Ch. 21.4 / Experiment 15.0.3 / My funnel thesis got some validation, so here’s my million dollar offer.

This is an experiment for the leaders and stakeholders in this ecosystem. It is an experiment to add value in the AI enabled era of humanity, and to generate revenue, through carefully hypothesis oriented research projects. I am arriving as a researcher.

Every funnel has bottlenecks and areas of optimisation. Mine included. What I am looking for is the opportunity to help someone optimise and enable their AI native or AI enabled funnels. And for the other stakeholders who enable those funnels, or parts of them, there is an ask for you at the end too.

So, about me.

I am a beginner in the Salesforce ecosystem. And since Salesforce is just a piece of the puzzle, the actual problem space is often undefined.

Fifteen years under my belt in various roles: product management with early stage startups, running operations at fast growing startups, launching ventures as a raw builder, and operating email marketing at scale.

My product management career taught me to care about the thing and the process, rather than building for the sake of building it and agreeing with the seniors.

Asking questions is the core skill I am building a portfolio of. Agents are going to be answering a lot of questions, and the audience can ask anything. It is us who need to build the guardrails around the systems that are reliable, cost effective, and useful at scale.

New to this ecosystem, working from a small town, looking for friends here to find ways to add value.

On the 11th of July, at Bharat Dreamin’, one day, fifteen hundred people, I went in with a conviction that I would ask one question to many leaders: do you think every conversation is a funnel? And I asked it, in very plain words, often, mid conversation. About a hundred conversations. Most of them agreed.

One of them said: “I don’t think so.”

I asked why. The disagreement looked like an unclear answer. She could not explain her thought, and there was a hole in it that I could see and feel but could not probe, due to a hundred reasons. Maybe due to the presence of mind we needed at that moment to go deeper.

I am still carrying that hole around.

But wait. Validation is not movement. So let me be exact about the state of things.

I am not just broadcasting. I am connecting with people, sending DMs, commenting, inviting. With Bharat Dreamin’ I now have a common point of reference, which gives me some credibility. And it is not landing yet. No deal closed. But “not landing” is the transient state. It is the expected consequence of moving in this direction, not a verdict on it.

What it revealed is that I have not built enough credibility to enter their ecosystem. And underneath that, one thing I don’t yet understand and desperately wish to:

What is the shape of the financial funnels of this ecosystem, and how are the shapes of these funnels evolving, when the foundation of the basic existence of humanity is shaking?

I am looking forward to either learning to build million dollar funnels, in the Salesforce ecosystem or systems in general, or empowering yours. Or both.

Salesforce is one layer. Above it sits the funnel. Above that, the business model. Above that, an AI enabled era rewriting all three at once. Each layer has an owner. The seams between them have none. I work the seams, which is the one place a beginner in any single layer can see something the specialists cannot.

Every business has a goal. Somewhere below it runs a funnel that is supposed to turn that goal into money. The two drift apart. Nobody notices, because money arrives in different shapes and sizes than expectations, and inside that noise a drift and a normal fluctuation look identical.

I cannot tell you where your additional million sits. Nobody outside your system can, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a template. What I know is that every funnel, every process, and every workflow has an area of improvement. That is not optimism, it is the only assumption I need. It is why generating an additional million dollars in your funnels is a direction to work towards rather than a promise to deliver in five days.

I have done this before, on a different platform, at a different scale. In 2020, I was handed a kids’ learning app with a 15-day free trial. Not enough parents were subscribing after the trial expired. The expected funnel said: download, use for 15 days, subscribe. The actual funnel said something else. I reviewed 50 profiles for patterns. I called at least 50 parents. Some didn’t even know their children were using the app. Others loved it but couldn’t articulate the value of a 10-15 minute daily exercise for their kids. The drift was not in the product. It was in the gap between what the product delivered and what the parents understood they were getting. I designed a 15-day onboarding journey on CleverTap, over 100 nodes, optimized for exit points, waiting points, and exceptions. In three weeks, homepage landings increased by 25%. The platform changes. The method has been solidified, iterated, and optimized for the AI enabled era, with research methodologies, to focus on the basics. (Full story on Notion)

I read The Goal twice. It changed how I operate my life. So I will say the uncomfortable part plainly: you may not have written your goal down with the depth and clarity your business needs at this stage. Most haven’t. That is not a failure, it is what happens when a system grows faster than its documentation.

One more thing from Jaipur. The universe connected two people randomly from the same hometown, existing in two different universes, connected by another thread: Salesforce. He builds out of the Silicon Valley of the country. His roots sit less than four hundred metres from where I live and grew up, in Bhiwani, a small town in Haryana, India, spread over less than 25 km².

I only work remotely. What I have instead of proximity is a portfolio of agents.

The first runs my daily live stream operations. It works on every stream automatically and hands me a to do list, a summary, a Notion document in a database, a draft set of questions I answer to publish the stream’s story as a blog, and a recommended moment worth cutting as a short.

The second is the foundation of my lifelong project, the discipline program, at 3mistakesofmylife.in.

The third is a philosophy: how humanity will look for collaborators in the AI enabled era. Agent god complexes.

One person, running like a small team. The full portfolio, with architecture breakdowns, lives here.

Before Day 1. We write down a rough goal statement together. Short, incomplete, something we can validate at the end of five days. Starting with statements like these:

Goals.

We will know if this worked when ________.
The revenue target this funnel is supposed to hit in the next 12 months is ________. The gap between where the funnel is today and where it should be is ________.

Systems.

The funnel we are diagnosing runs on ________ (Salesforce, plus ________). The number of handoffs between the first touch and closed revenue is ________. The last time the system was architected intentionally rather than patched was ________.

Operations.

The team running this funnel day to day is ________ people. The part of the process that depends on one person’s head rather than documentation is ________. The report that gets pulled every week but nobody acts on is ________.

Assumptions.

The assumption we are most confident about but have never tested is ________. The stage where we lose the most and understand the least is ________. The number we report upward that we are least sure is accurate is ________.

These are deliberately incomplete. You fill them in with me. If we cannot agree on even a rough version, the five days should not happen and I will say so.

Day 1. We break that rough statement into pieces we can verify clearly, programmatically where possible. The goal after Day 1 is sharper than the goal before it.

Days 2 to 4. I diagnose the system, and I keep asking questions. The theoretical funnel, the one that exists in the design and the documentation, against the actual implementation, the one your people run every day. Every stage, every handoff, every assumption nobody has written down.

Day 5. You get three things. A map of the funnel as it actually is. The delta between the theoretical funnel and the implemented one, which is the drift. One designed experiment, with a hypothesis and a falsification condition, aimed at the largest gap I found.

The additional million is not in that deliverable. It is in what we do after it, iteratively, with the drift finally visible. Five days is what it costs to find out whether the drift is there, and whether working together is worth it.

I run one diagnosis at a time. Slots are scheduled, not stacked.

I am only available 4 to 5 focused hours a day. That is roughly 20 to 25 hours across the five days, and that is all there is. The grounding assumption is that the system we are looking at already operates at a scale where ten million or more moves through it. Finding an additional million inside it is not aspirational, it is arithmetic. We work like scientists: not to justify what we already believe, but to uncover the truth we don’t know. Every moment, every word, every assumption we uncover or start with is a million dollar thing.

And here is my bet, in writing, where it can embarrass me. Inside your funnels there is a delta between the goal, the funnel that was designed, and the system that is actually running. Either I find it, or you learn exactly where your system resists being understood, which is worth knowing too. Being wrong in public is my method. What’s yours?

The expected outcome of this chapter is not applause. It is a pipeline: 15 to 20 conversations in the next 45 days, a constraint added intentionally, because a deadline that hurts is the only kind that operates. Aiming at 4 deals empowering an additional $250K each, or 10 empowering an additional $100K each. Same equation either way: an additional $1M generated in my clients’ funnels, on their scoreboards, not mine. My conversion assumption is written here so it can fail in public. This page is the top of that funnel. If you’re reading it, you’re in it.

If there is a funnel in your business that should be producing more and you cannot say exactly why it isn’t, send me one line about it. We get on a call and decide together whether the five days are worth it. That call is also where you will see how I think and how I ask questions.

If you are an architect, a consultant, a delivery manager, or anyone working inside a Salesforce practice who knows the leaders with the willingness, the need, and the permissions to run a research project like this, this ask is for you.

If a name came to mind while you were reading, send them this page. Or send me the name and one line on why you thought of them, and I will do the rest. Your introduction is how I enter the ecosystem. That is not a small thing.

[email protected], or reply here.

Open Source Humans is my podcast on YouTube and newsletter on LinkedIn, where I am working through conversations with 100 people in this industry, on human behaviour and its economic implications in the age of artificial intelligence. It is how I build my worldview of this ecosystem while the experiments run. You do not need to be on it to work with me. But if you want to see how I think before sending anything, watch a few. And if you would rather start with a conversation than a diagnosis, ask me for a slot.

Experiment 15.0.4 runs alongside this one, currently in drafts and iterations. In my town, Bhiwani, I am designing a research experiment around training beginners to build agents. The goal: an agent that is supposed to know everything about the town, hypothetically first, then literally. This is not ready yet. When it is, it will live here. If that sounds like something you want to build towards together, same email.