Claude and Gemini thought it would be a disaster for me to make a post like this. That’s why I’m doing it. AI gives terrible advice that turns you into a generic business that everyone ignores. Oh and I’m writing this all by hand. I’m probably going to scrap any AI generated content on my website and rewrite it all by hand too. When everyone is creating monotone AI generated content, no one wins (except the ones who write real authentic content).
It’s probably no great big secret that before I started Lendnet.io, I used to run an online course for Tinder (I even had it featured on my LinkedIn for 5+ years). And before that I used to be heavy into cold approach pick-up. I was so immersed in it while in college that all I did was eat, sleep, and approach girls on campus.
Here are 3 key major lessons that I learned from 3 years of cold approach on OSU campus:
Lesson 1: Cold Outbound Sales and Cold Approach Dating are identical. A lot of guys in sales know this, and treat dating like sales. That’s why some of the most successful men in the dating game are usually sales guys.
Lesson 2: Outbound sales and cold approach both have a low return on investment of time. Yes, you hustle hard to get their interest by approaching/calling, building a pipeline of numbers/contacts, but at the end of the day, conversion rates are usually pretty low. Out of 100 girls whose numbers I got, I’d say I probably met up with 9 to 10 girls, after all flakes were accounted for. And the same rings true for Cold Calling or any Outreach based method of acquisition in MCA, or business in general.
Lesson 3: Cold approach / Cold calling / Cold email / Any outreach based method of acquisition immediately frames the receiver as the prize (because you had to go out of your way to approach them). They feel like they are a prize because they were approached by you, so they will act accordingly. They will flake, behave poorly, or lead you on and waste your time, or even worse in some cases.
Don’t worry. At the end of this post, you’ll know the correct way to approach customer/client acquisition. I won’t leave you hanging. This is all leading to something. But let’s have fun along the way…
Here are real audio clips of me doing cold approach on campus:
Okay, okay… so you’re probably wondering: Sean, those interactions went great. You must have dated every one of them!
Wrong. Haha. Dating is the same as sales. Your initial interaction with them might go great, but after time passes, they may grow lukewarm, or cold. So you have to constantly keep them warm through texting them in a certain way that demonstrates high value (keeping texts short, not double texting, confirming the date on the day of to ensure she doesn’t flake, etc.)
Does that sound familiar?
Yep… In the business world, this is called nurturing your leads with email campaigns so that they don’t grow cold and lose interest.
And just like in business, only a certain small percentage of my leads “closed” in the cold approach game. (Take a wild guess what I mean by “closed” haha)
My experience cold approaching women taught me that the outbound approach is a seriously inefficient use of time, while an inbound approach is ideal. You don’t make the effort to reach out to potential clients, they reach out to you. You focus only on creating pipelines that deliver leads into your calendar for you to close. If they flake, no problem, they invested all the time and effort into applying to meet you. Make the client invest the effort, don’t chase them. Focus instead on cultivating a presence that attracts them to your offering through direct response marketing and other such efforts.
What I used to do was:
- Approach girls with body language that showed casual interest (over the shoulder) slowing down while walking toward them
- If they stopped, I engaged further verbally
- I told them I had to go soon (my time is valuable = high value signal)
- Then I would try to demonstrate interest saying I think they’re cute, we should grab coffee sometime.
- And finally, I’d ask for the number.
I was getting anywhere from 7 numbers a day to 15 numbers a day on some days, since all I was doing was just approaching girls 7 days a week for like 2 years.
And then occasionally, every few days, I would text blast my huge list of girls something like “wut u doin tn? free 4 drnks?”
It was highly effective. I would sometimes have 3 dates lined up on a single night. If one flaked, I had the next one coming anyway.
Does the text blast method sound familiar? It should, because email and SMS blasts are a huge thing in MCA currently. As you can see the similarities are crazy between pick up and sales.
By the way, just to give a little credit: I was running Paul Janka’s method on campus basically. (Paul Janka is a notorious New York player who went to Harvard and was featured on Dr. Phil)
Because of the volume I was running on cold approach, women on campus started to learn about what I was doing, and the whole thing kinda blew up in my face haha.
Yes, I became infamous on the internet all because of running Paul Janka’s method on a college campus (haha).
I was featured all over Brobible, Jezebel, Huff Post, Business Insider. But it was a false narrative and did not actually state the facts. Just a bunch of women making up stories to try to cause trouble. Notice how similar this is to MCA companies getting bad publicity all over media outlets for cold calling the shit out of small business owners and pounding the phones all day.
Which brings us to another key lesson about dating and sales:
Don’t burn out your list if you’re doing outbound.
This whole thing wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had taken a few girls out on dates, settled with one of them and called it quits. But I became addicted to the game, and I was playing the field so successfully, that I didn’t want to “settle down.”
It was blown out of proportion since I kept doing it consistently over 2 years on almost a daily basis (similar to a sales rep on a dialer hitting the same list of merchants for 2 years every single day… some getting called multiple times without you knowing). And yes, I would sometimes unknowingly approach the same girl multiple times, running the same script on her (just like in MCA lol).
Anyways, after all this happened in Ohio, I moved to New York City and continued to do cold approach in the day time and also on the weekends.
Audio clips of me doing day game in NYC by “assuming familiarity”:
The reason I changed my approach to “assuming familiarity” and pretending I already knew girls when I approached them was because they responded way better to that approach in a place like Manhattan filled with panhandlers and crazy people. Being dressed well, and assuming familiarity was effective in the city.
My background in cold approach was actually why I was a beast on the phones when I first learned about the MCA industry in the end of 2013. I would open a cold call with “Georgie george! How you been?” (George being the business owner), and the person who would pick up the phone would immediately route me to the owner because my open and my tonality all hinted that I knew the guy personally (lol). And I would get them to submit their app and statements too, by using this assuming familiarity frame.
So, as I was saying, running cold approach in Manhattan was way harder than back home in Ohio. Women had their guards up, and getting numbers was like a full time job, especially since walking around looking for attractive girls was a hustle in itself (Campus back home was a target rich area, but a big city is all types of people on the streets).
This showed me it was essential to have a better system. Hustling for numbers and going out at night to try to pull girls was a full time job. I needed a system. This was right around the time that Tinder came out. And on Tinder I figured out a way to get results and over time made a course about it, which sold pretty successfully to thousands of guys. But Tinder stopped working over time as it became more and more crowded and saturated, and the algorithms became more anti-men and basically just destroyed the app.
I stopped promoting my Tinder course because I saw the writing on the wall for the dating apps (they were on a path to failure), and I started searching for a way to make money by applying what I had learned about dating and sales to an industry I knew all too well.
This was when I came back to the MCA industry in 2018.
When I saw brokers and funders cold calling merchants, I saw my own reflection looking back at me. I thought to myself “This is what I used to do back in the college days, but instead of pounding the phones, I was pounding the streets. And instead of chasing merchants, I was chasing girls…”
During this time, I started noticing most people in this niche were still doing outbound cold calls, and had no inbound system to get leads. They would just chase merchants (like I used to chase girls), instead of having merchants come to them. So I tested out a basic system where I drove paid traffic into a funnel and automated system that captured the merchant’s paperwork, and it worked amazingly well. This was where Lendnet.io came into existence. I was running inbound lead gen for MCA to clients who wanted to stop chasing merchants and just wanted a system where they could get deals in.
Finally, ISOs were getting inbound leads without having to pound the phone all day, without having to slave away all day begging merchants for their bank statements, and without being treated like shit by merchants.
Once Lendnet.io was successful, I also kinda grew tired of the US and how dull and boring it was. I wanted to see the world, and since I worked remotely, I was able to go overseas while running the business. This also gave me insight into dating overseas and how the dynamics of business, sales, and dating play out overseas. Is it the same BS going on all around the world? I wondered to myself, as I boarded a plane headed for Bangkok on a Korean Air jumbo jet.
And thus I had begun a new sort of lifestyle… I had left the US and started the digital nomad lifestyle (I was always a fan of Tim Ferris and the 4 Hour Work Week), where I was traveling to different countries while bringing clients inbound leads through Lendnet.io.
I traveled to Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Poland, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, etc.
You name it… I’d traveled there. I moved every month to a new country. It was a fun adventure.
I was getting such great results for my clients with Lendnet.io that I started thinking about what other stuff I could apply the concept of an inbound lead gen system to.
What I realized was that I could apply this to dating.
I realized that dating apps like Tinder are an outbound hustle (just like cold approach and just like MCA).
Yes the girl chose to match with me, but she had a thousand other matches. And I had to hustle and it became a full time job to just message her and keep her attention and get her to come out. This was all distracting me from Lendnet and my business activities.
While traveling in Colombia in late 2023 and early 2024, I finally created the first inbound lead gen system for dating.
I ran ads into an inbound funnel that attracted women to my web page and ran a conditional, algorithmic funnel to filter out women I wouldn’t want to date (girls who smoke, girls who drink too much and party, girls who have had too many partners, girls who already have kids, etc). Here is what it looked like and the results I got from that:
And it didn’t just work in Colombia. I did this in Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, other countries too. Inbound lead gen actually worked for dating lol.
This was the ultimate proof. Chasing clients does not work. Chasing women does not work. Have them come to you. Business and dating work the exact same way.
And so, if you are still dialing for dollars on the phone, or having reps pound the phones, look at my story and learn the core lesson. You must have an inbound system, or it will be such a grind that it will make you want to quit.
If you’re ready to get started with an inbound lead gen system for your MCA shop, click the link below and check out my case study, and then schedule a call with me so I can understand how to help you stop chasing merchants and avoid that mindless grind. You know by now that it leads nowhere fun. I’m living proof of that, wouldn’t you agree?
