Confirmation. Continual Progress. And Consistency.

It’s been a very interesting week… 🕺🕺🕺

Cool ideas and clarity is just becoming “the norm” → which I am reallyyy excited/grateful to have at this point in time.

This is Week 6 of The Unicorn Founder and as per usual, I have some EPIC things to tell you about, which will hopefully get you inspired, and also a highlight on how powerful consistency is.

I have exciting confirmation and progress on the unicorn-to-be startup, some interesting ideas around web design, the agency client flow, and some other things I’ll be experimenting and testing in the week coming.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 🕴️ Industry Leader Feedback: The power of building/nurturing relationships with people in the industry you are building a startup in.

• 💻 What’s with Web Design: My hunch on where the tech world is going and how that influences every single business around the world.

• 🏢 The Client Onboarding: A client flow to get inside a business, increase customer value, and build out a strong customer relationship.

•  🧪 Some Upcoming Experiments: Some marketing stints, design ideas, and maybe crazy inbound lead gen strategies.

🕴️ Industry Leader Feedback

I reached out to this guy in 2023 August sometime - it may have even been later in the year… but nonetheless it was a while ago. (feels like years in my way too impatient mind)

Around once every week or so we would spend a few hours together discussing the future of the real estate industry, I’d be listening to his thoughts/experience in the industry, including the insights from his business partners from all over the world.

He’s well-connected to say the least.

He has been aware from the get-go that I’ve been interested to build some sort of startup in the industry, involving tech in some way.

This week we jumped on a call and I got to pitch the idea to him, with a small demo of the product (yes can you believe it… we already have the first beta demo ready → told you I’m impatient).

Amazing news is that he’s super keen.

📢 Better news: He believes in the vision of it and the need for it → with more than enough examples in the last week to list of where it would’ve helped him close more deals, get more new clients, and just have an overall improvement in money-making productivity.

That’s what we’re here for!!!

🖊️ My takeaway: build fast, test early, and refine a LOT.

Our initial product is soooo bad, like so bad → but it’s enough to get the point across that more money can be made when agents use it.

Wait till what gets done this week…

💻 What’s with Web Design

Okay, now onto a whole different, but also not so different point.

The internet is here to stay, that’s a fact.

And what comes with the internet is a web-based presence, commonly done through the forms of websites.

🖊️ Side note: Whenever I am about to go “all-in” on something i.e. invest a lot of time, effort, and energy towards it — I look into how future-proof the “thing” is.

→ i.e. How certain am I that this skill will be needed in 5, 10, 30 year’s time?

I find it’s a great way to ensure I invest this precious time I have into meaningful, necessary things → making me as productive as possible.

With this in mind, I have decided to really go all-in with the web design (alongside the startup work, they go hand-in-hand).

🗒️ A few points I have uncovered:

1. I really, really love building things and I love design (especially creating things from nothing) and web design is my catalyst of being able to do all of that in a completely uninterrupted manner.

   → Wait till you see what I reveal next week.

2. Well-designed websites are a fundamental need all over the world and will not go away anytime soon + if you’re good, it pays quite well for the average person.

3. I have been catapulted even deeper into the technical world which has been a blessing in disguise → all of the technical skills (even with low-code tools) feels like a superpower when wanting to build things/startups.

And no, this is not the average website you saw from some local business → I am planning on/am building the most exclusive, interactive, and customer-converting websites (starting with my own startup).

→ An additional point on this under the Upcoming Experiments highlight.

🏢 The Client Onboarding

Now, regarding the agency, the web design fits into it quite nicely.

I do have a small team already assembled who are helping me along this process, including with the startup → which is definitely a big reason why so much progress is happening so quickly.

🖊️ Tangent Takeaway: Definitely try to be surrounded by competent and consistent people as much as possible.

Below the figures are purely used as a placeholder range for now, but this is the rough idea for getting into businesses and being in a position to really evaluate all opportunities to earn their business.

The niche is aligned with the startup by having all clients being in the real estate industry = perfect positioning to find startup-worthy problems to solve/MVP test.

The whole idea around this all is to limit the number of different clients = fewer new relationships to build from the ground up (a LONG process).

All of that is done whilst maximising the value provided and therefore returned in the form of revenue from each client.

This is yet to be fully tested, but that’s what I’ll be testing over the coming weeks/months with the agency model = allowing me to bootstrap the startup as much as possible.

🧪 Some Upcoming Experiments

• 📱 Leveraging social media for the web design publicity & exclusivity.

  (No cooking clue how this will end up)

• 💻 Outreach plans for building websites for leading public figures… getting the foot in the door for a lot more exciting work to be revealed still.

  (a longer term game)

• 👨‍💼 First product beta tests with one of the top real estate agents in Cape Town → let’s see how much more money he can make.

  (over the next 3 weeks)

• ⚡️ Some A/B tests to see how expensive the web design can reach due to hype, exclusivity, and prestige.

  (All testing my marketing/psychology tactics)

Next week I’ll add the results/in-progress results as well as the other experiments not mentioned here.

😌 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.

Did someone forward this to you? You can follow the billion dollar company journey here.

Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn.

Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan