Running a Business Means Contact With Reality
A year ago I decided to help build a service business for my mom because I wanted to learn about marketing and business. One of the largest blindspots engineers have is around sales and marketing. I was determined to not fall into this trap, but marketing seemed like a skill I couldn’t just learn by reading — a form of tacit knowledge. I needed some kind of sandbox to test out the marketing skills I was learning about and my mom had been bothering me to help her set up an organizing business for at least a few years now. I had previously set up an MVP website and a profile on Thumbtack (similar to Angie’s List), which provided her with a bit of side income. We decided to give it a real shot!
These are the lessons I’ve learned from working on this business. There have been a lot of reality checks — where my assumptions on how the world works have been rudely disproven.
How People Buy Things
Prior to beginning this business I hadn’t actually understood how to make money. I had begun a couple of side hustles but I always felt I was missing a key element. I was, and it’s called marketing. I know it’s difficult to believe but I just assumed the following steps
I put a product into the world ??? customers would find it and purchase it from me.
I didn’t realize that it required conscious, applied effort to get people to buy your service.
Getting people to buy things is generally a solved science. I kept thinking “no it can’t be that simple, we’re a special snowflake business”. Every single time the blindingly obvious thing that everyone was telling me to do turned out to be the correct move. I refused to believe that jamming a huge call to action button on a webpage would change conversions, I thought discerning clients wouldn’t appreciate it. Yet it was just that easy — adding giant buttons everywhere worked wonders. I had some weird preconceived notions that people would be put off by the salesy-ness, yet having a professional redo the website copy made a huge positive impact. I was wondering why people were calling us from other states — until I added the phrase “in New York City” in a few spots.
There was a lot of unlearning on my side, trying to understand that people don’t buy the way that I do. If I could give a quick insight into my perspective on selling — most people are busy and are easily swayed to do what they were intending to anyways. The way that this balances out in the world is because of the adversarial nature of markets. Customers are individually impressionable, but the wisdom of crowds provides a counterbalance.
The Art of Organizing
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