The fastest way to get your first sale

[0:00]This is the formula to find your first paying client, even if you don't have any audience. So this is like the single hardest part of starting a business, right? It's hard enough coming up with the idea, but like, you can come up with the idea in your own head. The difficult part is when that idea then makes contact with the market and you start actually having to sell the idea, which is really, really, really hard. Because until you've gotten your very first sale, you're going to have massively low confidence in the product in the thing that you're selling. And you also just don't know, is there actually a market for this? Do people actually want to buy the thing? The process that we teach our students in the Lifestyle Business Academy, which is my online business school, is that you want to do whatever you can to get people into discovery calls. Basically a free 20 minute, 30 minute zoom consultation where you are basically trying to add a lot of value to them to help them solve whatever problem your business is purporting to help them solve. And so through the course of that conversation, if you're truly able to understand what their goals are, you're able to understand kind of the roadblocks that get in their way. Then a, you could give them a road map on the call as to how they might be able to solve the problem that they came to you with. And then after doing all of that, if it feels right, you can pitch them on a case study offer, which is that like, hey, I'm starting on my business. You would be my first customer. I'd like to give you a massive discount or I'd like to give you the thing completely for free in return for your feedback. How does that sound? So you've now just like drastically lowered the bar to getting your first client. And once you get that first client, that first case study, that first testimonial and you can prove you can actually get results for someone for whatever your business is doing. It becomes a lot easier to land subsequent clients. And then you might be thinking, how do I get people into my discovery calls in the first place if I don't have an audience? And the answer is, you do have an audience. You have people in your iPhone contact list. You have people on LinkedIn. You have followers on Instagram, even if there's only like 20 or 30 of them. You know people, right? The easiest way to get your first people into discovery calls is by actually just reaching out to the people that you know and asking them if they know anyone who might be interested or who has that particular problem that your business helps solve. And so that's the process for getting your first client.