B (8:45)
This is something I think that has gotten a little bit twisted in the whole builder space because people don't realize, oh, Greg and Peter put crazy effort into making sure that their content is useful and valuable so that people know about them and therefore people can figure out what it is that they are offering to the world. And if you were never to do a podcast and if you were never to create any content, no one would have a clue about any of this stuff. And so for me, I just want to get that baseline before I go into showing how I would recommend thinking about selling stuff. So let's open. I'm out. You know what? I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you a beautiful vibe coded blueprint for how I think about selling the whole or how I think about like selling stuff in general. So this is. So I put this together earlier just as like a. I mean, this is how I show it just to show, hold up to the screen. This is how I show it to my clients. Literally scrawled on a piece of paper. But I was like, I'm going on Greg's podcast. I'm going to actually show this in a fancy vibe coded way. What I'm also going to do is show the AI use cases for these steps as well. But there's no point in me doing this until people really understand the basics and understand how money is made in this. You know, selling products, space. The first thing you talk about this, you talk about this all the time. But I'm Just going to, like, really take a step back and show the key ideas. The first step is you need to figure out how to get traffic from somewhere. And the only two categories of getting traffic are organic or paid. So either you're out here like me right now, going on other people's podcasts, you're running events and networking, you're doing posts on social media, free content, or you're paying for ads on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. I always recommend push that traffic not straight into the product. Like, not, hey, just buy my product. I always recommend push them into a holding pattern. So step two is the holding pattern. And the holding pattern is basically where you're just slowly warming people up. And it's like your email newsletter, it could be your podcast. So your podcast, for example, the startup ideas podcast, is a great place that people get value from. You don't need to promote a lot of stuff there, but you're keeping people sort of in your space, in your world, and the attention is on you. YouTube content, posts on X that keep people engaged. This is basically the holding pattern. And that's almost like your daily content, your weekly content. The next thing. And I think I would say a lot of people on X are okay at the first two, so they know how to post and create a lot of followers, create a lot of engagement. But I almost see nobody who's good at moving people from now I have some people listening to me to that turning into money. And so that's the next step. The next step is thinking, okay, I've got all of these people, they're watching what I'm doing, they're excited about what I'm doing. How do I move them to a selling event? And a selling event is something like, for example, a webinar. I talk about these all the time. So you could do a live demo of your product and show people how it's being used. You see, like, companies like Superhuman doing this all the time. You see almost all the AI companies doing demos where you can see how these products work. And you don't even necessarily need to do a pitch at the end. It's just, you now see how this product works. You now see how valuable it is. That's a live workshop, That's a live webinar, That's a live demo. I'm running these all of the time for myself and my clients and my partners. Second thing is an email campaign. This could be as simple as, like a string of three or four emails that lead people in your holding pattern to actually making a purchase. And you see these all the time. You can see the examples of this all over the place. And by the way, I just got hit with a webinar campaign from Superhuman today because they want me to buy superhuman teams or they want me to upgrade to superhuman teams. And so I just got hit with a campaign to get me on one of their webinars. The other thing is, if you want to pay, and a lot of people don't realize this, you can retarget people with a paid campaign that are already in your world. So let's say you have like a couple of thousand emails that you've collected. You can actually put those into Facebook. And again, it's not like they take the exact email. It's not like it all perfectly lines up. You create a lookalike audience. And those emails can be used to retarget people on other platforms or similar types of people on other platforms to push them towards something. And the last thing which people don't really think about is if you're building a holding pattern. And for me, if I look into my email, like, okay, let's see the last 30 people who signed up, oh, this person has an email address. Microsoft.com we work with enterprise clients. Let me see if I can reach out to this person and jump on a call with them and see if they would be interested in working with us. And so the selling event, which a lot of people just call campaigns are the bridge between I'm holding people in this space to now I'm moving them over to, they're buying something from me, they're getting a free trial, or they're booking a call with me because they want to buy something expensive. And if it, if they don't convert, which most won't convert, they go back into the holding pattern and they stay there until the next selling event. And if you look at, at the example of Peter Levels X account, you could even take a look at like, you know, Jason Fried's X account or any of the people that you associate with selling really great, interesting digital products who you wouldn't consider to be very marketing heavy. They are, you know, going on other people's podcasts to generate traffic, which pushes people into their world, whether that's their X account or newsletter or, or their YouTube channels or whatever it is, or the podcast, their own podcast. So it's from their traffic to your traffic. Then they keep people there. This is where they're posting like their personal stuff. And like Peter is always posting about like how to, how to Cook steaks in an air fryer. And all of this stuff is happening there. That's not where you're generating traffic in the first place, but that's where that's happening. And then every so often, you'll see them make a clear push to selling, a clear push to, okay, I want to have people push towards this thing now. And you saw on Peter's account, he did this E. Girl post, which is now pinned on his account as we speak. And then he posted the bump in sales that happened after he did that post. And so I'm not saying, by the way, that he's cynically sitting there and being like, this is specifically a sales campaign and this is how much I'm gonna make. Whatever. Not that that would be a bad thing or anything. It's just that this is an activity that he's. That's happening from the holding pattern. It's an activity that's not just happening randomly from an ad. He's not t. He's not doing his sales pitch on podcasts, that when he goes on other people's podcasts, he's going on other people's podcasts. And people get confused about this, by the way. Like, why is this person, like, why is the CEO of Anthropic right now at Davos getting interviewed by Bloomberg? Right? Is it. Is it for the good of humanity? No, like, his job is. He's a promoter. He's moving people from here to the holding pattern, to their world to understand it. When I'm watching the interview with the CEO of Anthropic, Darius, I am thinking he's doing a really good job at doing this sort of pre pitch to enterprises who are now going to understand, oh, Claude is the enterprise AI company. And so he's bringing people, he's creating that attention, bringing people into that holding pattern. And the selling events for Anthropic, I mean, they have an outreach team because they're actually the company that goes and tries to get these big enterprise deals. But, you know, you're following them on Twitter, you're on X, and then they post about Claude, Cowork. You're in their world, you're in their sphere. You're hearing about these things again. Those companies are huge. We don't have those types of budgets. But this is the general, I would say, loop that's happening the whole time. We're always trying to get new traffic. And let me do this in a meta way. I'm on your podcast now. I would like to get traffic, right? I'm Trying to expose myself to new people who might not know me yet. The next step is, ideally people are going to start searching who I am, because I'm not. When you're on other people's content, you don't want to make a pitch. So people are going to like do the work themselves to figure out who I am, where I am, what I'm doing. They'll then fall into one of my holding patterns. It could be that they listen to the podcast, email, newsletter, whatever it is. Eventually, as some of them have seen this week, because we did a big campaign, they're going to get pushed towards something. Right now it's a webinar. And that webinar will be pushed push them again towards some people doing enterprise calls with us, some people buying, some people buying cheaper B2C products with us. And then 90% of the rest of them fall back into the holding pattern bucket. And as a promoter, ideally you're waking up every morning and you're able to understand that this is like the, the oxygen of the business, essentially. So, for example, if there's no traffic coming in, if you're not doing any traffic building activities, then there's not going to be enough people in your holding pattern because. So that when you run a selling event, there won't be enough people in that selling event or campaign, which means you're not going to have a lot of sales. And so for us, for example, like we're running meta ads, I'm on this podcast. I'm always out there trying to get as many people into the holding pattern as possible. Our biggest holding pattern is our email newsletter. And when I see that an extra 5,000 people have joined the newsletter, I can mentally say that means another 200 people will turn up to the next webinar and that means another 12 people will buy something. And so the machinery starts to make.
