How a Non-Technical Founder Built a 6 Figure SaaS App Using Only Free Sources – Brecht Palombo

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0:07[Music] so as it turns out everything I have in here has been talked about in one way or another by somebody else over the course of the past couple of days I I'm gonna take that as hopefully a good sign so and I also want to thank you for voting for me and giving me an opportunity to to tell my story so this is what I promised and this is what you voted on so this is what I'm going to deliver but this is a ridiculous amount of stuff to do in 12 minutes so but here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna show you how I

0:44found my idea and source the data how I validated the concept with an MVP that was not software three key things that I did to achieve 100k last year and I didn't do any paid advertising that worked and two big mistakes that I made that set me back 18 to 24 months and and what I do differently I am distinctly non-technical I come from a sales background I am I'm an auctioneer I'm a real estate auctioneer sell commercial real estate and so if you take anything from this but I want you to take is that most of you in this room already have more Skills than I do in so if you're

1:27not to get in this kind of business to get this kind of business done a SAS business and so if you're not already where you want to be or if you're not already making a living with it then then maybe which takeaway from this is if that guy can do it then I can do it too if you are already making more than that then maybe I'll give you some seed or a nugget that you can you can take away so about the headline what's that mean six figures 2012 I did just over a hundred thousand dollars in sales and you can see that's my traffic in the green and

2:00the sales in the blue and then I had a I was running another business the commercial real estate auction business and I quit that in September is kind of a golden handcuffs situation be quite honest and so to leave that took and I've got kids and we'll get into that but it took a big leap so but 100k is that a lot of money man it's not really that much money but what it means is that I can I can be free I don't have to work for anybody I don't have any boss and no clients - nobody's schedule and it really only comes from product

2:35revenue I've had clients for a long time but you you can't you can't get the kind of freedom that I'm talking about without without selling products and so that's really that's really the deal because I'm not now beholding to one or two or ten clients to make my whole year which is the way that it was but instead of got you know hundreds of paying customers which also brings some security which I'm going to get into in just a minute so this is when I started the auction business the auction business is counter cyclical this is not my revenue instead this is the commercial real estate property price

3:14index and so I kind of got in just before you would expect an auctioneer might be required right so but what that meant is that I spent a lot of time looking for clients cuz nobody really needs you right there so what I decided to do was start a commercial real estate brokerage which if if you're from I'm from Boston and so we'd say that's wicked smaht and it didn't go well so what happened was you know spent really a lot of time just you know we're hiring agents and we're training them and we're trying to do our own deals and then in June of 2009 just my whole my whole

4:01sales pipeline just died you know just I want to say the bed so I'm gonna say and so I guess the reason that I I tell you all this is because when I started when I started building my project I wasn't I wasn't fooling around I wasn't gonna see if this would work I wasn't gonna try and make some money on the side I was committed I had I had one child already at a year-and-a-half old and another one in the oven I had my wife was at home I had money just flying out the door because of one bed I've had two bad business decisions I'm only gonna tell you about

4:43one and so at that I was committed so here's what happens when you commit them and I want to point out that before this you know I'm I'm listening to rob I'm in Mike and podcast and learning all that I can but I'm not doing anything and so it's shortly after after this implosion I I came up with my MVP yeah which I'm gonna tell you about in a minute and then I worked like a bastard for about six weeks you know three four o'clock at night all the time and then I shouldn't say launch I kind of leaked onto the scene on September 1st and then

5:31by October I had my first sales and it made like a hundred and forty two bucks for that month so I could almost pay my iphone bill so so in the real estate market awk about the product a little bit now so in the real estate market when a crash is we know that banks they are kind of in first position so they I don't want to get too deep into all all how that works but suffice to say what happens is that this guy has a lot to sell and so do 7,000 other banks in the US and so do 7,000 other credit unions because they're there they've got to

6:09clean up they've got to clean up their books so if you're in the business that I was in then these are these are the this is the only show in town so so what I had been doing when during the the run-up was sort of learning about how to know who the best who my best customers would be in the bank space and so I started digging into this data and I found all this free public data and so they filed financial reports on a quarterly basis they're called call reports and what I did is I learned how to make sense of that call report and

6:44the data in it in order to determine who my best possible clients would be so fast forward to rebuilds later and and now it's gonna be four years in August and basically it's three api's I've got a soap API to the FFIEC which is where I get my bank data use LinkedIn and jigsaw I put it all together I put some charts on it and then people pay me to get access to it so that they can find the people that they want to talk to at the places where where they're gonna buy the the various assets so what I want you to take away from that is that there's a

7:23whole bunch of of data out there and it's growing all the time and it's getting more open and there are businesses out there who can use that data to make real business decisions to make money and if it's people like us who can find that data we can present that data and and I just I think there's a huge opportunity as we're going forward and more and more of this becomes available in those niches to provide a real business value I told you I was going to tell you about my Minimum Viable Product as a super secret so yeah I appreciate if we don't it doesn't

8:02leave here I downloaded CSV of the free public data I did a mail merge into a Word document and turned it into a PDF and then I asked for $150 for it on a on a page and I sent some targeted traffic to it and and people bought it and you can look at that and be like why don't do that but I was giving them what they wanted in a way that they could consume it really easily so they just come by reports and it was like a you know 500 page PDF and and they pay me a hundred fifty bucks word ran that for a couple

8:40of weeks and and I was satisfied so it's not rocket science and I think it's easy for us to say well you know it's not really gonna work in my market and you know what people wouldn't buy that this kind of thing but I think we should hesitate to just go out and just start building and in doing complex solutions when you can do something like a PDF and get paid so three keys that got me to a hundred thousand last year were I opened up the data I think I learned this from Patrick in the bingo card creator but what I did was I'd had everything behind

9:22a paywall and so I have all these thousands of institutions and reports and so what I did was I just I I took down the wall except for only of the things that that absolutely needed to be protected and I did it right there and you can see what happened to my traffic after that because it just it just went right up all my traffic's it's either organic direct or mostly a lot of email at this point the other thing that I did is real estate is a is a big niche with huge huge players and so you know go out there and like talk about real estate

10:00investing you're not you're not getting anywhere but if you're going to talk about a list of banks in Alabama that have REO which is an acronym for bank owned property essentially that's that's a whole different thing the other thing about this is that nobody's googling for you know some kind of sales intelligence software for banks just doesn't exist there's no keyword count that you can do from my product and so what I did instead is I talked around the problems and the solutions that I knew that that these people would have who would be interested in in using a tool like I had so I think everybody should go home and

10:45make an email mini-course because it seems like everybody comes up and talks about that sixty-two percent of my customers buy after they go through a 14 day free email mini course and in that email mini course I give away the farm I show you where to find the data I show you how to download it give you a video so you can see where the excel sheet is I tell you what everything means in it and and still people go through all that and then at the end of it they pay me because it you know what I have is is better they don't even necessarily need

11:14it anymore but it's much more convenient and saves them a lot of time and and so at the end of that you know people trust me I'm an authority and so I'm not asking I'm not selling at that point I'm just letting them buy so let people buy this is when I did the free course two big mistakes that I made that cost me 18 to 24 months this one I couldn't believe how many times people said this but does anybody have this you know shiny object syndrome but nobody's shown it on a chart so here's what it looks like on a chart I'm going along and you can see

11:52yeah this goes you can see right here it's starting to go pretty good and then thank God I'm almost at 4,000 a month I should definitely I should definitely start an affiliate niche site because that's that's cool and I won't have to do any work I won't there won't be any customer support and you know so easy and then Oh watch Willie oh that's awesome I love how I I should build a mobile marketing app is what I should do right now and you know this just doesn't make any sense it was off mission I didn't know what I was doing none of these these things

12:26didn't go anywhere they cost me money and time and you can you can see what it cost and that was based on when I bought the domains and ended the contracts so Rob's been talking about this a lot I I was bad with AI was bad with contractors I had they released finally an API so and have to go get these CSVs and import them into the database and everything and so I hired a new developer to do it and I should have fired him and I didn't and I just let the thing go on and on and you know so I could make my niche

12:59site or whatever and and so if you're hiring contractors then when you start to see a problem to shut it down I found the problem right so I have all these things that kind of went wrong and another challenge that I told you about though were external so there wasn't like I didn't get panda door penguin the market wasn't bad you know wasn't thing like that it was it was 100% internal and so I think what you have to do is constantly refocus so that you can you can you can know what you're doing because otherwise you know it looks something like this and you're going

13:38along and you're like ooh you know what's over here and you know maybe I should maybe maybe I should sell real estate yeah and do that so how do we get rid of this and the best way that I know is with goals which you know maybe a lot of people you're gonna groan when you see that but I want to tell you a quick story and then I'm gonna wrap up so now the other font not there so I found one of these they recently moved in August I moved and I found one of these and it was dated November 2012 so it was a book

14:13from the future in my handwriting and so I opened it up and I started going through it then I realized that it was a it was a goal writing exercise that I had done five years prior where I had written everything down I had written down goals like two pages of goals in the positive personal present tense which is the way that you're supposed to write goals like that and 90% of them had come true in the parts that had come true were places where I didn't have it wasn't a priority in my life anymore and so you know may sound silly or trite or whatever else but if you're not writing

14:52setting tracking and pursuing goals and you should do that the way that I stay focused now is I have these huge post-it notes and they're they're you know they're plus size and so I have I have my mission I worked with a stand-up desk and so I've got my mission over here and I've got some key objectives and then I have the the tasks that are most immediate and pressing over here and the reason that I want to bring this up is because you know I didn't I don't have really like social media presence or anything like that with I didn't know anybody in here and you all voted for me

15:32too to do this and the only reason that I know that you might have done that or the only edge that I could think that I might have is that I had set a goal to become better known in the local and legitimate online business communities for this year and then the rest just kind of fell into place so that's it [Applause] [Music] [Applause]