How To Get Your Customers When You’ve Got $0

When you’re just getting started and you haven’t got cash for marketing, here’s one of the fastest ways to get traction.

1. Identify your target audience - for us at Tacit, it’s CTO’s who are looking to build their own SLM’s (small language models) on their own data

2. Use the following prompt and place it into ChatGPT

   “Can you please scrape Reddit (insert social forums) for (insert customers) who are looking to implement (insert what your business does) - please rewrite this as a better prompt for ChatGPT”

3. ChatGPT will give you a longer query, and you’ll get an answer like the one below:

   

   ChatGPT long form

4. Look at the pain points and then turn them into content and post it on social media (ideally LinkedIn so you can see more about the people who engage with your content) with a photo of yourself (typically, people like seeing pictures of other people) - post a minimum of 3 times a week

   

   Content pain points scraped from Reddit turned into a social post

5. Scroll through all of the people who engaged with the content and reach out to the people who fit your target customer profile and send them this DM:
   
   “Hey (first name),
   
   Cheers for liking my most recent post - I’d love to hear about what you are up to at (insert their place of work).
   
   Have you got time for a 15-minute chat on Tuesday or Wednesday arvo?
   
   Best,
   Kale”
   

6. Here’s an example from a prospect I did this with:

Repeat ad nauseam until you’ve got a pipe that will verify product market fit.

Fraud Checking My Landlord

We have 2.5 years left on our gyms lease and have spent the past 6 months trying to discuss a new lease with our landlord.

But for hand-wavy reasons — “now’s not the right time to discuss a new lease”.

However they keep reassuring us that they want us to remain a long-term tenant.

Once upon a time I would have taken them at their word. But I’ve been burned enough times now to know that words change.

And if circumstances changed (which is a classic way people go back on their word) and they reneged on giving us a new lease or used our expiring lease as leverage in negotiations, we could end up in a terrible position and potentially out of business.

So I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Way higher lease payments starting from today in exchange for adding 2.5 years to our lease with no rights of renewals or other extensions.

They declined.

They turned down 60,000 extra dollars for doing nothing but keeping their word.

Which obviously means they have little to no intention of giving us a new lease and weren’t going to tell us either.

It sucks, but at least we know now who we’re dealing with and can prepare accordingly.

I’m not saying don’t trust people in business. People do keep their words. And I regularly take people at their word. But when something, like the future of your business is hanging on that word, you want to be sure about it.