Louis, Author at Louis Nicholls

We need to talk about cofounders.

February 28, 2019 / Louis / 1 Comment

Building a business is really, really hard.

Some parts of it you can learn-by-doing along the way. For example sales and customer support.

Other parts, however, you have one chance to get right. With no prior experience and disastrous results if you mess up.

Finding the right cofounder(s) and building a strong, successful relationship with them is an example of this kind of challenge.

Inexperienced founders constantly underestimate how hard this is and how important it is to get right.

I’ve heard that over 20% of startups fail due to Continue reading

Double your sales 🔥 by moving from product- to value-based messaging…

February 19, 2019 / Louis / 29 Comments

This is a draft of a post I’m writing about how to identify and fix a common marketing mistake founders make, which could double your sales in under 90min.

There are a few rough edges and the examples aren’t final. I’d appreciate any feedback/questions/thoughts to the usual address. Thanks!

Last week, a friend reached out to me with a problem.

He’s a technical solo founder and just started a side project. Because he’s still employed full time at a FAANG company, he asked me not to share his name/project, so let’s call him Dave.

Anyway, Dave’s problem was that he had put up a landing page for his project and was doing cold outreach, but not seeing many sales.

When I took a look at the landing page, it was obvious that Dave was making a super common mistake that nearly all first-time founders make…

His messaging was focussed on the product functionality, not the value to the customer.

We sat down together and, over a coffee, made some small changes to the landing page and cold-email copy.

This week, Dave has converted nearly 5x as many paying customers since Continue reading

How to make your first remote marketing/growth hire

February 5, 2019 / Louis / 0 Comments

Growing a business is hard…

If everything is going well, you’ll be swamped in work.

If things haven’t quite taken off yet, you’ll be sweating over growth.

Either way, sooner or later you’ll think about hiring someone to handle your marketing and help you grow the business.

As a founder/indie hacker on a budget, you’ll most likely choose to make a remote hire.

Sometimes, this can work out really well. But if you’re not careful, you can fall into any number of common traps which will leave you with more work, no results, and a lot less cash.

Here’s a stage by stage rundown of how to set yourself up for success when making your first growth hire Continue reading

2019 Goals Update: January

February 3, 2019 / Louis / 0 Comments

Here’s an update on my progress towards my goals for 2019.

If you want a bit more detail and the backstory to my goals, you can check them out here.

So, here’s how January went Continue reading

Your referral program won’t work. Here’s what to do instead…

January 31, 2019 / Louis / 87 Comments

When founders start trying to acquire their first customers, they often search for shortcuts.

One of the most common shortcuts founders try is some kind of referral program.

In this post, I’m going to talk about why referral programs almost certainly won’t work for your (early stage) startup, and how you can get most of the results anyway by building bits of a referral program into your sales process instead. Continue reading

Sales > Marketing

January 22, 2019 / Louis / 350 Comments

I spend quite a bit of time on indiehackers.com, helping newer founders. By far the most common question I see is “I’ve built product X, how can I market it and get customers?”

Well hang on. If you’re in that situation then you’ve already made a big mistake.

There’s only one way to make sure you’re building something people will pay for. And that’s to Continue reading

How LaserTweets.co uses social proof to reach more customers

January 17, 2019 / Louis / 9 Comments

In this post I’m going to talk about a powerful but less common use of social proof – to reach new customers, not just handle customer objections. We’ll look at how LaserTweets.co uses social proof as a channel, content and delivery mechanism to reach more customers. Then, we’ll take a look at a few tweaks they could implement to make their social proof even more effective. Continue reading

Update – I launched my consulting service

January 9, 2019 / Louis / 5 Comments

[Work in progress – I’ll be back to make changes and improvements soon]

Today I officially launched my social proof consulting service at SocialProofMe.com.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a breakdown of how I put together the site, pricing and the thoughts/goals behind my new offering…

The Background

I’ve been doing consulting on marketing personalisation and social proof optimisation for a while on the side now. But it has always been word of mouth and Continue reading

Projects I (won’t) be working on in 2019

January 4, 2019 / Louis / 2 Comments

Recently, I stumbled across Josh Pigford‘s list of ideas he’s worked on over the past 15 years or so (see embedded spreadsheet, below).

Spoiler alert: it’s a lot of projects.

What shocked me is that my own tally of projects probably isn’t much shorter. No matter how hard I try to resist, new ideas for Continue reading

2019: A Preview

January 4, 2019 / Louis / 21 Comments

I’ve been in bed with ‘flu for a week, so my goals for 2019 are a few days late.

In this post I’m trying to take a more methodical approach to setting realistic but challenging goals for 2019.

Firstly, I’m splitting the goals into categories (professional, personal, health etc) and prioritising them clearly. Like most people, I have a nasty habit of tackling the easy/attractive goals first if left to my own devices, so this approach should help Continue reading

Louis Nicholls

Thoughts on startups, web dev and other stuff

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