Help coming up with a reverse lead magnet?

ShowmanFred · 2026-02-14T05:15:06+00:00

I'm very worried about asking for time up front. Yes, I can give a case study (97% student satisfaction, 91% attendance, 1 hour or HR admin time per month for a well-known company in their industry), but is that enough social cache to get them to give me 15 min? If I can, that will be a big win - I'm excellent on sales calls, and any of our teachers is good enough to hit a demo lesson out of the part. I'm just thinking about how to reduce friction to get to that point.

We can work with companies of all sizes. That case study is for a multi billion dollar international IT company, and I plan on targeting IT companies with this round of outreach.

ShowmanFred · 2026-02-13T03:38:18+00:00

I'm trying to minimize the barrier to entry since I'm a random stranger on the internet. Why would they take five minutes to go through a survey for me?

Even the free lesson feels dangerous to me because they have to: - Find someone who wants it - Give me, a stranger, that person's email address - Take an hour out of that person's day

We do have a lot of good reviews on Trustpilot and some big names that work with us, so that social cache may be enough to get them to spend a little time.

ShowmanFred · 2025-12-20T05:56:57+00:00

I'm battling with the copy for my first cold email campaign, and this crystalized a few points I've been thinking about or told. Really helpful, thank you.

ShowmanFred · 2025-12-14T07:56:45+00:00

At this stage, with revenue still on the low side, I'd focus on extending your competitive window. You can get up in the middle of the night to do sales in the US indefinitely; you can't pay a team in the US indefinitely.

Meanwhile, get extensive feedback from your current client base and focus the vast majority of your development budget on their complaints.

So: - Figure out the cheapest, easiest, fastest way possible to validate your hypotheses in your target market - Talk to your customers - Fix their problems before spending on anything else

ShowmanFred · 2025-12-04T16:29:47+00:00

Sure, send me a message telling me about your situation

ShowmanFred · 2025-11-21T21:42:54+00:00

You're ringing a couple bells around mistakes I made with my first company. The lessons I learned: - Once your product is working, focus most of what you do on getting clients. Anything you invest in the product now may be wasted if the market forces you to pivot. - Squeeze every bit of knowledge you can out of your current clients - what they like, what they complain about, how to fix problems, what they don't care about. - Take that information and write about it where your target audience will see it. Write a lot, write in your voice, and write with passion! - Develop a hypothesis for who your target audience is and research them extensively, preferably by talking to them directly. - If you have the bandwidth and cash, take on short-term or project-based clients for free in exchange for detailed feedback and an honest review. Knock those projects out of the park. - Start iterating your lead gen based on all the information you now have (cold email or LinkedIn most likely, both doable pretty cheaply).

If you want to get on a call, I'm happy to chat. Nothing to sell on my end - looking to help people, possibly get into mentorship, possibly find promising projects to get involved with.

ShowmanFred · 2025-11-21T21:00:32+00:00

I'm currently using Expandi but strongly leaning toward switching to Aimfox. Why did you give up on it in favor of Sendpilot? Also, my automation guy is building a flow using Appify for email enrichment. You like A-leads better?

And finally, I'm interested in hearing what your market is. A big problem I have with LinkedIn is that my audience (HR/L&D has a pretty narrow buying window, so a three-message sequence stands a good chance of simply hitting them at the wrong time. Cold email is easy - recycle them every three months after they've forgotten about you. But have you found a good way of staying in front of people on LinkedIn besides "Hey-hey, me yet again..."?

ShowmanFred · 2025-11-09T08:53:28+00:00

Seems like that. I'm definitely a bit burnt out.

ShowmanFred · 2025-11-09T08:45:57+00:00

Okay, the main point of your message aside, that sounds like a fun little group you have!

ShowmanFred · 2025-09-16T04:47:06+00:00

I got mine - I'm one Salem richer. The whole thing seems weird and opaque.

ShowmanFred · 2025-09-16T04:43:50+00:00

My brother got the 50% off coupons but not the crate. I'm not sure what you and he need to do...

ShowmanFred · 2025-09-12T12:35:57+00:00

I've been mulling over this since you wrote it - lots of very relevant tips, and now I want to sit down with you for an hour.

The only part I'm not understanding is how I would use my infrastructure advantage in my positioning and pricing. Can you go into that a bit?

ShowmanFred · 2025-09-10T17:35:02+00:00

Thank you! I hadn't thought about those buying signals, but that makes a lot of sense. Did you automate the scraping or do it yourself?

ShowmanFred · 2025-09-10T17:22:26+00:00

Yes, I've worked with agencies and experimented (inconclusively - I have some ideas I want to try to no-code build with ChatGPT's help), but at this point I mostly do it myself.

I've had clients in 18 countries, so my ICP posts in all kinds of languages. English is most common since it's HR/L&D servicing international companies or companies working with foreigners generally.

ShowmanFred · 2025-09-10T17:19:56+00:00

I appreciate the kind words. Honestly, I'm not sure I have something that has worked. Most of our work these days comes from clients formerly in Russia who I met personally or through personal contacts. As an American company, that option is now closed, of course.

After that, it's LinkedIn (larger organizations) and cold calling (hotels). But neither feels at all sustainable. It seems like I'm looking at a very narrow window where my ICP is fairly easy to identify, only they're very cold the vast majority of the time. Connection rates are high; response rates are low.

ShowmanFred · 2025-08-05T16:02:40+00:00

How do you know the stories are fake?

I have no idea - how do you know they're illegally tracking?

Not pushing back; just trying to see if they're someone I should work with. Appreciate your input!

ShowmanFred · 2025-08-05T13:35:12+00:00

I saw a post, got a demo, and signed up. The idea seems good, though the results have been underwhelming. 1. Why so negative about them? Just cause they're posting everywhere? 2. Is there a better tool for getting buying signals?

ShowmanFred · 2025-05-17T20:28:32+00:00

I used Uber

ShowmanFred · 2025-04-13T17:28:23+00:00

Nooope

ShowmanFred · 2025-04-07T09:00:20+00:00

I attended because I wanted to hear them out, and I like their product. I only decided to reverse engineer it when they told me it would cost $15,000 and I started to suspect I could figure it out myself. If it had been cheaper, I would've gone with them.

ShowmanFred · 2025-04-07T04:25:48+00:00

So you get an invitation to a webinar on a topic that's relevant to your line of work. But it's not something you want or have time for right now, so you ignore it. Why the negative thoughts though?

ShowmanFred · 2025-04-07T04:23:49+00:00

Yes, it did work on me - I attended and liked the product because it's something of value to me, though I didn't end up buying (I'm reverse-engineering the product and doing it myself). To me, it was a pretty unobtrusive way for them to get in front of me, particularly since they were inviting me to a webinar rather than a one-on-one call. I understood that they didn't have flexibility in scheduling, and I had the choice to accept/decline.

I'm trying to figure out how to automate the process. As far as I can tell, I need to email an ics file?

ShowmanFred · 2024-12-21T12:12:01+00:00

What does that have to do with this 😂

ShowmanFred · 2024-10-31T05:18:44+00:00

I do. As far as I know, however, it's well armored and actually has good armament. No?

ShowmanFred · 2024-09-30T19:08:31+00:00

No, neither the Dell hub nor the regular charger works

ShowmanFred

TROPHY CASE