Acquire and sell
How a Startup wins its first outside paid Order by hand, then its next ten through Plays, with spend that waits for payback.
Demand brings a person or an Agent to a Startup, and selling helps them accept the right Offer. The first outside paid Order comes by hand, and the next ten come through Plays.
Who is who
Each step toward a sale has its own Noun, and the difference decides what the Startup may do next.
| Noun | Means |
|---|---|
| Visitor | Reached the Site or an Interface |
| Prospect | Found by research, with no hand raised |
| Lead | Raised a hand: asked, signed up, or replied |
| Contact | A person the Startup talks with |
| Customer | Accepted an Offer, at any price |
A researched list of studio owners holds Prospects, not Leads. A Lead asked to hear back; a Prospect did not, so every message to one honors each Suppression and Consent rule.
The first ten by hand
The first Customers come from people the Founder can reach by name. The Founder lists 10 to 30 of them: past colleagues, communities they belong to, and ICP members who already gave Evidence.
Each gets one personal message with a stated Price. A human founder sends it, or an Agent sends it as that founder under a Mandate scoped by Channel, volume and topic. Payment asks counts the asks, and every no is recorded as Evidence with its reason.
Take a Startup selling a bookings app to independent yoga studios, whose founder taught at four studios and knows thirty owners. Ten asks at $49 a month bring three yeses, two not-yets and five noes. Four of the noes give one reason: they already pay for a class-pass app.
Setup is done by hand as well. A step done by hand three times becomes an Issue for the Product Team, and that is how a hand-run sale turns into Software.
Seed, then compound
A new Startup starts with a $0 demand budget. Seed Plays reach first buyers within days: Launch sites, Directory listings, Agent registries, and Cold email to a researched list.
Compounding Plays such as Answer engine optimization and Programmatic SEO take months to start, then keep paying. A Startup seeds until a compounding engine carries it.
The Marketing Lead runs one lead Play at a time until it works or fails by its own Metric, then adds the next. The yoga Startup leads with Directory listings in the categories studio owners search, because its buyers already shop there.
Paid demand waits for payback
Paid demand runs when the first transaction pays for acquiring the Customer. A $60 acquisition cost against a $49 first month fails that test; against a $490 annual plan it passes.
A probe of $100 to $1,000 is the exception. With no audience, it is the fastest way to learn which message converts, and it counts as exploration, not acquisition. A founder who funds a larger demand budget records it as a Decision with a target and a stop rule.
Ad spend and outbound campaigns are one-way decisions. Each waits a delay window before it runs, anyone watching can pause, redirect or cancel it, and on timeout it proceeds within its Limit.
Self-serve, assisted, and Agents
Most Offers sell with no conversation: a Customer reads the Offer, pays, and starts. A studio chain asking for twelve locations on one invoice reaches Answer inbound, which replies at once and opens a Deal.
Send a quote prices the Quote from the list Price inside the discount Limit. A larger concession creates an Approval, never a promise delivery cannot keep.
Many buyers are Agents acting for a Person or a Company. They read the Offer through agents.json and the API, take a key, and pay under their principal's Mandate. Claims an Agent can check by machine win; adjectives do not.
The demand checks
Repeatable reads this work through two checks. Ten or more outside Customers who arrived through Plays pay in the trailing 30 days. The lead Play repays its fully loaded acquisition cost within one month.
Play-sourced Customers never counts the founder's network, which is why the first ten do not pass the check alone. Free Plays are not free either: Agent hours, shared accounts and published content all post Cost, so Acquisition payback never reads zero.
Next
Deliver and accept turns the accepted Offer into the result the Customer paid for.