Adam Griffin of Bodeefit talks to Straight Shot teams about two methods of selling to bootstrap your startup.

The way Adam Griffin, CEO of Bodeefit, sees it, startups have a few avenues for growth. There’s venture capital, there’s bootstrapping it yourself and there’s growing without paying for it.

And by not paying he means inbound selling and what he calls programmatic selling.

Griffin spoke with the seven Straight Shot accelerator teams last week on the topic.

The founder has experience in the area. He began two startups before he even knew what the word meant and later went on to be a salesperson at Full Contact, a Foundry Group-funded startup.

Now Griffin heads Bodeefit, a fitness app that provides daily body weight workouts and weekly Paleo recipes, meal plans and shopping lists. He said the goal is to help people who don’t have the time or knowledge about how to work out.

“We had 3,000 subscribers in the first few weeks,” Griffin said. “But we realized we needed a face and story behind the company. A fitness person with expertise to trust.”

That’s Griffin’s first piece of advice.

Create content to drive traffic and turn it into inbound selling

“You are what you tell customers you are,” Griffin says. “With a startup, you have to make a lot of noise or no one is going to pay attention to you.

“I started to pursue content partners to help drive traffic to Bodeefit.”

Griffin has blogged for the Huffington Post, Men’s Fitness and LifeHack.org.

His advice:

1. Become a subject matter expert in your startups area. For Bodeefit, that was fitness. Flywheel, the WordPress hosting site for designers, for instance, blogs a lot on design trends.

2. Have a story to tell. Why are you different from others? What is your mission? Why should anyone care?

Line up your personal brand with these answers. Your LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and other social media presences should reflect in some fashion that you are a subject matter expert.

3. Reach out to other publications with niche audiences that are like your customers or have a wide swath of customers.

“Start with torso publishers (medium-sized publications), not tail (small) or head (large) ones. Have a pitch ready and build content around your voice. Make sure the pitch helps their audience first and helps your business second. If the content you create isn’t published, it’s perfect for your own blog.”

4. Your company has to have great content, too.

“Other people’s content is driving traffic to your website. What do they do when they get there? You need to have actionable content on your blog. Create an editorial calendar and plan it out and maximize SEO using Yoast on WordPress.”

Create five to 10 evergreen content pieces from the beginning so your newly acquired traffic has something to read about. The goal is not to sell your product, but to build trust. Having a good social media footprint also builds trust.

4. Create partnerships early on. Offer value to other companies for nothing in exchange. This is the only time in your company’s life when you will be nimble enough to execute quickly on large partnerships. Bodeefit partnered with Greatist, a fitness site, and had more than half of the referral traffic come from their site.

Bodeefit also took over PaleOMG, a paleo recipe blog’s workout of the day feature and had 13 percent referrals from there.

Use programmatic sales and outbound marketing

“This is the most efficient, effective way to sell to thousands with a small sales team.”

The process begins with the sales funnel broken down into pre-contact, during and closed sales.

Griffin targets certain people with lists made with Built With and uses LinkedIn to target specific people in an organization he’s trying to reach. After he finds them he uses Kickbox.io to verify email addresses.

After contact is made, the first thing you have to do is build rapport. Understand them. Use LinkedIn or other social media to find talking points or common connections. Talk about them first before you talk about yourself and your own product. Understand their product, needs and pain points.

But don’t expect to close a sale on every call.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned in selling is that your product is not a fit for everyone,” he said. “Sometimes you just have to accept that.”

The third way: out-work everyone

“38 percent. That’s the chunk of time between Friday and Monday. Out-work companies. Work-life balance was created by someone in a large company who didn’t like their job,” Griffin said. “You don’t have a job, you have a mission. Commit to the long haul. Minimize your expenses. Sell your ass off. Work your ass off.”

Griffin’s first book from FG Press about grief, loss and thriving on the other side is out soon. He wrote it after his best friend died just days after college graduation, and after losing his first-born son in March.