How To Be Remembered & Referred

I was flying back from Auckland and was seated next to a savvy salesman.

He gave me his number (I’ve fictionalised his name below & edited the number by one digit).

He said, “I’ve got the easiest number in the world to remember, and you won’t believe how many new customers tell me that they were speaking with a mate about the mortgage advice I gave them and they just rattled off your number.”

I loved it so much that I’m now telling thousands of people about it.

Want to be remembered? Make it as easy as possible for people to remember you.

Building A $400 K ARR Business From Scratch

Gravy was on track to do $400k revenue this year. We started Gravy in 2024, and it’s growing 100% year on year. But now we’re deleting it and starting again.

We’re changing our fundraising service from a done-for-you old-school (100% human) services business to an agentic (10% human) done-with-you service.

Besides the obvious decrease in human input, there are two core differences:

Pricing - We now charge per unit of work output (a ready grant application), rather than the results of our work (how much money we raised).

Value - Our core value offering was a concierge fundraising service; we did everything, our clients did nothing. Now it’s a we do all the thinking for you service (thinking as a service - have we started a new thing?).

We tell you exactly what to do and how to do it and give you the resources you need to do it, but we don’t do the thing.

We’re using AI to handle all the repetitive admin and information-shifting work — while we (humans) do the 10% of the thinking work that creates most of the value.

We made this change because we’ve refined our insight that Gravy was built on.

Initially we realised people just didn’t have time to fundraise for community organisations on top of family, work and running the actual community organisation.

But as we’ve worked, we’ve realised it’s actually that they don’t have time to think about fundraising.

So we can spoon-feed them, step-by-step, what they need to do to fundraise (do the thinking for them), and they’re happy doing the last mile of admin work needed to prepare and submit grant applications.

It’s a win-win.

We hated doing that last mile of admin work. They don’t mind it. And they save 66% of our fee while still receiving 90% of the value.

This all sounds good in theory. But starting new things is messy. Real messy.

New processes, new tools, new websites, sales pitches, marketing materials and so on.

What I laid out above is how things “should” work once we’re there. But we’re a long way from there.

I’ve mapped, remapped, automated, then re-automated our onboarding process, for example, at least 10 times since we’ve started.

We put a version live, take some leads through it, realise 20 different ways it could be better, then rebuild it. And do that on repeat. And that’s just our onboarding process.

Only just now, after 4 weeks, have we delivered our first work output and earned our first dollar. And we’ve already put 200-300 hours of work in.

I’ve started a bunch of new things over the years, and this part always feels the same — like you don’t really know what you’re doing — like maybe you should stop — Like fuck what have I done?

Especially when you’ve just thrown away a healthy growing business to do it — with a reasonable wage bill you’ve still got to cover every fortnight.

But I read this line about how an entrepreneur I know thinks.

He said something like “you should do what’s right or what’s best, not what’s easiest; if it's harder, it doesn’t matter- that’s what you should do.”

So I’ve got to have faith, and trust doing what’s best also turns out to be what’s right.