This week, I made the mistake of learning a bunch of methods for traffic generation, lead conversion, and operations, without focusing on the three basic steps of a business: Building trust, making an offer, fulfilling the offer.

Today I want to focus on the first step - building trust.

📈 Trust Fall? Or Trust Fail?

This was how I mapped out my customer journey when I was building my previous company (Yes it was also called GOM).

I divided it into two parts:

1. Let people know about the thing

2. The thing

The idea?

If I let people know about the thing, and the thing is good, then I would have a successful business. Simple!

It was a great plan, except for one tiny little mistake.

Trust.

About seven years ago, while I was at college, I was taking an uber from Princeton to Newark. I had to catch a flight, and missed the last train going to Newark Airport by a hair. If you’ve never been on that little route through New Jersey, things can get a little rough. About 7 minutes away from the destination, a very drunk lady came up to my window, tried to open the door, and asked for (demanded) a ride home.

I’m sure she was lovely, and didn’t have any ill intentions, but I was still thankful that the cab door was locked.

The funny thing is, she and I had the same business plan.

Let people know about the thing = Knock on random car windows.

The thing = A free ride home.

What did she do wrong? Well, she was a stranger to me. She made no effort to make herself seem agreeable. She made no introduction, gave no proof of her intentions, and demanded that she be given a service. Basically, she made no effort to make me trust her.

Now it might seem like I am stating the obvious, but I had built up the whole plan above, while making the same mistake.

How do I get a complete stranger to trust me to solve their problem?

Here’s what I ended up doing:

🔗 The Best Ways To Build Trust

Outreach: Copy what works, then innovate.

The first step to any outreach effort should be through warm introductions. But at some point, you do run out of friends that can help.

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I spent some time copying ads from industry leaders. Looking at their creative, copy, and cta and adapting them to my needs.

This allowed me to articulate the actual pain points of my customers, and took a lot of the guesswork out of ads.

Copy, then innovate.

Don’t Get Cute.

This was perhaps the most important lesson.

Because I didn’t know what my offering should be, I tried to do everything. A monthly consulting ‘subscription’, a full package offer, and the equivalent functions through the use of AI GPT wrappers.

In other words, I was hedging my bets, and getting cute.

Please, please, please, save yourself the trouble. If you don’t know what your offer is, then no one else will. And if no one knows what your thing actually is, no one will buy the thing.

Get crystal clear on your product at first. Sell one thing, tell people about one thing, do one thing.

You can always pivot, you can always change direction. But doing multiple things is a great way to make sure none of it succeeds.

What’s Next?

Next week I’ll be focusing on outreach to venture studios and venture clubs around the US and UK, and testing out different offers.

Thank you to the early subscribers! If you have any founder friends that might like this newsletter, let them know!