Swipe.by · B2B · AI marketing for restaurants
Sell to hair and nail salons with the same restaurant sales team
Stopped; product was ~5% short of what salons need
What they did
What happened
In their words
He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads
… think, before we would think in buying restaurants is we have a huge market opportunity in hair salons, nail salons, gyms, doctor offices, car dealerships. Like- Why do you want to go cover so many industries? Doesn't that make you weaker on everything else? Like knowing what brain to build for a salon is different than the brain for a car dealership. Car dealership, let's take that out of the equation. Salon and restaurant, very, very similar.
So that is the one we would look at first. but yeah it's a good question I mean for now we are exclusively every time we hire new reps everyone is can I go into others and we say no we are only in restaurants but if we think bigger Mainstreet has such a big need I don't see and I see you know a big opportunity when our product is there we own the distribution on the ground it could be an easy flywheel to unlock but exactly that is the challenge like we did open up to hair salons nail salons late last year and exactly what you mentioned we found. We are just missing 5% to be perfect for them. And that is why we stopped
it. With building becomes more bottleneck. The question is how easy can we adjust for this 5%, right? And we're not answering that question over the next six to 12 months, but we might try to answer that question next year. Well, consider this my official sort of call for startups for Founder Path. We are looking for what we call ABC and that's atoms plus bits plus capital. Bits is Carl. He has data that sits on top of the atoms. He knows what …
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More from this episode
- Sell only door-to-door, with reps walking into restaurants~$3.5M ARR, ~400% yearly growth, $0 ad spend
- Pay door-to-door reps mostly commission, with a guaranteed minimumReps keep 30-40% of year-one revenue; top reps promoted in ~6 months
- Promote top reps to open new cities
- Recruit sales reps with Indeed job ads
- Have the rep sit with the owner while a remote lead runs the demo300-400 demos a month
- Skip free trials and push small businesses to pay a year up frontMost customers pay the year up front
- Give websites and online ordering away free; charge for the AI services on top
- Swap revenue-share loans for fixed monthly debt payments to fund the sales pushKept 100% equity; fixed payments made cash planning easier
Tags: vertical-expansion, adjacent-vertical