Spending Money Is How You Avoid Selling

The Man Who Invested 00K to Avoid Making a Sale

I was on a coaching call recently with a guy who'd done everything right - on paper.

He'd read the books, joined the masterminds, and spent money on infrastructure. Over 100 domains at one point, 200 sending accounts, running the full cold email playbook - he'd hired the VAs and built all of it out. He'd even had a business doing $40,000 a month in revenue. And then he'd quit.

By the time he got on the call with me, he was $100,000 in debt, working a $60,000 biz dev job to keep the lights on, driving rideshare on the side to cover two rents, and pitching me on two joint venture deals - a dev shop and a golf business mastermind - that he'd never sold a single client for.

The first thing I told him: your problem is spending instead of selling.

And if you've ever found yourself deep in tool research when you should be making calls, you probably do too.

The Fibonacci Pattern

I brought up Fibonacci sequences early in the call to talk about the life pattern. Same mistake, slightly different clothes. The only way to break the pattern is to identify it first.

So I walked through his with him.

He'd built a cold email agency to $40K a month, then quit. Went to work building someone else's business instead of his own - spent his own money helping a mastermind founder grow his Instagram and channels, in exchange for a JV deal. Then quit that. He spent five years and $100K across masterminds, ads, and random channels trying to build something great before shutting it all down and taking a corporate job. Now he was back, ready to spend more on infrastructure and tools and programs before making a single sale.

He was setting up to do it again.

And I had to say it out loud: you have a quitting problem. It wasn't a strategy problem or a market problem. You commit fully right up until the moment you don't, and then you rationalize the exit. You shut down a $40K/month business. If I had asked you a year before you shut it down, "are you still working on this in twelve months?" - you would've said absolutely, hell yes. And yet you quit anyway.

If you don't see the pattern, you can't break it. He was already planning to invest in infrastructure before making a single sale.

What Spending Money Does

When he told me he was ready to invest in cold email infrastructure and set up everything properly before he started selling, I recognized it immediately. I've done it myself.

Spending money on your business feels like work. It is work. You're making decisions, building something, investing in your future. The receipt hits your inbox and you feel like you've made progress.

But for a lot of founders - especially ones who've been burned before, who know what it feels like to pitch someone and get rejected, who've had clients churn and felt like failures - spending money has a second function. It keeps the scary thing at arm's length.

What's scary is walking up to another human being, looking them in the eye, and saying: here's what I do, do you want it?

And having them say no.

Or worse, having them say yes and then having to deliver.

Infrastructure doesn't say no. Tools don't judge you. Masterminds tell you you're on the right track and sell you the next module. Every dollar you spend is another day you don't have to face the market directly.

This guy had spent $100,000 doing exactly that. And now he was ready to spend more.

The Offer Problem Is Usually a Feedback Problem

He came to the call wanting help with two JV offers. One was a software development agency his friend runs in Michigan. The other was a golf club another friend was building for business owners who play, with networking and instruction, at $5K a year.

For the dev shop, he'd tried cold email for about two months. Thirty domains, sixty sending accounts. Zero clients closed.

When someone tells me they've been running cold email for two months with no results, the instinct is to diagnose the copy or the infrastructure or the targeting. Those things affect results. But the first question I asked was different: when your old $40K/month agency was working, was it obvious early that it was working, or was it a long slog before it clicked?

He said it was working from the start. He'd get on the phone with someone and close them. Retention was the problem, not acquisition.

That told me the offer had worked before.

If a working offer produces results even with mediocre execution, and an offer produces nothing even with decent execution - the offer isn't working. They blame the channel, the tools, or themselves. So they go spend money on a better system. What they should do is go talk to 20 people.

Twenty People, No Money, No Excuses

This is the prescription I gave him, and it's the one I'd give almost any founder who's about to spend money validating something they haven't sold yet:

Before you spend another dollar, go talk to 20 people about your offer. In person. Show up with nothing but your pitch.

You have a phone. You can find businesses for free on Google Maps. For the golf mastermind, go to a golf course and walk up to people on the driving range. Any street with small businesses works for the dev shop - walk in and ask if the owner's in. Pitch them.

Twenty conversations will tell you what you need to know.

One in-person conversation gives you as much feedback as roughly 20,000 cold emails.

When someone tells you "that's not really what I'm looking for" to your face, you learn something specific. When 10,000 people ignore your email, all you know is that something's off - could be the subject line, could be the offer, could be the targeting, could be deliverability. You have no idea.

In person, the feedback is immediate and direct. You pitch the golf mastermind and the prospect's eyes light up at "get better at golf" and go flat the moment you say "and it's also a business networking community" - that's signal. That's an insight that would take months to extract from a cold email A/B test.

When I was building x27, I closed our first $600,000 in sales personally, working out of my mom's basement without a sales team, a SaaS platform, or automated outreach at scale. Cold email works at scale because it's replicating something that already works in real life. But if you're trying to use cold email to validate something you've never successfully sold to a human being in person - you're doing it backwards.

What I Heard When He Pitched the Golf Offer

He described the golf mastermind to me during the call, and I told him what I thought of it. This is useful because it shows exactly what happens when you haven't done the 20-person process yet.

The offer was for golfers who want to improve and make money online, business owners who want to connect with other golf-playing business owners, and eventually - a country club property.

When he said "teach me how to get better at golf," I was in. Specific, clear value prop. I know what I'm getting and I know whether I want it.

When he added "and it's also a business mastermind and networking community" - I was out. When both things are in the pitch, I don't know what I'm buying. Is it golf? Is it business? Who is this really for?

He probably thinks both angles are a feature - more value for the customer. But in sales, adding things to an offer usually makes it harder to sell, not easier. The prospect can't hold it in their head. They can't explain it to their spouse. The specific itch it scratches never becomes clear.

Now - I don't know for certain whether the golf instruction angle is the right one or the business mastermind angle is the right one. Neither does he. The only way to find out is to pitch it 20 times and see which version makes people reach for their wallet. Maybe ten golfers love the instruction and couldn't care less about the mastermind. Ten business owners might love the networking angle and see the golf as just a backdrop. Maybe the whole thing needs a rethink. You cannot answer this with a spreadsheet. You can only answer it by having the conversations.

Why JV Deals Are Usually Another Way to Avoid the Hard Part

I want to address JV deals specifically, because this guy was running two of them and planning more.

JV deals feel like smart risk reduction. In a JV deal, you generate leads and take a cut while your partner handles the product and fulfillment. A 50/50 revenue share sounds great on paper. But here's the problem: you still have to sell it. And if you don't know how to sell it, you're going to spend a lot of time and money building infrastructure for an offer you can't close.

I pushed him on this. He'd made zero sales for either JV partner. Two months of cold email for the dev shop - nothing. His explanation was bad implementation - the emails weren't tailored to specific industries or case studies, and he was sending too broadly. Maybe. But when I looked at the dev shop's work - small business clients, construction companies, telehealth clinics - the case studies checked out. Had he ever successfully sold a development project in his life?

No.

Custom software development is a hard sell cold because you need a very specific combination: someone who has an idea for an app, has the budget to build it, is ready to start now, and trusts an agency they've never met. That's a hard set of conditions to satisfy over cold outreach.

Compare that to something like local SEO - a productized offer where you walk into any restaurant or dental office and say "I'll get you to number one on Google for your main keyword, which drives more customers to your door." Specific outcome, something local businesses want, something you can pitch on foot in any city without a single tool.

Business is not charity. I told him that directly. You don't owe it to your friends to build their businesses at the expense of your own financial stability. When you're $100K in debt with two rents and driving rideshare on the side - pick the offer with the highest probability of getting you paid in the next 30 days.

The Right Order of Operations

Since we're in it - here's exactly what I told him to do. This is the right sequence for anyone in a similar position:

First: Pick one offer. One, not two or three. The one that gives you the best shot at closing a sale in the next week or two. For him, that was the golf mastermind - newer, more testable in person, and there's a free place to find your exact prospect (a golf course).

Second: Build a list of 100 relevant people - for free. Early validation doesn't require a B2B lead database, Apollo, or any tool. Google Maps exists. LinkedIn exists. You can find 100 relevant people without spending a dollar. Tools are for scaling what's already proven - not for discovering whether your offer works in the first place.

Third: Contact each of them in the most direct, non-scalable way possible - call them or walk into their office. Do the thing that doesn't scale, because right now, scale is the enemy of learning. Twenty conversations give you enough signal before you invest in the machinery to have 10,000.

Fourth: Pitch them, get feedback, and adjust the pitch - not the offer. In early validation, if you're not closing, change how you're explaining the offer before you change the offer itself. Twenty conversations will tell you whether it's a pitch problem or a product problem. Two hundred cold emails won't.

Fifth: Infrastructure comes after you've made a sale or two. Cold email works - I've sent millions of them, and I wrote a whole book about the mechanics if you want the foundation: grab the Cold Email Manifesto. Custom SMTP infrastructure is the right call for serious cold outreach. Good sending tools make a difference. But none of that counts until you have something you know you can close.

The Trap Has a Name

The trap is called "preparation." It feels virtuous, looks like diligence, and disguises itself as investment.

I've done this. Clients fall into it too. You know something needs to change and you're not sure exactly what, so you do the thing that gives you the most sense of control - you spend. You buy the tool that will solve the problem, join the program that will teach you what you're missing, and hand off the thing you haven't figured out how to do yourself.

Masterminds can be worth every dollar. Infrastructure counts. Good tools are legitimate force multipliers - when you're ready to use them, a solid lead sourcing setup and a verified contact list will change what you can do in a week. But only if you have a working offer underneath them.

If you don't, spending money is just buying yourself another few weeks before you have to face the market. The market doesn't care about your infrastructure. It doesn't care about your SOP documents or your email warm-up sequences or your Slack workspace. The market only cares about one thing: do you have something I want, and can I trust you to deliver it?

The only way to answer those questions is to go ask some people. For free. Right now. Before you spend another dollar.

I told him: it's 12:36 on a Tuesday afternoon. You have three hours left in the workday. You could go have five conversations today. Will you?

And I'm asking you the same question.

What Happens After the Twenty-Person Gauntlet

If you do this and you close one or two people - you have a working offer. Now you can build the machine. Set up email infrastructure properly, build your lead list with solid tools, write sequences that convert. Check out the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint for the full build-out. Now all of that investment has a working offer underneath it.

If you do this and you close nobody - now you know something. The offer needs work. The pitch needs work. Either way, you haven't spent $5,000 on infrastructure to discover what twenty conversations would have told you for free.

And if you do this and you find you can't bring yourself to do it - if you keep finding reasons to set up just one more thing before you start having conversations - then you have a different problem. Be honest with yourself about what that problem is.

Whoever someday runs a $100K/month business is the same person who's been spending money instead of selling - just making different choices. An uncomfortable conversation is available to you right now, today - it costs nothing and requires no tools.

Twenty people. Go do it before you spend another dollar.