September,
When the code does not work, a test is all it takes.
August: a month for thinking. A productive month spent building.
Every piece was beginning to fit: search workflows, the first data feeds, the loops.
Every click on Play returned thousands of websites and search results within minutes.
Every Action added information: Mozilla Readability, SEO checks, cover screenshots, JSON-LD.
A second search across the database added financial data. Everything was simply perfect.
I had everything, but still had nothing.
September came in hard, packed with work to do on more than 8,000 websites.
Call after call, online meetings, deals close to signing, potential clients hanging up in frustration.
It all looked great. It was all still potential.
September draws to a close.
8,000 websites found, zero clients.
In my world, when something does not work, you debug it, test it, and get it done.
I studied marketing more than 20 years ago. I picked up Kotler again and read The Power of Selling in two days, a book I would never have chosen to read on my own.
I began to understand where I was going wrong, and how little I knew about a territory I thought I knew: sales.
I was looking for a bug, but not in the software.
I had mistaken a problem I could solve for a problem someone wanted to solve.
The software had found 8,000 companies. I still had to learn how to find a client.
By the end of this article, it will probably have found another 2,000.
Still no clients.
In the meantime, I am working on the post-mortem.
And learning to communicate while I am still in the game.
Back to school in September!
