Avenue · B2B · booking widget for trades
Demo the website widget on iPads instead of phones and leave printed brochures
Cleared up confusion that it was an app; early traction followed quickly
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- Early door-to-door selling
This shipped together with other changes, so the result can't be credited to this alone.
In their words
This Simple Widget Makes $50K/Month
… You didn't have any customers. You didn't have any revenue, but you were able to hire all these people. How did you like afford that? >> run a marketing agency for 10 years, which still had like 70 plus clients paying like website hosting. So, I used my like very precious income that I did have to live to basically fund the start of this and try [music] and transition out of the agency into this full time. So, I was very very fortunate that the
past business was still like actively running without a whole lot of like attention required, but needed that income to kind of be able to hire staff to then get the product up and running. >> Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you grew this business from zero to over $50,000 a month in a relatively short time frame, like a year, year and a half. So, tell us a little bit about that growth. How did you get that initial traction? >> Door-to-door sales, essentially. Like, [music] going and showing people our product. Initially, we showed it on an iPhone and they'd go, "Oh, what is it?
It's like an app." And I'm like, "No, it goes on your website." There was a lot of confusion about what the product actually was. Then we switched to iPads. One of our early staff was like, "Why don't we just show it on like an iPad so they can understand that it's like embedded onto a website? [music] They can see it's in their branding." So, we switched to iPads and then printed like brochures explaining what the product was. And that quickly kind of got us really early [music] traction where it's like when you show someone the problem they have and you can explain it quite [music] clearly, like, "You can't get sales outside of hours. This fixes that."
They're very open to trying something new that they're being shown in person with a real [music] person, which has then led to us being able to get bigger clients because they go, "I've seen you guys everywhere. A lot of people must [music] trust you." Um, but we didn't have any connections to get into those bigger clients if we didn't do the hard work of getting the smaller ones first. >> Mhm. That's awesome. Just tell me a little bit of how you …
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More from this episode
- Walk into local businesses and show them the product in personFounder says it got early traction quickly; no customer numbers given
- Pitch every open business on the street, then focus on whoever responds bestTrades responded best; product adapted for them and they became the core customers
- Sign lots of small local businesses first so bigger ones have seen you aroundBigger clients signed because they'd 'seen you guys everywhere'; no numbers
- Hire a designer and two developers before any revenue, paid by your agency incomeGave confidence to sell to bigger companies; founder calls it a terrible idea on paper
- Have a developer friend build a rough version to prove it can be doneSeeing it come to life convinced the founder to go all in
- Put a 'Book online' button on each client's Google listing, not just their website
Tags: live-demo, sales-collateral, brochures, ipad