This week’s highlights:

We got an office!

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office pic 2

office pic 3

We signed the lease on our first ever office!

Wes, myself, and our most recent hire Shane couldn’t be more excited to get the place set up.

Part of me was expecting that picking up the key from our realtor would feel like a really big deal, but in reality she just handed us something that looked like it could open my freshmen college dorm room, and told us to let her know if there were any problems with the place.

office key

I have a very real fear that between Wes and Is interior design sensibilities it could resemble something of a middle school classroom by the time we’re done decorating it.

I’m counting on all of you to give your real feedback when I show you pictures of it set up!

I know the choice to invest in a physical office space may seem strange (even foolish) in the times we now live in, but contrary to popular trends I think there are some valid reasons not to abandon our fluorescent lit and asbestos filled office spaces just yet.

I took the time to formalize those thoughts here.

Redesigned Hometown Industries site

This week I began to overhaul the Hometown Industries site in earnest.

This had been in my backlog for some time, but with the sudden reality of our new office space, something internally upped the priority on this for me.

As we mature and grow as a company, I want our website to reflect that.

Although the old site has served us well for almost a year now, the result of this complete design overhaul is something I’m very pleased with so far.

I frankensteined together a few templates I really liked on colorlib, and then began to modify and design it for our purposes.

Here is a comparison of the old and new landing pages.

Old landing page:

Old Landing Page

New landing page:

New Landing Page

You can’t tell from just the image, but there is also a fun loading animation for the different stats about our company I feature on the landing page.

I hope to wrap up the final design changes and have the new site live by the end of this weekend.

UPDATE: the new site is live!!

Closed Biggest Sale Yet

After a week that was uncharacteristically slow on the sales front, I got a response to one of my outbound messages.

A half hour later, I was on the phone with the CEO of this company.

Six hours later, a deal was signed.

They are probably the largest and most high profile company we’ve ever worked with.

I really wish I could say who they are!

Unfortunately, I had to sign a NDA that doesn’t allow me to say anything.

They have some celebrities involved in the company that are so famous even I know who they are.

This was truly a testament to the fact that all of the preconceived notions we have in our heads of how these kinds of things are supposed to work, do not apply to reality.

When the CEO of this company called, I was sitting on my couch, wearing ill fitting flannel pajamas with fire trucks on them, and eating a Pop-tart I had discovered in the far back of our pantry.

You can be absolutely no one, and direct sales can still work, even on large companies.

Investing In Sales

Growing sales is currently the number one thing that occupies most of my time and mental energy. Wes and I have built, what is in my opinion, an amazing product.

Now we need to convince the world of that, or at least the manufacturers and wholesalers of consumer goods that would benefit from it.

Wes and I recently made a big decision to augment our own direct sales efforts by outsourcing some lead generation to a company called Cience.

We’ve agreed to a monthly recurring fee paid out over a 3 month contract, and we’ll see what kind of results they’re able to deliver.

Learned more about B2B sales

Because we’re a productized service that replaces the role a company would traditionally hire for, an effective lead generation channel for us has been job board sites.

We apply to job posts not as individuals, but as a company. A certain percentage of the time we get a call back and get to make our pitch.

These job sites are a great channel for us because they’re a strong indicator of demand for our services.

You can often get an idea of what a companies budget is if their post includes an hourly or salary range.

It’s cold calling, but it’s cold calling someone who has publicly said they’re in need of a service like the one we provide, and are willing to pay money for it.

This is how Wes and I have done B2B sales for the last few months, and basically this strategy alone is what’s allowed us to scale to just under $20,000 in MRR.

Neither Wes or I come directly from a sales background, so we’ve been learning a lot as we go.

Special thanks to Andy Snoap and Eric and Mark Shealy! They have all been invaluable resources in answering my B2B sales industry questions.

Recently, Andy gave me a crash course in using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

I’m super excited to start using it as a way to augment our job board strategy by following up with the CEOs and CMOs of companies whose job posts we apply too.

Contentyze AI Writing

As I try to scale the amount of content we’re putting out I was fascinated to learn about the Contentyze service from the Indie Hackers podcast.

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Przemek Chojecki has built an incredible tool with features that address everything from bulk generated ecommerce descriptions to automatically written and shared social media posts.

I experimented with his AI writer.

You give it an article title, some other parameters, and then it just writes an article for you.

I am really intrigued with the service.

I’m not sure if our team could use the Contentyze AI writer to scale up our content creation just yet.

A lot of our content tends to be on really specific things, and the AI writer performed best when it was given parameters that were more open ended and general.

However, I will be following this project closely, and can see us using it in the future.

That wraps up the week!