Pay by the hour

Last night I spend several hours traveling to the North of England in my own time for my first f2f meeting with our only paying clients. Hoping to learn what got them to part with their hard earned cash.

I traveled up the night before because I had booked a meeting with prospect for 9am on Wednesday who told me he was looking for this exact solution and even accepted the calendar invite, so rather than reschedule and grab an 8am train, I traveled up the night before and stayed in bookey hotel where the room was a relief compared to the lobby that first greeted me.

The prospect had even accepted my invite. I honestly thought this was a sure thing. What a FOOL I am.

I logged on early at 8am to check the hotel wifi and found out that 9mb/s was not gonna cut it. So i quickly grabbed a hot desk at the closes WeWork with space and marked the 15 minutes across town.

The hour came around, he didn’t join.

At 2 mins past I emailed, like the pathetic person I am telling them i was [desperately] “waiting for them on the link”
At 5 minutes past I called. No dice.

12 mins past, i accepted my fate and realised the only way i might make up for this massive L was to spend the next few hours before my f2f making cold calls and try and book at least one more meeting to make up for the depressing fact that i have been yet to establish any real pain with my prospects that makes them want to attend a demo or even take a call.

Anyway, proceed to finish the day by having a 5 hour meeting with our first clietns which went really well but tbh i feel like the only reason they bought was because they knew we would spend more money/time helping them to solve problems for less than it would cost them because we were trying to build a business around it. Smart play from them. Something I will consider for my next start up I am sure. Most of the things they would benefit from are simple investigations into existing workflows the software they already pay for can serve them if they spent a few days investigating it with AI tools and setting it up.

Told them where I was staying and they commented that that was the last hotel in the city you could still pay by the hour. 2 people. Seperate convos

I tried my best to steer them in the right directions, actually told them how i’d do it and recommended several other cheap tools to assist but most people think things are more complicated than they are when all you really need to do is know the process of teaching claude to investigate how the tools work and spending the time to explain it to claude. That’s half the problem. Typing is so boring. I find Wispr Flow gives me the ability to really broadcast what i want to to claude without the cognitive load of typing sentences (I have actually typed this blog post thought. I’ve had 3 pints and i’m on the train).

Our CEO didn’t turn up to the f2f so a simple vague excuse was used incase he magics his own when he does resurface. I really hope nothing serious has happened. A lot of stress on his plate and worried about him as a friend. I only, really, took this job for 2 reasons. I wanted to help prove the people wrong who had fucked us both over and build a great new company and thought his last was an overnight success (shock, it wasn’t) and because I had nothing else to do at the time and like to get stuck in on a challenge more than the challenge itself.

Fingers cross.