u/johnlocke8

Spent weeks cold calling and had a ton of interest in my service over the phone. Ironically enough the service I provide is actually a lead gen service so cold calling also equates to dogfooding my own product.

Here's my cold calling series on youtube if anyone is interested (I cold call during my lunchbreaks because I have a day job lol) -> link to youtube series

I originally had set my free trial to 30 days to try to get more interest but eventually i had like 16 people riding out a free trial and getting access to my leads with no money spent so I brought it down to 7 days.

Tonight I had my first user end their 7 day free trial and then upgrade to the paid version.

Couldn't be more ecstatic, have never made money on the internet before its like I manifested 99 dollars from thin air lol.

Big thanks to the founder community im in for all the help. We share backlinks with eachother and like all of eachothers social media posts so its been a massive W. Join if you're interested :)

Probably like a lot of you, I have a full time job (i work as a SWE in big tech) and I'm building my SaaS on nights and weekends. I'm lucky enough to work remote a couple days a week, so I started using my lunch breaks to cold call. I tried weekends and after hours first and people just dont really pick up and when they do theyre like why tf are you calling me on a weekend? So business hours on weekdays I think is optimal.

When I first started my voice was shaky, I was nervous, and I had no real idea what my pitch should even be. So I started recording the calls and posting them to YouTube to track how I'm improving and to demonstrate to people that cold calling is actually kind of effective if you call the right people and have a decent pitch.

I’m calling the YouTube series “Cold calling on my lunch break until I close 1000 customers”

https://youtu.be/qY-Bo2GJhng?si=2P4mg8AMTRXxel5C

A few things I've figured out so far:

Almost nobody wants to sign up for a free trial on the phone. 8 of my 10 customers came from asking for an email at the end of the call and then following up with a short demo link. The call is really just to get permission to send the email.

Also I’m thinking of creating a discord channel for people trying to learn how to cold call (unrelated to my SaaS), dm me and I’ll invite you :)

This is a visualization of my cold calling progress that I find very cool. As someone in my mid fourties, learning a new skill has been difficult but rewarding.

Basically out of 1,541 leads:

I made 1,327 calls

Which led to 613 answers

Which led to 82 closes → $23,487

Lots of rejection but this helps put things into perspective for me.