10 sales tactics that work:

YCombinator is not worth it, a thread:

These days, I get asked by founders all the time: “Should I do YC (YCombinator)?”

My answer used to be: “Probably not worth it, but if you really want to, sure.”

Today, given what YC has become, my answer is a hard: “No.”

Here’s why 👇

Before we dig in, a note on my motivation.

Some think my recent tweets are marketing stunts.

The truth: there’s nothing that pisses me off more than the Mob Sh*t that goes on in Silicon Valley.

My mission of empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs drives all my work.

Ok, now to YC…

This thread is long, but here’s the main takeaway:

YC might have started off pure.

But money, power, and greed have corrupted it.

Today, YC is a lottery factory capturing 10%+ from founders with little concern about the individuals going through the program.

The problem: founders new to Silicon Valley think of YC as a MUST.

This is the narrative that needs to be put to bed.

And, I’ll go one step further, it is a MUST AVOID.

Why?

How to run a company (in priority order):

1: Define a crystal clear north star

Great companies know their destination.

Everyone rowing in one direction.

The best north star? A SIMPLE, measurable metric.

Get it right, and watch the magic unfold! 💫

2: Hire uncomfortably good people

Ah, my favorite line!

Hire people you have no right to hire.

Who are so good it makes you nervous.

Who force everyone to step up their game.

Always level up 🦾

3: Create a culture of urgency

Nothing is more powerful than a group of people making every day count 🔥⚡️🚨

4: Make sure no one gets blocked

You’re paying good people good money.

Make sure they don’t get stuck!

Demotivating for them 🤦

Disastrous for the bottom line.

What to look for in a cofounder:

Oh boy, this is a big one!

Why?

The #1 cause of death in startups is 🥁🥁

Co-founder issues!

Who you pick as co-founder is perhaps THE most important decision you’ll make.

I have a TON of advice on the topic, so let’s dive in 👇

The MOST important thing to know:

Your cofounder must fit in the overlap of TWO venn diagrams:

1/ Personality fit

2/ Ability to execute

A pitfall founders make: choosing ONLY ONE.

Why?

> Choose personality fit w/out ability to execute, and there will be an inevitable reckoning when one cofounder feels they are contributing disproportionately.

> Choose ability to execute w/out personality fit, and the relationship strain grows until it becomes paralyzing.

Someone worthy of a cofounder title must be a unicorn 🦄

ie. they must have both!

Having both results in a DEEP MUTUAL RESPECT amongst each other.

And of course, there are some nuances to both of these venn diagrams.

Let’s double click on each one:

Over the last 72 hrs, countless founders reached out in private to thank me for standing up.

My realization: VCs don’t just dominate the capital, they also dominate Twitter.

We need to balance the scales.

For founders, here’s how I’ve grown my Twitter with minimal time 👇👇👇

Before I dive in… I’m challenging myself!

I started writing this at 8p ET on the DOT.

Let’s see how fast I can get it out.

Here we go 👇

Filling the queue 📜

I use Buffer (.com) to queue up tweets.

For 2-3 hours at the beginning of each month, I meditate and fill it up 🧘

My focus: business insights and wisdom.

Once you get flowing, it keeps on flowing.

Packing the punch 👊

Some people think Twitter is for 280 characters.

I’ve found the opposite to be true: it’s the most effective long-form platform on the planet.

Instead of a single blog post, each section is its own tweet and can be shared.

Maximum momentum!

I try to do long form 1-3 times per week.

I find that if I’m in a meditated state and have picked a good topic, the words just flow out.

These “tweet storms” take about 1-2 hours to get out.

PRO TIP: keep a "list of topics" and any time you think of one, write it down.

How to build a sales team:

To start, a note of credit to the great Jim Herbold from Box.

He was my hands-on mentor for many years. Bolt sales would not exist without him.

Much of this is learned wisdom from him.

Ok, here we go 👇

1/ Close the first deals yourself, end-to-end

It’s impossible to now how to construct a sales team without first knowing how to conduct a sale.

Some founders try to hire before this step.

Doing so is skipping a crucial step of getting intimate with your product and customers.

2/ Document the learnings

At Bolt we wrote a 50+ page sales playbook which included
- Email scripts
- Cold call scripts
- FAQ and Rebuttals
- Negotiating tactics
- Closing tactics

With this handy, new salespeople ramp 3X-5X faster.

3/ When ready, always hire in pairs

If you hire just one salesperson and they can’t sell your product, you’re in trouble.

Why?

You don’t know if the problem is the person or the product!

Hire two, and you have a point of comparison.

THREAD: Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. It’s 6pm on a Friday evening, everyone is sat around a table at a nice restaurant in London. The head of Marketing from some big company is sitting down with his agency who invited him down to talk things over.

They insist on paying the bill, it’s a casual thing they say. Just a chat about ideas.

Wine starts flowing and jokes too. Everyone has a good time.

Especially the agency, they just signed a new client retainer for £5,000 a month.

Easy pickings.

Too often we see Marketers signing agency contracts because of a few casual chats, usually following some conference waffle sales pitch about how everything in Marketing is dead now and only they have the solutions in this “new world”.

The point here is that turkeys won’t vote for Christmas.

They won’t sell you the best option, they’ll sell what’s best for them.

But the problem isn’t the agencies, its Marketers.

Agencies will try to sell you what they sell, of course they would. Marketers of all people should be aware of this. It doesn’t really matter if you get on really well and they paid for your meal and they are young, millennial, white and middle class and do digital.

How To Promote Your Stuff On The Internet: A Thread

After all the recent online events/conventions, I realised that there are a lot of people who don't understand how to maximise their promotion potential, so here's a quick, basic thread on how to do that!! 1/13

1. POST YOUR LINKS EVERYWHERE. People are lazy and want to do things as easily as possible. Put your shop/website/patreon link in your Twitter bio, in your pinned tweet, in your IG bio, make links easy to find on your site, put your links everywhere, please oh my god. 2/13

If you're making a post talking about your shop, put a link to your shop in the tweet (or in the tweet below if you're worried about algorithms). Say "shop link below!". Make it as easy as possible to find your shop! The majority of people will not go looking for the link!! 3/13

2. POST YOUR EMAIL EVERYWHERE. Someone looking to hire you isn't always going to want to DM you, and if they can't easily find a way to contact you, they'll just skip you. Put it in your bio!! Put it in your pinned tweet!!! Put it in the header of your website!!! 4/13

3. Related: make a website. If you don't want to make a portfolio website, then make an Instagram or Tumblr where your work is clearly on display. People are lazy. People don't want to scroll through memes to find your work to see if they want to hire you or buy from you. 5/13

We've used "seller financing" on two self storage deals in the past year.

And it raised our cash on cash return by 20%+.

And lowered the amount of capital we needed by $500k.

Here's a THREAD about a deal of mine and how this magical debt structure can work.

👇👇

My method is simple. In the late stages of negotiation I submit two offers:

One at a lower price.

And one at the exact price the seller wants but with him holding back 10-20% of the purchase price in the form of a 2nd mortgage (with a second position to your bank loan).

Contrary to popular belief seller financing rarely includes the seller holding back 70-80% and acting as your bank.

Two reasons:

#1 most have some debt on the property.

#2 most want most of their money now.

Have you heard the saying:

"you name the price and i'll name the terms?"

This is a case of that situation exactly.

Lets paint a picture here:

Last week I was negotiating with a seller on a property in a small western PA town.

Not many interested buyers so I knew I had some leverage.

His asking price was $4.5MM. I wanted to pay $4.2M.

After a week or two and a lot of back and forth I found his lowest number.