Few weeks ago, I landed a $4k/mo social media consulting deal. It’s the most money I’ve made on the internet ever and it all came at once.
Today, I wanted to share the story of how this came about.
Around March this year was when I was fired from my startup sales role. I started applying for roles immediately but I felt I needed another project to work on- something that was fun.
My friend and I had been shooting the shit about me joining him to try and make money off his IG page on geopolitics.
This guy is like Rain Man for short form content. He grew this page from scratch to 370k followers in the last 9 months.
The rub was: he was ready to bin the entire thing in Dec’23 because he couldn’t see a way to make money from this. I saw potential and convinced him to keep at it, launch a newsletter (at 8k subs now!) and eventually go towards digital products (work in progress).
Anyhow, somehow our initial conversations went in the right direction, he decided to keep at it and jet off to Oz. He’d live the digital nomad lifestyle and work on the page. I stayed put in London and in April’24, we kicked off our work relationship proper.
My job was to make us money any way I could think of. We started off with the most basic offer- reach out to D2C brands and ask them to sponsor content on our page.
Between April and July, we got two sponsors this way. Here’s a brief account of how I turned an initial no into a yes- this was our first contract that came from cold emailing.
We did the work for very little money because we wanted those logos and also exposure to the market, understand our ideal customer and test out our hypotheses.
Here’s what we learnt:
There’s levels to the brands that will pay good money for sponsorships. Many brands we spoke with aren’t spending much today. That model worked better pre 2022 but now with the market conditions, media buying is generally down.
We also learnt that brands are very conversion focused- how many followers can a sponsored video send to us or how many app downloads? And that isn’t something that a page like ours does well because we’re a little broad rather than having a niche audience that has very specific pain points.
But, on a discovery call with a prospect a month ago, I leaned in to their marketing goals and she revealed a great insight:
“We’ve been trying to grow with short form videos but haven’t managed to get to consistency there- and nowhere near the polish you guys have”
I asked her if they’ve had someone come in and help the strategy and execution of their short form videos. She said they had but finding people that could match their brand tone, voice and editorial quality was hard.
That was it for me. Bingo. I had my pitch.
I set up time with her to propose how we could help her brand with these challenges. Did some homework and pitched next week. I’d essentially come on as a silent partner and create short form content for their page.
She liked it and wanted me to meet her social media manager. We set up a meeting…. and that’s when disaster struck.
My partner texted me something to the effect of:
“Sorry dude, need to take time off. Totally overwhelmed”
Well….shit.
How long would he be gone for? No idea. I knew he’d been struggling for a while and having gone through a version of this last year, I hardly could ask. You can’t put a timeline on getting your mental health back on track.
But, also…shit.
So, here I was, one final conversation and pitch away from signing a deal. I knew the decision makers, knew their budget range and their decision making process.
I was tantalisingly close but now it looked like I didn’t have any product to sell.
What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.
But this issue is getting too long, so I’ll cover it next week.
PS: I wrote a book last month that delves into sales lessons from selling in startups, called Zero to One Sales. I cover the frameworks behind my selling process in detail in it- leaving it here in case it interests:
Speak soon,
Shubhankar