Call centres, Brazilian Portuguese AI Callers, and automated financial advisors

Those are a few things colouring this last week.

And there are a lot of clients in-progress…

Welcome back, this is Week 15 of The Unicorn Founder, and yes, I have been busy again.

With the main priority of getting more clients from demo → paying.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 💸 Monetary Validation: Why it matters, how I got here, including the pains of not getting it, and where I am still conflicted.

• 🙋‍♂️ The Line-Up: How I got in contact with call centre CEOs, including my plans for thereafter, and things I’ve been scheming with some potential clients.

• 🤠 The Brand: Why I am upgrading the website, the pains of doing so, and what I did that helped.

• 🦄 The Application: Why I am applying to YC Fall 2024 and what I hope going forward.

💸 Monetary Validation:

The importance of it:

Building something people want requires you to “get out of the building” to be in front of customers understanding:

• their routines

• their problems

• the ways they try to solve them manually

• etc.

And then building a little bit, getting a ton of feedback, and iterating a lot.

The three main ways to find validation that people want what you’re building:
1. Trust — ex. email signup
2. Usage — ex. free trial demo
3. Money — ex. paid you for it

The hierarchy of which has the greatest validation value is from point 3 → 1.

If people part ways with their hard-earned cash just to use your product, you’ve got pretty solid validation that it is solving a problem for them and something they want.

so, it’s huge that we finally got to that point — which has felt like forever to get to lol.

The steps I took to get here:

1. A simple landing page to collect email addresses (trust)

   a. Daily posting on LinkedIn and Instagram as a way to drive traffic to the landing page.

   b. Facebook groups, Reddit communities, and Quora threads to get feedback + drive traffic to landing page.

2. Manual, non-scaleable outreaching, calls, and in-person conversations with “potential clients” for 100 call demo’s (usage)

   a. Reaching out on email, LinkedIn, IG, and Facebook DMs to setup calls.

   b. Cold-calling estate agents → then directors of agencies and meeting in-person.

   c. Poaching unanswered leads from competitor social media ads in the comment section.

3. Highly customised AI callers, CRM integrations, and post-call follow-up setups (money)

   a. Literally spending a good 3 - 5 days with my first paying client setting everything up perfectly & even getting leads for him ourselves.

The pain of not having monetary-validation:

Doubts.
Questions.
Hesitation.
Frustration.
Impatience.

It feels like you’re perhaps doing something wrong — knocking your head against a wall, expecting something great to happen.

You also get hyped up about the potential things could turn into and it hits hard when you realise: people don’t care.
→ They’re living their own lives and you’re just another breeze blowing past… you have to put in serious effort to make sure your presence is felt and that it gets people to start caring.

You also feel like you’re a fake, you’re not even a proper business yet:
→ you don’t have a business generating revenue, how can you call yourself a business?
→ How can you mingle with other business owners?
→ How can you make posts about what you’re doing, where’s the validity in what you’re saying?

What I’ve found is that it’s incredibly humbling and also an opportunity to break through many glass-ceilings in your life:
→ Social media posts don’t need to be preaches, they can also be documentation of learnings (the most authentic output you can give)
→ There is absolutely nothing wrong with being the dumbest/least successful/earliest-in-the-game person in the room (it’s actually what you want)
→ Everyone else is also just trying to figure things out just like you — collaboration, teamwork, and meaningful connections is the best way to win together.

I am still confused

Yes, we have got our first revenue but there are so many different pricing strategies to use — it’s hard to know which one is best.

Instead of doing nothing in procrastination, I am instead building out the different models/scenarios and starting with the simplest one first:

1. Price per call

2. Price per minute

3. Monthly subscription

4. Completely free tech, but commission on real estate sales.

And then, we’re gonna see how things go and which model works out the best for us.

Action always, always, ALWAYS beats inaction — because it brings experience, and that’s what matters, the physical outputs in the world that we can then analyse, reflect upon, and examine.

🙋‍♂️ The line-Up:

The Call Centres

Last week Sunday I mentioned call centres being an industry we want to target alongside the real estate agencies — just as an exploratory endeavour.

I ended up finding a super old directory of BPO’s (Business Process Outsourcing) companies based in South Africa, Cape Town in particular, which had contact details of the CEOs of those companies 💀 

What luck… 🍀 

So I emailed them all, got a few responses already — around 22% response rate — and I attached a demo to all my intro emails, which got them super excited.

I had meeting scheduled for Thursday, but those got rescheduled to this week coming, alongside the others, so we’ll see what comes from those.

The bigger the client, the longer you need to nurture the relationship, so I’m putting the reps early — trying to think ahead.

My goal: To start automating their inbound calls they receive and build out a completely automated framework for the call centre where calls get routed to a multitude of different AI agents for different tasks.

Overarching goal: To have call centres as close as possible to being 100% automated where every single call is answered/made by AI, and every single action that occurs during and post-call is automated (such as retrieving shipping information, placing orders, refunds, etc.)

The Estate Agencies

There are a few estate agencies trying to shake things up a bit in South Africa, starting off in Cape Town and JHB, and so I am looking at working very, very closely with them to facilitate their “shaking” of the industry.

→ With technology being the main trigger they are pulling.

Whilst this is just a brief signpost of something I am working on, it will be fleshed out in the weeks to come with more details.

🤠 The Brand:

The New Website:

If you can get your website optimised to convert visitors into paying customers, you’ll have built an incredibly simple cash cow.

That’s the premise behind upgrading the website → because initially I made it super quickly just so that we could have some sort of landing page out in the world.

Now it’s time for a bit more effort to go into it.

The main thing I’m focusing on: high-quality product demo alongside high-level relatability with the target market — making that link super tight.

My Process of Thinking:

I have never had to build such an in-depth website before, and so I have zero framework for what I should do first or last etc. and so I just went with intuition.

I had a lot of ideas and it was all feeling stuck in my head
→ So, I decided to just design sections of the website that I thought were necessary and continue to refine from there.

This allowed me to:

• see ideas physically in relation to other ideas

• reshuffle formats, sections, and design styles to find the best-looking, and -fitting collective.

• have an idea, put it on the page, and then move on to the next idea without getting brain fog.

Honestly, it’s a power-play move to just start outputting things and remove any sort of inaction stemming from procrastination.

An additional hack that I did was just start writing out:

• the problem

• my target market

• their mentality

• their thinking

• their concerns

• etc.

And that helped so much with getting better clarity on which sections to be placed in different places, what sort of copy to use, and how to structure the overall website.

Plus, I went and viewed other websites from a few other tech companies to see their format and how they converted customers to their product as inspiration.
→ Was hugely helpful.

🦄 The Application:

Y-Combinator

Rated as one of the most prestigious startup accelerators in the world with an acceptance rate between 1.5% - 2% it’s sort of like the ivy league equivalent for startups.

When I first started learning about startups it was through YC, which I heard about from the book, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

All of YC’s content was free, and I mean, if they were the ones that backed Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase, Reddit, and Dropbox (just to name a few) — then I think they know what they’re talking about.

And what I found is that most other accelerators around the world — at least from the surface-level — seemed to be offering pretty much the same, if not a more watered down, model of what they teach.

So, my consensus was that if these are the guys everyone else is looking to for knowledge then surely I want to get to the source, and not some downstream provider.

That’s just how I think.

YC has now offered an Autumn batch, which takes place from the end of September to early December — they previously have only done Summer and Winter batches — and so timing-wise, it’s perfect for me as I wanted to initially apply to their Winter batch end of this year…
But hey, the earlier the better to potentially get into YC.

My hope is obviously to get in.

But it’s more than that.

To be surrounded by the best of the best effects you psychologically:

• You are forced to become better just by association.

• You experience a new level of discomfort (aka growth) as you break glass ceilings in your life with the level of excellence around you.

• And you have an opportunity to build relationships with people on the same level of crazy as you hahaha

So I’ll be applying this week. Holding thumbs.

If you have any advice or anyone you know who has a YC alumni connection or is a YC alumni themselves, I’d love an introduction to hear how their experience went 🙏 

😌 Want to give honest feedback?

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

Or just thank you for the really helpful feedback :))))

Did I miss anything? Hit that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

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Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan