From Zero to Hero: How to Get Your First 5 Customers | Ep 572

I'm going to show you how to get your first five customers in 10 steps. The wild world of YouTube has videos everywhere telling you how to scale and grow, but I think people overcomplicate it. And so this is actually a sneak peek from my new book. 100 million dollar leads, it's comes out 819, you can go to acquisition.com/leads. Let's dive in. I had a video that did really, really well that talked about how I got my first customers in every one of the businesses that I ultimately scaled to multiple millions of dollars a month. But we were like, that's amazing. But how do I do this today? And so if you don't have a business, one, get an LLC, which you can find on legal zoom, go to a bank with your LLC papers and get a bank account and then go online with Stripe or PayPal and get away to process money. When you do those three things, congratulations, you're now a business owner. Now from there, you have to do the next thing, which is you have to let people know about the stuff you sell in order to get them to buy it. There are 10 steps that we're going to walk through and by the end of these 10 steps, you will be able to have five customers or more with no money out of pocket, just time. So the first step to getting this going is you need to get a list. But I don't have a list, Alex, you're damn straight you do and I'll show you right now. Number one, I want you to go to your email account and I want you to pull all the contacts that you have in there. Anybody that you've ever messaged or emailed, that becomes list one. List two is I want you to go to every single social media profile that you have. So go to your social media profiles where you can direct message people. So if you have followers that you can DM or message, I want you to write down every single one of those people. That's list number two. List number three. I want you to pull out your phone and I want you to look for your contacts and I want you to export them. List one is all your email contacts. List two is all of your social contacts and list three is all of your phone and private personal contacts. If you add all three of those together, you will have a shitload more leads than you thought you did. And you're like, wait, you're going to ask me to contact these people? Slow down, not yet and we're not going to do it in a really weird way. All right, I'm sure I have to do it in a classy way is how I start every business I have and have people thank me for it. The second step is that you pick a platform. All right, so you have all these contacts. So you're going to have to pick one platform that you're going to start messaging or emailing them with. The way to pick which one you're going to use is start with the one that you have the most people on. So if you have the most Instagram people or you have the most email contacts, you have more people in your phone than any of those, start there. Step three, but what do I say? You personalize your message. So what you want to do is you want to use something you already know about the personal prospect in order to initiate reaching out to them. This is also just called being a human being. So what you do is you take 30 seconds, you look at someone's profile and you say, oh, we have got this thing, we have something in common, something interesting happened, whatever. And you can reach out to them with that as your primary message. So for example, you can be like, hey, saw you got a baby. It's hey, saw you switch jobs. Hey, saw you move. Hey, you saw that movie last weekend. It doesn't matter. All you need to show is that you took a few seconds to actually not just blast some sort of message and you reach out to 100 people every single day. So let's say you had 3,000 people between all your emails, all your phone contacts and every single follower across all your social media. Step 4, you reach out 100 every single day, which means the first four hours of your day goes to that because when you are starting a business, if no one knows you have a business, the first thing you did is to let people know that you exist, which is why advertising will take the majority of the beginning of your business career. Everything must be hard before it can be easy. It took you 20 years to send your first DM and it'll take you two minutes to send the second one. So just get over the hump, send it, just something so you can realize that you won't die. Step 5, what do I say if they reply? You warm them up. I use a framework that I call ACA. You acknowledge, that's what A stands for, compliment, and then you ask. For example, I can acknowledge and say, oh, so you have two kids that would be the acknowledgement of something they just told me. So it shows active listening. So C, it's the second step, because you're going to compliment them about the thing. So it's like, wow, you have two kids. You must be a super mom. Working full time and having two kids. We now complimented something about their lives. We gave them a positive label that when we go to ask, we're going to tie our ask to the compliment. We just gave them to the label that they want to reinforce about themselves, because they want to stay consistent because they want us to feel that way about them since we gave them that compliment. So we then say, hey, so you're super mom, then we transition to whatever type of question that's going to lead them to the service we sell. So if I sold therapy, I might say something like, man, how do you get timed yourself? If I were selling weight loss, I'd be like, hey, how do you have time to eat right and work out doing all that stuff? It doesn't matter what you sell, talk about them, you compliment them, and then you link that to the next leading question that will lead them down the path to the thing that you ultimately want to help them with. Wait a second. This is how it's like selling. It's not because of talking to fucking humans. It's already like, which, by the way, this is step five. You can find the other steps and step 10 of the chapter of blah, blah, blah, which you should check it out. It's $1.99 on Amazon. It's Mondo. And I do that because I hope that you make all the money in the world and then eventually get big enough that we can invest in your business so we can make even more money together. That's why we do this stuff. All right. That being said, step six, invite their friends. When you're talking about this stuff, you're not going to sell them. This is fucking huge. You're not going to solicit them for whatever your services are. You ask to question, they're going to tell you stuff, and then it's going to be like, oh, yeah, by the way, do you know anyone who's looking for X, Y and Z? Because I'm opening up a few slots to help people do exactly that. Here's why this is so important. You're not asking them. You're just asking them if they know anybody. And since your friends with them and since your contacts, you're asking them for a favor. You're not asking them to buy from you. This should make you not feel weird about messaging people because all we really did, let's backtrack, is that we paid attention to people. We actively listened and we complimented them. And then we asked them how they're dealing with something out of curiosity. And then we say, do you know anybody? If they say, hey, I'd like to find out more. Now what they have done is they've transitioned from a lead to an engaged lead. A lead is somebody that you can contact. And engaged lead is someone who you can contact, comma, who has showed interest in the thing that you sell. If she says, you know what, I haven't had a lot of time to myself. Or I haven't been able to keep up with my workouts, et cetera. Now they have shown interest in the thing after you say, hey, do you know anybody? Then they say, well, me. Boom. Well, then how do I get them to buy from me? We're going to give them the easiest off in the world to say yes to. You're going to make it free. They probably know that you're not that experienced. I mean, in my due, you're DMing them. So you're not running some massive PR campaign across Times Square. Just be honest. So, gather round. I'm going to give you two versions of this. One is a slightly longer one and one is slightly shorter one. You say, by the way, do you know anybody who is described their struggles, looking to dream outcome in time to life? I'm taking on five key studies for free because that's all I can handle. And we're being honest because this is a first business and you fucking have no idea what you're doing. So you better not take more than five customers on. I just want to get some testimonials for my service or product. I help them repeat the dream outcome without effort and sacrifice. It works. Period. I even guarantee that people get dream outcome or I'll work with them until they do. I just had a girl named XXX work with me to get dream outcome. Even though she described the same struggle the person you're talking to is struggling with because you just asked them about it. And I also had another guy who got the dream outcome and it was his first time. I'd like to get more testimonials to show it works across different scenarios. Does anyone you like come to mind? If they say no, here's a really funny way you can respond to that. Just say, "Ha ha, does anyone you hate come to mind?" It breaks the weirdness, right? If there is any. Honestly, that's when you'll sometimes get the real response. Hey, real quick guys, are you a business owner or you want to start a business? Well, the first thing that any business owner needs is someone to sell their stuff to. And I spent the last decade getting proficient at advertising to the point that right now I have a 36-to-1 return on advertising. Meaning for every dollar I put in, I get $36 back. And I spent two years and 2,000 hours writing 19 drafts of my next book, $100 million leads where I share everything that I've learned for you, foe free. And if that sounds at all interesting, go to acquisition.com/leads to register for the event. It's absolutely free. Everyone's invited. It's virtual. I'll see you there. I'll have time to say all of those things. You just say, "I help the type of customer get, dream outcome, in time period without effort and sacrifice." And I guarantee X, Y and Z to decrease risk. That's it. That's if you just have that moment to deliver one thing of what do I do, okay? Now, this is important. The reason we do it for free is you say, "Hey, I'm going to do all this stuff for free as long as you promise to do three things." One, you actually use my service. Two, you give me feedback on it. And three, leave a killer review if you think it deserves one. These are the terms of exchange. I work for free as long as you use it. You leave a review and you give me feedback on what I could do better. Some special snowflakes are going to be like, "You should never sell your time for nothing. You suck. You have never done this before." So it would be unreasonable for you to be good. And so why would you want to sell sucky service to people you know? Give it away for free. And you're actually getting the better end of the deal. I'll tell you the quick story of Warren Buffett and Ben Graham. Ben Graham was the goat back in the day for investing. Warren Buffett was just a kid out of Columbia and wanted to go learn investing. And he offered to work for Graham for free. Graham said, "You're getting the better end of the deal." The actual answer was, "You're overpriced." So free was too expensive for Graham because Graham knew that he was going to have to invest more in getting Warren good enough to actually work for him. And so right now, these first customers, they are exchanging something for your service. They're exchanging their time and their effort and some stuff later that you're going to have them do. Just because you're not getting paid doesn't mean it's free, but it is monetarily free. The reason I want you to start with that is that one, it'll get you more reps. Two, you probably suck. Three, you need to learn how to suck less and you suck less by doing more. And it's way easier to get more people to work with you if you lower the barrier to free. If people don't want to work with you, even for free, then ask them why. Because the reason that someone tells you they don't want to work with you, even for free, is because there are hidden costs associated with whatever thing you sell. If you figure out what all those hidden costs are, you can eliminate those hidden costs. and then be able to charge significantly more for your solution later compared to the other people who charge for it and still include this hitting costs. So I'll give you an example. I got solicited in this exact manner to do short form videos. This is way back when I hadn't done anything. And a guy message me and said, "I want to do short form videos for you." And he said, "You don't have to do anything. I will take all the stuff you already have online, and I will make them for you, and I'll even post them for you." Like, you actually just need to say yes. And so I said, "Yes, and guess what? You started making short videos, and he started accepting payment for it." Because he had removed the hitting costs. If people get value from this thing that you have, especially if it's free, they're far more likely to leave positive reviews, give you feedback, and send their friends and family. Once we have that, we have our first customers. Now we go to step eight. You start back at the top. So you had that big list, and we hit all of the months and back again. So some of those people, by the way, when you ask them if they know anybody, they actually just give you people that they know that might help. And you get free leads. Because if you reach out to 3,000 people with a free thing, you'll get five people who will take you up on it. I promise you. So now you're like, "But Alex, I can't work for free forever." Now we're on step nine. Start charging. Once people start referring, that's when you know you were good enough to start charging. When this happens, all you do is you go back up to the script that I just read to you, and you change free to 80% off. And you say that's for the next five. What do you do after that? You change the 80% to 60%. After you get those five, change to 40, then to 20. Then you're at full price. But guess what? Doesn't have to stop there. You can go 20% over. You can go 40% over that. Because there are no rules. And if at that point you're way better, you may merit that because of the value that you deliver. Because ideally, you're charging full retail, but now you're at 10x the value. Value that you have done has gotten better because you figured out from the feedback that these people that work with you for free have told you so that you can make it even better for people who pay you. Once you have those people and you started transitioning, congratulations, you are in business and you are making money. You will at some point reach capacity. A supply and demand is the single truth of business. When you fill up all your slots with free people and discounted people, now you have true scarcity. And so you can ethically sell with conviction that you really don't have that much room. And so then you can sell someone with conviction that you don't have a lot of supply. They will desire you more because you are scarce from a resource perspective. And then they will pay the same or premium in order to work with you. And then you turn to your free person and you say, I am accepting somebody who is paying full boat in order to do this. If you would like me to keep doing this for you, you would have to start paying to match them. Are you comfortable with that? If they're not, no sweat because all you did is you helped them for free. And you say, no worries, can I get the killer review you asked me for? Or I asked you for. And those free people, you have to love and cherish them more than anyone else in your life. Because they're going to get you business in three different ways. One, they're going to leave you reviews that are going to get your business. Two, they're going to send you people that are going to get your business. And three, they themselves may transition into paying you which will also get you business. Don't think short, think long and you'll make long money. Now you have paying customers, you're reaching your capacity, you're consistently raising your price because now there is more demand than you have supply. And we have artificially created a condition for profit. So what's the 10 step? Keep them warm. You've got this big list of people. Check in like a human being. Provide value to them on a regular basis. When you do that, you continue to reinforce and deposit goodwill in the audience because what will happen eventually is you won't even need to ask them because you've provided enough value. You start posting enough testimonials, enough results, talking about some of the intrents stuff that you're doing right now that people will be like, "Hey, that's actually pretty cool. Hey, can I find out more about that?" And then they will actually start soliciting you. And that's the game. That's how you go from zero to hero and get your first five paying customers. If you just like that episode, then you are going to love the free virtual event that I have for my next book, $100 million leads. And before you click away, listen to what I'm about to say. Fast forward three months from now. Your friend is using something that you didn't have access to and their business is growing. Another person posts about how grateful they are that they went to the event because they're using these skills that they learned from the free thing that I'm going to give to only people who are there live and give you some context. We have the tech now that we are going to scrape every single person who is at the event. And they will be the only ones who gain access to a project that I've been working on for four years, which means that every person who is not on the link live is not going to get it. And I'm doing that because I know I'm going to piss off 99% of people who are not there. And it's because the next time I say, "I'm going to give away something, it's going to be awesome. You're going to want to be there. I want people to believe me." And if you haven't taken action on it yet, go to acquisition.com/leads. I'll see you there.