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You can build the smartest product in the world and still go broke if no one hears about it or buys it. Meanwhile, plenty of mediocre offers make mountains of cash because their owners know how to market and sell. That’s uncomfortable, but it’s the truth. If you want an Alpha 2.0, location-independent business that frees you from the nine-to-five and lets you be internationally mobile, treat marketing and sales as the engine, not the paint job.
There’s also a lot of confusion here. People mash together “how you get your first clients” with “how you scale once money is coming in.” Those are two different phases with different tactics. Get them mixed up and you’ll either move too slowly—or burn months building complicated funnels you’re not ready for.
Two Phases, Two Playbooks
When you’re new, broke (or at least budget-conscious), and in a hurry to quit your job, you don’t start with ads, joint ventures, webinars, and sales teams. Those tools can work brilliantly, but they’re phase two tools. Phase one is simpler, cheaper, faster: do the minimum that gets you your first 2–4 clients and cash flow.
Only after you’ve got those clients—and the confidence and clarity that come with them—do you layer on the fancier machinery.
Phase One: From Zero to Money (Fast)
Early marketing has one job: create paid conversations now. That means direct outreach and phone calls. Not because you’re signing up to be a career cold caller, but because the phone compresses learning and closes the gap between you and revenue.
If that makes your introvert soul twitch, good. Do it anyway—for a few weeks. The phone is a tactical bridge, not your permanent identity.
What you do in Phase One
1. Pick a tight niche and a single painful problem.
Do quick research so you can articulate their pain in their words. You’re not guessing; you’re confirming.
2. Build a short list of real prospects.
People or companies who obviously have the problem. Twenty to thirty is plenty to start.
3. Have real conversations.
A simple opener: “I help [people like you] reduce [specific problem] in ~30–45 days. Worth a quick chat?”
On the call, ask a few serious questions about impact and timeline, then propose a small, outcome-based engagement priced in the low four figures. Keep the scope tight and the win measurable.
4. Close, deliver, collect proof.
Deliver a clean result. Capture a testimonial. Raise the price a little for the next one.
That’s it. No funnels, no ad dashboards, no six-part nurture sequence. You’re buying speed with sweat instead of cash.
Why the phone (briefly) beats everything else
- Speed of feedback. You’ll know in minutes if your offer language lands.
- You can tailor the scope on the fly, which boosts close rates.
- Cash first. A couple of $3k–$5k projects hit your monthly targets faster than “growing an audience” for six months.
When you can say, “I’ve closed two clients and delivered two wins,” you’re a different operator than the person still polishing a landing page.
Phase Two: Scale Like a Pro
Once you’re bringing in several thousand a month, then you graduate to leverage:
- Ads (paid traffic to a simple, proven offer)
- Joint ventures and affiliates (borrow trust from established audiences)
- Webinars and workshops (one-to-many sales)
- Productized services (clear scope, clear price, cleaner margins)
- Inbound content (Long-form, YouTube—now it compounds)
- Sales support (appointment setters, closers, or a tiny team as volume rises)
These tactics are amazing when you’ve already proven the offer by hand. They are frustrating, expensive time sinks when you haven’t.
A nice trick if you dread phone work: pick your favorite “phase two” channel and use it as a carrot. “As soon as I close three clients, I’ll switch to ads/webinars/JVs.” Now you’ve got a finish line.
Because ads are complicated and capital-intensive when you’re learning. You’re optimizing copy, creative, targeting, budgets, landing pages, follow-ups—and bleeding money while you guess. If you’re sitting on a giant war chest and you don’t care about time, fine—experiment away. Most people aren’t in that position. Most people need wins this month.
And those wins are easier when your price and margin are healthy. Selling a $3,000 outcome requires a handful of buyers. Selling a $200 widget requires a small town.
You don’t have to love the phone. You do have to use it briefly. Reframe it as a short, intense sprint that buys your freedom. Two to four closed projects is usually enough to replace a lot of nine-to-five income fast and buy you the right to automate and scale.
Remember: the worst-case scenario isn’t a week of awkward calls. It’s a year of “setting things up” without a single paying client.
What You Should Actually Avoid at the Start
- Complex funnels. If you’ve never sold this offer, there’s nothing to automate yet.
- Endless branding. Logos, colors, and taglines won’t sign checks.
- Content as a stall tactic. Publishing is great—after you know what converts.
- Buying courses to avoid action. Pick one plan, execute it for 30–90 days, then evaluate.
A Simple Early Script (Use, Don’t Worship)
- “I help [niche] reduce [pain] by ~ [reasonable % or outcome] in [30–45 days]. If I did that here, what would it be worth?”
- “Based on what you’ve told me, the fee is $3,000 for [tight scope] over [timeline].”
- If they balk: “What number had you in mind?” Reduce scope, not standards, to make it work.
You’re not pushing. You’re offering to fix something they already hate, in language they already used.
The Principle Underneath It All
Marketing and sales are the business. Delivery matters—of course—but delivery only happens when marketing and sales open the door. In phase one, choose the fastest door (the phone). In phase two, build more doors (systems, ads, partnerships) that open without you.
Do it in this order and you stop chasing “someday.” You start collecting checks, gathering proof, and buying back your time—fast.
The shortest path to a location-independent income isn’t clever—it’s direct. Talk to a focused market about a painful problem, close a few outcome-based projects at real prices, and deliver. Then—and only then—turn on the scaled marketing you’ve been itching to try. The engine is marketing and sales. Everything else is how you make that engine prettier and more efficient after it’s already moving.
Leave your comment below, but be sure to follow the Five Simple Rules.
robert
Posted at 05:04 pm, 4th November 2025This was a great read! Love having something to quickly eliminate discouragement & hopelessness that can sneak in on occasion. This article really articulates, as a beginner, the simplicity, in a sense, of building a business such as an independent location one, Much gratitude for this, Thank you!
Opportunity Finder
Posted at 09:54 pm, 13th November 20254 questions:
The following assumes that most who start out have no leads and will be dealing with nothing but cold prospects.
1. Should you use DM or email to open them up before calling vs picking up the phone and calling each one?
2. Many want to know price early or mid-conversation. Do you only pitch this on the phone? I realize you can give them a range if they press. And, do you redirect here when they ask, like you do with women when they ask you a question you don’t want to answer?
3. When is it fine to pitch price through email and when not? Newsletter marketing would maybe be a yes, but would you recommend it with people you are messaging cold?
4. If you make too many calls at once, just like with emails with a new account, you start showing up as a “spam” caller on people’s cell phones. This goes back to question 1. How many calls do you think is ok to make per hour if you are calling cold without talking to them through message first and warming up?
Caleb Jones
Posted at 11:48 am, 14th November 2025That’s purely optional. You don’t need to do it. Most people ignore cold emails and cold DMs anyway.
Yes you only pitch this on the phone during the initial states of your business.
If they ask about the price up front, the answer is, “I don’t know yet, I need to ask you a few questions first,” then keep going with the conversation.
Don’t market through cold email unless you are a cold email marketing expert, which is very hard.
Uh, no. You’re not going to call enough companies (only do B2B, not B2C for your first business) for that to ever happen.
Opportunity Finder
Posted at 02:14 pm, 14th November 2025There was a salesperson on X that responded to me and noted that trying to sell over “messages only” is pretty tough especially if the conversation is “asynchronous”. Which means, not simultaneous or concurrent in time.
This boosts your argument for using the phone. My thought was that it would be better to ask Socratic questions through email or text, then confirm and close on the phone. My fear is that if you are calling someone cold, it’s going to be harder to close them on that first call unless they have time for you precisely at the time you call.
– Just to be clear, you do no email/dm warm-up to companies? Simply jot down 20-30 then pick up the phones, correct?
– also to be clear, you would not try to sell a new prospect through email or DM, period, in the beginning, until you have done business with that prospect? Then, later on you could re-sell them through email, newsletter, whatever. Would this be correct? (we can open a prospect through DM/email, but do all selling on the phone)
– Do you follow up on the phone a 2nd time or through email/text after the 1st call if you couldn’t close? As in, do you use the phone again to close the prospect on attempt 2 or is it no longer needed since you talked to them on the phone already?
– last thing, how do you deal with “I want to think about it”? Do you do a Harry Browne method where you make sure you didn’t miss anything or do you simply quickly disqualify since the maybes will kill you? 🙂
Caleb Jones
Posted at 07:55 pm, 15th November 2025That’s what I do (or did), yeah.
Not for something that was thousands of dollars, no. If you were selling something for $150, sure, but you shouldn’t be selling something that cheap.
Always phone.
That means you didn’t elicit enough emotional reasons on the call to buy; difficult to close at that point.