Don’t Quit Your SaaS Until You Watch This

0:00You've launched your MVP. Maybe you have a customer or two. You're marketing it, or at least you think you are, but you're still not getting traction. There are only three reasons this happens, and two of them usually mean you should stop. One means you should keep going, but change what you're doing. The problem is that from the inside, they can all look the same. Are you in what Seth Godin calls the dip, or are you at a cul-de-sac? I'm Rob Walling. I've started six companies, invested in more than 240 SaaS startups, and written six books on building businesses. I've watched early-stage founders get stuck in the exact same spot over and over. An

0:33early-stage founder recently sent me this video. Hi Rob, this is Xavier from France. I have a question about very early-stage project doing less than 500 euros ARR. So basically, project with maybe their first paying customer, but almost no traction yet. After reading The Dip by Seth Godin, I'm wondering how do you differentiate what he calls The Dip from a cul-de-sac at such an early stage? A few thoughts in no particular order. How do you know whether you've done enough marketing, whether you tried enough channels for long enough, or should keep focusing on one? And how do you tell whether you're facing a marketing problem or a product problem? I know

1:15there's no perfect rule here, but you've probably seen the situation many times with early-stage founder. Are there patterns you've noticed that make you think this founder should keep pushing for the dip versus this probably isn't working, and it's time to move on? Thanks a lot for your content, which is helpful for the years, and I hope to

1:34hear your thoughts about that. Cheers. So first of all, thank you for sending that question in, Xavier. I think it's a question a lot of early-stage founders have. So you actually asked me four questions. First, how do you know if you're in the dip or a cul-de-sac? Second one is, have you done enough marketing? The third is, is this a

1:51marketing problem or product problem? And fourth, what patterns have I seen with founders at this stage? I'm going to get to all four, but reading between the lines, I think they all come back to one thing. You're feeling stuck, and there are only three reasons founders get stuck. The frameworks and thought process I mentioned in this YouTube video are from my new book, Idea to Traction, and I'm going to tell you more about that in a bit. But let's start with the first reason that founders get stuck. Reason number one is that nobody has the problem, or they don't know they have it. And this is one that you really

2:22can't market your way out of. If folks don't know they have a problem and you're trying to educate them, it's going to be very expensive and very hard to reach them. You can obviously do cold outreach and try to educate an entire market, but as a first-time bootstrapper, it's not something I'd recommend. This isn't always 100% a reason to move on, but it's definitely a big red flag if I'm bootstrapping a new business. Ways to figure out if you're stuck in this reason is is there any search volume online? Is there any Google or LLM search volume? Are there folks talking about this in Reddit threads, looking for a solution to a

2:57problem? And if you do get folks on sales demos or sales calls, do prospects tell you the problem they have and realize that software could solve this? Or do you have to explain all of this to them? And And as I said earlier, educate them that this solution exists. Reason number two is if they have a problem, but you can't find them. And this one usually means you should keep going, but change what you're doing. It's the most

3:21fixable and often the most misdiagnosed. Founders decide the market doesn't want what they have when realistically they've only tried one or two marketing channels, and they haven't put much time into doing them well. So if you work a channel properly for three to six months and you've got nothing, that's data, right? If you dabbled, it isn't. Founders mess this up all the time. They want to post on social media and think that they're marketing, and they abandon a real market because they never actually marketed to it using SEO, paper click ads, cold outreach, going to events. You know, there's 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. I talk about them

3:55all the time. They're in my book, The SaaS Playbook. And if you haven't gone down and tried several of them, I'm going to dig in more to that a little later, and you're abandoning a market, then I think it's a misdiagnosis. And reason number three is that you can find prospects or customers, but they don't want to pay. So, this is where the pain or the problem is real, but maybe it's

4:15just not enough of a pain or problem. It's more of a vitamin, not an aspirin. This is usually a reason to stop, too. If you're solving a problem that isn't desperate enough that people are willing to pay, they aren't willing to pay what what you need in order to make it a great business, I would usually look at trying to pivot into an adjacent problem, or consider abandoning it altogether. Now, the exception is

4:38sometimes moving up market can fix this. So, if you've solved the problem for consumers or prosumers, nobody wants to pay for it, they might be really price sensitive, and if you move up into the mid-market, get five, 10x your pricing, or even into enterprise sales, that can be something that can help your business. But, it can be tough if you're a solo operator operating nights and weekends to do that. Now, there is one more reason why things might not be working, and it's that you're solving a problem, but you're not solving it very well, meaning that your solution isn't the right solution to that problem. Uh

5:11that's actually pretty rare, and I'll talk about it as we dive in to my answer to Xavier's question. So, Xavier's first question is, "How do I tell whether I'm in a dip or a cul-de-sac?" And you'll hear Seth Godin, who wrote the book The Dip, answer this as well. It kind of depends. It's hard to put an exact definition on this. But, for me, I've always known by getting multiple signals. So, one signal is I look at any feedback I'm getting through the business, right? So, am I able to reach some customers? Are some people saying this is a desperate pain point? Or is absolutely no one, after talking to 50,

5:4760, 70 different prospects, no one is saying this is a problem they have. Or can I not even get 10 or 20 conversations going? Like if nothing is working, that's a signal. That's data. Usually, what you see are things that are kind of working. A lot of different approaches that are maybe generating a little bit here and a little bit there and trying to absorb those signals and weigh them in my founder gut and make hard decisions with incomplete information. That's where I start is do I have any signal or is everything just at zero, the volume is off basically and nothing I'm trying is working cuz those

6:20are two different scenarios. The second thing that I do is I try to get outside perspective. So for me, I've been in the same mastermind for more than 15 years. So I I would talk to my fellow mastermind members. If I have a co-founder, I'd want to talk to them. Do I have an advisor, an investor? Can I pay a coach? Can I pay someone from the internet? You can look for SaaS coaches online and have someone come in and give you their advice and that have them look at the data and get a fresh perspective because just doing things in your own head constantly is often not the best

6:52way to solve problems. And then the third thing I usually ask myself is do I have any more ideas? Like once I'm out of ideas and out of motivation and kind of just done pushing, it's usually when I A want to get some outside perspective to maybe help me refresh or when I start considering shutting it down. But in

7:10this one, you have to know yourself. There are some people who run out of ideas after five days of working on something because they just want to make it and ship it and ship 12 things in 12 minutes. I'm just kidding. It's 12 things in 12 days, right? Isn't that the kind of the the indie hacker dream is that one of these catches and you don't actually have to do any of the hard work. So if you find yourself running out of ideas really quickly and wanting to just bail on everything and quit too early, you probably need to stick around quite a bit longer. But if you find that

7:34you're someone who works on the same idea for two, three, four years and nothing's working, you probably should have quit a little sooner. So this comes down to knowing yourself. Xavier's second question was, how do you know whether you've done enough marketing? And look, it's a it's a guess. It's a rule of thumb. I always have this feeling that if I'm starting a new effort, I want to try three channels for probably three to six months each, depending on the channel. And I want to pick the top three channels that I think are most likely to work. And if I don't know, I ask. I will ask my friends. I

8:03will ask not my friend friend founder friends who are knowledgeable, not your rando friend you know from high school. But I will ask founder friends or folks in my mastermind. You know, it's that same group of more knowledgeable people who can help me try to narrow down the list of channels that I should be trying. I think if you've tried five channels and nothing's working, you probably given this a pretty good go. I think if you've tried one or two, that's not nearly enough. You know, SEO can take six months or more to go into effect. Cold email or cold outreach

8:31usually takes at least a couple months. So, that's kind of my rule of thumb is three to six months and I think three or four channels. And you actually putting time into educating yourself or hiring someone to do them, not doing half-ass efforts. I see this all the time on Twitter. People say, "Oh, ads don't work

8:47anymore." And I ask, "What did you try?" And they say, "Oh, well, I bought some Google ads for two weeks. I spent $100 and it didn't work." And it's like, that's not a try. That's doing nothing. I mean, you you basically have wasted your time and your money. Actually, go all in on one not all in, but you know what I mean. Actually, go deep and put a lot of time and effort into these channels. And you can do these in parallel, right? You can do more than one marketing channel at a time. You can be experimenting with them. Your only limitation is time and budget. Xavier's

9:15third question is, how do you know whether it's a marketing problem or a product problem? And this one depends on where the roadblocks are. So, obviously building a product from scratch is different each time. But generally, if you're building a B2B SaaS product, there are four steps. First one is problem validation. It's just finding a problem and realizing that people

9:36actually have it and need it solved. Second step is problem solution fit. So, you can come up with a solution to a problem that doesn't make any sense. Often times a solution to a problem someone has is not software. So, if someone's problem is they want a really nice website built, you building a duplicate of Squarespace probably isn't the solution they want. They may just want to pay you a few hundred dollars to build them a website on Squarespace. So, finding the right solution to a problem is important. Third step is product validation. So, that's when you figure out, okay, does my product actually solve the problem? And does it do it

10:11well enough that people will stick around? And the fourth step is product market fit. And that's when you've learned how to market and position and sell your product and generate demand. So, at each of those, you have to ask yourself like problem validation, this comes back to, you know, the the steps I said earlier, which is if no one has that problem or if you're finding people are just yawning and saying "Ho-hum" around your problem or your solution, then you know it's more of a product problem. But if you're not generating enough leads, let's just say you're not bringing in if you're doing cold outreach or if you're doing marketing,

10:44no one's coming to the website, that certainly is a marketing problem, right? Not enough leads. But if you are getting leads and you're doing demos and no one is closing, you may have a problem with the way you're communicating it, right? Is it your positioning, your copy, or your sales process? And then if folks are actually buying and then churning out, usually that's a problem with your product. So, you just have to look at where you're losing people in order to try to diagnose, is it marketing and sales? Is it positioning and copy? Or is it your product? And Xavier's fourth question is what patterns have I seen in

11:20early stage founders? I see a lot, especially with makers, that they want to jump to the solution, not even to the solution, they want to jump to the product. And that is the third step of the four steps that I named here. They don't want to learn how to do the market research, the customer development, the customer conversations, some type of validation, some type of research of demand, and actually look at marketing channels and figure out I mean by the time I'm getting to where we're going to launch a product, I already know the top three or four marketing channels that I'm going to be approaching, and I

11:50probably have flywheels starting to go with content creation for SEO or paper click ad campaigns already running. And it's not just cuz I have budget, it's because I have knowledge. Almost every serial entrepreneur I know who builds a second, third, or fourth company, they do a lot of research and validation up front. None of them, like literally zero, spray 12 ideas in 12 weeks and see what sticks. That's another anti-pattern I see in entrepreneurs who want to take the easy route and try to get lucky, right? So instead of putting the work in and building and learning and asking myself questions and failing sometimes and pivoting and making hard decisions,

12:32they just keep pulling up the next die on the craps table and just throw it, throw it, throw it, and hope they hit snake eyes, although that loses in craps, but you get the idea. They hope they throw a seven. And it it really doesn't teach you anything. And it at that point it's just a luck game. So that's another pattern I see is folks

12:49not wanting to put in the hard work. Another one is folks patterning themselves after whoever's successful today. But the thing you have to think about is that person has traveled their own journey. So if you're going to look at what Jason Cohen is doing and say, "Well, as a first-time entrepreneur, I'm going to try to compete with him or I'm going to try to start WP Engine the way he did." That was his third or fourth company. He worked his way up. He stair-stepped his way up to get to that point, had a lot of knowledge, a lot of uh he had his own, you know, funding to

13:19get himself going on that. You often want to start smaller, you want to start simpler, and you want to educate yourself and then act. So, pick a couple mentors online and it can be me, it can be someone else. Jason Cohen has an amazing podcast, YouTube channel as well, called Smart Bear Live. You can

13:37watch him, listen to see how he thinks. But pick a mentor or two that really resonates with you, who is where you want to be someday, and tune everybody else out because the noise on X, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but mostly X, Twitter, is is really not helpful for most people. say the majority of the advice there is so bad that it is actually detrimental to your entrepreneurial success. So, thanks again for that question, Xavier. Hope that was helpful. So, if I were Xavier, that's where I would start. And in my new book, Idea to Traction, there's a chapter called How to Know When to Throw in the Towel, where I go deeper into the

14:12seven signs it's time to move on. The book also covers all the way from finding ideas to validating ideas, building your MVP, launching, getting to product market fit, or at least early stages of product market fit. Took me years, several years to write this book, and took me well over a decade to learn what I should write in this book. This is like a spiritual successor to Start Small, Stay Small. If you've read that book, it's like a updated second edition of that, if you will. And it's a prequel to my successful book, The SaaS Playbook, which kind of starts where you're doing five or 10K a month. Idea

14:47to Traction is all the way from zero to get to that five or 10K a month. And if you pre-order the hardcover before November 10th, you'll get the ebook or the audiobook free, plus some extra resources that my team pulled together from the book. You'll also get access to a live Q&A, where I'm going to answer more early stage questions like this one. To get all the details, the bonuses, and pre-order the book, head to

15:08ideatotractionbook.com. So, whether you're in the dip or at the dead end, a lot of it comes back to the idea itself. If you're starting over, you need a better one. If you're pushing through, you better be sure the one you've got is solid. I surveyed more than 200 founders making anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 a month and asked them one question, "Where did your idea come from?" In this next video, I spent 36 minutes breaking down the results. By the end, you'll know the eight places good ideas come from, whether you're hunting for a new one or pressure testing the one you've got. Check it out

15:41and I'll see you over there.