Getting your startup selling in under 30 days is a challenge. But sometimes, you just need the money, and you have to take extreme action. After all, you need the money.
That’s where this post can help. It explores the guerrilla tactics you need to use to ensure that you make sales and drive conversions, allowing you to generate revenue and get your products off the ground. The more you understand how to do this, the more likely you will be to succeed long-term, since you can always find a way to paper over your finances, even when investing heavily at the start.
Launch Your MVP
The best way to start is with your MVP or “minimum viable product.” This is essentially the least you can sell to customers without:
- Making them feel ripped off
- Damaging your reputation
Obviously, don’t sell them anything that’s a waste of money or bad value. Instead, give them the bare bones of what you’ve been working on and price it accordingly. Even if your business is still taking a loss overall, providing clients with something that they can get their teeth into is often worth it, as long as the sale price is above the marginal cost of making the goods.
If you can offer a beta version, that’s even better. This way, customers know it isn’t the finished product, which, again, protects your brand and gives you time to adjust the service until it is of a standard they expect.
Leverage Content Marketing With Social Proof
Another tactic is to use the holy duo of content marketing and social proof. When you put these two things together, you can benefit from extraordinary results.
For example, collecting testimonials and social proof is a great way to address the audience’s suspicions and convince them that you offer the best service. You can also do things like create helpful content or go on X and LinkedIn and discuss your professional credentials and why you do everything better than anyone else in your industry. Testimonials from early beta testers are also useful as you can use these to snowball your customer base in the first few days when people are most skeptical and least likely to hand over money.
You’ll usually want to implement this phase during the first 8 to 12 days of your plan. If you can start generating social proof early, that will accelerate your ability to generate profits later on.
Identify Your Niche
During this phase, you also want to be thinking carefully about your niche and the people who are most likely to buy from you first. These individuals are those who feel strongest about your unique selling points.
Figuring out who these people are can be challenging, so you should carefully consider this in your business plan before taking action. You want to know from your research who is willing to buy.
Tools like LinkedIn and X are helpful for this. However, you also want to see firm evidence that people are willing to pay for a worse version of what you want to sell at a lower price.
Run Targeted Paid Ads
Part of the way to do this is to use targeted pay-per-click advertising services. Plugging into this expertise can help you reach people around your business faster and enable you to excel more than you ever thought possible.
Running targeted paid ads on platforms like Google Ads or Meta Ads is useful because of their data collection practices. In short, these tech giants know when and how to serve your ads.
This advantage can be enormous in some industries, especially in those where competition is light. Often, you can stroll into a space and begin winning customers immediately, especially if it is for purchases they can’t put off.
Targeted paid ads are something you can do right from the start, the moment you have your MVP. Usually, someone will want to know about it if it solves a problem they have in their lives.
How much you spend is very much up to you, but you want a clear call to action (CTA) using tools like Carrd or Leadpages. You also want to ensure you’re spending enough to get the results that you want, which usually means up to $50 per day for a starting business (which is quite a lot).
Cold Outreach
Direct cold outreach is also sometimes, unfortunately, something you’ll need to try during the first 30 days. This approach isn’t usually pleasant, but it is helpful when you need to pick up new customers, especially those who think you can solve their issues immediately.
Cold outreach works best when you use DMs these days. If a client thinks you understand them and the issues they face, then they are much more likely to get in touch with you to hammer something out.
Another setting for cold outreach is where you work with complementary, established businesses, like gyms. For example, you could offer co-marketing opportunities.
What you do is up to you, but you should always think about how to sweeten the deal for the person on the other end of cold outreach. If you understand them, you can make tremendous progress.
Offer Time-Sensitive Deals
Another tactic for getting your startup selling in under 30 days is to offer time-sensitive deals. These are handy when you want people to commit.
Time-sensitivity induces the “fear of missing out” in many people. They know that if they don’t take action now, they may never get the deal that’s right in front of them.
This classic sales tactic has been around for a long time, but it is still surprisingly effective. Even if you plan to lower the price again in the future, most consumers don’t know that, and a lot of them are unwilling to wait to find out when the next sale will come.
Another way to create time-sensitivity is to offer the special deal to the first few customers, and then increase the price after that. For example, you might offer to sell a product to clients for $100 if they are in the first 250, and then ratchet up the price to $250 after that.
This approach is helpful because it gives you a chance to gain customers while building social proof. Anyone who does buy from you can write reviews about your services and encourage others to come in later, even if it is at a higher price.
Optimize For Referrals
Related to this last point, you also want to find ways to optimize for referrals. If you can get more word-of-mouth customers, you can lower your marketing costs massively while also benefiting from every non-referral sale you make.
Referrals are essentially how people ran their businesses in the past, before it was possible to pay for ads. They would create a positive reputation for themselves and then leverage that to be even more successful.
Of course, referrals don’t work for everyone. However, it is a skill that you can learn and get better at over time.
One of the best ways is to simply encourage buyers to send you referrals, perhaps offering them a commission if you do. You can also do things like use apps to automate the process. Viral Loops is a good example.
Referrals obviously work best after you’ve become established, and not so much in the first 30 days. But if you can create a positive impression on people quickly, you can set yourself up for additional business within the first 90 days, and that can be a great way to get established and do more.
Start A Webinar
For quick sales, you could also try a webinar in the first 30 days. These are ideal if you want to sell something that offers considerable non-obvious benefits.
For example, you might have a new insurance product that requires some explanation, or a medical device that’s essentially a new category, or an investment platform that works differently. All of these require people to understand the value before they buy, which is why webinars can be so valuable.
Don’t listen to people who say that the era of the webinar is now at an end – it’s not. It’s still a powerful tool you can use to get your message out there and connect with the people who matter to you.
One approach is to start on free platforms, like Zoom or Google Meets and build up from there. You should also promote the event through social media or your email list to get people interested and involved.
If you can provide further incentives for individuals to show up, like special discount codes you’ll only give out during the webinar, that’s even better. These encourage people to pay full attention to the presentation, and provide them with massive benefits at the same time.
So there you have it: some of the ways you can sell more in the first 30 days of your startup. If you can put together a live demo and get the marketing right, you’re on a roll.