17) Hotline Bling

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to figure out its mission. Please pardon the stream-of-consciousness style. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

(typos are to make sure you’re paying attention)

Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In our last post, Capital Cadence, I explored my current relationship with venture capital. I love the startup and innovation ecosystem, and feel so fortunate to have been part of it as an investor, but I just don’t think I’m in a position right now where it makes sense for me to raise venture capital. I’m also curious to see how AI will impact venture in the long-term.

My guess is that “traditional” software venture will probably increasingly concentrate around top-performers (“hyperscalers”) and then we’ll see more venture investment in physical infrastructure and hardtech-type companies that still require massive amounts of risk-capital to penetrate certain markets. Although those investments might require a longer-term investment horizon than 10-year closed-end funds permit. But I digress.

[Absolutely devastating Steelers loss after a surprising Week 1. We might just be terrible. But I’m confident that we’ll rebound once we’re healthy. That’s the only option.]

Hotline Bling (s/o Drake)

In today’s post, I’d like to amp myself up for a cold-calling campaign unlike any the world has ever seen. I have some past experience with cold-calling, albeit mostly unsuccessful, and so I want to sort of reflect on it’s necessity, how I’m going to approach certain tactical decisions around the #artofthecall, and other stuff that pops up. Let’s dive in!

TL;DR: I’m gonna call a lot of companies and try to convince them to work with me.

Current situation

Now that I’ve vacationed and rested and relaxed, it’s time to actually generate some shareholder value. And, as the sole shareholder of the corporation of my life, that really means I just have to figure out how to pay rent. Candidly, I don’t have much personal runway; but I’m at my best when my back is against the wall.

To that end, I recently launched a new GEO-oriented website, which you can find at our normal url (vambrace.ai) and I warehoused our beauty-feedback-marketplace-pivot site (beauty.vambrace.ai) and so now I’m trying to find clients. I’m leading, I think, with the GEO offering—but I’m also willing to do pretty much anything AI-related that helps these businesses with their operations (or whatever).

I have one in-network warm lead [is that redundant?] from a landscaping business that already has some idea of what they might want (I think billing automation), and so I’m hoping to do some work there and then roll that into a testimonial and then hopefully some more referrals. So that’s one avenue I’m pursing. Maybe, a more concrete breakdown:

Warm and cold funnel

1) Warm leads. Obviously this is the primary area of opportunity and where I want to spend a good bit of time. I received the first lead just by talking about what I was working on and they asked if I’d be willing to talk to their dad (who owns the business), which is great. I haven’t really activated my network yet to offer my services (since I don’t really know what those services are yet) but I’m going to start doing this in earnest this week.

2) Cold leads. This is the focus of this post, because I intend to start a cold-calling campaign to the ~900 leads that I’ve collected in the Chicagoland area thanks to Clay (s/o Clay). I’ve focused initially on high-ticket services businesses that might not have the most refined web presence. I’m planning to just rip through 20-40ish probably calls a day and see what happens. And now that I’ve lowkey expanded the aperture of the services I might offer, maybe I’ll try to grab another like 1,000 leads or something of adjacent services businesses.

Cold-calling background

I actually have some experience with cold-calling from way back in the day. Actually, in a somewhat embarrassing admission, I was tasked with cold-calling VC firms when I was just starting in the industry and helping a ~seed startup raise capital (in like 2019). My manager wasn’t super well-versed in the VC world and thought cold-calling was a viable avenue for raising venture dollars—which I now realize was kind of silly.

But, nonetheless, I drafted my script and endeavored to call ~100ish VC firms. Pretty much all of them either didn’t answer or were quick to reject. Actually, surprisingly, Sequoia answered and I asked to speak with Roelof Botha, lol. And, even more surprising, Roelof has twice responded to cold emails I’ve sent him. The best are the best for a reason!

I then had a more successful cold-calling campaign as part of a buy-side M&A prospecting assignment where I was tasked with identifying and soliciting pressure vessel fabricators in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico (for acquisition). I found ~43 companies and actually had pretty productive conversations with many of them. So that gives me some confidence for this upcoming campaign, I think.

My tactical orientation (aka, what I’m thinking about)

1) Script. I don’t know that I’ll really have a formal script here because I’m kind of trying to play into my humanity in order to persuade other humans (hopefully) to talk to me. So I almost feel like the more I play into human imperfection maybe the more likely the people I talk to will be to talk to me [say that three times fast].

2) Disposition. I aim to be kind and pleasant on the phone—which is actually much easier said than done, I think. The impersonal and pseudo-anonymous nature of telephonic interaction can really take people to dark places! But so I intend to be kind and human in my interactions. I don’t really know what that means, but I guess I’m just going to be myself and try to speak clearly and eloquently about what I’m interested in and what I’m offering (although I don’t really even know what that is).

3) Goal. The goal with anything like this is to be elevated to an actual decision-maker so that I can move forward to the next step, which would be sending a one-pager or, even better, scheduling an in-person consultation or something. And then from there hopefully we can get to a close and then I can deliver what I say I’m going to deliver. So I need to figure out what triggers and methods get me to the decision-maker as quickly as possible.

4) Attitude. I don’t want to too narrowly define what I offer or even restrict the boundaries of success in any way, because really I’m willing to do anything. And so then that gets us to the classic issue of boiling the ocean, which I get, but also in this type of hand-to-hand sales I feel like really I’m just trying to make meaningful connections with business owners who keep hearing about the looming threat of AI but have no idea what to do or how to navigate it. I want to be a conduit to the cutting-edge and become more of a confidante or something—and so that’s sort of why I’m being a bit blasé in the technical specifications of my services.

(attitude cont.) I have a good enough handle on AI to know pretty well what is and isn’t within scope—and anything that’s within scope I feel like I’ll be able to figure out—and so that sort of underlying and fundamental self-belief informs the generality of my outreach. If I can have like 1 real conversation for every like 25 calls or something then I think that’d be amazing—and then once I run like 4-5 successful pilot engagements and build a real testimonial-base and generate more warm leads from won-clients and then more sharply refine my offering then that’d all be great—and that’s pretty much the goal.

5) Mental fortitude. Even 1 successful conversation for every 25 calls, so a 4% hit rate, means that 24 people don’t give a f*** about you, and that’s never fun. So I want to be very intentional and mindful of giving myself the grace and space to deal with an abundance of rejection. Because really it does only take 1 or 2 hits to make all the rejection worth it—and I just want to be aware of that.

Other related considerations

6) Premium positioning. This is more difficult to explain, but I do feel pretty capable and like confident in my ability to actually deliver real like practical implementations of AI to these types of businesses, and so in the long-run I want to position myself and the firm as a premium provider of whatever we provide. I don’t really know what that will literally mean from a pricing perspective—and everything is relative—but the main point here is that I’m not going to sell myself or my abilities short, and I’m going to be okay walking away from work if somebody isn’t able to afford me, and I want to be intentional about some degree of price discipline from the jump.

(premium positioning cont.) Obviously for the first few engagements I’ll be looking at reasonable rates and say I’ll give them their money back if they’re not satisfied. But then after 4-5 successful pilot-engagements (which really is the Level 1 milestone here) then I’m going to sort of hit the market with more premium upfront pricing and I’m not going to back down on that. Because really my business goal is to run like 4-5 engagements per month or something and then eventually have some people hire me on retainer just for general AI advisory services or something. I don’t really know—and I think that’s the beauty of it all. But so the quicker I can start to blur the lines on buy-side/sell-side and create real (or perceived) scarcity of my services then I think the easier it will be to command higher prices.

7) Customer service. My formative professional years (although I guess they’ve all been formative) were in a services business (banking, after all, is a fancy services business) and I do have a decent grasp of how to speak to customers, how to understand what they need and what they’re struggling with, and how to provide top-level attention and care to them to make sure they feel adequately serviced. I’m also by nature a people-pleaser, and so to some degree I think I can be obsessive about making sure people are satisfied, and I’m just trying to extract as much economic value from my psycho-physiological wiring as I can.

8) Role models. Not to get too mushy-mushy but I really do think of myself as walking in the footsteps of those that’ve come before me. My grandfather started two engineering consultancies, and I think his first one was pretty established and successful by the team he was like 35–so that gives me 8 years to try to match him. And then my dad released his first album when he was 28, so this is kind of like the first album of my professional career in some ways. And then I have all sorts of entrepreneurial people in my extended family, and so I just think this is a very natural extension and expression of my professional genotype (or maybe phenotype??)—and we’ll see where things go. And then also there are so many people I’ve met while in venture who I think are incredible entrepreneurs and leaders and so on and so forth; and I hope to leverage those relationships as well. Like, I just know that I’m never really alone, and I’ll always have people to help—even if I don’t know who they are yet.

(role models cont.) With the risk of sounding pedantic, I learned in college that really the most effective use of time for me was office hours, because you had people there to help you figure things out and you were able to commiserate and collaborate and co-learn with peers. And, if you think about it, post-collegiate professional life is like one big office hours session that you can actively participate in at any time with whoever you deem relevant to the accomplishment of whatever objective you’re pursuing. And so I guess just leaning into the wisdom and guidance of those around me and being willing to always meet with new people and interact with the world will allow me to trust that the answers I seek will reveal themselves to me when appropriate. I just need to keep showing up and putting my best foot forward.

Looking Forward

Moving forward, I’ll try to keep some sort of public scorecard on how my outreach is going. We’ll see if I can actually hit a 4% success-rate, which feels maybe a little optimistic. And we’ll see how the tactics develop over time as I liaise with Mr Market.

Next week I think I might discuss how I’m structuring work-product to help with funnel progression and conversion—and how I’m using AI on the backend to enable those work-products.

Because, notwithstanding literally all of the foregoing, part of this entire exercise is seeing if I can’t find a venture-backable business within the day-to-day hum-and-drum of building a consultancy.

Have a great week!

Sincerely,

Luke