Hiring a geo-guesser, change merchants, one distribution channel is all it takes

Hey,

this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to share the most interesting trends, frameworks, opportunities, and ideas with you.

Let's dive in!

💡 Opportunities

• “request for service: roast my onboarding for SaaS companies“ Jon Yongfook

• “I want to hire a geo-guesser.” - Tom Osman

• “Need a way to block chargebacks from happening for software. Instead just refund as soon as they try. Any solutions?” - Luke Alexander

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out

• Sam Floy, a fellow expat living in Denmark, is not just running an awesome B2B podcast agency but also now offers sales + operations consulting for anyone looking to reach escape velocity from feeling trapped by their business.

• Are you interested in growing your business using cold email? At Sales.co we’re already helping dozens of companies and we’d be happy to record a custom loom to share some ideas. No strings attached and all ideas are yours to use even if we don’t end up working together. Just fill out this form and we’ll send it to you asap.

• The Change Merchants is a great post that puts the spotlight on a class of people in society today who are incentivized to push ever-constant change, everywhere in society (even where it makes little sense).

• Grow your Twitter account faster and spend more time running your business with Pete Codes’ ghostwriting services. Read how it works.

• Enjoyed this post by Tim Stone about the pros and cons of living and investing in popular nomad destinations (Dubai, Manila, Bali).

• Had a great chat with Grant Hushek about all things digital operations. Listen here.

👨‍🎓 One distribution channel is all it takes

Every successful serial entrepreneur has mastered exactly one distribution channel.

They look at any opportunity through this lens.

That’s their secret.

• Elon Musk has mastered PR

• Pieter Levels has mastered Twitter

• Lori Grainer has mastered TV

• Nikita Bier has mastered virality

They only tackle projects that can be distributed through their channel since they know they can make it work.

Entrepreneurship is always full of uncertainty. But if you master one distribution channel, you can at least take that part out of the equation.

That’s a huge unlock.

It also makes it much easier to say no and focus on what matters. If something doesn’t work with your channel, you don’t even have to think about it.

An interesting corollary I’m thinking about is that for most founders it makes more sense to think about the channel they want to master first and then look for opportunities that fit that channel.

If you do it the other way around, you usually end up with project after project that you can’t get off the ground.

And you never know why. Maybe the product really is not something people want? Or maybe you just didn’t distribute it right?

But if you’ve mastered a distribution channel first, you know exactly what the problem is. It’s always the product.

Knowing this, you can iterate quickly and kill projects that don’t work without wasting any time.

And what’s really cool about this approach is that you can get paid to learn how to master a distribution channel.

Just start an agency.

You’ll get paid to learn how to distribute products.

And once you’ve mastered a channel, you can start testing how the market responds to your own products.

The standard pattern is that 1st-time founders obsess about product, 2nd-time founders obsess about distribution.

But there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t obsess about distribution from day one.

💰 Revenue Signals

• “Just passed $15,000,000 in all time sales for @SciChart - a software library I wrote v1 on the commute to work. Today we have >10k customers in 90 countries including Nasa, US Gov, F1 and more. VCs will scorn at our numbers (that's over 10 years) but I'm still proud!” - Andrew Burnett-Thompson

• “ConferenceBadge.com might be for sales. 2023: En route for $700 000 USD in revenue.” - Phil Lehoux

End Note

As always, if you’re enjoying this report, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

Have a great week,

Jakob