Playing with funnels.

Despite having run a marketing agency for 4 years, I really have no prior experience of doing marketing.

But since deciding to turn FounderON into a proper business (meaning a one that makes money), I've had to quickly learn. This is all kindergarden level marketing to you professionals, but all brand new for me.

I started offering mentoring to agency founders at the start of the year. Low cost 1:1 support to help them overcome common challenges like lead gen, proposition, hiring, pricing etc.

But despite it being low cost, the initial take-up rate was much lower than I anticipated. It was a handful of people that I had worked with in some shape or form in the past, that knew me as well as what I'd achieved with my agency.

But it became clear quickly, that just because I had run and sold an agency, it wasn't enough for people that don't know me to trust me with their hard earned cash.

The weekly blog and the content I share on Linkedin can only build trust so far. People want to try before they buy. Completely understandable.

At the same time as launching the paid mentoring, I also started offering a free 30 minute advice call. The only catch was that you'd have to pay a ￡10 charity donation in order to book the call.

I started adding a CTA to my Linkedin posts and blogs, pitching the free call and the mentoring.

I got lots of free calls booked. And on the mentoring side, complete silence. So I started pushing the mentoring more frequently. Still nothing. But Calendly kept on filling up the slots with the free calls.

Slight dent to the ego, but I was still excited to speak to lots of founders and see if I could help with their challenges.

So the free calls commenced. Roughly 5 every Monday and the same on a Friday afternoon. I loved doing them. The founders seemed to also great value from them.

There was no sales pitch, it was genuinely just 30 minutes to brainstorm ideas and come up with possible solutions.

But then I noticed that people started asking at the end of the calls whether they could sign up to the mentoring service. Without the need to pitch or sell.

Then the next week. More free calls. More people signing up to mentoring. Still no sales pitch.

By making that 30 minute call a genuine offer of free value, it allowed both parties to build trust, build relationship and identify if there would be value in working together ongoing. Selfishly it also allowed me to see which businesses and challenges were most exciting and ambitious.

So I stopped pitching the mentoring and just focussed on the free calls.

4 months after starting, and 21% of free calls turn into ongoing mentorship. Purely by offering free value.

These results led me to delay the launch of the digital courses that I'm creating. Not only am I gaining huge insights into the most common problems that founders are facing, but I can now design the courses to fill in the gaps between the free call and the mentoring.

Now it won't be a case of ￡500/month or nothing after the free call. Although I've tried to make it as affordable as possible, it's still a lot of money to someone starting out or about the make the leap into self employment.

So it's inspired me to make the digital course super low cost to allow me to help as many people as possible, while still running a sustainable business.

Once all of the products are live, I'm going to start experimenting with ads to see what impact they have versus the organic posts and blogs I'm writing. And then, as I mentioned in last weeks newsletter, I'm going to use the income from the courses and mentoring to increase visibility and distribution of the blog. To try and help as many current and future founders as possible.

Who would have thought, this former marketing agency owner would turn out to love a bit of marketing.

Thanks for following the journey. And any tips or tricks would be much appreciated!