A business begins to move when we understand the journey a customer needs to make before deciding to buy. Marketing activities become more useful when each step follows naturally from the previous one and helps people move from discovering a company to trusting it enough to become customers.
In this conversation with Reggie Valpoort, we explore how that journey is built, why understanding the customer comes before designing the funnel, and how the same incremental approach applies to entrepreneurship itself.
Reggie Valpoort is an entrepreneur and marketer from the Netherlands, founder of Valpoort Marketing, an agency focused on Facebook advertising and sales funnels. His entrepreneurial experience started while he was still studying accounting, when he noticed that international students at his university needed bicycles and created a rental business around that need.
He later built a social media agency, returned to a corporate job after the business struggled, and eventually went back into entrepreneurship with a different understanding of where his attention needed to go. His background also includes playing baseball at a high level in the Netherlands and mentoring young entrepreneurs through Mind Elevate.
One of the first lessons Reggie learned came from his own failed attempt at running an agency. He had opportunities and enough time, yet his attention was divided between several activities. Looking back, he identifies customer acquisition as the work he had neglected. A company needs people willing to buy what it offers, and finding those people requires regular conversations, outreach and testing.
That experience shapes the way he thinks about marketing today. A funnel, in his view, is a sequence that takes someone from first contact with a company toward becoming a customer. The business decides what journey would be useful, creates the steps and then watches where people stop moving forward. Each stage gives the company information that can be used to improve the process.
“Exactly, you need to earn the trust, exactly, and that’s basically in business as well. You need to earn the trust and you start that by giving first. And in this case, the coffee, the hike, the small things to say yes, and then later on you can ask for the big yes.”
Reggie Valpoort
This way of thinking changes the starting point of marketing. Reggie suggests beginning with the problem already occupying the customer’s mind. What are they trying to solve? How do they describe it to themselves? What is the smallest useful step a business can offer them? The answers influence the landing page, the offer and the sequence that follows.
He also discusses a common tendency to spend too much attention on design. A polished page has limited value when its message misses the problem people arrived there to solve. Reggie compares this with a car: the engine determines whether the vehicle does its job. In marketing, that engine is the relationship between the customer’s problem and the proposed solution.
The conversation then moves from funnels toward the way entrepreneurs learn. Reggie mentors younger entrepreneurs and encourages them to study the language customers actually use. When a company understands how people describe their frustrations and goals, its communication becomes closer to the conversation already happening in their minds.
Learning from people with more experience is another recurring theme. Reggie talks about reading books, listening to conversations with experienced entrepreneurs and working with mentors. He sees mentorship as a way of shortening the learning process by benefiting from mistakes someone else has already made.
“Because it you literally help you skip a thousand steps and thousand mistakes you would have done yourself – just by getting a mentor. So be open to learn from other people that have already done it.”
Reggie Valpoort
Baseball gave him another useful frame for entrepreneurship: an unsuccessful attempt is one moment in a much longer game. A lost sale, a bad day or a business that fails leaves another opportunity to try again. During the conversation, we connect this idea with Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game, a book mentioned in the episode. Business has no fixed final whistle. Careers develop across projects, companies and repeated attempts.
In the final part of our conversation, Reggie brings the same incremental thinking to confidence. His approach starts with commitments small enough to complete. Someone uncomfortable with networking, for example, can begin by simply saying hello to a stranger. Completing that action provides evidence that you can do what you told yourself you would do. The next action can then become slightly larger.
“For building confidence, you need to literally shoot for the pebble in the sand, and then get that one, and then go to the bigger pebble, and then go to the rock, and then go to the house. A small incremental. Steps to build your own confidence.”
Reggie Valpoort
The connection between these ideas runs throughout the episode. Customers move through a sequence before buying. Entrepreneurs learn through repeated attempts. Confidence grows through actions that gradually become more demanding. Reggie’s experience with business, marketing and baseball leads back to the same practical approach: understand where you are starting, choose the next step you can execute, learn from what happens and continue from there.
Main Ideas
- Your business grows when you spend time on the work that brings customers. It is easy to stay busy with projects that feel productive while avoiding conversations with potential customers. If you are building a business, regularly ask yourself which activity is most closely connected to getting leads and customers. Focus requires choosing where your attention goes, especially when nobody else structures your day.
- Build the customer journey before you build the marketing. Think about the path you want someone to follow from discovering you to buying from you. Each step should make the next one easier. Start with something small that helps the customer experience part of what you offer, then gradually develop the relationship. A funnel works better when every page and interaction has a specific role in that journey.
- Start with the problem already running through your customer’s mind. Learn how customers describe their situation in their own words. Listen to the language they use when talking about frustrations, needs and desired outcomes. Your marketing becomes more relevant when people recognize their own problem in your message. Spend more time researching customers before investing heavily in how a page looks.
- Give people one action to take at a time. Every additional option creates another opportunity for someone to leave the path you designed. Decide what you want a person to do on each page and organize everything around that action. Then experience the entire process yourself as if you were a customer. Click every link, complete every form and check what happens at every stage.
- Treat setbacks as another attempt in a longer game. A lost sale or an unsuccessful project represents one moment in your entrepreneurial career. Tomorrow gives you another opportunity to speak with someone, change your approach or start something new. Learn from people who have already travelled part of the road as well. Books, podcasts and mentors can help you avoid repeating mistakes that others have already encountered.