How a Non-Technical Founder Bootstrapped a SaaS to a $3.5M Exit

0:00Hey everyone, how's it going today? So, I'm here to talk to you a little bit about what it's like for a non-technical founder to scale. Um but first, before I do that, I want to just take a little audience poll real quick. How many non-technical founders are here by show of hands? It's actually a little bit more than I thought. So now, on the reverse, how many technical people and technical founders are here? Show of hands and

0:27keep them raised. Okay, perfect. Now, if you don't like marketing and you don't like outreach or sales, put your hands down. Okay, so a good portion of you put your hands down. So we're going to go into that. You can The rest of you can put your hands down now. So we're going to go a little bit into that um and how to kind of some of the growth tactics that I used as a non-technical founder to be able to scale. But this applies for technical founders who don't like talking to people, who don't like doing the outreach, who don't want to do that outreach. So there's several ways to do

1:00that. So first-time founders, I want to address you first, the people who are in the idea phase, the people who are in the pre-revenue phase, or the small revenue phase. People who are there um not having an experience, it's not an excuse. You can succeed with drive and persistence. So, no previous SaaS experience, no social media following or online presence, no funding, no financial backing, and doing whatever it takes to achieve financial freedom. Does this sound like any of you? I feel like it sounds like a couple of you based on some of the conversations I've had. Well, if you said yes to any of those, you're not

1:35alone because if I can do it, so can you because I can literally code zero. So, I'm a bootstrap SaaS founder, non-technical, zero coding skills as I mentioned. I built an influencer marketplace. I hired a 1099 dev to do all the coding, everything, infrastructure, back end, front end, full stack dev. We scaled to 140k MRR within 3 years. Pretty much I was running the business side, he was running the technical side. And exited recently for 3.5 million. I know it sounds crazy, but it happens and it's I

2:09didn't expect it either to be honest. Um the scale didn't happen overnight. It actually took it took a while to kind of get the stride, to polish the software, to polish the pitch, the acquisition channels and find out what worked while staying bootstrapped and maintaining a much smaller footprint financially because obviously we don't want to be

2:29spending all the revenue. Um so I already had product market fit, but talking a little bit to the pre-revenue, the small revenue, here are some questions to ask yourself when starting a new SaaS. And one is what is is what I'm offering better than what's already out there or filling some gap? So the reason I already had product market fit is because I was running a business an existing business beforehand and I saw that the the platforms out there that I needed to facilitate my business were just not up to par or feature-wise, they were too expensive, they were too complicated. There was a lot of problems

3:07with those systems. So I said, "You know what? I'm going to hire someone to build a solution that I think would be great for my business." So we instantly transitioned our customers to the software platform that I built and it was an MVP and it was complete garbage. I mean, it would crash all the time. I had one dev build it. It was he wasn't even on board at that time. This was just a freelancer that I hired and essentially he gave me a line of code to restart the server every time it crashed, which was every couple of hours. Um so but but it was a it was a

3:37feature not a bug. So we um we started scaling more so because we were using the system and we believed in it so much and we our customers saw it and our customers started becoming customers of the platform itself. So, I started focusing on that full-time. And the more people started using it, I was giving away the system for free in the beginning. And I was like, you know, there's got to be a way to make money from this because I can't First, it was 10 people, then it was 100 people, then it was 500 people. I'm like, I got to start charging for this because

4:07something's wrong here. But, we were just using it for our own product. The other thing is, do you know your target audience and how easy it is for you to reach them, particularly without ad spend? So, my target audience was built in because they were my customers originally, and then other people doing similar activities of selling, you know, cut digital content, financial information, you know, access to events,

4:30tickets, courses. And then, does it save people time, money, or energy? And is it enough of a moat or add-on to provide 10x the value of the sub? And I know 10x sounds pretty crazy, but that's really the goal that you want to shoot for in terms of the value that you're giving to the people that want to use your product. If you could shoot for that 10x value, it'll be a no-brainer

4:52for people to sign up for your system. And can I make the product easy to use and easy to understand? And so, part of the problem that I've seen with a lot of developers that I've spoken with is they tend to over over-engineer things, over-develop things, and that's not everybody, but some. And for getting started, you want to make it as easy as possible and self-explanatory as possible. So, that way you don't have the customer service issues, you don't have the

5:20you get a higher conversion rate. So, if you said no to any of these things, you may want to spend a little bit more time researching before you start investing in building something like that. So, now let's get into the post-revenue founders that are here. So, these are five tactics to use to scale, especially if you don't like talking to people. And if you hate doing marketing, there are ways to do it. And I know it feels like a dirty word because, you know, it's salesy and pitchy, but it needs to be done, it it doesn't need to be traditional. So, here are the five tactics you can use to scale without

5:49having to personally do the outreach. And I know there's one missing, but the fifth one's obvious. You all already know what it is. So, the first one is brand ambassadors. Leveraging your customers is a growth hack. So, the way to do that is to know your product and to develop your product so well. So, originally my platform, uh going back doing a callback to the first talk that we heard here at MicroConf, there's sales-led growth and there's product-led growth. Well, because I had a crappy MVP, I had to do sales-led growth in order to afford the funding to do product-led

6:22growth. So, sales-led growth, most of you are product-led growth, I'm assuming. Um so, the first thing is to track every single thing about your customer. Feedback, satisfaction, demographics of who's using your platform, personas, NPS scores I found were extremely useful. Also, gathering this data at the beginning sets you up very nicely for an exit because a potential buyer looking at your business, seeing customer satisfaction, it also directly correlates to retention

6:51and churn and all of the other things. And then you can use this data to reduce those numbers, to reduce the churn, and ultimately get a higher valuation, which is what I think most of you want to do if you're heading down the path of an exit. Giving away things it to build loyalty is one of the best things that you can do when you're starting or at at

7:09mid-revenue, small revenue. Trials, rebates, digital downloads, special pricing for certain uh types of groups, specially certain verticals that you're going after. This is my personal favorite, revenue share partnerships. So, you're paying for customer acquisition using future dollars instead of current revenue, which I think is fantastic because in most cases it's revenue that you

7:31wouldn't have had anyway. So, who cares? And so, the key to a successful campaign to get people to wanting to sell your product is Shout it out. Anybody that knows. Anybody? Come on, it's so simple. It's money. It's It's money. It's That's all it is. So, just make your offering so attractive and ridiculous that people would be insane not to sell your product. So, we just taking a quick aside, we actually had two separate marketing campaigns when we started having a paid ad budget. One specifically for our target audience and one for our affiliate audience. So, people who didn't even care about our product and didn't even want to use our

8:07product, but that wanted to make enough money with our product because we were giving away 50% lifetime commissions. The other thing that this did was it turned those affiliates into basically account executives. So, they became the first line of defense against churn before us. So, that kept our churn numbers so low because essentially what we did was we built a dashboard that allowed the affiliates to see when people signed up, when they paid, and when they churned. So, as soon as they churned, they knew that they were going to be losing a stream of income, and they reached out to the person to get

8:41them back on our platform. Guerrilla marketing, another another favorite, especially if, you know, listen, paid ads are great, but if you're looking for a little better return on ad spend or return on investment, there's alternate campaigning. Non-automated DMs, we're all sick of the automated ones and the AI ones, you can tell. Um you can just

8:59tell when they come, it's it's terrible. What you do is you just look at what the customer is that what they're doing and how your product can help them and actually mention in the ways that your product can help them based on the information that you glean from their profiles or if you're not B2C from their

9:15website. Influencer sponsorships, this was this was another big uh acquisition channel for us. What we had was we had built pre-built contracts that I would send to influencers. And what you do is you kind of build in what you're looking for. So, $5,000 for 10 30-second interstitial ads for subscribers in X vertical with over

9:39X subscribers. And blast that out to as many of them as you can. And if one or two of them pick it up, great because now you have future deals. The other thing that I'll add to that is making them an affiliate as well, so they start seeing additional streams of revenue and then they start making content on their own, which is what happened for us for our platform without us having to pay them additionally aside from future revenue

10:00dollars. Stealth mode product placement, you know, Rob talked about this a little a little bit earlier. Um Quora's great, Reddit's great, blogs, any type of stealth product placement, but make sure you're helping the person first. Help them with the solution and then put the plug. So, using F5 bot to kind of see when your product is being mentioned, that's a little bit more down in the funnel. We're talking about problem aware, not product aware. So, problem aware, that's where you want to

10:28do the stealth mode product placement. Gamification and challenges. This is another big thing that we did and not not a lot of people use this. So, what we did was we actually incentivized people for learning more about our system. People who didn't have all of the features enabled. So, we gave them rebates or incentives, little badges, tokens, all these nonsense things just

10:50to get them to learn the product more. If they completed reading certain knowledge bases, they got rebates. So, we made it a fun kind of game for them to learn and be more more um in tune with our product and which in turn made it stickier. Personalized video outreach. Now, technically this is a form of outreach that you would have to do, but you could only do it you don't only have to do it once because there are AI tools out there now that will let you automatically modify your voice and who your target is, or you can pay an influencer to do it, or hire someone off

11:20of Upwork, an actor, or something like that. It's just a unique way of outreach that is not the typical hey cold email, hey cold DM. And free tool giveaways, this one is another fantastic option. So, by providing free tools, you gain a lot of traffic, which you can funnel to your related paid product or tool. People love free tools, so why not yours? With with an upsell, obviously. So, some a list of some free tools that you can build or buy if you

11:47don't have time to build one. Directories, newsletters, free courses specifically targeting the vertical verticals that you're looking to go after. Niche search sites, free information sites, learning education courses, um and single purpose use case sites, NS lookup, QR gen calculators, things that people will use, but preferably you want to do it to solve a problem or um a redundant issue that your particular vertical has issues solving. And something short, one transactional kind

12:18of tool that will help them. And so, the final last piece, obviously, which all of you already know what it is, you're doing it right now, is just ask people who have done it before. Talk to the people next to you. The person next to you may be 2 years where you want to be. They're They're you in 2 years. So, ask them, how did they get there? What What steps did you take? And you may inspire It may inspire you to find some information, or you can reach out to me. My DMs are right there, my Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, if you have any questions. Join the MicroConf

12:51Connect, and just talk to people who have done it, because that is That is probably the best way that you can do it. So, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for the for being here, and this is my first MicroConf, so I love it so far. It's fantastic. Thank you all very much. [applause] Thank you, Spencer. We'll do two

13:10questions for you if you're game. Hey, Spencer. Thanks for the talk. That was great. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. What How long did it take you to go from like idea to your first MVP? So, the problem was finding a developer qual qualified enough to So, as a non-technical a non-technical person having to interview a developer is very difficult um because they could be BSing you the whole time and you just go, "Hmm, all right. Well, let me see your portfolio." And but it it took about 3 months to get there. So, we were building it based on feedback from our existing customers and from what I

13:48thought was wrong with the existing platforms that were out there. So, I was taking bits and pieces from the systems that were out there that were either too expensive. I like the ones from this one. It was I was menu picking from each of them and that's how I cobbled together this MVP. And it worked.

14:06Spencer. Hey. Um what was it like going through that hockey stick growth period you had in December 2020 through February 2021? So, the reason we had that insane growth is because at that point we were stuck below 20K MRR for a for a while. We were trying to break through that. And and so, the thing is that's why I said it takes patience and it takes time is because there's a lot of refinement that needs to take place. You need to make sure your funnels are completely aligned. You need to make sure your conversion strategies are aligned. Um one of the big things that I did that I

14:40personally think a lot of people should be doing is for your pricing strategy, not necessarily testing different pricing, but testing different pricing pages. So, we had four different pricing pages that we had that we sampled out to all the people that were signing up. And every 2 weeks we would eliminate one of them. And then by the by the end of it

14:59we had the page that converted the best. And so, with that once we started honing the bottom part of the funnel for the actual conversions, honing the top part, it it it started to really accelerate the the growth because we were really anybody who was problem aware and found us converted very quickly. So, it was it was exciting. It was just a it was a little stressful. I'll tell

15:24you that. [laughter] And and through the other thing that I don't publicly mention and I'm not going to get into too much detail because the we this is recorded. Um there was a lot of there was a lot of troubles in the business um that nobody saw. For example, we got ransomware'd attacked, but none of our customers we had 6 million daily average users. No one knew that we had a internal ransomware attack. We we had a situation where hackers got my information and they were threatening to dox me across all of my network. So, there was a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes, but you

15:57just keep chugging on because this is what you need to do to achieve, you know, achieve your goals and you don't let anything get in your way. Nothing. [applause]