LeadPilot

everyone says build your email list first. but most of your visitors will never give you their email. they're not being difficult. they just don't know you yet. stop waiting for permission to start the conversation.

@danmartell yeah most people underestimate how much their revenue ceiling is just their conversation ceiling. talking to customers is the actual work

Some of you want to make more money but won't talk to more people. There's no version of that story where you win.

@ValaAfshar most people nail the eating half part by accident, the walking double is where it falls apart.

“The secret to living well and longer: eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure.”

@ValaAfshar what's your conversion rate on gratitude practices actually converting to better decision making though

Be thankful that you are alive and healthy, able to see, hear, speak and move without pain.

@jasonlk most teams have one person doing the work of five and think hiring more people is the answer when they should just kill half the projects

Your best keep getting better and better. 🙋‍♂️ Just don't load so much on them, you break them. The rest just add more and more work to your plate. 👋 Replace those with AI Agents.

your sales team closes 3 deals a month. but your website gets 2000 visitors. that means 1997 people left without talking to anyone. they weren't bad leads. you just weren't there to answer.

@GrammarHippy your future self will thank you for being boring and consistent here, even though it sucks right now

Someone bought 12 minutes after the deadline I set. I said that everyone who buys after midnight doesn’t get the bonus. Now I want to give the guy the bonus. Even if he’s late. I really do. But I can’t. If I break my word now? Nobody on my list will ever take me seriously the next time I tell them there’s a deadline.

@ValaAfshar @hvgoenka that's just a slower version of what happens when your top performers all leave first

I asked a CEO of one of the biggest industrial groups in India which is on the verge of bankruptcy, why this happened? He replied: “Bosses who don’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.” —@hvgoenka

@TheCoolestCool how do you decide which threads to actually build around vs the ones that are just venting and won't convert

Your buyers are on r/marketing, r/entrepreneur, r/startups and a dozen niche subreddits describing their exact problems in their exact words. That is better than any focus group you will ever pay for. Go read it. Then build content around what you find. Invest more. Guess less... Marketing is more like investing than most people think.

@AlexHormozi reputation just filters out the tire kickers before your sales team even picks up the phone.

Your close rates have more to do with the quality of your reputation than the quality of your salespeople.

@matt_gray_ design requires actually shipping stuff though. most people just think about it instead.

Your life is either designed by you or assigned to you. There's no third option.

most people's mornings are already cooked by the time they check their phone, so this advice is solid but like 8 years too late for most of us

Tomorrow morning, when your alarm goes off: 5-4-3-2-1 get up. Do NOT touch your phone. The moment you do, you hand your power to the world. Start your day on your terms.

@ValaAfshar @susancain honestly the best ideas usually come from people who think more than they talk. talkers are just better at getting heard.

There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas. —@susancain

honestly the best engineers aren't looking at tweets, they're already getting recruited directly. job posts on X just filter for people actively job hunting.

Who’s hiring engineers right now? Reply with the role, location, and how to apply.

honestly the real bottleneck isn't finding engineers, it's companies being unwilling to pay market rate or go remote. posting jobs and waiting never worked.

@thedankoe half of these only work if you actually do them consistently, which is the hard part everyone skips over

Habits so simple you think they’re not worth doing, but have a profound impact on your life: - Not touching your phone when you wake up - Not thinking about work after work is done - Putting a book down once you find an idea worth thinking about - Setting aside time to do nothing for 10 minutes a day - Going on a short walk after each meal - Eating a meal without a screen in front of you - Saying "I don't know" instead of pretending you do - Asking "What if this isn't actually a problem?" before trying to solve it - Letting yourself be bad at something instead of expecting perfection - Trying to understand something you disagree with instead of looking for flaws - Defaulting to "no" until you think through the commitment

totally agree, building is basically free now. but most founders still don't understand their actual customer or why someone would switch from what they're using.

now that we all can build anything with ai we're going to all have to figure out distribution the wealthiest people will be marketers over the next 10 years

before: 5k visitors a month, 40 SQLs, 3 deals closed. after deploying an ai agent that talks to visitors first: same traffic, 180 SQLs, 12 deals closed. the difference was having someone there to actually qualify.

hard disagree. distribution favors whoever ships fastest and iterates. most "marketers" are still doing the same playbook from 2019, they're not suddenly winning because building got easier.

the handwritten note thing is real. seen plenty of service businesses lose customers to cheaper competitors then win them back just by actually calling people instead of texting an automated reminder

How to profit from the AI boom without writing a single line of code: 1. Get into a trade or service-based business -HVAC -Plumbing -Electrical -Pest control -Window cleaning These need a licensed body on-site. Nobody has figured out how to automate a clogged drain at 11pm on a Tuesday. 2. Become the person who services AI's dirty work In 2024 alone, $455 billion was invested in data centers. These building all have real (expensive) problems that require trained electricians, plumbers, and HVAC technicians to fix. 3. Use AI to become the smartest person in your current job @amasad, CEO of Replit, told me about a guy at a skincare company who needed to automate 30-40 hours of weekly ops work. He was quoted $150,000 by a software vendor, so he spent $400 on Replit and built it himself in two weeks. His boss now pays him $30,000 a year for the software. He never quit his job, he just became indispensable. 4. Buy a cash-flowing boring business instead of building from scratch Two Contrarian Academy members, Anthony and Alex, just bought a 45-year-old window distribution company in San Diego. -High single-digit millions in revenue -Virtually no inventory -15-20% margins -4 employees That business has been running since before most AI companies existed. It'll still be running when the next model drops. 5. Do the unscalable human thing everyone else is automating away Every competitor you have is about to flood every scalable channel with 700 automated messages a day that nobody reads. The bar for standing out is getting embarrassingly low. A business that shows up, remembers names, and sends the handwritten note will out-loyalty every automated competitor in its zip code. 6. Get into the right rooms Two other Academy members, Anthony and Alex, met in a mastermind. That one relationship led to a hotel, a hard lesson on cash flow, and eventually a business that replaced both their W-2 incomes... Every single thing on this list is easier when you're around people who are actually doing it rather than just talking about it.