Automated Webinar meant nothing to people. Those people who did know about automated Webinar software that had existed prior to us typically had a really bad reputation as being scammy. So first of all, it's a category that people don't really understand or grasp and so how the hell are you going to get them to stop scrolling. No matter what messaging we tried, we were not able to stop people and get them to click through. Some of that might be unique to us, but I think in general ads to early is
definitely a mistake. Welcome to ProfitLed Season 2 Episode 14. I'm Melissa Kwan, co-founder and CEO of Ewebinar Enterhost, and I'm here with my co-host Todd Parley, Ewebinar's COO. Hey Todd, how's it going in your building today specifically?
Well the firemen were just here, this New York for you. If you watch episode 13, you might see some unusual edits because we recorded this in the last episode on the same day and the fire trucks were arriving during that episode. But yeah, we had a carbon monoxide thing in our basement, so we're fine now. And everyone else is a alarm one, all except for yours, because you had your windows open.
And there's my windows open with the fans on because it's in a heatwave today, so. Well in the last episode, we talked about why we decided to own our SEO strategy after hiring numerous agencies that underdelivered. Why we thought they underdelivered and of course how we actually went about owning that strategy ourselves. Today's episode is pretty juicy. We're going to talk about the 10 go-to-market strategies we tried that did not work on our ways who a million AR are.
These are going to come as a surprise, but some of these are not, so I'm excited to kind of go through them. I've got to listen in front of me, so I think the easiest way to do this is just to kind of read through them and we can jog our memory and you can share perspective and I can share mine. I think one of the first things that we tried, just real marketing, not sales, because remember, like I was still doing founder-led sales during a lot of these.
And one of the first things that we did, I think it was like four months after launch was wanting to launch on product. We put in a lot of effort. I spent about $7500 on just like a consultant to help us with this launch. And like I know I talk a lot about like saving money and being my full of burn, but I'm always willing to invest in strategies I believe have an ROI and I'm also always willing to invest in people to teach me how to do something so I can learn it in the shortest amount of time.
And that's how I evaluate our ROI as well. So product hands hiring a consultant to kind of help get things in order was one of those things. But you know, I think we put in, I want to say like two, three months to get the assets ready, get the product ready, have an offer that made sense, have features specific to a product hand launch. And in the end, I think we did a pretty good job. We launched on a Tuesday, which was you know, supposed to be the busiest day of product hand the big day.
And I think we came in top three. The reason why you want to come in top three is because then you get featured in the newsletter the next day, which goes out who knows how many hundreds of thousands of readers or emails, not readers emails. And that was a lot of exposure, but we got one known successful customer. I mean, that was madness. There's something about product hand that it feels like it's like your debut on ball, you know, you sort of like coming out to the world.
And it feels like that's what you need to do. It's like a graduation from launch, right? It's like you launch to the world and then you launch on product hand. I don't know if it's still like that. I'm so disconnected from like launching products, but it definitely felt that way. Yes, at the time it felt that way. Again, I don't know if that's really true anymore. I think in the end, clearly with only one customer, we spent too much effort on it.
It was probably valuable the experience of like honing some of our messaging and things like that, but it was an exciting day and I'm glad we did well, but it was a let down. Like nothing came of it. Yeah, I mean, I can share the show notes, by the way, from this experience working with consultant. I have a very extensive product hunt launch checklist that I put on notion to help others that they want to go this route.
What was really surprising to me about being on product hunt was the audience. It became very apparent very quickly that they do have a lot of exposure, very wide audience. And I think it's still a pretty active site or community, but it's all hackers, people that like nifty products, like we're a B2B product.
It didn't really resonate with that group. Like you probably do better having some AI bot that does a really cool thing, but makes no money. I guess I didn't fully understand that nor did anybody tell me at the time. So now this is something that I tell people.
The reason why we spent so much time and energy on it is because you can't really launch often. And it was also not something that, you know, we thought we were going to do over and over because we were just so overwhelmed with the number of things that we needed to do.
This is like a few months after our own launch, but I do think the benefits that kind of came out of it was really like honing in on our messaging getting certain assets design and features out that we wanted to show off that maybe wouldn't have made it within that timeline. You know, within product hunt, I forgot like how many size you get and we had those designed and we had a better kind of analytics screen that we didn't have, but we got it done in certain like customer testimonials.
We had an integration that we had with product hunt so we could talk about it, but I think the major benefit was it gave me a reason to reach out to people like my own network to tell them, hey, by the way, we're launching this thing on product hunt. Look at us again. Do you want to see what this does? Of course, we already had a two minute video made that we put on the page as well, but all of that was actually quite beneficial from a sales perspective.
And what we had created after that one day was a giant testimonials landing page part of people coming to support you is writing a comment on how awesome you are and to congratulate you. By the way, you can't ask someone to outfote you. It's like a no no. I sent out a calendar invite for people to put on their calendar.
They had multiple calendar slots that they could choose and then they could click on that and they'd be able to write a comment like had all these nifty tricks to get them to that page. So I think there were like 400 people that actually went there and wrote something which was huge. And we always have that and that's an ever great asset. I don't know how high it ranks, but it's something that, you know, it's not like a complete wash right.
It's it's even though it didn't get all the signups and revenue that we wanted. It was still a great marketing asset that just kind of like lives on the instrument. Yeah, I mean, I guess the only kind of like hindsight advice I would give to anyone doing this is to just follow the checklist and not sweat it so much. It feels like such a big deal, but if you follow the checklist that you'll execute well, but you can just get it done because I think that was part of the thing to us.
We had pretty high expectations for something to come of it. Yeah, I mean, I think just know the audience, right? Like first know that you can launch again and know that the audience are like kind of indie hackers early stage found like super, super early stage founders, usually product focused developers. Ask yourself if that's the audience that's going to buy from you and that was not the audience that was going to buy from us. So definitely listen learned.
Yeah, we definitely got benefits from it, but if we were to go back, we would not do it again. I think I would do it, but not spend that effort. Like I would just roll it out and not spend the money, not spend the time, not spend the effort. And you know, that's why we're having this conversation with you guys now.
To tell you guys, it's going to lower expectations. The second thing was digital marketing. And I know we touched on that most young SEO last episode, but like just digital marketing as a whole. And we wanted to pay someone to take away our pain and then realize that we couldn't pay someone to just do digital marketing because it's not a single function.
And I think we tried like a minimum of three different content firms to add buying firms or consultants that just kind of got us nowhere. And it was like nine to 12 months journey, like working just through multiple people. I think the thing that didn't work is that we tried to have someone do it for us without really understanding what it was, not really understanding the functions of marketing and the different functions of marketing.
But as a small bootstrapped startup, you can't expect someone to take that pain away from you for sure. Yeah, and just know that you're going from zero to one when you need to experiment with a lot of things. You don't know what you are yet. Your customers don't know what you are yet. You don't fully know the problems that you're solving and how you're solving for people. And so hiring someone to do your marketing when they don't have anything to market is why that strategy doesn't work.
It's just something that needs to come later. I think in the beginning, it's really just about like getting a really great product out there, getting people to use it and then extracting that language. Those case studies from your customers, figuring out your own marketing language before you even attempt having someone do digital marketing.
And of course, like try to own as much of it as you can, but don't make the same mistake that we did and just expect like someone else to just like remove that part of your business. I would say now like our business is probably 90% marketing. Like of course we make product and we build features and all those things, but our real brain power is spent on marketing.
That is why founder let's sales are so important because it fills that gap between figuring out all those things and when you can actually put the gas behind digital marketing. But it's also when you're able to learn and hone your messaging and find out from customers why they switched to you all that stuff. So it's not like you can sit there and not make money, but that's why founder said led sales is kind of the bridge while you figure out marketing stuff.
Yeah, so the third thing that didn't work that we spent quite some resources and time on is just writing mediocre content for the sake of mediocre content.
We're not talking about SEO like writing blogs with sake of having something. Yes, we did that, but getting into newsletters of completely unrelated companies is trying to get our name like literally in anywhere, getting people to feature us or website pages that were not very thoughtful, but just wanting to have that to beef up our website, doing guest writing blogs or letting other people write on our blog as a guest post that was kind of unrelated.
Co marketing content, we paid a couple firms, I think, based in India to do like quote unquote PR, but it was just like let's get content out in the internet with zero thought behind it outside of just wanting to get content out in the wild. None of that brought us anything except for which in hindsight, I believe content that actually represented our company in a light that we didn't want to be represented in even the quality of the content was mediocre.
But I think the main point was that it was not thoughtful. We just started trying to just get everything that we could out there because we just didn't really understand how to be strategic or focused about content yet. And the thing is like writing bad content when you pay these kind of firms to do it, not only does it not read well, right? Sometimes like it's grammatically wrong.
Like sentences or poorly structured, I don't know where they're writing them, right? Like sometimes even like punctuation is off and then you spend a lot of time editing it and it just kind of goes out there. And then I think they've got networks where they exchanged backlinks with, but no one's going to read that and be like, yeah, I think I'm going to buy this software.
Like in fact, it might be it might be the contrary, right? It might be like, why are you here? Why did you pay this person? Is blog to just get you on there?
In hindsight, what we were doing was absurd. It was not doing a thing for us. I mean, the backstory is nobody knows marketing. So we were like in marketing kindergarten and trying to do stuff that has any impact and a lot of the stuff that we did were things that I learned from a blog or a Facebook group or a Slack channel or a group, you know, I'm just trying to learn from other founders or marketing people and just trying to do it myself, right?
So I didn't really have a bar for all these things, but of course part of this journey is like you live you learn. You just got to start executing because even though it does seem absurd what we were doing, it did get us to where we are today in terms of understanding what works and what doesn't. So like to sit in some kind of paralysis is also not helpful either.
So the fourth one is paid ads. So mentioned before we worked with two different ad buyers. I think it might have been three. I don't know. Let's just say two, but maybe three. We didn't have enough budget to do this meaningfully, but nobody tells you that and that's actually really frustrating for me. Every single ad buyer will say, Oh, you can test something for a hundred bucks test something for five bucks. I really don't think you can. Yes, you can spend that money, but it's not meaningful.
So now I'm spending money on a retainer, but I'm also paying for the ads that aren't going to go anywhere and that has a lot to tie in with like how early we were as well. And we still don't spend money on like paid ads, right? We do like retargeting stuff, just kind of own our own traffic, probably like less than thousand bucks a month.
But back then we didn't even know how to describe ourselves. And then we were expecting an ad buyer to write the content to help sell us based on what we thought other people were seeing us. So that's also kind of sounds absurd now that I'm seeing it out loud also learning that our product is not a scroll stopper.
We are not in a mature product category. We are not zoom. We are not webinars. We are an automated webinars. In fact, I still don't know where way past a million at the recording of this. I still don't know if automated webinar is the best way to describe us. We're still going to playing with that over time. But now like we're talking six months to a year post launch. We were trying paid as because we were kind of desperate to get people through the door.
Yeah. And I think maybe some of this problem was unique to us in the sense that automated webinar meant nothing to people. Those people who did know about automated webinar software that had existed prior to us typically had a really bad reputation as being scammy. So first of all, it's a category that people don't really understand or grasp. And so how the hell are you going to get them to stop scrolling no matter what messaging we tried.
We were not able to stop people and get them to click through some of that might be unique to us. But I think in general adds to early is definitely a mistake. Yeah. And I don't always spend a time money on it. I think but through that experience really realizing like, oh, actually if you're a mail chimp, you're a scroll stopper. I think the light bulb moment for me was how many inquiries we were getting like through the website and in our demo that needed us to explain what we do in detail.
Like nobody understood this without going through a demo and asking us questions within that demo. So how can we expect them to fully understand what we did and then click through to the site in two seconds or like a split second. And after realizing that, it was like, okay, we should actually just stop the bleeding because we're just wasting money. So the fifth one is email outreach.
You know, it's kind of like between sales and marketing, but I was trying to do like mass email outreach. I don't know if anyone reads cold emails anymore. I don't maybe for enterprise products, but certainly not the product at our price point, which back then was starting at 50 now it's 100.
I didn't really know anything outside of sales right. I was a sales led founder for a decade, right. So I hired somebody and I work with him for probably like nine months at least he was very, very good at email outreach like mass outreach like warming up emails, getting people's emails, verifying them, sending them in batches. I was writing the content and he was trying to help me write the content, but I would edit it and then he would do the outreach himself.
That did not work at all. We didn't get a single sale. I think a lot of it also had to do with like I had a no call policy. I still do. So when he got someone to respond, they would want to sit in a demo. Because actually that's how people receive those emails. They're like, yeah, I'm interested. Let's book a call. But then my follow up would be, we'll just go look at this demo and then they just never do.
So I'm using a sales led approach to get them, but then a marketing product led approach to follow up, which is completely disjointed. I was not directly involved. I don't think in any of this. All I know is that you were telling me it wasn't working. Yeah. And it was frustrating for them as well. They're like, well, why did you reach out to me if you don't want to hop on a call?
That's just what they're used to. And then I would sometimes get ridiculed for not wanting to get on a call. But that was my policy. Sometimes I would, but it was just kind of demoralizing because whether you're selling a $50 product or a $50,000 product, like it's the same call. It's the same amount of time. In fact, like it's a way more sophisticated buyer at $50,000. So now I'm kind of getting these like people that aren't taking me very seriously because of the price perception.
And not making the sale, but spending, you know, half an hour, 45 minutes. It wasn't really fun for me. So not saying that like sales outreach doesn't work, I think it didn't work for us. It was hard letting that person go because I mean, he was a contractor. Of course, everybody's a contractor on our team, but he was just doing such a good job. And he wasn't seeing success. I'm sure it was frustrating for him as well.
The sixth one that didn't work and I and I tried this for a very brief amount of time is LinkedIn outreach. And this was before I started writing on LinkedIn regularly. It was like email outreach, but actually like adding, connecting with people and then sending them a message and wanting to, you know, wanting to show them a demo. This was the cringiest thing I've ever done. Like to date, and I am like the queen of call calling cold emails. I would not recommend trying this at home.
We did not automate it. I know people do now. And that is something absolutely should not do because LinkedIn really cracks down on that. Like if you have a bot that actually helps you do the outreach, they could ban your account anytime. And sometimes you can't get it back.
So I was going to these sales groups customer success groups, founder groups, you know, messaging people asking them if they wanted to look at our website. If they had this issue, you know, just like kind of the typical sales stuff.
I've been doing cold outreach for like well over, you know, a decade, probably around like 15 years previous to start ups. I was always in enterprise sales. I have never heard worse responses. Then LinkedIn outreach. Like people have never used like more file language to get me to stop talking to them. Like it was insane.
Like I don't know. I think people are just generally more angry nowadays. I don't know if they're like, oh, this is a good target. But they're just like cruel. And after a couple months, I was like, no way. I need to stop this. This is probably TMI, but I remember I was going through some folders in our share drive looking for some market and I came across a folder called LinkedIn, Horing. So I know that you did not exactly enjoy the process.
No, I mean, and then afterwards I did a different kind of like denhoring and just started writing on it. But we'll talk about that in a later episode. So the seventh one that didn't work and we will have a full episode dedicated to this affiliates and partnerships. We were way, way, way too early to invest in them as a primary channel. I thought we were at a point where we didn't need a sales person because it was not a sales that product.
I thought our product was mature and good enough because people were raving about our product such that we could engage influencers, affiliates and some partnerships that help sell it for us. We will dive into this in the later episode, but it was my biggest financial mistake to date that investment. It didn't yield anything. I think we spent like 10 months, 130,000 and contributed something like 500 bucks a month to the revenue.
I mean, it is still a very, very painful experience for a multitude of reasons, not just revenue that we tried like way too early. I've come to the conclusion that even in a later stage, there are only certain products that really can do anything with affiliates. I mean, it's like, you know, you see so much affiliate marketing for VPN software.
The reason why is because the upfront amount that gets the people pay is so high that it's worth it for affiliates to do it because they get one big payout upfront. But like for something at our price point, it was really hard even to get affiliates interested. Yeah, I mean, we are going to really dive into all the reasons why we figured out or just maybe assumed I didn't work.
But I think the main reason, if I were to say like why didn't work was our product was not easy to sell because it's not much more product category because it's not a school stopper. So a lot of these other things didn't work also because of kind of those same reasons, right? So it's one of those things where like you wish you could pay someone to take your pain away.
None of us had marketing background. I was told that affiliates and partnership can work if you have a dedicated person and I wasn't going to do it myself. It's actually a lot of work. It's not like go to this influencer and offer the money and they'll sell it for you. Like that is not how it works.
And I think that was kind of a really tough learning also is like I thought it would be that simple. Like I thought it would be like, hey, we'll give you 20% and then you can just expose us to your network. The agreement, the financial agreement that you have with them is step one and to your point like 20% of 50 bucks 100 bucks like nothing. Like someone else is selling a $20,000 product and they're making $4,000 on that.
And they're way bigger company and they can also give them exposure and return. So all these are really tough learnings, but that's why we're talking about them right now. But I also think it's interesting what you said is that if you look back at all of these, a lot of them are attributed to the same root problem, which is that we still didn't know what our messaging was.
We were not a scroll stopper. We were not a mature product category. There were lots of things that were stacked against us that we really didn't know to kind of stop and let that mature organically over time. We just kept trying things, which is which was good. We learned, but yeah, a lot of these things can kind of point back to the some of the same reasons.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to try things, but it's also being a founder and being the bootstrap founder is also having the awareness and the clarity on when to stop something. Right. It's understanding like, okay, how long should I give it? And when do I know that this is just not going to work? And that's sometimes a really fine line, but that's part of why this job is so hard.
Yeah, you want to give something a fair shake, but stop grinding your face into the grindstone if it's not working to stop. Yeah, and every dollar spent on something that doesn't work or time is an opportunity cost toward something else. So the eighth thing, which we've only done once is event sponsorships like live event sponsorships.
You know, we were kind of playing with a few different industries or lines of businesses back then, you know, one of our biggest use cases and still is today's customer success. CS teams using us for trading and onboarding and there was a CS conference that was hosted by one of the largest customer success software companies in the industry.
I had a hunch that it wasn't going to work like we weren't going to get our ROI on money. I needed to try it. It is part of that thing like you need to try it. And when we try something, we give it our all because otherwise I would think, oh, maybe it's because we didn't try enough. So as everybody knows, right, like event sponsorships are super expensive.
You got to have a booth. You're going to be there, but I wasn't going to be there. So I was talking to this software company and I basically just told them our situation that I don't do live events, but I want to participate in some way. And you know, they knew we were an early stage startup wanted to get us involved. And I really just had a logo that was revolving in one of their TVs in the hallway.
And so I think it was still like five six seven thousand like somewhere in that range, but that was like a 50% discount than what another company would pay. And so a lot of people that sponsor those events are selling 10,000 to $100,000 a year products. They kind of understood that. And I think they thought it was cute that we wanted to be there.
But I needed to prove to myself. So part of wanting to kind of make the most out of that was engaging a partner on the ground. So I had a friend slash partner that is still a CS consultant for for larger companies. And they were going to have a booth there. I worked on a partnership with them where I said, hey, like show our two minute video on your TV at your booth, have our brochures there. And we will give you money to run a contest.
So I forgot exactly what the contest was, but it was like an Instagram type contest and they get to choose a winner. That's going to be one of their potential clients to win $500 cash. So we really did try everything. I think all in all we spent about like $10,000 like running the contest, engaging the partner and then paying for the sponsorship. And we got $0 in return. I think the person that won the money wouldn't even give me time to give them a.
So since then, I don't do anything of that sort. And I think that you're after this company goes, hey, do you want to sponsor again? I'm like, no, but you can see how like if a company had a more expensive product, that kind of investment would make sense. Luckily, I didn't have to go there because going there would have added a minimum of like $5,000.
Yeah, and I think it's important to just reiterate that we don't kind of have asked things like we really give it a fair shake. We do our best to make it work. We're not like sticking our toe in halfway. So I feel like when we do try something and it doesn't work, we have pretty good evidence to say, yeah, we just need to move on.
The ninth, which is actually quite surprising to me, we're like newsletters, you know, everyone's trying to get into newsletters. And I think they still do today. But I remember being the only feature in a 250,000 person newsletter from a partner and getting 18 trials.
I mean, you could think about like even if they have like an open rate of 2 to 5%, 18 trials is not a lot. Like I mean, it's outrageously low. Back then, we would fight also to get into like the HubSpot newsletter, the Zapier newsletter. So many different newsletters with massive list consultants newsletters. I've tried paying for response or positions on like tech influencer newsletters and creator newsletters as well with like what I believe is a shared audience.
But none of those felt like a good investment, not just of my time, but also of like the money that we put in. And like I remember paying, I think anywhere between like 2000 to 5000 for like three sentences, like depending on the audience, that's how much you would pay to be at the top of the newsletter.
Like I'm actually surprised by that because some of these audiences are like small businesses or creators that would use this product and they're from credible people that are sending them out. So I'm still surprised that didn't work. But if you are listening and you're wondering like, should I spend thousands of dollars to get into these newsletters. I think you're probably better off just spending time and money kind of creating your own content and putting it out there.
And the last one, which is not so much a go to market strategy, but something that we thought would get us a lot more eyeballs in conversion was around like 600,000 or R, we did a pretty big design update.
I think people like the product as it was, but there were things, especially the mobile experience that we had to forgo in the beginning, just for time. And we thought that would at least move the needle to help people kind of make a decision and convert. We probably spent three to four months on that, just that on its own. And I don't think it changed people's decision making process. But I do think it made them happier because we did not see an uptick in signups or conversion.
The main thing that we gained from that was a much better mobile experience because even though our product kind of looked modern and fresh relative to other products in the category, it still didn't quite meet kind of the level of design that we wanted that we thought would make just the aesthetic of it be even more compelling at least for people to check out. But it just didn't move the needle much. I mean, as a product manager, I tend to think that the reason for that is that ultimately the new feature has to have real tangible value.
For the customer, even if it's prettier, yes, they will enjoy it. Yes, that helps, but it's not going to move the needle much. Yeah, and it doesn't mean we wouldn't have done it. I still think we would have done it because when we do something like we are the company that goes the extra mile, but I think setting your expectations as to like just understanding that this is not going to add more revenue probably makes you feel better.
Just know that you're doing it just to provide about our experience and that's okay because I think that value compounds and when you keep doing the 2% where no one else is willing to go, especially your competitors, people really take notice to that. And that's a credibility and trust and brand that you build with your audience.
The company I worked at previously, they brought in a consultant. She was the former CIO of the NFL. And one of the things that she said that struck me like if you work in tech and you expect your customers to stand up and apply. When you give them something new and great, you're in the wrong business. She's like, if you launch something new and you are greeted with mostly silence, you have knocked it out of the park because that means that it just works.
It works how it was intended. People are happy. It flows well. That's still always really hard on me at least. I mean, I remember in my last startup, one of our customers would be like, I know you guys are doing a good job, but we only hear from people and at that time we were selling to real estate agents like we only hear from them when they're complaining.
And that's the reality. People expect things to work now. It's expect to be bug free and not break down. Yeah. And he's like, while I sound negative, I'm just not telling you when things are positive. So like no news is good news. Yeah. And I think that's actually important. If you launch something big and new and you hear back from some people like, oh, this is great, but the majority of the quote unquote feedback is actually nothing interpret that as a positive.
You did something really well. It did not interrupt anyone's experience. If you're basing your product roadmap on evidence from customers, then you did a good job. But you only hear from the squeaky wheels. That's for sure. I guess to conclude here, what I've realized from this experience, especially being a sales that founder and then coming into product led and marketing led is most marketing doesn't move the needle.
There are so many things that you think will help or help move the needle, but they just don't. And this is especially true with people. People you hire in the early stage that you think could take your pain away or help propel you. You need to figure out a lot of those things yourself first before you engage someone. You know, the things that we thought would have any impact, not even huge impact just didn't.
But even though nine out of 10 things that we do or that we did didn't work very well, we did them anyway. And we would still do them because we don't know the one thing that might work really well. And I also think that it's a myth to think about marketing as like this end goal, right, this hockey stick end goal growth that just doesn't exist.
There's no like thing that you do and all the sun, everything shoots up that I think is kind of a unicorn myth, right? I think everything collectively helps a little. It's really hard to attribute which one did, but everything that you do helps builds your brand and credibility. People see it over and over and over and then all of a sudden your top of mind.
Even though I say like, okay, well, all these emails that we were in, all these newsletters that we were in didn't get revenue. I knew that it was building our brand and we were a new company. And after people see it multiple times, then we become a more established company. I think that's probably a good place to wrap up just to summarize what we talked about today. We just talked about all our failures.
All the good two market strategies that we tried that did not work from product launch to LinkedIn outreach, all of the above paid ads with that in mind. What is your hot take for our listeners today? Yeah, I mean, my hot take is I think building a startup is really throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. You can try your best to choose the best strategies, but a lot of times you don't know what the result's going to be until you actually do it.
And what worked for someone else and their product and their audience may not work for you. And you need to do all the things, especially all the things that don't work. So you know exactly what to focus on saying no to things is just as important as saying yes to things. Yeah, I agree. What's your hot take? Well, I would say learn quickly and move on when something's not working. You have to give something a fair shake. I think it's sometimes easy to become discouraged when you fail.
And you just got to learn to shake that off. Once you realize that something's not working to move on and just that's easier said than done, but you just got to kind of pick yourself up and go on to the next thing. Which is hard when you're maybe not seeing immediate results, but like you said every little bit helps. You can't really know the impact that you're having, but you just got to keep trying things.
I think you make a good point. I think being a converted saleslet founder where everything was instant gratification, right? Selling a product someone buying. So you're like, you've got this dopamine of a sale. It's a bit depressing when you do so many things and it doesn't work and you don't know if it works and the trials don't change. It's been four years since launch or trials don't really change that much. It's really frustrating. Sometimes you do a lot of stuff and then it's a down month.
And you're like, why is it going down? But at the end of the day, like you just have to have faith that it is all working and this is normal. Like all the stuff you read on the internet and on LinkedIn and how successful other people are. Like they're all going through the similar things as you. And yes, you can lean into the things that work, but yes, you just have to keep trying.
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