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Hey friends,

It's day 24 of my new job at Meow.​

And I've spent 24 days sprinting.

Sprinting from sales call to partnerships call to content brain dump to vendor negotiation to recruiting new people to product feedback....

You get the point.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I've learned more in 24 days about business building than I would learn in 24 months somewhere else.

But it's a long way of saying that I'll keep today's piece short. Because duty calls:)

Okay... let's get into it!

One of my pillar beliefs:

The world is malleable. But if you don't run through the wall to make something happen, it never will.

Let me give you a tangible example:

I'm on a zoom call with a potential customer. He's the VP of Finance at a Series A startup.

Also as a refresher, Meow's goal is to help startups earn extra yield on idle cash. We give access to stuff like plain vanilla US Government Treasury Bills packaged in a stupidly simple dashboard.

So the call is going well. I feel like this one is in the bag. Because I'm basically "selling" cold water in a desert.

He says he'll sign up for an account. Then, there's a few approval steps before he'd wire any money.

3 days go by.

Me: "Hey John kindly following up. Let me know if any questions!"

Nothing.

2 days later.

Me: "Hi John just wanted to bump this. Happy to hop on a call to complete onboarding when you get a second. Can do whatever works for your schedule!"

Nothing.

2 days later.

You get the point.

John doesn't want to talk to me.

So what do I do?

I know John wants to do this. Because he literally told me! And partially signed up for an account already.

He just needs a little nudge... :)

So I grab his phone number from his application and cold call him.

No pick up.

I leave a message.

24 hours later.

I call Johnny again.

He picks up... "hello it's John"

Me: "hey john it's chris from meow. how's it going?"

I can't read minds but I'm picturing John on the other side sheepishly embarrassed that he was dodging my emails for over a week... for something he wanted to do!

But of course I take that in stride.

I get that no one realllly cares that much about treasury management.

So I shrug it off and tell Johnny a few things.

1. Final steps of onboarding process
2. Walkthrough his thoughts on sizing and allocation

And here's the most important part on urgency.

"I hate to bother but I wanted to prioritize your onboarding over others because you'd already expressed interest."

John had also been losing ~$8,000 per week in opportunity cost on his interest :)

That night, John completed his application.

The next day, he emailed me making sure he wasn't missing anything since he saw in our portal he hadn't been approved yet.

I obviously hope he becomes a customer.

But dealing with John burned a big lesson into my brain:

Follow up. Send the email. Pick up the phone. Create a little urgency.

But do it all with a smile and the goal of building decade long relationships.

But sometimes you need to run through a brick wall to make it happen.

Chances are, if I sent some more emails he would have ignored me.

If this makes you uncomfortable, let me put it this way.

If you were a water bottle salesman in a desert, would you do anything to save people dying of dehydration?

That's how you should feel about your product.

That's all I got for the week!

Keep crushing it,

​Chris Hlad​

p.s. what do ya think of this personal piece? Hit reply and say "yes" if you liked it

p.s. if you loved this, forward it to a friend. if you hated this, forward it to an enemy. And if you're new, hit the big blue button below...

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