One win is all you need

Today was a fun day. I did a lot of cold calls, and didn't expect it to be that hard and exhausting. Out of 200 calls, nothing worked. But I was able to get 2 demos from LinkedIn cold messaging instead, which saved my morale.

Out of that whole pile of calls, we got one pilot. Hard to tell yet if it converts, but they manage $1.7B, so feedback from their director of acquisitions should be extremely valuable.

I was also still cooking on the pitch deck. Did a lot of research and learned even more. These companies' returns depend on picking the right deals, 67% of their returns come down to that, but 60% of their pipeline never even gets properly seen. It's like getting 70% of your salary from apples in a garden, but losing 60% of them because there are too many trees to harvest in time.

I also thought a lot about winners and losers. Essentially you just need one win to accelerate the whole process. One big win gets you enough cash, other clients, VCs, and it rolls into a bigger success. But usually that one deal is one of the hardest things in the world to land.

Had a call with an ambitious team today, and I can't stress enough how important it is to sell before you build something. Probably the biggest time saver early on. If you could choose between wasting 2 months or 1 week, why would you choose 2 months? Yet most people do exactly that. They're 100% confident people will pay for their product, spend 2 months building it, then realize no one actually wants to buy. Why not just sell first and see the reaction, get the early signal before you build anything?

So simple, yet so hard.