The #1 Problem with Running a SaaS Business…

0:00I want to take you back a few years to the last time that I launched a SAS app we grew very quickly because I had an audience and I had pretty good skills as a marketer and we grew to 7 or $8,000 a month and then we plateaued and I didn't know what to do next the problem was we hadn't built something that people really needed and were willing to pay for we didn't have product Market fit and as you build launch and grow your own SAS business the number one problem at any stage is going to be that you don't know what to do next that's the

0:30biggest problem and it depends on the stage you're in so in this video I'm going to tell you the next steps that I would take at three distinct stages of building launching and growing your SAS company and if you stick around till the end I'm going to tell you one mindset that will help you move forward no matter what phase you're at it's what sets some of the best entrepreneurs I've worked with apart from all the rest so in this video I'm going to talk about three stages there's the idea phase or really it's pre-launch then there's I've launched but I haven't built something people want and are willing to pay for

1:02so shorthand is we could call this pre-product Market fit stage and then there's I have product Market fit what do I do next those are the three stages we'll cover in the next few minutes so you're in the idea stage and you have a list of 20 ideas in a notebook or maybe you have zero ideas you have no idea which of these to build the solution to this is to start talking to potential customers maybe talking involves emailing as I did when I emailed 17 people that I knew who I thought might want to use the SAS app I going to build so talking doesn't necessarily mean in

1:32person it can be email you can do it over Zoom you can do it over text or slack or Twitter DMS the idea is to immerse yourself in the market that you are hoping to serve and start talking to potential customers so if I knew 10 or 20 or 30 people who might potentially use the product that I was thinking about building I would reach out and say hey I'm thinking about building this thing do you mind if I ask you a few questions I can do it via email or DM or I can send you a Voxer or we can jump on a Zoom call whatever is easiest for you

2:01and then I'd have a few questions that I would probably pull from the book The Mom test about do you have this problem how big of a problem is it what have you done to try to solve this problem and if I didn't know anyone in the space I would be going out and looking at Facebook groups slack groups online communities pretty much any vertical that I'm going to go after is going to have a gathering place online and I would want to find that I would want to provide some value in there and I would want to do a ton of learning both about the problem I'm trying to solve but also

2:31about the people I'm trying to solve it for this is why when entrepreneurs these days come to me and say I have an idea for a SAS app I say don't tell me your idea tell me the problem it solves and in addition the next step is tell me who it solves it for in this phase you're trying to figure that out as best you can before you spend the dozens or frankly hundreds of hours to go out and build something that people can start using to figure out did I solve that problem so that was stage one in stage two this is you've launched something or

3:02at least you have users using it but you know that you haven't quite found product Market fit you haven't built something people want and are willing to pay for maybe you have 5 to 10 users some are triing some are paying you for it but they are giving you feedback and the feedback is kind of a mess right it's not going to be clear-cut being an entrepreneur is making hard decisions with incomplete information and never is your information more incomplete than in the early stages of building your startup it actually does get I'll say easier the problems get become different and The Angst over the uncertainty of

3:34what you're building becomes less the further you get into this journey so at this phase you are trying to trial and error and you're trying to take your vision of what you think you're building and match that up with the feedback that the market is giving you it's not the whole Market it's the 10 people that are trying out your app and so the solution to this part is to look at the data talk to these early customers who are they right who's using your product how are they using it why are they not getting enough value out of it what else do you need to build to make the product

4:03crucial to solving the problem they're trying to solve in addition you have to be evaluating are these customers the ones I want to serve because if you have an application and you have a bunch of designers and you have a bunch of developers and you have a bunch of photographers and you have a bunch of hair salon owners and they're all giving you different feedback it might be time to think about which of these markets are going to be easiest to reach which are more willing to spend money on technology and which do I want to listen to if they're each giving me different feedback obviously this process can be

4:31painful and it is really not clear usually where which direction you should go and this is where you need to use your founder gut your vision of the product also consider getting outside counsel if you're in a mastermind group or you have advisers or you have someone else who knows a little more than you about this phase this is where you bring in that outside advice to help you navigate this even if you're really good at this and pretty confident and have a good Vision it might easily take you 6 months or 12 months to get from I've launched to to have actually built something people really need with my

5:02last SAS company it took us just about 9 or 10 months to get from we've launched 7 or 8K a month Plateau to built this incredible thing and it's starting to become a rocket ship so stage three is you finally caught the tiger by the tail and you've built something that people want and they're willing to pay for it and you see your churn plummet and you see your trial to paid increase dramatically you've basically found loose product Market fit right product Market fit is a Continuum it's not a binary but maybe move from 5 out of 100 up to 30 or 40 out of 100 and that means

5:33that you've solved a problem for a specific segment of the market so what do you do now usually at this point what you're trying to do is strengthen product Market fit so you want to keep building but at the same time you want to escalate your marketing and sales efforts and so this is where you start trying different channels to see what works so if you have a channel and when I say Channel what do I mean cold Outreach is one channel SEO and content marketing are channels Partnerships in-person events running ads on Facebook Instagram or Google the each of these is a marketing channel it's just a way to

6:06get people to be aware of your product and so whatever channel was working for you initially to get your first five or 10 customers can you scale that can you double down on that or do you need to start testing your next Channel I've written quite a bit about this exact process of how to prioritize marketing approaches I go through all 20 of the B2B SAS marketing approaches I know about in the SAS Playbook you've heard me talk about it on the channel before but there's an entire chapter on just this process so it's not something I can summarize here in 2 minutes but realistically it's to take the list of

6:36channels ask yourself which you think is going to work or get outside counsel about that and then you dive deep into that for a month two months 3 months until you prove or disprove the theory that this is the right way to scale this business because having product Market fit is the step before reaching escape velocity I call escape velocity building something people want and also having one or more scalable marketing channels to where I can coste effectively drive more leads and convert them to customer in a repeatable fashion and at that point that's when you have a pretty incredible business that will grow month after month year after year in a second

7:11I'm going to tell you about the personality trait I see in most of the successful Founders I know but before I do that applications to microcom connect are once again open microcom connect is our online community of more than 5,000 bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped startup Founders in microcom Connect you'll find other folks who are tackling the same problems you're facing as well as folks who are a bit further ahead and can give you candid advice to help you move forward faster as you probably know as I say often surrounding yourself with other Founders who are in the same boat they're like-minded some of whom are ahead of you some of whom are at the

7:46same stage it is invaluable especially at the early stages of your journey go to microcom connect.com to apply okay so now the single most important trait that I see in Founders who are getting it done who are are moving fast and who are growing incredible companies is this trait a bias toward action really it means moving quickly when you aren't sure what to do it's easy to get stuck in a rut analysis paralysis takes over and you tread water while you overanalyze things so the key to having a bias towards action is to avoid analysis paralysis and it's to make a small bet on something you go with your

8:19gut you run a test you do something you're trying to prove or disprove something at any given time being in motion gives you more data to make decisions this doesn't mean flip all around and track 20 different things at once and every other day I'm launching a new product that's not what I'm saying but I deal with some Founders where they have come up with an idea for marketing let's say a series of blog posts and it takes them three or four months to get those live and then I'll talk to a different founder and it takes them two weeks to get those live so what is the

8:45difference there it's someone who is willing to have a measure of intensity and a level of urgency to ship things you know they're not right all the time but they're right enough of the time that it keeps the product in motion and it keeps momentum because so much of building a successful company is building and maintaining momentum if you've been grinding on the same business idea for a while and after watching this video you still don't know what to do you'll definitely want to check out this next video that lays out six signs that it's time to move on to your next idea thanks for watching we'll

9:14see you next time