Being a purple squirrel.

Eleven years ago, I was sitting in the Financial District WeWork in Manhattan, watching one of my sales guys tape together a paper pyramid.

I was in my second month as the VP of Sales at PatientPop, and I had just hired and trained our second salesperson named Sagar Patel. Back when Sagar joined the team, we were a seed-funded startup with barely any resources. We didn't have a marketing team, there were no inbound leads, white papers or case studies, and certainly no marketing slicks. We had a half-functioning website, maybe seven example customers, and about $40K in annual revenue. That was basically it.

Most salespeople in that situation would complain. Where are my leads? Where's marketing? I need better resources! I've heard some version of that from just about every salesperson I ever managed. But Sagar saw a different problem to solve.

He needed to explain local SEO to physicians in a simple way. Marketing can be complicated, especially for doctors who just want to show up to work and see patients. They don't care about search algorithms and profile optimization. They care about getting more patients through the door.

So Sagar grabbed some notebook paper and drew five sides of a pyramid. He labeled each one, describing his "5 sides of local SEO for healthcare providers," and then taped them all together.

He made himself a little paper pyramid to use in his sales pitches.

A purple squirrel

In recruiting, there's a weird term called a "purple squirrel."

A purple squirrel is a candidate so rare and perfectly matched to what you need that finding one feels impossible. Someone who checks every single box, including boxes you didn't even know you cared about.

Sagar was a purple squirrel for me at PatientPop.

I needed someone who could sell, of course. But I also needed someone who could create their own pitch from scratch when we had nothing. Someone who could handle objections without a playbook and design their own marketing materials. And most importantly, I needed someone completely self-motivated, who’d figure stuff out instead of complaining about what they didn’t have.

The paper pyramid was purple squirrel energy in action.

I remember watching him use it on a call with a practice manager. He held up his janky little pyramid, turned it around to explain each side, and walked through the strategy like he was presenting to a billion-dollar CEO. The practice manager nodded along, engaged throughout the call. And that day, they signed a deal worth $14,300 in annual contract revenue (nearly triple the size of our average deal at the time).

Sagar used his paper pyramid for a full year and probably closed over 200 deals with it. He could make as many as he needed and say, "Keep this on your desk," if he couldn't get the deal done. The doctor would see it daily and call back to say, "Let's move forward." Eventually, the pyramid became the foundation for our first real marketing slick, the one that the actual designers made once we could afford to hire them. By the time I left PatientPop four and a half years later, the company had grown to over $70 million in revenue.

And I still think about that paper pyramid taped together with notebook paper.

Why the paper pyramid worked

Most people in Sagar's situation would have waited for the marketing team to produce a professional PDF or for a designer to create a "proper” infographic to use in front of customers. They would have complained about not having the right tools to hit their quota instead of making their own.

But from day one, Sagar knew today’s scrappy version beats the polished version you're waiting for.

That pyramid worked partly because it existed. Because it was a tangible object doctors could hold in their hands and examine. They didn't need a beautiful marketing piece. They needed someone to make a complicated topic like SEO easy to understand. And Sagar did that with a pencil, notebook paper, and tape.

People wait months for perfect conditions all the time. They think they have to launch with a gorgeous website, the best visuals, and the right pitch deck. So they procrastinate for months or even years, while some purple squirrel is out there with a paper pyramid, closing deals.

What I did with my first product

I think about Sagar's pyramid all the time, especially when I look back at my first product launch. The idea for that product came in the spring of 2020.

I was living in Los Angeles, and I had a LinkedIn following of about 21,000 people, which was a huge number back in the day. I had grown my following by writing about healthcare consulting, sales, marketing, and building software companies.

But every week, when I opened up my DMs, most of the questions were some version of:

How are you growing so fast on LinkedIn?

I would have ignored those questions entirely if my friend Kevin Dorsey hadn’t seen the writing on the wall (that I was definitely missing).

“Why don’t you teach people how to grow on LinkedIn?” Kevin asked.

I'd been reading Russell Brunson's books about online marketing, and I started to think there could be a digital product somewhere in these LinkedIn questions. So I decided to find out.

I sat down in front of my webcam and recorded myself walking through PowerPoint slides I'd designed myself. No professional setup or studio with fancy lighting. And no script. I just talked through my slides like I was explaining them to a friend.

It took about 90 hours to put my first product together, and I didn’t do any editing. I priced it at $50 and put it up for sale. I launched with a single LinkedIn post on April 16th.

And that day, I made $300.

I can still remember the very first time my phone pinged with a little cash-register sound. I glanced down at it and realized that a stranger on the internet had just paid me $50 for something I created. I was utterly shocked.

That first sale was a huge unlock for me. I remember thinking, "I can actually do this."

That product was called The LinkedIn Playbook, and I sold $10,482 in my first month. Over the next 18 months, that ugly little webcam course did $75,000 more in sales before I finally retired it. And when I updated and rereleased it as The LinkedIn OS, it generated over $4.5 million in sales.

None of that would have happened if I'd waited for professional lighting or a real studio or a proper script. I learned what to build by building the ugliest possible version first.

The bottom line

Sagar's paper pyramid closed over 200 deals and became the marketing foundation for a company that grew to $70 million. It had less to do with design and more to do with Sagar needing to explain local SEO in a way a physician would understand.

So he got to work with the only tools he had. His hands, some paper, a pencil, and tape.

When you're building something from scratch, you don't have the luxury of waiting for perfect conditions. And you don’t need perfect conditions anyway. You don't get a marketing team or a design budget or someone handing you a playbook on day one of building your own business. You get the equivalent of notebook paper and tape. And the question is whether you'll make something with it or sit around wishing you had more.

So here's my question for this week: What's the paper pyramid you can make now?

What's the scrappy, imperfect little thing you've been avoiding because you're waiting for the "right" way to do it?

Maybe it's time to tape something together and see what happens.

Write back and tell me about your paper pyramid.

I can't reply to everyone, but Jennifer and I read every response, and we love hearing from you.

That's all for this week.

See you next Saturday.