How we closed a $60k deal in a weekend

Author

Jesse Pujji
July 05, 2024

Hi, it’s Andrew (Bootstrapped Giants’ CEO) stepping in for Jesse to share a quick behind-the-scenes story about how we closed a recent sale.

On Friday, June 14 a sponsor told me he was ready to sign a $15k ad deal that we needed to close on Monday.

I went home proud. It was going to be the first deal I closed since becoming CEO.

Meanwhile, a competing company’s founder emailed to say he wanted to sponsor.

I told them we couldn’t do it. We were going to work with a competitor.

He didn’t build a fast-growing company by backing off after getting a little resistance. This was his response:

The team and I started discussing it in Slack and text.

  • Was it too late to switch sponsors? Can we do this deal in a weekend?

  • How does this impact the upcoming launch we’ve been working on?

  • Do we have space on the calendar for the number of ads they want?

  • Can we run the kind of campaign they’re describing?

  • Etc.

The thing is, because the sponsor and I were talking via email and the team was texting, it was hard to keep everyone updated on my conversation with the sponsor.

Then I had a realization! We could use Superhuman’s new (private) Team Comments! (Jesse got us early access because Superhuman is a sponsor.)

This is what it looks like:

Our team was able to chat PRIVATELY under the sponsor’s email. And every time the sponsor updated us by email, our whole team saw the new email.

It’s an absolutely game-changer. By Monday, we worked out the details we needed and we had a deal.

We closed $60,000 in sales with no drama or miscommunication.

Since then, we’ve used the private chat feature of Superhuman for many other purposes. Including:

  • Private collaboration on email without risking that someone on the team might hit “reply all” and leak our conversation to everyone.

  • Helping someone on the team formulate a response to a tough questions.

  • Discussing emails from potential hires, to give each other context.

  • Asking for context about at mutual introduction. (Jesse is constantly including me on email thread and I sometimes have to ask Nak for context.)

  • I'm just giving you a taste of the features, but the list goes on.

Both Jesse and I have been die hard users of Superhuman for YEARS before they sponsored this newsletter.

This is one of many features we love, including:

  1. Ask AI - We can “ask our inbox” questions like, “What’s the CEO community I was invited to?” or “Who told me about ALE, the company that got me to Antarctica?”

  2. Offline Email - My flight might not have connectivity, but I always have my email with me.

  3. Fast responses - Because it’s trained on the bajillion emails I sent over the years, Superhuman writes responses that are so similar to my voice that even my wife can’t tell I use it.

  4. Speed - Everything is super fast.

—Andrew