30 Messages, 2 Meetings, 1 Sale: What I Learned About Selling My Expertise
In the last post, I shared how I ended up selling my expertise instead of building a SaaS product right away. I wanted to learn about real industry problems, test my value, and build sales and marketing skills I knew I’d need eventually.
What I didn’t expect was how uncomfortable the actual sales process would be.
Once I decided to focus on smartphone refurbishment operations, the first question was: what exactly am I selling?
Consulting is a broad word. I needed to make it concrete. I started with a few ideas—audits, process reviews, margin analysis—but I knew I had to test them with real people.
I started reaching out to companies before my offer was fully baked. That turned out to be a good decision. I didn’t wait for perfection—I just got moving. The market shaped the offer faster than I could have on my own.
I began with Finnish refurbishers because they were easier to find and contact. I used LinkedIn Search and Sales Navigator to find companies and decision-makers. I scraped refurbed.com to collect leads from sellers listed there. Other similar sites had bots blocked. The data was not very useful in the end because it did not tell me the size of the companies and what they were refurbishing. But combining it with I also used Apollo.io (free version) to identify international companies in the refurbishment space. Apollo was super easy to start using and free, which made it an ideal choice. The issue with many other European business databases was that they were too hard to buy or access. That might even be a niche worth exploring in itself.
To understand the companies better, I used ChatGPT and LinkedIn data to analyze each one. ChatGPT was most helpful in translating the Linkedin information and finding public information about the companies. Everything else was unreliable and had to be checked. In the end I don’t know how much it helped.
Despite all this effort, the results were underwhelming. Out of around 30 contacts, I got two meetings and made one sale. Contacting people manually through LinkedIn took a huge amount of time and quickly started to feel tiresome. I thought about automating the outreach completely, but that felt unethical—like spamming people I wanted to build trust with.
A bigger problem surfaced quickly: I ran out of companies that fit my ideal customer profile. There just aren’t that many independent refurbishers in Europe that are big enough to hire external consultants. Even worse, the margins in refurbishment are thin. After talking to the CEOs of Fixably and Ringy Hub, it became clear that many refurbishers might not have problems that are painful—or profitable—enough to pay someone else to solve.
That left me with a new question: if refurbishment isn't the right industry, where else could this expertise apply?
The Fixably CEO suggested I explore more profitable industries with similar operational challenges. One example was car repairs, but I realized my background isn’t in repairs—it's in manufacturing operations. That’s a subtle but important distinction. I'm good at streamlining throughput, reducing bottlenecks, and aligning teams and tools—not diagnosing broken things.
And that might actually open up more opportunities. There are many industries—especially those with light manufacturing or assembly operations—that suffer from the same kinds of inefficiencies I worked on at Swappie.
So the current challenge is no longer just selling my expertise. It’s figuring out where that expertise is most valuable—and who feels the pain enough to pay to fix it.
