I was actually quite pleased with the experiment.
I told him I’ll pay him the $3500 if the conversion rate stayed high for 3 months. The logic was that I was making $2k a month profit from that product. With the new conversion rate I was making about $3200 a month from it.
So to earn the $3500 I need about 3 months. Well, it did, and the guy got paid (I even sent two referrals his way).
This was many years ago and today I have a much better copywriter and not a n00b who was willing to work for free.
But hey, that’s how we all start. No one is born with a client base.
You just got to find people who might be interested, contact a whole bunch of them, a few will bite if your offer is good enough.
– Harsh Strongman
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