On targeting startups as a development shop with Paul Xue

This one is *packed* with golden nuggets.

Paul built his development shop (Spacestation Labs) on targeting startups. It feels natural cause startups generally need to do dev work.

It can also feel counter-intuitive because startups do tend to hire in-house. So a big way Paul handles that is through…

Timing the fundraising cycle

Turns out there’s a pattern. Startups raise, hire people, and 12 months later when they need to raise again, they’re looking for contractors.

Why?

They’re in a “crunch time” of “let’s push this one project out to make investors optimistic”. So that’s when you approach them. Or at least when you pitch them.

You’re problem isn’t sales, it’s marketing

This one’s a pattern already. It’s what Jamon kind of said as well.

Your problem is likely not sales i.e. converting the lead. Your problem likely is the top of the funnel i.e. finding enough leads.

That’s actually quite true for me with LeetSoftware. It’s not that we’re not good. I think we’re great. And I think, and have been told, that I have a good personality too (which should help with sales).

The problem is I barely get to pitch our services to leads.

So how do you fix the top of funnel?

• your network, people you meet at events, etc
• twitter, reddit, social media in general
• youtube content & content in general

The usual suspects.

One thing which I appreciate a lot about Paul is he called me out on some BS I said. More particularly on this assumption I haven’t actually tested.

My thinking was “all these (networking, twitter, youtube) are great, but they’re not going to pay off short-term”. But have I validated that? Not really, no.

He pointed out how the designer community does this really well on twitter by showing sample work in public. He pointed out he’s met people that did this consistently for a 2-3 months and found work from it.

It’s a bit harder to do the same for dev work sometimes. But I can’t discount this strategy if I haven’t done it.

Made me genuinely consider if I should build some projects for “fake” clients in public to showcase my skills. I *should* do this…

(I’m going to be so dissapointed in me if I don’t at least test this strategy)

The interview

There’s a few other things we touched on like enterprise sales. And obviously text can’t contain nuance the same way that voice and video can.

Give it a watch.