In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the importance of infusing a human touch in inside sales. Field sales have paved the practices we use in inside sales, so it is important to know the benefits of field sales. Personal connection, clear demonstrations, effective on-the-spot communication cannot be easily applied to inside sales. So what are some techniques to keep things personal with insides sales? Tune in as Steli and Hiten provide their key tips to keep your interaction with customers personal in insides sales.

00:05 – Today’s episode is about how to infuse a human touch in everything you do when it comes to inside sales

22:48 – There is a glitch in the dates of the blog, but Steli will work on it

3 Key Points:

The knowledge people have from doing inside sales came from the methodologies and practices...

In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the bones of what makes a great pitch deck and how to use it to wow possible investors. Steli and Hiten give you tips based on real life stories and pitches that got their attention. Tune in to find out the importance of knowing and communicating your “WHY”, turning your pitch deck into a story, and how you can connect with your audience. Hiten also gives the inside scoop about his new pitch deck product to listeners for the FIRST time—this will definitely help you with your next pitch.

00:05 – Today’s episode is about creating a killer pitch deck

01:25 – People send pitch decks to Steli to be critiqued

09:18 – Hiten says investors just want to invest in a great business

12:20 – The investors do not care so much about the details, they care about the essence and how true it is

14:34 – The guy had an older sister who was an overachiever whereas he did not get into a great school and wasn’t offer the same opportunities for work

15:33 – The WHY connects with many people

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the art of confidence. Steli shares an event he observed in a coworking space, one day, that really frustrated him. It showed the importance of having confidence in one’s self.  Listen as Steli and Hiten share their thoughts about what it means and takes to be confident and how their own personal level of confidence has affected their life and business. Steli and Hiten also discuss the importance of knowing and accepting yourself as a means for boosting your confidence.

00:05 – Today’s episode is about the art of confidence

01:38 – Steli shares what he has observed that led to today’s podcast

01:44 – Steli is still limited with his leg injury

04:37 – Steli is most bothered by people taking advantage of founders

06:36 – Hiten explains the “push and pull” factors

07:18 – How confident are you in yourself?

08:57 – In Greek, charisma means “having a gift”

09:19 – For Steli, confidence comes from self-belief

13:24 – Hiten sat with it for 10 minutes and accepted it

14:45 – “Watch your emotions, watch your reactions”

3 Key Points:

Confidence comes from having both success and failures.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.

[0:00:05]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:06]

Steli Efti: In today's episode of The Startup Chat, I wanted to talk to you about the art of confidence, or how to develop confidence. We're just talking about this concept of what is even confidence, right? Something happened between me pinging you about this yes...

In this episode, Steli and Hiten go through more website teardowns. Steli and Hiten comment on five different websites and give their take on what they are doing right and what needs to be improved. Tune in to find out the importance of being clear in communicating the value of your product or service and who you are targeting in the first few moments spent on your landing page.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:04 – Today’s episode is about website teardowns

01:08 – Steli is unsure about who the target audience is

03:35 – The next website is Better Proposals

04:08 – The site expresses who their market is

09:03 – Steli and Hiten move on to Squad Fusion

09:58 – Steli says the logo looks outdated

 12:30 – The next website discussed is Venture Storm

12:45 – The value prop at the top is great

17:51 – Steli and Hiten discuss My Show Notes

18:08 – The catch phrase is poorly written

21:43 – Join the private email list to get more website teardowns and exclusive episodes  

3 Key Points:

The copy is an important aspect of your website and deserves your attention.

[0:00:00]

Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli .

[0:00:03]

Hiten: And this is Hiten . Today on the startup chat, we're gonna do some more tear downs. And Steli's gonna start, but what I'm finding interesting about this one is it's in German.

[0:00:12]

Steli: Oh shit. Do you see the German? I have the slash EN, which is English. So I see the English version for this.

[0:00:17]

Hiten: Oh wow. Awesome.

[0:00:18]

Steli: Yeah.

[0:00:18]

This is Part Two of Website Tear Down. In this episode, Steli and Hiten look at websites and provide important feedback to listeners. Steli and Hiten give their thoughts about two particular websites and how they can improve and build upon what they already have. Tune in to find out the importance of keeping your website pages as clean as possible and the importance of communicating your value compared to the next guy.

00:05 – Today’s episode is Website Tear Down: Part Two

01:22 – The headline is moving too much

13:35 – Remote Interview is the next website

13:51 – I know this gentleman who owns this website

19:55 – Steli and Hiten close the episode

3 Key Points:

Simplify your pages as much as possible to make your message clean and clear.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey, everybody this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:04]

Hiten Shah: Hey, this is Hiten Shah .

[0:00:06]

Steli Efti: And in today's episode of the were doing a website tear down part two so you guys had submitted way too many websites that we can cover in one episode so we're gonna have some fun with this and we'll see how many episodes it takes us to go through most of the websi...

In this episode, Steli and Hiten discuss what it means to trust your intuition and follow those gut feelings. Steli shares a story of how he followed his intuition when it came to a potential hire. Steli wasn’t feeling very great about this particular candidate, decided to act on these feelings, and do his due diligence regarding the candidate. What he found out confirmed the questions he had regarding the candidate and in turn, informed his decision to not hire this particular person. Tune in to find out the importance of knowing and trusting yourself when it comes to those gut feelings.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:04 – Steli introduces today’s episode about trusting your intuition

01:04 – Steli was on a call with someone who applied to work for them

05:49 – Steli fought with his intuition

06:48 – Steli called the company’s founder to talk about the guy

08:35 – They did not hire this man

In this episode, Steli and Hiten look at 3 websites and provide important, specific feedback. Steli and Hiten give their thoughts regarding the home pages and share their overall experience. Some of the key lessons to be learned in this episode is that your value proposition needs to be clearly shown and that you should always evaluate how you are communicating that value in your written content.

00:09 – Today’s episode is a special episode about website tear down

01:45 – Hiten asks what a “Lean Coach” is

07:05 – Next website they evaluate is Live Tiles:

07:29 – The background of the homepage is a video and it is distracting

16:15 – Hiten and Steli look at Inapptics:

16:34 – Based on the name, they look like analytical tools

23:26 – This is only Part 1 of The Website Tear Down

3 Key Points:

In making a website, it is important to be clear about the value that you are selling.

[0:00:01]

Hiten: Okay, sounds good.

[0:00:02]

Steli: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.

[0:00:05]

Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:06]

Steli: And in today's episode of The Startup Chat we're gonna have a special episode which is gonna be a website tear down episode. So all of you out there, we asked for submissions a few days ago and we got a ton of people submitting their websites, asking Hiten and I to just look at the site and and provide feedback and tear it down and be hypercritical and very, very honest. And that's what we're gonna do this morning. It's just gonna be going through one website after the other that you guys submitted and we'll try to be as useful and helpful in providing feedback. All right Hiten, you want to take it away and take a look at the first website submitted?

[0:00:47]

Hiten: Absolutely. This website is called Swip, it's getswip.com. So, it's G-E-T-S-W-I-P dot com. And right when I hit the site on the right there's a big picture of a MacBook and it looks like it's got some interface. On the left it says "Lean Coach For Your Team: The guidance and tools you need to run your business Lean." "Get it for" and then it says "$6.99" and then crosses it off and it says "free." And then next to that that's the button and then next to that it says "How it works." And then there's a "Offer available for limited time. 600+ people already claimed their free account. Claim yours now using the button above." So that's what shows up on the main page, it's like a nice big, blue page. Well first of all, the first thing that hits me is that it says it's a lean coach for your team. Right away I'm like "well what's a lean coach?" That's already something that registers for me and makes me confused about what thi...

In this episode, Steli and Hiten teach you what to do when your financing falls through in the last minute. Every business plan includes a heavily researched and projected financial plan. However, there are a lot of internal and external factors that can directly affect whether or not you’ll be able to reach your goals. Worst case scenario, your projections may even fail at some point. Tune in to know what to do when the unexpected happens.

00:04 – Today’s episode teaches you what to do when your financing falls through

3 Key Points:

Investor money is NOT the only option you have—be proactive in finding those other solutions.

[0:00:00]

Steli: All right, you start.

[0:00:02]

Hiten: Check. Hi, this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:05]

Steli: And this is Steli Efti, and in today's episode of the The Startup Chat, I want to talk to you about what to do when your financing is falling through in the last minute. So, the reason I want to chat about this with you today is that in the past two weeks, I had four different conversations with founders where the basic theme was that they were just about to close a financing round, and it has either fallen through completely, or the round or the financing is some kind of in a crisis. There have been different reasons why. For two of them, it was the main investor that ... The lead investor pulling out and in two other cases there are slightly different reasons for why financing has become much much harder. One is that the lead investor all of a sudden has brought up a lot of terms that are just incredibly aggressive and were never agreed to.

[0:01:11]

Hiten: Yep.

[0:01:12]

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the challenges faced with managing and building remote teams. Listen as they list several key issues every mobile team encounters—from selecting the right members to dealing with miscommunication. Tune in to find out some key strategies Steli and Hiten have used with their remotes teams that enable them to work with their teams more effectively.

00:04 – Today’s episode is about managing remote teams

3 Key Points:

Create a way or channel for your team to communicate about other things besides work.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:02]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:04]

Steli Efti: And in today's episode we wanna talk about how to manage and run remote teams, or a remote company, right? So, we've talked about, I think in the past, how to hire freelancers and why remote is powerful and why it can be an alternative model to having an office and hiring everybody on-site, but we've not yet talked about the day to day, the operational challenges and opportunities that come with running remote companies. I know you have built multiple remote teams and are constantly creating new remote teams that are working on projects and for us we went from, kind of a semi-remote setup, where we had a bunch of people in the office and a bunch of people remote, to now finally transitioning to being a fully remote company and team. So, there's probably lots to talk about. Maybe to kick us off, what are some of the things that you had to figure out and learn on a practical level, through trial and error,

In this episode, Steli and Hiten answers questions they received from readers of their ebook, From 0 to 1,000 Customers and Beyond. This is Part 2 of Steli and Hiten addressing questions as readers get the opportunity to ask for specific feedback and advice. Listen in as they discuss how to generate leads, how to hire that first salesperson, educating your market and more.

00:04 – Today’s episode is all about answering questions from those who read the ebook From 0 to 1,000 Customers and Beyond

02:06 – In Episode 14, we talk about sending cold emails

04:19 – Should we start with B to B or B to C?

05:17 – Stay with what you are doing, especially if you are doing it well  

06:45 – When is the right time to hire the first salesperson?

07:04 – We have an upcoming episode about hiring your first salesperson

08:05 – When using content marketing, how do you avoid becoming too bloated by unqualified leads?

08:59 – Put qualifying dropdowns in the lead generation form

12:12 – How should I start marketing?

12:52 – SEO is the right strategy for you if you have the money

14:40 – What is the best way for new startups to educate and change the mindset of an entire market?

16:05 – All products solve existing problems, so you should ask yourself, “Why are they not adapting to it?”

17:36 – They had no problem getting their first 100 customers, but feel they have plateaued

18:45 – Time is the biggest challenge

21:35 – The four podcasts about hitting your customer milestones:

030: How to Get Your First 10 Customers

21:57 – E-mail Steli or Hiten for a copy of their book or for any questions

3 Key Points:

Do things yourself before bringing in other people to do it for you.

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hi everyone. This is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:04]

Steli Efti: In today's episode of The Startup Chat, we're doing a Q&A session based on all the questions you guys have sent us around the eBook that we launched, From 0 to 1,000 Customers & Beyond. We've done 4 podcast episodes in the past on how to acquire customers and how to hit certain milestones, your first 10 customers, getting from 10 to 100 customers, from 100 to 1,000 and so on.