This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
I'd like to begin today's episode with a shout out to everybody out there who is in search of their first customer. If you're looking for your first customer, first client, first sale, this is a very important milestone. And that's why for all of our case studies, whenever we do those stories, which I now do twice a week, but for the first three years of the program, I did, you know, every single day, one of the questions I always ask is, do you remember your first sale? And I learned to ask that question many years ago when I was first talking to accidental entrepreneurs and other people who started side hustles, because I noticed that there was a high percentage of people who actually remember that first sale. Not everyone does, but it's not unusual at all to hear that achieving that milestone feels incredibly satisfying.
And hopefully, of course, it's the first of many. So anything we can do to get people to their first customer, first sale is so important. And today's lister fits this description, okay? He wants to become a digital personal assistant to help people with tech support. Now, how should he proceed?
Is his offer clear enough? Is there something we should change? Should he go out and buy Facebook ads? He's wondering all kinds of stuff. So let's talk about it.
How to get my first customer as a digital personal assistant, right after this message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hi, Chris, my name is Nate. First of all, thanks for everything that you're doing to help out the community of side hustlers out there making it happen. My idea is being a digital personal assistant focused more on like a personal tech support, right? Being basically like the nephew or niece that answers questions for people for people that don't have that person in their life.
Really quick, text or phone based, easily billable. I can build all the structure for everything. But what I'd really like to know is how do you get in front of your very first customers? Should we go and spend money on ads? Should we post things on Facebook?
I'm not really sure. And I'd really love to know about how to plan going from zero to one. Thanks so much. And hope we're able to make a success out of it. [Music]
Nate, what's up?
Thank you so much. I'm so glad you're out there. So look, we're gonna make a success for sure. But before I send you off to buy ads or post on Facebook, I do have a bit of a concern about the service. And I think the more we can address on the front end, like before you start, like here's my checklist of 28 things I'm gonna do to try to market the service, what could you actually do to improve the service or perhaps refine it a bit beforehand?
It's gonna achieve much better long-term results for you. Listeners, if you wanna check out his website along with me, it is caloshero.com. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correct, but K-A-L-O-S hero, H-E-R-O.com, caloshero.com. So my concern is that this service is too vague. And I'm not sure that Nate knows enough about his intended customer because it really could be a lot of different things, a lot of different things, a lot of different people.
There's no doubt that lots of people need tech help for sure, but that's a really big market of people, as I said, and also their needs are quite different. Somebody setting up their smart speaker set up, I won't say the name of the Amazon device, you know what I'm talking about, that's one thing. Other people are trying to use their computer or phone for any number of tasks that don't have anything in common besides this broad category of tech. So on the one hand, you might think, and I could be wrong, but you might think, well, a tech concierge who could do all these things is the answer. But personally, I'm not sure because people do tend to ask their nephew or niece or someone they know for help with stuff like this.
And yes, not everybody has that person, but in that case, are they then actively going to search for a tech concierge or a digital personal assistant? I don't think most people think about that kind of language. So, I mean, this is a very common issue, by the way, this whole issue of like, when I'm starting up, I have an idea, I think I know what's right, but the way you get to what's really right is through adjusting. And so here's an action step, perhaps for Nate. Try to show this website to someone that you think might benefit from the service, and you're not trying to sell them on it, right?
You just kind of want to see what they think and try not to ask them too many leading questions. Just, you know, show them the website, have them look at it. You might get some information just through that observation. And if you're not able to do that, then the next best thing would be to try to do it yourself. Just try to go through your own website and pretend, oh, this is not me.
I'm looking at somebody else's thing. What questions do I have? Do I really understand this? Do I see the compelling benefit here? And so to go back to where I started, I'm just a little concerned that the service is too vague in terms of the promise, in terms of the benefit.
The pricing is also kind of just, you know, oh, we'll send us a message and we'll get back to you. We'll get you a quote and stuff. So my suggestion is don't spend money on ads right now, unless it's small money that you're just using for testing a certain question. You spend the money on ads once you have an offer that converts. So spend some more time thinking about the offer.
And then of course we can get to that, you know, 25 step checklist of some marketing things to do. I just want to make sure that Nate and everybody else uses their time well. Okay, that's my two cents. The listeners, if you have a question, come, decide us a little school.com/questions. We'll be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects.
And by the way, Nate, let us know what happens. If you get a retooled offer at some point, come back and perhaps we can mention it again. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you have a wonderful day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
