About this article
Episode 1 of coiai's podcast, "coiai's Strategy Meeting."
This first episode is about **"how a startup that's struggling with sales takes its very first step forward."**
*This is a transcript based on the audio content, lightly edited for readability.
Listen here
Topics in this episode
- Running the company with three people, none of whom has a sales background
- Mostly living off work from personal connections; selling their own product is tough
- Starting to look into outsourced sales agencies (feeling out the budget too)
- Lead-generation services: everything from expensive plans to low monthly fees
- Sending proposals and getting no reply / how much speed matters
- Sales they can run themselves (DMs, ads, press releases, content)
- Wanting to turn the podcast into "a mechanism for getting our name out there"
Full transcript
Opening
coiai:
Starting with this episode, we're a venture company that's honestly struggling quite a bit with sales, and we wanted to start a podcast around that very topic. Let's get into it. Yeah!
Introductions
coiai:
A quick rundown of my background — I originally worked at a venture company, then moved into apparel, and after that started this company… that's roughly the arc.
Hashimoto, what about you?
Hashimoto:
I used to be at a certain major company, and after various things happened, I ended up joining coiai. My background is pretty different from Hattori's, but I think there's actually a lot of overlap in how we think.
coiai:
Right now it's me, Hattori, and someone named Takemura running the company as co-founders, with Hashimoto joining as an engineer. So it's the three of us.
Struggling with sales (where we stand, and the challenge)
coiai:
None of the three of us comes from a sales background, so we've been struggling with what to do about it — it's genuinely tough.
Right now, most of our work comes from personal connections. We're also developing our own in-house service, but selling that has been really hard too…
coiai:
We're currently researching outsourced sales agencies and having meetings with a few. We've never hired an outsourced sales team before, so we're starting to get a feel for what that actually looks like.
We don't even really know what a reasonable budget looks like yet, so we're just going in and consulting with people at this stage.
coiai:
Since it's just engineers here, we don't have anyone in sales, so we kind of have no choice but to lean on an outsourced sales team.
We've also tried putting out press releases, but if you actually want that to translate directly into work, it feels like we need to go a step further with more direct sales effort.
Lead-generation services (price gaps, and it's a speed game)
coiai:
We're using a lead-generation service where you land work through it — some plans run around 2 million yen a year, while others are as cheap as 16,000 yen a month.
We're using the 16,000-yen-a-month one, but it's not like we're landing work consistently every month…
coiai:
A lot of the time we send a proposal and just never hear back — I think clients are comparing several options at once, and by the time we submit, they've often already finished comparing.
It also feels like applying is first-come-first-served, so speed really does matter.
coiai:
I keep going back and forth on whether we should send a quote the moment we get an inquiry, or whether asking for a first round of hearing/discovery first is what's actually causing the silence.
Sales we can run ourselves (DMs, ads, content)
coiai:
On the flip side, I've been thinking about what we could do ourselves — maybe having Hashimoto send direct outreach messages from our official Instagram account.
But it's not just about sending messages — you also need to pick the right targets, and that part is genuinely hard. We could run ads too, but we haven't gotten there yet.
coiai:
And then there's this podcast — it's basically our own content, and we barely have any other outlet for putting ourselves out there, so we figured we'd give this a shot.
The plan is to keep doing it weekly.
Ending (the show's name is still homework)
coiai:
We still haven't decided on a title for this podcast. Something easy to understand would be nice.
That's homework for next time. Comments and likes are welcome!
coiai:
All right, see you. Thanks for listening.
Next time (tentative)
Next time, we'll get a bit more concrete in our strategy meeting — covering things like how to choose an outsourced sales agency, how to run early outbound (DM) efforts, and whether quotes should be sent out quickly.