Das schwierigste Geschäftsmodell überhaupt

0:00Hey, yes, so this is Sebastian. I sell rental relocation services to people who want to move to the Netherlands or want to move within the Netherlands itself. Okay. Uh, we make $0 at this point. Uh, what is stopping me is that I am getting free users uh for a free tool I built to kind of host all the listings. >> So, the software thing you built. Okay. That's it. Yeah, but barely any conversions to the paid offer. Um, so if I can't get paying customers, I'll basically have to get back to uh having a job in about a year, but I have some saved up to to work on this. Okay. Um, so really my focus is on how to define my avatar so I can specifically target higher-paying clients. Yeah. Uh, the free service is doing well. I'm getting about 333 users there. So, like it's growing by itself. Per what?

0:43>> leading to um just in the last 3 months by word of mouth. So, 100 100 users a month. Yes. Is it accelerating? Um, yeah, so for example, uh today I got five free users without doing any marketing. Yesterday I got like six. Um, I've had cases where I get like 80 in a day if a group shares it. >> Okay. Um, it's just like that's more so students and young people that feel like they can do the tech. My ideal was let me share it that way and then uh some of the users will be willing to pay for it.

1:12And that transition has been hard for me. Uh, how many of them have you been on the phone with? Um, so in total just three. Um, a lot of them are just students where like they're they're in uh 8 months. I'm not able to sell them a 150 euro service for more. Um, for the ones that got on the phone, I got one person as a someone who will be a client essentially. The thing is he's only starting to look for an apartment in September. So, it's just too long of a time like for me to wait for that to get a referral and like get that as a result.

1:47So, I have two considerations. So, the first one is the volume that you have for a free tool is actually still pretty low. Um, >> [clears throat] >> and so I would normally say maybe we need to constrain down the amount of free stuff that you're giving so that the paid tier is more attractive, right? So, it's like if if Spotify had no ads ever, then you would just never upgrade, right? If they make the ads annoying enough, you make the upgrade, right? And so, there's always a sweet spot with freemium.

2:14Freemium is one of the toughest models out there, but if done well, you basically have zero cost of acquisition and all of your your marketing efforts, so just so you can recharacterize how you think about the business, your marketing spend, if freemium is done well, is on ascension. So, think about all of the free users, they should be zero. That the cost of that should be zero. And then where you deploy capital or effort should be on the ascension. And so, right now if you've only gotten on the phone with three out of 300 users, I see that as silly because right now, given the if you're getting five a day, if you told me I five sales calls a day, the likely that you're not going to make money is really low.

2:49So, I would say like can I can you add in an onboarding component that you manually do it? Because I think those conversations like if you told me six months from now, cuz at the rate that you're currently growing, cuz it's accelerating, you probably have another 500 users conservatively. If you take 500 calls over the next three months, one, you will make money. Two, you will learn very quickly rather than me telling you what your users want from them, what what they will want more, and you might end up pivoting the business. I don't know because it's obviously super new.

3:20But that is that is what I would do. Cuz right now you're super early. So, it's like we need to make dollars. You have free lead gen, which is the hardest part to crack. So, kudos to you for doing that. But that's what I would focus on. Okay. Yeah, so that's one thing I like I said, I have one client that's willing to pay in September. The one caveat I I've had so far is just cuz I can see the the type of home they're looking for is like 80% of the free users that basically have a budget of $1,000 or less. It's mostly been shared under students. So, that's where like I I I feel like maybe just even if I could get them on the phone like they're still students who literally have no money. Well then you just have you want to ask them because the thing is is you're you're thinking about only one Let me say it differently.

4:03The We want to channel demand. We do not want to create demand. So demand already exists and we want to we want it's like think about there's like these rivers of desire. And when we market or sell, we just want to like carve out a tiny little piece of that river and direct it towards us. And so right now you've got a flow that's coming towards you. You've got these students that want your thing, right? And so there might be a rivulet that exists there that's like maybe there is an automated thing that's $50 or $100 that you can sell them that and there's a ton of volume there, too. So like there might be a play there, but either way right now I think you tinkering on the computer is not going to be the solution.

4:40Yeah. So getting on the phone and also you'll find out quickly are there messaging that they're responding to that the people who have money aren't? Mhm. Cuz obviously you're getting all these students. Now maybe you got shared in these groups and that's fine and we don't want to shift the whole you know the whole product road map because you had some early traction with a specific demo that wasn't your your your goal. But we also have the real the financial reality of like the like the likely In order for this to succeed and increase its chances, we need to make money. And so I'm okay with it yeah right with it being bootstrapped and you making a couple hundred bucks a day uh just from having those conversations. And what will probably happen too is that when you serve a cheaper demographic first, you end up finding ways to automate almost everything. Which if you can do that, you might end up finding out that you automating everything for them allows you to be a low-cost leader, which then allows you to serve a huge base at a really affordable price, but still have a lot high gross margin.

5:31Got it. Then essentially what the free tool does is I looked at what our kind of software are currently charging for like 40 bucks a month and I basically just copied that for free. Now I just have to figure out how to get people through that. And just ask them what they're what they're struggling with. Like you might find out that you actually are a lead gen for moving services, dude. Mhm. Like, the just think the next problem. Like, whenever you solve a problem for a customer, if you do it well, it always creates another problem. If I solve leads, you'll have sales. If I solve sales, you'll have delivery. If you have delivery issues, you're going to have revenue retention and expansion issues.

6:02If all of those things are right, then you're going to have leadership and scaling issues. If all of that's right, too, like we go back to the beginning, create more demand. Right? So, like there's always problems. So, as long as you're doing it well, just ask them the next thing they're doing. Like, you could sell the you could sell the student leads, probably. Like, there's a version of this business that doesn't sell anything, just sells the leads themselves. Just the poll itself. Yeah. And just sell the leads. Cuz the moving company will happily sell, you know, pay you 200 bucks or 300 bucks for a warm handoff.

6:32And then you have no work. >> Mhm. So, like there's there's place here, but I think it all is going to start with you getting on the phone with these customers. Okay. So, just make like within the onboarding flow, whenever they give their email, name, basically make one step before finalizing, just like get on a call something. >> Yeah, and you're going to have no shows, to be clear, you're going to. But, you can also like the moment you get it, I would outbound call. Okay. Got it. Sounds good. That's what I would do, man.

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