March 50 Challenge

Wait...when does this take place?

The challenge starts on March 15, 2024 and goes to the end of the month.

I'm confused, what is this all about?

It's a challenge where the goal is for you to do 50 cold outreaches during the last half of March. A cold outreach is when you send a message to someone who has not indicated any previous interest. People often do this to network, sell a product, or to do market research.

No, no, no. I know what cold outreach is. What do you mean by "publicly share"?

Oh, that's simple. Whenever you send a cold outreach to someone, as part of the challenge you will also post that message on SellInPublic.com.

Now I just have more questions. Doesn't that violate some privacy...posting a private message publicly? And what is this SellInPublic.com thing?

Let's start with your first question. When you post your message publicly, you will want to redact it. Meaning anything you don't want to share publicly, just replace with brackets. Here is an example:

Hi [Name],

I recently saw your post about [our industry].

Have you been able to [private industry knowledge]?

In the right circumstances, I'm seeing people increase their conversion rates by 15%.

Do you think your [private company] is getting the conversion rates you are wanting or would you be interested in increasing [private details about my solution]?

Sincerely,
[My Email Signature]
                    

OK, that makes sense. But what is this Sell In Public thing?

SellInPublic.com is a new, free to join community that helps developers, builders, founders, and entrepreneurs improve and share their tips about what they are learning about sales, marketing, and other related topics.

Don't we already have places like that? X/Twitter? IndieHackers, Reddit, HackerNews?

Yes and no. There are other communities that focus on similar demographics, but I think they are lacking in various ways. Here are my thoughts on each of the ones mentioned:

X/Twitter: There is a really great group of builders there and the community is really helpful and welcoming. However, due to the constantly changing algorithm, it makes it difficult to participate in the community if you don't have a large audience or if you are not posting regularly and following all the hidden rules. You can't really start discussions of new topics very easily and to really stand out you need to pay attention to trending posts. There are hidden rules that can penalize your post. For example, my posts with two hashtags see about about half the views that my posts with one hashtag have due to the algorithm penalizing "multi-hashtag" posts.

IndieHackers: The IndieHackers site has a wealth of knowledge and a lot of really great content, but the forums seem to be fairly dead (unless you have an audience outside the community or have something impressive to share). If you look at the newest page, you will see post after post, page after page of no responses and no upvotes. My impression is that the site's focus is on its email newsletter and less on the forum.

Reddit: There are some great communities but it is also going through a lot of transition with the changes to their API access. Each community has its own rules and it is sometimes hard to know what content is acceptable and what is not. There are often reports of moderators who enforce the community rules unevenly which can make sharing difficult at times.

HackerNews: The site continues to host really in depth discussions and it continues to be one of the main ways I stay up-to-date on technology news. However, sales and marketing tends to be looked down on by many of the users. If you are wanting to learn more about sales and marketing, you will have limited opportunities to do that here.

I guess that makes sense, but surely there are places to learn about sales & marketing out there on the internet from the perspective of a developer?

If you know of any places like that where anybody can freely participate, I would love to know about them. I think a lot of developers have a deep aversion to sales and marketing. It combines a bit of art and can be difficult to effectively measure unlike code which has a strict logic to it. Sales and marketing can also be done in a manipulative manner or stretching the truth, which can also be a turn off for others, especially people who highly value truth and logic. You can see the animosity towards sales and marketing whenever it is brought up in developer-focused forums. There is often someone who brings up the unethical nature of advertising and sales.

Most places that I have found that openly discuss sales and marketing are places for full-time sales and marketing professionals or they are places that are specifically doing content marketing so it is not a forum that allows others to participate in the discussion.

I think most developers and builders would benefit from having hands on explicit examples. We have open source software, where a developer can see and learn how other programs work. I want to bring the same open concepts to the sales process.

Isn't this whole "Sell In Public" idea just a rip off of the #BuildInPublic movement?

Yeah, it definitely has its roots in the #BuildInPublic community and concepts. From my perspective, there is a heavy emphasis on building (which is something that comes naturally to developers and creators) but there is not a heavy emphasis on selling which I think is probably one of the most important skills a solo founders needs if they want to have a successful product.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, you want me to post my cold outreaches onto your site and my goal is to have 50 of these in the remaing days of March?

Yeah, that's it!

Why didn't you start this at the beginning of March? It seems like that would have been the better approach?

You're right, that would have been the better approach. That was the original goal, to launch this challenge at the beginning of March but I needed to get a lot of other items finished first. So for 2024, it will just be the second half of March. If this is successful, I may do it again in 2025 but start at the beginning of the month.

So if the goal is 50 posts, how will these posts be tracked?

There will be a leaderboard set up on MetricRiv. You can see it here with just my name for now: March 50 Challenge Leaderboard

Each day, probably around 3pm Central time, the leaderboard will be updated from the public posts that have been shared. I'll respond to the posts when the leaderboard has been updated and a post has been counted.

Mondays are my day off and Sunday, March 31st is the Easter holiday. On Mondays and Easter, I will not be posting any updates. The final leaderboard update will happen on Tuesday, April 2nd.

That sounds great! How do I get my name added to the leaderboard?

It is really simple. On the SellInPublic.com home page, at the top right is a Register link. Register an account and then post an introduction post.

In the introduction post, share that you want to be a part of the March 50 challenge and if you want, share any details about what you are promoting or the reason you are planning to do cold outreach. For example you can see my introduction post here: Introduction Post. It says: "I am joining the March 50 Challenge and will mainly be promoting my MetricRiv.com site."

Where do I do these cold outreaches?

It is completely up to you. Any where you can message people is an option: email, LinkedIn (you can freely message other people who you are in groups with), X/Twitter DMs, etc.

How do I track who I've contacted or reached out to?

I'm glad you asked! I'm actually building a simple CRM (Customer Relationship Management) app for builders and entrepreneurs called CRMJot. It is a very, very early alpha but if you would like to get access to it, let me know. Other ways to track can be as simple as a text file or Excel spreadsheet. You can also use a full CRM tool like HubSpot or Pipedrive.

This seems like an elaborate way for you to just push other tools you've built and are building.

There is definitely an aspect to this of me trying to get my tools out in front of the public more but most importantly, I want to encourage other entrepreneurs and developers to embrace sales and marketing.

Can I do cold calling on the phone?

Absolutely! The March 50 Challenge is more about getting you moving forward on cold outreach. Use whatever method you think works best. If you do a non-text based outreach method, in order for the outreach to count, you will need to provide some kind of summary so that it can be documented.

What about follow ups? How do I handle that?

The more information you can share with the community the better. For example, if you want to post a follow up as a reply, it will boost your original post back to the top of the latest page (like an old school forum) and people will be able to see further details about how your outreach has gone.

Can I only post outreach content or can I share other things?

The more you post the better! If you have success (or failures), post follow ups and explain what you learned. If you have questions, found tools, built tools, and want to share something else of relevance with the community, you are more than welcome.

My goal is to make sure the moderation is fair and transparent. The Sell In Public site is a professional community specifically focused on sales and marketing but any posts related to developing, building, and bootstrapping are welcome. The more helpful content and interactions you can share, the stronger the community will grow. I would love for the Sell In Public site to become the go to community for learning and improving sales and marketing techniques.

What about spam? Do you condone spam?

No, spam as defined under the US CAN-SPAM Act is not acceptable, will not be promoted, and if it is determined that you are spamming, then your posts will not be eligible for the March 50 Challenge leaderboard.

The March 50 Challenge is geared towards manual prospecting and outreach to potential users who would be interested in what you are building. There are ways to automate outreach but for the March 50 Challenge, the goal is manual, legal cold outreach.

What if I don't know how to write a cold outreach message?

If you are unsure how to start, I would recommend asking a question in the SellInPublic.com community. That being said, if you are looking for a starting point right now, I recommend starting with the RABT method

The RABT method stands for:

• Reason for outreach
• Ask a question
• Back up with data
• Tease a solution

Feel free to use any method you want but the RABT method would be a great starting method to try. Who knows, maybe this challenge will help uncover a new effective method of cold outreach.

How do I get started? This is a whole lot of information, can you just get me the next steps I need to take to join the challenge?

Sure!

1. Go to SellInPublic.com.
2. Create an account.
3. Post an introduction message.
4. Start cold outreaching.
5. Post the redacted versions on SellInPublic.com.
6. Try to get to 50 cold outreaches by the end of the month.