
Tips for getting clients? Sell cake - nate
https://medium.com/@natekontny/tips-for-getting-clients-sell-cake-364d1b36a05f#.vhyu12oxo
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dawnbreez
Point number one is the most important one. The best salesmen can sell dirt,
but anyone can sell gold.

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nate
Love that. Thanks.

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johansch
Interesting, sort of. But I worry that HN is turning into a "get rich quick"
type of forum.

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nate
Hmm, sorry if my article seems to come across that way? I feel like many of
the points I'm making are very much: you aren't going to get rich quick.

You need to practice to get good at something for a long time. You need to
take the long game approach to building an audience (Basecamp took awhile to
build up its audience which eventually propelled its product which still took
awhile and never became a 'unicorn'). Going to where your customers are is a
grind. You just keep talking though and eventually you find a ton of value
from those conversations. Inkling (YC W06!) was a long grind. Never turned
into a unicorn. Never got rich. But... all the hard work eventually led to us
figuring out how to make a living from it. Same with Cityposh from YC S11.
That was a total bust. But eventually, after a ton of pain and even had to
take a break and do the Obama campaign tech team, figured out some value that
turned into Draft ([http://draftin.com](http://draftin.com)) which tada also
hasn't made me rich. But it makes some decent revenue for a thing that runs on
its own and took one person to build and maintain.

A lot of grinding and figuring this stuff out and doing stuff I mention in
this article kept getting me further and further and further. And now all this
stuff led to me taking over Highrise
([http://highrisehq.com](http://highrisehq.com)). I'm not rich like some f u
money acquisition, skyrocketing, startup success story, but through all this
long hard work for a decade I've been able to largely wake up and work on
whatever I deemed important, and explore lots of weird ideas, write, not
travel so I could hang out at home with my family (my consultant days sucked)
and 19 month old daughter.

I think anyone can repeat this too. There's usually always a way to make some
money from something we think we're passionate about. It's probably not plan
A, B, C, D, or E. But eventually we can figure out an angle. But you're right,
it's not quick. The stuff in this article took me a long time. But it was
worth it. And I'm happy to help anyone I can figure this out. What can I do?
@natekontny on Twitter and nate.kontny on Gmail. Please let me know how I can
help.

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johansch
Ok, sorry, you are right. The article didn't show a recipe to get rich
_quickly_. It was more about a "hot to get rich in due time" recipe.

Perhaps I'm just being overly sensitive and cranky.. I guess HN is different
things to different people. I know most of us are doing this to make money. I
certainly am. But when the discussion turns to purely make-money things that
don't have a clear technology angle, I get antsy. (Yes, they obviously have
parallels in the teach business, but still.)

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nate
No problem at all! I understand too. This stuff has a way of making us cranky.
Probably because the success part of getting people to use something isn't as
formulaic as building something. I quit my career in chemical engineering
because I wanted that structure of the computer. The mess of how chemicals
react drove me nuts. And then I just find myself in the mess of human
psychology and "chemistry" :) Oh well.

For what it's worth, even with this non-tech, hand wavey stuff, I try and
share as much tactic and followable strategy as I can. That point in here
about asking "Can I buy you a virtual cup of coffee" that worked so well.
Everyone I've emailed with that subject line has opened that email and taken
me up on it. Got some great meetings.

But still at the end, there's no guarantee those meetings will create any
immediate wealth. But like I said earlier, from so much of life I feel like
most of us who have the capability to get on a computer and read this stuff on
this message board, eventually we can figure out an angle to making money from
the stuff we want to.

It's not maybe exactly your dream but I keep finding ways to make it work. For
example, maybe your software product just doesn't turn out to be the SaaS app
you get 1000 people paying $100 a month for. But with enough giving up, trying
some new variation, testing again, we find what does sell. Maybe it's selling
licenses as one off installs for big banks, or doing consulting in the same
domain. If you love the domain of your product, there's so much room for the
actual original product idea to suck, but find something tangential that you
still love to work on.

And those books I mention in the article about Blue Ocean Strategy and
Something Really New are mind opening on how to design a product. Draft was
all about analyzing tasks we have as writers and removing steps. It wasn't
overnight, but was a key way I thought about the product design that led to
some great usage.

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meesterdude
is it an article or is it an ad? who can tell!

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dsr_
Did you ask permission from the redditor to post his/her question on medium?

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csours
Your question makes me wonder: Are questions (by themselves) copyrightable?

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dsr_
All minimally original expressions (other than facts) gain copyright status as
soon as they are expressed in a fixed form.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Prote...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works)

There's a fair-use right which might apply, but this is clearly promotional
for Nate's reputation and current business.

It could all be avoided by slightly reworking the beginning and not quoting
without permission, or by getting permission.

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chc
Newspapers are for-profit businesses, but nothing stops them quoting things
because fair use is not solely for noncommercial ventures.

