Hey everyone 👋 I'm Görkem from Turkey. I am a freelance video editor and I am currently developing a business about AI automation for creative agencies. Good to be here and looking forward to know about you guys. Thanks :)

Hi all 👋Jem here. I run an operations/VA placement business working mostly with ecommerce founders. Joined to learn from how this community thinks about AI marketing and trade notes. Looking forward to it. 🤓

Do you have a local or service business? Like a contractor, construction, local stores, professional services (legal, accounting etc.), beauty (hair , nails etc.). What are you biggest struggles with marketing or with customers at the moment ?

I never started by sending ten or twenty emails a day. I went straight to sending sixty thousand emails on my first day, and I made a lot of mistakes. When I first launched, I was convinced that volume was the only thing that mattered in outbound campaigns. I had set up what I thought was a foolproof setup, expecting my inbox to be flooded with positive replies by the next morning. Instead, I woke up to a complete disaster. My domains were flagged, my main inbox was blacklisted, and my deliverability plummeted to near zero. I watched in absolute panic as my entire budget evaporated in a matter of hours, with my emails delivering directly into spam folders. That failure forced me to look closely at my target lists. I had bought database access from major, expensive pre-packaged platforms, believing their promises of clean and updated contact directories. In reality, more than sixty percent of the lists I downloaded were completely dead, leading to a massive spike in bounces that destroyed my domain reputation. To make matters worse, my email offers and templates were incredibly simple and generic. Because I was blasting out the same basic copy-paste pitches to everyone, major inbox providers quickly flagged the repetitive footprints. The spam filters triggered across all domain networks, routing my messages straight to the spam folder before anyone could even read them. I was also pitching small local business owners with the same corporate messaging that I used for enterprise-level executives, treating totally different markets as if they were identical. Realizing the data brokers and bad deliverability were draining my budget, I decided to build a custom system to scrape and verify my own leads directly from source pages. The results were eye-opening. When I scraped one million raw records, I filtered out the stale data, incorrect titles, and inactive domains, leaving me with exactly fifteen thousand highly verified, high-intent leads. Targeting only those verified prospects completely turned the campaign around, allowing me to finally scale my outreach and secure high-value client deals.

One of the biggest reasons founders struggle to generate sales is that they don't spend enough time validating whether their solution truly fits the market. Many entrepreneurs fall in love with their idea long before the market has a chance to evaluate it. On paper, the concept may look exceptional. But once it reaches real customers, practical challenges begin to surface. The market often reveals flaws that were invisible during the planning stage—whether it's poor positioning, weak differentiation, lack of urgency, pricing issues, or simply solving a problem that customers don't care enough about. Instead of gathering direct feedback and refining the offer, many founders immediately look for a salesperson to solve the problem. This creates another common mistake: hiring commission-only salespeople before establishing a proven sales process. In many cases, commission-only roles attract individuals who are eager for opportunities but have limited experience closing deals. As a result, you end up with a founder who has never personally mastered the sales process and a salesperson who is still learning how to sell. Neither side fully understands the customer's objections, buying behavior, or decision-making process. The outcome is predictable: poor feedback loops, inconsistent messaging, weak market insights, and missed opportunities. Even a strong product can struggle when it is represented by an unproven sales system. The most successful founders usually take a different approach. They sell the product themselves first. By speaking directly with prospects, handling objections, conducting demonstrations, and closing initial customers, founders gain invaluable first-hand market intelligence. They learn what resonates, what fails, why customers buy, and where the product needs improvement. Only after a repeatable sales process is established does it make sense to scale through a dedicated sales team. A founder's first job is not to manage sales. A founder's first job is to understand sales.