How to Start a SaaS Business With No Idea – Pawel Brzeminski – MicroConf 2015

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0:14it's high- bevelle kremensky so this is great pronunciation thank you i came all the way from Canada this is my first time at microcon and I'm really stoked it's a feels like great place to be and right place to be so thank you very much for allowing me to be here and for also letting me speak to you there are a lot of talented and smart people here in the audience so it's an absolute honor to be able to speak to speak to you for me so I'm going to talk about how do you start a sales business especially when you're right at the beginning you have completely no idea or

0:46you may have an idea but you don't know if it's any good you you haven't picked the market for example or if you have part if you have written in the market you don't know if it's you don't know any you don't have any connections with it within this market and you can all only use very basic tools like for example Excel phone or email right and this topic is really important for me and I'm extremely actually passionate about this because I probably failed so many times at starting a business in the past I've I've run a sauce business in enterprise space we're selling predictive analytics

1:20solutions to insurance companies so I have some experience that about that we'll be sharing and also I went through a program called the foundation last year which was extremely useful and I'm in the process of starting my new sauce right now as we speak and so I'm going to share some of some of my experiences so my goal is basically if I can help even a handful of you to help you with save you some frustration some time and some money when you're starting your new sauce business that would be a huge one for me all right so a couple of things about this talk it's duck is definitely not a

1:52fully bulletproof idea for success it may it may not work for you it may not work for your market but it definitely I'll offer some practical advice and it allows you to basically focus on complete new market for me with the completely no existing connections to that market and go pretty quickly to seven customers before the application was created alright so how do you find those good business ideas right so first of all you want to focus really on a target market even if you have an existing idea I need that you need the target because you need somebody to sell to right target market is really a set of

2:27people our businesses would see much similar coloration characteristics then you want to contact the market you are looking for the most painful and salt or poorly solve problems and once you found the problem what you want to do you want to validate if this is the right problem for you to pursuing before you actually start building the solution and then once you once you resell the solution to a couple of customers then you can start developing the smallest source and then you can actually launch it so okay you have no market how do you start well you can just list of the industries that you're interested in and you can do two

3:03weekly you can go to Google as well you can go to the site called reference usa.com there is a lot of information about us and keen and Canadian businesses there the criteria that I used I wanted to actually to at least have between two thousand five thousand businesses in my market and the reason is because I didn't want to run out very quickly of of prospects to sell to in my previous business we're selling to insurance companies and unfortunately in Canada there there are only about hundred fifty of them so we very quickly run down to their list we didn't have anybody else so we need to change your strategy orbit

3:35right the other thing is affinity but if Mackenzie mentioned that if you don't like the market you're in you should probably not going to get go into into this market you don't have to love it but my advice would be don't hated because you're going to spend at least couple of years building your company right so if you if this is not in the market you're in or you're thinking about is not really exciting to you don't do it and the idea markets are really niche or very small because why because they're underserved no big competitor is going to actually enter this market and for this method to work of this market this

4:06market has to be compactable email and phone is the minimum where link 10 will work well as well all right so you've have in the market then what do you next you want to create even just a simple list of businesses and it can be a just Excel list of businesses I need the name of the personal email phone and the website URL is useful as well and then you want to send an email and just say hey I'm doing a study on the market and I'm looking for the main for them for the biggest challenges or most bait problems in the business that you experience on a day-to-day basis

4:40do you have view mind speaking would be for 20 minutes and that's it you can just stay your name but put your contact information there so they can actually call your email you if they want happen to me I send an email a guy called me five minutes later we have great conversation so and then when some people will say no of course but some people will say yes so then schedules some follow-up on phone calls with them and important thing is on those on those calls just talk to them what what kind of challenges or problems do you have in your business what keeps you up at night

5:11right what what thinks you want to improve what kind of internal products do you have right now on improving on something within your business an important thing is here you actually have to once you ask the question just shut up and let them talk the longer you be able to wait until you start interrupting them the more valuable information we'll be able to find from them and once you understand that they really have a problem and you understand this problem quite well you're gonna actually ask them a question which is the wave the magic one question and it's a really magical question because you can just tell them ask them well if we

5:42could if you could wave they wetter than a magic wand what what your solution would look like right and very often they will tell you exactly what they want right so the first minds that shift here is that the best ideas don't come from you they come from a market right the same way and the same the same way John has said that the best marketing doesn't come from you it comes from your customers it's the same thing here right the best ideas come from come from from your customers and the other thing is the second mindset chef here is that those customer exactly know what they

6:13want sometimes and and the solutions that they will tell you what they you know what they want there with a little bit of tweaking you can actually start implementing that so you don't have to even think about the solution you can be given the solution by your target market right it's okay you've talked to the market you have a couple of problems what you want to find what you want to focus on even a list of course all those all those different problems and you want to focus on the most painful the least complex which is the fastest to implement and also the ones that offers the highest value good

6:41for the customer and why because the solutions to those kind of problems are the easiest to sell and and then before you start developing that before you start writing the first of code you don't actually sell your non-existing product to a couple of prospects so how do you do that well you get a schedule a phone call with them tell them that you're excited we're solving this problem and tell them first explain the problem well tell them what the problem is as you heard it from them make sure they understand it you can even agitate the problem all that because it will motivate them to look

7:10for solution and then talk talk to them talk to them about the solution talk to them how the solution will actually make their life better and once you get to the confirmation from them then I was going to buy it and you can tell them well I'm looking for you can be honest I'm looking for it can tell them I'm looking for three to five people and once I had find three to five people that actually I will be building the solution right and very often they will say yes so this is great you found one person then go and would be with a couple of people

7:38one is not enough three four three four five and up then this is it's is getting much better and then you can start developing your product so here's an example I got the check for a personal check from a lady that is thousands of miles away from me she has never seen me and we exchanged couple of emails couple of conversations she had a painful problem I offered to solve it she sent me a check personal check for six hundred bucks so it works so why pre-selling is such a powerful compact concept why I like it because when you're starting a company you're going from the problem

8:07then you're developing a we are looking at the developing the solution you're building the product or service you're marketing and selling right so with pre-selling which you can do you can shorten the cycle because building and marketing can take you months or years and sometimes you may give up and you may know that never ship the product like some other people said before right so with pre-selling you can actually do the cycle very quickly with a little bit of our practice you can you can try a couple of different ideas and you can achieve it within one half an hour conversation so dramatically reduces the risk for you alright conferences

8:38conferences are amazing especially trade kind of trade shows or industry conferences why because the pace of learning is incredible you learned so quickly about the people in the industry about the trends and about you know generally about the industry right so and then you've also got the rapid feedback from from the people if you are even working a couple of ideas you can actually you can validate it very quickly right you can have multiple conversations within one day and i think come chances are great because I have tried to write drought they are tracking people who want to learn more about the endures they're in industry they want to

9:11they want to know what their peers are up to so as Geoffrey Moore crossing the chasm you are actually picking the early adopters these are the right people for you to be talking to so by coming by going to a conference you're actually pretty qualifying your audience and follow up with them after the conference because you can learn a lot more and I think smaller is better as micro-trauma is just you know about two hundred hundred twenty people those smaller conferences offer you this high collision rate which is basically you are bumping into the same people several times which is useful because you're building relationships and those

9:40relationships will be super useful later on because those people who introduced with their friends colleagues in business that will help you market your product they'll tell you why your website doesn't look the way it should and and so focus on building those relationships it's you're really useful so specifically what work didn't work for me I was lucky to get the chairman of the Association was one of the customers I was reaching out to other people within the Association and I asked her if I could use her name she said fine I sent an email the response worried it was quite a reward so a lot more people want to talk to me

10:08and it gets specific if you're not getting the right quality answers that you're expecting you've got ask more specific questions right you're not asked you can ask instead of what what is the problem that you're dealing with with what you're struggling with your business you can ask okay what about the sales what about when you're delivering the the product or service to your customers right you can be much more specific with that and it will get better answers and get personal as I said it's fine to talk to treat them even as friends on the call because there will be there will be much more willing to share more information with

10:34you recording the cost was extremely useful for me I'm one of the people that I can either pay attention to us somebody else's saying or I can take notes but I can not do two things at the same time so I was able to recorded phone calls and then I was able to take detailed notes after the call and and I was super useful to and stay in touch with them one person said well said no initially when I was trying to actually pre sell him two months later again knew got an email from him saying hey and then I said Minnie noise so here here

11:04are my stats within about one market effect completely new I just sent hundred sent four emails over ten weeks so it was part completely part time effort for me I was running another company the same time so I was pretty busy and from those hundred seventy four emails I was able to get 2:32 people which led to 52 conversations and i found eight potential business ideas I picked one and I was able to sell seven people and we're at the point right now that we can actually start scaling we have the solution is proven and we can attract more more people all right so I think

11:37there was one slight missing here but it's fine all right so I think there was one slight missing from the presentation but thank you very much I really enjoyed meeting you and you have any questions specific about this topic talk to me later [Applause]