andyakb

First, I just want to say that building anything and getting paying customers is never easy so it's impressive to see what these guys have done.

While there is definitely a large market of agencies suffering from this problem, I don't think this is the "true" solution.

Clients hire an agency because they just want to pay somebody to build them a website (or whatever it actually is). When approaching this, they are almost definitely not thinking at all about having to do anything other than tell the agency what they want.

This is the client having unrealistic expectations, but they aren't supposed to be the experts, so it should be on the agency to be clear about those expectations. Even if you think you're clear about the about of work required of them, most client will drag their feet to no end on delivering the content. This is because they have 1,000 other things to do, don't really know where to even begin, and are getting frustrated because the reason they went to an agency was because they didn't have the time to deal with this.

Looking at setting up endless reminders as a solution misses the reason they came to you and loses out on a ton of value. Clients don't want to do this. Find a way so that they don't have to and then charge for that. If a client doesn't want to pay to have you do it at the start, give them a deadline for the content, if they don't get it to you by then, they can either get the site as-is or pay to have you do it for them.

What content do you need from the client? Figure out what questions you have to ask them to create that content, schedule a call, then ask them those questions, get a transcript, and give it to a copywriter. Then give the result to the client along with a timeline of "if this isn't approved or edited by X, then it is going live as-is."

I get where Content Snare is coming from, but I think it misses a much bigger underlying point of why this is such a problem.

I dont think OP is suggesting buying their oil to somehow impact the price, and is instead saying that the cost US oil companies are paying to extract oil themselves is more than it would cost them to just buy it from Saudi companies

This is true, but it is very, very unlikely that anybody would pay 8x yearly revenue for it

Would your earnings teaching English in Japan cover living expenses and debt? If it would, the go for it. If it wouldn't, figure something else out.

If you do go for it, and don't want to make this a permanent change, make sure to stay current with technology. Build a public portfolio showing that even though you aren't working in tech, you are still working with it.

Another option would be to slowly transition away from teaching English to becoming a freelancer so that you could travel while still earning mid-high pay.

Without touching on the other examples, insisting that you stay for a full day isn't unreasonable, let alone abusive. While it would have been nice for him to be a bit more empathetic to your situation, it isn't his fault you didn't plan better.

They guy sounds fairly insensitive which sucks to deal with, but be careful not to twist everything he does just to fit that narrative.

If that 1 out of 50 was picked by random, then that might be correct, but the article makes it seem as though that isn't the case.

Since most of these autopsies are conducted when foul play is suspected or when the cause of death is unknown, that doesn't help doctors improve in the cases where they thought they knew the cause of death but were wrong.

I don't think its fair to say FB ads dont work as well when your audience is not ready to buy. If you try to run an Adwords style campaign on FB, then you are right, that isn't very likely to work but that isnt because of FB.

The problem is the ads don't match where the prospects are in the buying cycle. Where FB excels is driving leads into a nurturing campaign that gets them ready for the sale down the line. These campaigns work wonderfully across a wide variety of industries.

What did you do to get those first 1,000 customers? What are you actively doing now to try to get the next thousand?

What are you doing to market the product?

From the outside, it seems likely that you have the common developer mentality of "If I build it, the customers will come."

If a business does not have a reliable, repeatable way to acquire customers profitably then any success they may have is based on luck. It is much easier to just try to code that problem away, but likely you need to step away from the code and start talking to customers so you can find out what they really care about and where you can find more people like them.

Why the hate for consultants who write books? If they dont provide value in the material then sure, that sucks, but if it is worthwhile information why should I care if they use it to help get consulting clients? Shouldnt I be happy that consulting allows people with valuable things to say to publish it for a price I can afford?

In the author's first letter to Christopher Knight, he told him that he was a journalist

Bill Gates is older than Steve Ballmer, they were friends, and his stint at Harvard was not short

This misses the point of the article.

The author's premise is that you burnout because you do not spend time on the things that truly fulfill you, whatever those may be. It is very possible, and maybe even probable, that people who do not "work so hard" can still experience burn out because they do not use their free time to do the things that fulfill them.

If you are working so hard that you simply cannot find any time to fit in fulfilling activities, then yes, you should not work so hard.

If you are being taken advantage of and pressured into working too hard without adequate compensation, then you should find a better job.

However, "not work so hard" is not an answer to the problem as outlined by the author and seems more like a response to the headline than to the article itself.

>>There's gotta be an official name for these. That skinny page with varying font sizes of text images or embedded youtube videos encouraging you to buy/ act now / sign-up for their free newsletter til a big call-to-action at the bottom after scrolling for 10 minutes?

There is; long copy sales letters

Exactly. It is the same story when people say "Facebook ads don't work" or whatever the new ad platform is. If you could simply hand $X to an ad company and reliably return $2X or even $1.2X then the money would simply not last because there would be no barriers to entry.

Customer acquisition is not something you can leave to chance, it would be like placing a bet a blackjack table and saying you better quit if you lose. If you dont know how to count cards, you should have quit before even sitting down. If you dont know how to utilize different ad channels, you are better off studying them before betting anything, otherwise you are just playing blind.

Find a repeatable way to profitably onboard customers. If you cannot do that and have truly put the effort in to understand the different channels, then it may be time to pivot. Otherwise, you are just gambling.

Give me a break. Cuban is the first to admit that he got lucky in terms of his valuation, but it wasnt his first exit and his extensive writing on business should show that his success was not the result of luck.

Further, if it werent for his intelligent investing, he would have lost nearly all of the proceeds from that sale, like so many others did(1). It was exactly his smart investing that allowed him to _keep_ his "lucky" windfall

(1) http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-anat...

Yes. Your value as a consultant is dependent upon being able to deliver value to clients. From the sounds of it, you are a reasonably skilled programmer, so the difficulty is not on the technical side but on explaining to business owners why your services will make them more money. Read anything you can find by Patrick Mckenzie, and just start putting your knowledge to work. You will quickly learn what skills you need that you dont yet have.

If they are shipping items that require a prescription without verifying a prescription, then they are illegal, regardless of what the items are

Wondering how to get your first client as a consultant for a non-technical role? Creating something as thorough as this is probably a good place to start.

When people talk about creating great content, they dont mean a weekly roundup post, or asking 17 industry leaders to answer a question, they mean something like this.

Will serious companies actually post the money to an escrow? I dont have any experience with this directly, but cant imagine any company with say >100 employees would respond favorably to this request

You should never negotiate by giving a range. AT BEST they will give you the bottom end of that range. If the highest they can go is $60k, then start at 70 and dont counter below 60.

What other specifics could he have included? He showed his methodology in finding a problem, the way he found customers [including the copy in his ad], how he structured a email course, and the final product. The only other thing he could have included would have been the copy he used in the email course.

This blog lays out a very clear framework you can operate within, so I dont really understand where you are coming from.

I agree that your free trial was at the very least much too long, and that the money back guarantee makes a lot of sense for a bootstrapped SaaS company [Jason from WPEngine strongly recommends this as well]; however, I would interpret some of your data a bit differently.

50% of your signups never uploaded a podcast, but once they did, 80% uploaded more than one. Your takeaway from this should be that you absolutely need to do everything you can to onboard the user and get them to upload their first podcast because once they do, they are much more likely to continue using the service. I am guessing that now that you have a money back guarantee your average customer will be more motivated than before, but you still need to work to build processes that help users get started and continue using the service, otherwise your churn is going to be horrible.

I agree with this, however I would add a 30-60 day money back guarantee as a sort of "trial" to help communicate that if people arent happy with the product they can get their money back

OK, and where are you located? how long does it take you to get there and back? what would the cost be if you didnt own a car?

None of the servers for Pokerstars we in the US, and none of their bank accounts were either, however the DOJ was still able to seize those accounts. The US is not trying to stop online poker worldwide, they are trying to stop online poker sites from offering their services to US customers.

The major charges against Pokerstars were bank fraud and money laundering. If those crimes occur in the US, the DOJ does not care where you are based.

Im very confused about what you are trying to prove with your server example. The hard part of your example has nothing to do with building a cheap server rack and everything to do with the fact that it is very difficult to build a website that attracts 50mm hits a month, a point you completely hand wave around