The Solo Selling Playbook

Check the four things the author assumes are already true before any of the strategies will work.

Money is a byproduct of value exchange. You help people solve a problem and they pay you. Without content, an audience and a product, there's nothing to exchange.

1. You already create value-based content and have an audience. It doesn't need to be big.
2. You already have a product to sell.
3. You want to sell your own products and own your time, not build a freelance business.
4. You don't want sales calls or cold outreach. You want content that drives traffic to your product, and to sell organically. If you do want to reach out first, the outbound track is for you.

Open your product for a few days (5 to 7), let people buy, then close it for 2 to 3 months while you improve it. Then open it again.

People hate missing out. A limited window adds pressure in two forms: urgency (a reason to move now, like a discount or a limited-time offer) and scarcity (limited quantity, like a few spots). It also suits a first-time product: you get rounds of iteration, more consistent results and more testimonials, which help both the product and conversions.

1. Open the doors for 5 to 7 days.
2. Close for 2 to 3 months.
3. While closed, work closely with customers: improve the product, apply their feedback, iterate.
4. Open again, at the same price or higher.
5. After the second launch, decide: make it evergreen (always for sale), or close it again and repeat.

A free resource pulls people in, an email sequence builds trust, and an always-available product is waiting at the end.

Not everyone buys from a launch. Trust online is low. Free, unconditional value shows you're serious and good at what you do, and it grows your email list. The magic isn't the free resource itself. It's the 5 to 10 emails that follow, which give you chances to sell you wouldn't otherwise have.

1. A free resource to hook people: a lead magnet or a free masterclass.
2. An email sequence of 10, 20 or 30 days that starts automatically the moment someone signs up.
3. An evergreen product. If it isn't always available, the tripwire won't work.
4. Keep most emails purely about value. Pitch in the last 3 days.
5. Optional: add an automated exclusive offer for everyone who gets the lead magnet. The author's runs for 11 days, then disappears.
6. Promote the lead magnet everywhere and all the time: in your stories, under your posts, in your newsletters. People won't find it by magic.

A four-week campaign that educates your audience, builds leads and ends in one loud launch week.

Think of a launch like an elastic band: the longer and harder you pull, the bigger the snap. Four weeks gives you more marketing firepower. Its most underrated benefit: you can create customers by educating readers about their problem, your vision and your story until they want your product.

• Giveaway: a big influx of leads. The author gets 100 to 200 each time.
• Manual outreach: talk to past customers, leads and interested followers, and close them on a call or in DMs.
• Gradual price increase: start at 40% off and raise the price by 10% each week until you reach full price.
• Avoid offer fatigue: don't email daily for four weeks. Send 2 to 3 a week: a newsletter, a story email with a call to action at the end, and a reminder that prices rise tomorrow.

One list of every company that fits your ICP, plus the people you'd sell to there.

Every move starts from it, so the author says it's worth an afternoon.

1. Pull your last 40 or 50 closed-won deals and write down what they share: industry, headcount, country and who signed.
2. In your list-building tool, search for companies with those filters and save the result as your account list.
3. Search for people at those companies with the job titles you sell to. Keep each person's name, title and LinkedIn URL.

Get your name onto the pages AI answers are built from.

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found the ones with more web mentions showed up more in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews. Mentions scored 0.66 to 0.71 on a correlation scale, where 1 is a perfect match. Backlinks scored 0.19 to 0.24.

1. Write down 10 questions your buyers ask before they buy, like “best [your category] for [your buyer]”.
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT and in Google's AI Mode.
3. List every site the answers cite: review sites, Reddit threads, “best of” lists, news sites, LinkedIn posts.
4. Get onto those sites: ask happy customers for reviews (the author names G2), answer Reddit threads under your own name, pitch the people who write the lists, and post on LinkedIn.
5. Ask the same 10 questions again every month and note who gets named.

A “best X” shortlist page for your category, plus comparison pages.

Ahrefs looked at 750 prompts asking AI for recommendations and found “best X” lists made up 43.8% of the pages ChatGPT cited. The author's own “best GTM agency” page showed Frontal 1st in Google's AI answer 3 months after launch.

1. Pick the buyer question with the most buying intent.
2. Put the answer in the first lines: the shortlist, with 1 line on who each company is best for.
3. Rank every company on the same standards, and name them. The author's first standard is proof you can check: named clients and closed-won revenue.
4. Add an FAQ, a named author and schema markup (code that tells search engines what the page is about).
5. Then write comparison pages: you against each main competitor.

Watch your accounts for changes and write the same week one happens.

A funding round or a new hire changes what a company needs that month.

1. Load your account list into your list-building tool.
2. Turn on signal monitors for funding news, new hires in the roles you sell to, and job changes among people you already know (from their LinkedIn URLs).
3. Each new signal lands in your table with the account and the details.
4. Write to that account the same week.

Split the list into 3 tiers and give the best fits the most attention.

1. Tier 1: your best fits, including the dream accounts you'd love to land. They get email, LinkedIn and calls.
2. Tier 2: a good fit, grouped by industry, with messages written for each group.
3. Tier 3: everyone else who fits, the bulk of your list.
4. Run Tier 1 in a multichannel sequence tool. The author uses lemlist; LinkedIn and calls need its Multichannel plan, $109 a month, or $87 a month billed yearly.
5. Run Tiers 2 and 3 as email campaigns in a volume sending tool. The author uses Instantly.

Separate sending domains, proven to Gmail and Outlook, warmed up before launch.

Gmail stepped up enforcement in November 2025, with temporary and permanent rejections for mail to personal Gmail accounts that fails its sender rules.

1. Buy separate domains for cold email, like get[yourcompany].com. Never send cold email from your main domain.
2. Create 3 inboxes per domain (the author uses Google Workspace).
3. Add 3 DNS records to each domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
4. Connect every inbox to your warm-up tool and warm it up for at least 2 weeks.
5. Ramp slowly to 20 to 25 cold emails per inbox per day, and keep warm-up on after launch. (Instantly recommends 30 a day per inbox.)
6. At that pace, 500 emails a day takes about 20 inboxes on 7 domains.

Find and verify each email and mobile, asking providers one at a time until one returns a valid result.

Every bounce hurts the domain it's sent from.

1. In your enrichment tool, add a work-email lookup.
2. Put your first provider first, then a backup. The author uses Prospeo, then LeadMagic.
3. Map each person's full name and company domain.
4. Add a mobile lookup the same way, from each person's LinkedIn URL.
5. Send only to emails that come back valid, so bounces stay under 2%.

Turn the questions buyers ask on calls into posts.

Buyers ask the same questions on every call. The author says those posts book them 50+ meetings a month.

1. Collect last month's sales-call transcripts from your call recorder.
2. Give them to an AI assistant with the prompt below. The author uses Claude.
3. Turn the top 5 questions into 5 posts, written in your own voice, with 1 example from your work in each.
4. Post every week. Reply to every comment.

People at your target accounts who like or comment on your posts go into outbound.

They already know your name, so they're warm.

1. Every week, pull the people who liked or commented on your posts. The author uses HarvestAPI's LinkedIn Post Reactions and Post Comments scrapers on Apify: no LinkedIn login, $2 per 1,000 results on Apify's free plan.
2. Check each person's company against your account list.
3. Keep the matches and run them through Move 6.
4. Add them to a sequence that opens on the topic of the post they engaged with.

Build the post so a stranger has something concrete to add.

People quote when a post backs something they already believed, or when they know a detail the author missed. A bare “Excited to announce our new platform” leaves them nothing to say.

• Show the before and after. The author's example: a messy inventory spreadsheet becoming a working app — what you started with, what the tool produced, and what you had to fix yourself.
• That gives an operator their own problem to recognise, a developer something to examine, and someone else a reason to try it on a different spreadsheet.
• Before you publish, ask what a person who doesn't know you could add. If you can't answer, make the post more specific.

Plan several quote angles so each share has its own reason to be read.

“Insane launch” only says you're impressed. It doesn't tell a reader what to notice.

Angles the author names

• The founder's story: why they built it, a problem they lived, or an unusual path.
• The product's implications: which part of someone's work could change, who benefits, why one feature matters more than it looks.
• A video reaction: walk the demo on camera, pause at the interesting parts, say what surprised you and where you're sceptical.
• A controversial take: one implication you're willing to defend, with enough evidence that people can challenge you.
• Competing interests: the same product can save one person money and threaten another's business, or give a founder independence while worrying the team that maintains the result. Explore that tension honestly so both sides have a reason to respond.

Match each angle to people who can develop it from experience.

Someone who lives the problem daily will notice what a general tech account misses. A specialist can say what changes in their field. A customer can show results.

• Read their posts and replies before you reach out. Who pays attention to them? What questions come up? Would those people have a reason to try your product? A large following helps only if you can explain why that audience would care.
• Give creators enough access to form an opinion. A short brief works:
  • Here's what the product does.
  • Here's what you can test yourself.
  • This is the part I think your audience would care about.
  • Here's the evidence behind the claim.
  • What's your take after trying it?
• Get on a call if they need help understanding it. Make paid partnerships clear. Let them write the angle in their own words.
• Leave room for what you hadn't considered. Same-paragraph quotes kill the benefit.

When posts go live, divide the conversations: your replies, quote posts, and comments under creators' posts. Agree who handles product questions and who follows up on business.

The author's three jobs

1. Answer questions and notice who's interested. A potential customer might ask about integrations under a creator's post. Someone from a fund might ask about the market. An established founder might share a use case you hadn't considered. Answer where they commented. If there's a clear reason to continue privately, reach out with something relevant to what they said — after you check their profile. A like alone doesn't tell you what someone wants.
2. Collect what you can use later. Keep a shared document of recurring questions, objections, product issues, and unexpected use cases, with links and the answers you gave. Repeated questions become FAQ. A confusing feature may need a walkthrough. Product feedback should reach someone who can act. When you fix something or ship a requested improvement, go back and tell the person who raised it.
3. Share the strongest contributions. Look for people testing the product, posting results, or explaining it from an angle you missed. Ask permission, credit them, and feature the work. A customer demo can become your next post. A thoughtful objection might deserve a video response. That gives people a reason to revisit after they've already seen the announcement.

After the first wave, review which posts and angles brought the people you actually wanted.

• Look past views. Which conversations led to product trials, relevant DMs, or sales calls? Ask prospects where they found you when the source isn't clear. Keep track of what you can verify.
• If a creator brought useful conversations, book a follow-up in the next week or two with something new: a deeper walkthrough, a customer use case, or an update that answers questions from their first post.
• Feed the same feedback into your own content. If one use case keeps coming up with buyers, give it more space in the next demo and on the landing page.

The author has seen the same list and copy reply at 1% for one company and 8% for another. The 8% one had content and ads in front of the account first.

LinkedIn Campaign Manager

1. Export your account list as a CSV with each company's name and website.
2. Upload it as a company list. It needs at least 300 companies and can take up to 48 hours to match.
3. Target the job titles you sell to. LinkedIn needs at least 300 matched people to run an audience.
4. Set a budget. LinkedIn's minimum is $10 a day.
5. Start the ads before the first email goes out.

LinkedIn calls them Thought Leader Ads: you sponsor your own post and target it like any other ad.

1. Pick posts that already did well with no ad spend.
2. Create a Thought Leader Ad and approve the request.
3. Point it at the same company list as Move 9.
4. Send the people who engage into Move 8.

1. Pick 1 CRM. The author names HubSpot or Salesforce.
2. Merge duplicate companies and contacts.
3. Add the fields below, so every channel writes to the same place.
4. Connect your sending tools and ad accounts to the CRM, so replies, meetings and ad engagement land on the right record.
5. Mark every deal closed-won the day it's signed.

Omniscient Digital found 189 leads who wrote that an AI tool sent them, but HubSpot's first-touch tracking credited only 28 to AI. The other 161 showed up as organic search, direct visits and referrals. So track 2 sources for every deal: what your software logged first, and what the buyer told you.

1. Pick 1 number for every channel: qualified pipeline created, in dollars.
2. Tag every deal with its source channel from both fields.
3. Every month, put the channels side by side on pipeline created and closed-won revenue.
4. Move budget toward the channels that create the most pipeline per dollar.