15 KiB
Eugene's Concrete 90-Day Plan
#query #sales #planning
Question asked
Turn the corpus into eugene's concrete 90-day channel/niche plan — the dated version 2026-07-17-best-method-first-client stops short of — and resolve the live tension inside it: work the in-person first-client route, or build a marketing-system early?
Assumptions this plan rests on
Stated up front so the plan is falsifiable rather than merely plausible. Each is a vault inference, not a sourced fact:
| # | Assumption | Status |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | eugene is the vault owner | tentative — circumstantial (insin, the harness) |
| A2 | His target buyers are industrial-equipment vendors / machine-builder integrators needing CV & embedded work | tentative — vault inference, never stated by him |
| A3 | His natural deal shape is few × $10K+, not 100 × $1K/mo | tentative — inferred from domain |
| A4 | He has some prior paid work to mine for a result-pattern | unverified — if false, Week 1 step 2 drops and Week 2 carries more load |
| A5 | Enterprise-lite industrial buyers behave closer to sebastian's enterprise than to dan-martell's SMB | tentative — this is the single assumption the channel choice hangs on |
If A2 or A5 turn out wrong, the channel mix below is wrong and the online tier reopens.
Answer — the short form
One-to-one, in-person-weighted acquisition is the engine for these 90 days. The marketing-system gets a small fixed time deposit — not because it produces leads in this window (it won't), but because its clock is ~6 months long and because publishing is the articulation practice that may be his actual blocker.
That is the resolution of the live tension, and it is not a compromise — it follows from the vault's own stage reading.
Why the tension resolves this way
The vault had already half-inferred it; oskar-hartmann nearly states it outright (one repeatable channel builds the company; multichannel is a resilience property of scale). Three supports:
- The three-lever map is addressed to the wrong stage. marketing-system's pick-one-lever rule comes from a clip aimed at a founder with a stalled $1.5M. It omits outbound, referrals, and in-person events entirely — i.e. the whole first-client toolkit — because those aren't scalable levers, not because they don't work (client-acquisition-channels).
- The same author runs one-to-one at $0. His own $0→$100K blueprint prescribes phone-mining and cold calls (2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month). The pick-one-lever rule is stage-scoped by his own practice.
- The two poles agree about this buyer. On enterprise specifically, sebastian and dan-martell — who agree on nothing else about channels — both say cold outreach doesn't open the door and trust does; they differ only on built vs. borrowed trust (relationships-as-moat, partnerships).
But the system isn't deferred to zero, for one reason the stage reading alone misses: marketing-system's six-month lag means "start it when you need it" starts it six months late. And publishing doubles as reps at explaining — the fix prescribed by the rival diagnosis of Eugene's blocker (technical-founder-trap). A small deposit buys both. It is budgeted below as ~2 h/week and explicitly not measured on leads.
The channel count, settled for this case
ab-analytics says 3 channels × 90 days; dan-martell says 1 lever × 90 days
(the vault's standing conflict). Under the units reading the vault infers — a lever
is a discipline, a channel is a venue — both are satisfiable at once: one lever
(relationship-mediated one-to-one), three venues.
| Venue | Tier (client-acquisition-channels) | Why this one |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Warm mining of existing contacts | Common / referrals | The only referral-shaped motion that needs no past client; cheapest, fastest |
| 2. One recurring industry room — machine-builder / automation association, regional trade fair, not a generic Chamber | Low-key (in-person) | The tier both ab-analytics and sebastian rate highest; "3× = regular, 6× = trusted" needs recurring, so pick by calendar not prestige |
| 3. Partner-archetype recruiting — integrators & equipment vendors who already hold the buyer | Out-of-the-box | partnerships: borrowed credibility. Per oskar-hartmann's warning, court many small partners, never one anchor |
Deliberately excluded: cold email/LinkedIn campaigns at volume (A5 says this buyer ignores them, and it is the effort that already failed him for ~6 months); the 100 × $1K/mo money map (wrong deal shape, A3); building anything before payment.
The plan — 2026-07-26 → 2026-10-24
Week 1 (Jul 26 – Aug 1) — Name the target, fix the words
- Write the SOM in one sentence and list 10 named prospects — companies, not a category (tam-sam-som, sell-before-build). If the list can't reach 10, the niche is wrong or too narrow; that failure is the week's most valuable output.
- Old-client mining (per A4): call 3–5 past clients/employers — "what result were you paying me to get?", never "why did you choose us?" (pain-discovery).
- Offer formula: "we do X for [ICP] to close Y pain and get Z result."
- Commodity test: strip the words "development", "computer vision", and every technology name. What's left? If nothing, there is no offer yet (productized-service).
- The articulation rep: say the offer to one non-engineer and have them repeat it back. A referrals only travels if the referrer can restate it in a sentence — which is why this sits in Week 1 and not in the content bucket (technical-founder-trap).
Week 2 (Aug 2 – Aug 8) — The diagnostic that costs an afternoon
Run the phone mine: go through existing contacts and ask past the person — "do you know anyone dealing with [the pain]?" Often lands on "yeah, me"; otherwise yields warm, name-carrying intros (referrals, 2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month).
This is also the experiment that discriminates between the vault's two rival diagnoses of his 6-month blocker — a test the vault has flagged as needed but never specified:
| What happens | Diagnosis | What to fix in Weeks 3+ |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts engage warmly but can't restate what he does | technical-founder-trap — articulation | Reps at explaining; the content deposit earns its keep |
| Contacts restate it fine but know nobody to send | relationships-as-moat — network reach | Weight venue 2 & 3 harder; the rooms are the work |
| Neither — low response | Relationship decay, not either diagnosis | Rebuild contact-by-contact before scaling any channel |
Vault synthesis; no source proposes this test.
Weeks 3–4 (Aug 9 – Aug 22) — Open the three venues
- Book the recurring industry room through December. Recurrence is the mechanic, not attendance (relationships-as-moat).
- Identify 5–10 candidate partner organizations; approach as peers, not as a vendor (partnerships).
- First touches on the 10 named prospects, each customized — the template is a starting point, never a mass send (2026-06-15-linkedin-mail-template).
- Follow-up cadence: Day 0 → 3 → 7 → 14 → 30, 5 touches minimum, on every lead (sales-discipline).
- Start the ~2 h/week content deposit. Measured in reps, never views. Scrambled order if published as know-how (information-vs-implementation).
- In every conversation, surface budget before presenting anything — obstacles, not objections (sales-discipline).
Month 2 (Aug 23 – Sep 19) — Sell the smallest paid thing
This answers the vault's own open question — what is the smallest paid test for a dev-services offer? (sell-before-build, flagged there as arguably this plan's missing first step):
A fixed-price, fixed-scope paid diagnostic — a feasibility audit or discovery sprint on one inspection line / one device / one process.
It satisfies four constraints at once: money lands before the build (the services analogue of the paid waitlist — unpaid interest doesn't count); it is small enough to clear without procurement (dodging the whale-client trap oskar-hartmann documents); it manufactures the Before/After case study the corpus has flagged as missing for him; and it is a legitimate entry rung of an offer-ladder.
Also this month:
- Wizard-of-Oz the delivery. First results produced semi-manually; automate only what repeats (sell-before-build).
- Pricing-power probe on the second quote — raise it and watch. Cheapest PMF test in the vault (pricing-from-value).
- Ask for referrals immediately on delivery, while the enthusiasm window is open — 91% would, 11% are asked (referrals).
Month 3 (Sep 20 – Oct 24) — Standardize only what repeated
- After 2–3 similar paid audits, fix scope/price/name → a productized package (productized-service). Not before: the offer-first vs delivery-first dispute is unresolved, and this side of it costs nothing to obey.
- Write the case study as outcome + accountability, not scope (outcome-based-selling).
- Try the Zendesk motion on the warmest prospect: "how much do you spend on X?" → "and if it were 10× less, would we talk?" (2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively).
- Do not add a fourth venue. Channel-hopping is the failure mode both rules agree on.
The Day-90 gate (2026-10-24)
Review on inputs, decide on outputs — the reps-not-views substitution applied to the plan itself (sales-discipline, marketing-system).
Inputs — did the plan actually run? (target: all four yes)
- ≥ 10 named prospects worked to 5 touches each
- ≥ 6 appearances in the recurring room (the "trusted" threshold)
- ≥ 5 partner conversations opened
- ≥ 3 paid diagnostics offered (offered, not necessarily sold)
Outputs — what they mean for the next 90 days:
| Outcome | Read | Next |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ 1 paid diagnostic sold | Channel works | Repeat, productize, keep the system deposit small |
| 0 sold, but inputs all hit | The channel or A2/A5 is wrong | Change one variable — niche before channel |
| Inputs missed | No evidence either way | Re-run; nothing has been tested yet |
| Sold, but only via venue 1 | Warm network worked, cold rooms didn't | This is the referrals ceiling arriving early — now the marketing-system decision becomes live |
Thresholds are vault-inferred, not sourced. Their function is to be pre-committed, not to be correct.
Evidence trail
- Stage reading (one-to-one starts, systems scale); three-lever map's omissions — client-acquisition-channels, marketing-system
- One channel then multichannel; SOM > TAM; whale-client trap; partner-hope warning — 2026-07-26-how-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-2027 (oskar-hartmann), tam-sam-som, partnerships
- Signal hierarchy, Wizard-of-Oz, paid-waitlist analogue, duration-without-revenue red flag — sell-before-build, 2026-07-26-main-principle-of-successful-business
- 3-tier channel taxonomy, 3×90, 3×/6× recognition, Day 0→3→7→14→30, 91%/11% — 2026-06-15-17-ways-first-client (ab-analytics), sales-discipline
- In-person trust mechanics; "Big zero" on online outreach — relationships-as-moat, 2026-07-06-sebastian-interview-ai-and-software-engineering (sebastian)
- Phone mining / ask past the person; obstacles-not-objections; offer → pre-sell → build — 2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month (dan-martell)
- Six-month lag, reps-not-views, referral dependency as ceiling — 2026-07-20-referrals-will-sink-your-business
- Borrowed credibility, partner-archetype recruiting — 2026-07-22-stop-cold-calling-do-this-instead, partnerships
- Week-1 sequence (old-client mining, offer formula, commodity test) — 2026-06-15-meta-analysis-selling-dev-in-ai-era's 90-day roadmap, pain-discovery, niche-selection
- Pricing-power probe, guarantee test — pricing-from-value
- Predecessor query (method, undated) — 2026-07-17-best-method-first-client
- Eugene's blocker, deal shape, prior LinkedIn/articles effort — eugene
Caveat on evidence quality. Every channel and sales claim underneath this plan traces to promotional YouTube videos and stage talks — attributable, not verified (overview Contradictions). The vault still holds no failure-case source for the productized / sell-dear model itself, so nothing here has been tested against a documented loss. The one adversarially-verified source in the vault (ai-productivity-evidence) touches the AI-capability premise, not these tactics. Treat this as a pre-committed experiment design, not a playbook known to work.
Follow-up questions
- Which specific association / trade fair serves machine-builders and industrial integrators in his region, and does it meet often enough for the 3×/6× mechanic? The plan's venue 2 is unnamed and that is its weakest joint.
- Will an industrial buyer pay for a diagnostic at all, or is a free feasibility assessment the market norm? If free is the norm, the smallest paid test must move downstream and Month 2 needs redesign.
- Does the net-60/90 enterprise payment reality break the pre-payment rule for services buyers of this size? (Open on sell-before-build.)
- Is industrial CV/embedded a beachhead or a fortress niche? Changes what winning the SOM should lead to (open on tam-sam-som).
- Still outstanding and cheap: confirm/refute the two suspected dan-martell attributions — several rungs of this plan rest on his corpus, and it matters whether they are 5 or 7 of 20 sources. (Updated by lint 2026-07-29: a third anonymous source — the Claude-Code short — was owner-attributed to him that day, moving the confirmed count 4 → 5 and making this plan's reliance on his corpus heavier, not lighter.)
Whether this output changed existing pages
Yes — five pages updated, no source claim altered. This page is synthesis over existing pages plus four vault-original contributions: the stage-based resolution of the one-to-one vs. system tension (with the six-month-lag exception that keeps the deposit non-zero), the phone mine as the discriminating test between the two rival diagnoses of Eugene's blocker, the paid diagnostic as the smallest paid test for dev services (an open question on sell-before-build), and the pre-committed Day-90 gate. All four are inference, marked as such.
Updated: eugene (Next Questions closed; Related Pages), sell-before-build (its smallest-paid-test question now has a proposed answer), client-acquisition-channels (its Eugene channel question now answered), 2026-07-17-best-method-first-client (forward link to its dated successor), overview ("Application is unstarted" thread). Cataloged in index, logged in log.