🗞 What's New: Hold yourself hostage to build self-discipline

Increase productivity by creating a personal hostage situation:

• The PoWeR tactic for self-discipline: Basically, hold your breath until you begin taking an action that aligns with your goals. But don't pass out.
• If your sales demos suck, you likely aren't attracting the right matches. Vet prospects heavily before you demo.
• Niche job board. $13.5K acquisition. Focusing on SEO changed the game for Andrew Chemerynskiy, and helped get his site acquired.

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by Channing Allen

Self-discipline is my jam, and the PoWeR technique is one of the most valuable tactics I've developed. More below!

PWR: The main ingredients

PoWeR: Pause, What Now? decision, and Reset.

tl;dr: Hold your breath until you begin taking an action that aligns with your goals.

Pause

Pause and take a "ransom breath."

1. Whatever it is you're currently doing, stop.
2. Take a deep breath and hold it in.
3. Don't release the breath until you start taking a specific, goal-directed action.

You now have a hostage situation on your hands.

PS: Obviously, don't hold your breath to the point of passing out.

What Now? decision

The action step should be simple enough that you can get it done before running out of breath.

For example, you keep snoozing your alarm. What Now? decision: Get up out of bed.

Reset

1. "Unpause" to take action on your What Now? decision.
2. Once you've satisfied the conditions you laid out in step two, release the ransom breath and go about your day.

Why this works

To use a financial analogy, the return on your energy investment is massive.

PWR amounts to an implementation intention with a side of suffocation. Together, they generate a lot of chemical motivation at the cost of taking a breath.

The bonus ingredients

Sometimes, PWR be damned, you'll still struggle to pry open that space between stimulus and response. You'll want to stop scrolling or gaming, but even the tiny action of taking a deep breath will prove too tall of an order.

In these situations, you can add the "O" and the "E" to PoWeR: Override and Environment.

An override involves working your way up from a small ransom breath to a larger one during the pause step. And, adding constraints to your physical environment will make it easier to avoid unwanted behavioral patterns.

Override

1. Stop doing whatever you're doing.
2. Do a "no windup" breath hold by closing the windpipe in your throat (instead of taking a deep breath, as you would in the PWR version).
3. Don't breathe again until you take a normal ransom breath.
4. Take a normal ransom breath, then continue to the What Now? decision step.

Environment

If your environment isn't conducive to intentional action, set up a constraint.

Taking the example of hitting snooze above, don't just get out of bed. Play an upbeat song that puts you in the mood to get going!

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from the Growth Trends newsletter

💵 GPT-4 is now open to everyone, but you need a history of successful payments first.

📱 Your users' tech skills are likely worse than you think.

🧵 Threads for Android is now in beta.

🔎 Tweets are back in Google Search again.

🌞 The hottest day ever was recorded last week. That record will likely be broken several more times this year.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by Rob Walling

One of the most important parts of sales is nailing your sales demos. Here's how!

Educate, don't sell

Sales shouldn’t be sleazy. Instead, create an educational conversation. Put on your consultant hat to help your prospect define their problem, then come up with a good solution.

Qualify before you demo

Asking a few questions about budget, timeline, and the problem they are trying to solve can be a window into whether it’s worth your time to jump on a demo.

Say no to people who aren’t a fit

If you know someone will not get value from your product, or you believe they will be a problem to support, let them move on.

Don’t waste time or money onboarding them only for them to churn soon!

Follow up

It’s amazing how many salespeople don’t bother following up. People are busy, so follow up until someone tells you they are no longer interested.

Take payment on the call

Not every SaaS product is a one call close, but if yours is, set up their account at the end of your call. Then, take their payment information, or send them a payment link while still on the line.

Ask the right questions

1. What problem are you looking to solve? Your demo serves as proof that you can solve their problem.

2. How are you solving that problem today? Find out what software they’re currently using.

3. How big is your organization? Knowing this can help you understand how valuable this sale is to the company, and how much value you’ll be able to provide to them.

4. How sophisticated is their understanding of this category? Knowing their level of expertise will help you tailor your message.

5. What’s the decision-making process? Who else needs to weigh in on this decision?

A hack

Sales demos are pretty high touch, meaning they should be reserved for customers who are going to pay you enough to be worth it.

Dialing in your positioning, website, and marketing is one way to make sure you’re attracting the right prospects. Using a qualifying form to schedule a demo is also good. Have them put in the company’s name, the company’s size, their best work email, and other information you need to know.

Check out my new book, The SaaS Playbook, for more on how to build a multimillion dollar startup without venture capital!

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by Andrew Chemerynskiy

I built InGastro.pl, a job board for finding hospitality jobs in Poland, in my spare time. I recently sold it for $13.5K!

Idea

The idea for this project came up during a brainstorming session with my girlfriend. I was not on board at first, but after some research, I discovered that it was a great niche with almost no competitors (at least in Poland).

Building

The MVP was done in less than a month. After that, my main focus was polishing the site and improving SEO.

I'd work on it after my full-time job, and sometimes on weekends. Spending a few hours per week to build the site ended up being more than enough time.

Marketing

My main marketing strategy was based around posting to Facebook Groups, since a lot of people look for work there. I also sent DMs.

People were interested in it, and saw the value pretty early on.

Revenue

Publishing job offers was free. My only source of income was native ads, which is not a lot of money.

I planned on adding premium features, but I wanted to wait for more traffic. Surprisingly (to me!), I ended up selling before I could add those features.

Selling

I was contacted on LinkedIn by a person who wanted to build a similar website. He was interested in either working on it together, or buying it.

This was just my third indie project, and it was making almost no revenue at the time. Despite that, he wanted to buy it, so it was clear to me that I should sell. The price was evaluated based on the time that I spend building it, plus some bonus revenue.

Takeaways

• You can sell a website with almost no revenue for a good price.

• Invest in SEO. If my website was not placed on the first pages, no one would have been able to find it. Therefore, the acquisition offer likely wouldn't have been made.

• You can get lucky! Isn’t that perfect reason to continue trying new ideas?

Discuss this story.

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Darko, Rob Walling, Harry Dry, and Andrew Chemerynskiy for contributing posts. —Channing