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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

Failedmarket-selectionpositioning-niche

What they did

Opened sales to hair and nail salons (seen as closest to restaurants) late last year using the same field org. Found the product was ~5% short of what salons needed and stopped; reps asking to sell other verticals are now told restaurants only. May revisit next year.

What happened

Stopped the salon push; product was missing ~5% for that vertical

In their words

He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads

Play from 17:55

… 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.

17:55

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

18:27

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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Tags: vertical-expansion, adjacent-vertical