I refuse to learn the same lesson twice.

Halfway through a call

I made my first cold call ever at the end of August. Benjamin and I had decided to learn the work by doing it, because we didn't want to get stuck learning before we started.

Two weeks in, I was on a call when I heard myself and thought, what the hell are you saying? I'd fumbled my sentence to a receptionist. She understood enough to put me through, and while she did, I realized I couldn't say the same thing to the next person. I didn't know why I was calling.

Years of restaurant work had taught me to improvise, but on a cold call improvising meant fumbling out loud with a stranger listening. And we weren't even selling anything, because we didn't have a product yet. I only wanted to know what manual work comes back every day. That question gets hard when you ask it in seven to eleven different industries. Before each call I read up, and then I let an AI fill in the rest. It didn't hold back. For one company it came back with five different guesses about what was wrong. I had to look up half of them to know what they meant. I was researching the research.

Before the next call I stopped. I changed what the research could bring me, and now it only gets what the company's own website says in black and white. That's what they make, how it works, and where it hurts. If it isn't on the site, it stays out.

The next call went fine.

That fix helped one person. Me.

Note to self

A company I'd called rang me back on September 10. They thought we wanted to replace a system that worked for them. When I logged the call, I added one line. "Note to self. A lot of people take it as us trying to replace their system." That was a good lesson, but it would only ever have one reader.

Benjamin comes out of every day with something new too. He listens to an absurd amount of podcasts on sales, products, and running a company. I'm not there for most of them. When his view changes, it takes me a while to catch up, and I live in his house. Now picture a salesperson we hire from outside.

Where do the fixes at your company end up?

One fix for every colleague

In Mellovy you correct the AI colleague the way you'd correct me. What you said goes into an Evaluation instead of a note like mine, so the next colleague has to meet that too.

The Evaluation doesn't take the colleague's word. The Evaluation looks in your systems to see whether the email went out or the order closed.

We're building Mellovy on what we've learned, for you and for us, because Benjamin and I refuse to learn the same lesson twice.