Here's Why Your SaaS Side Hustle Isn't Working As Expected...

0:00my seventh thing that I think you shouldn't do if you want to build a multi-million dollar startup and bootstrap it is to launch a bunch of products hoping one sticks I'm a builder I love the idea of building 12 products in 12 months 52 products in 52 weeks building and shipping is a dopamine Rush it's amazing getting your new product or feature or chat GPT rapper or whatever into the hands of people on product hunt and Reddit and Hacker News and your friends and look I'm not mock I mean I know earlier I was joking about product hunt and Hacker News launches those are a mixed bag but they're not a bad thing

0:36like if I was launching a product today I would 100% want to get on those you know these social news websites I do take them with a grain of salt uh in terms of actually Gathering customers that will stick around but I do think there's some value there it's probably topic for another podcast episode but the idea of launching a bunch of products hoping one sticks has a couple problems like pretty major problems for me one is you don't learn very much cuz if I launch 10 products and one works it's unlikely I'm going to know why it's really likely I got lucky and again I

1:11don't like to teach approaches that need or rely on luck I've been doing this in the neighborhood of two decades and I've been successful at it for less time than that but I've been talking about it on on this podcast my blog my books and everything for whatever it is 15 years 17 18 years and I've always wanted to avoid the lottery ticket approach the big promise of You Can Be A Millionaire tomorrow here's an example of this person who did just that and I'm going to teach you how to do that when in fact that'sit when in fact it's Survivor bias when in fact that's one person out of a

1:46hundred who each launched five products and this one person got lucky and so it's not repeatable and I hated that stuff when I was coming up when I was trying to become a successful entrepreneur and I could just smell snake oil and the the further I dug in the more I found out that the person promoting the approach had really gotten lucky hadn't built the business that they talked about the examples they use had gotten lucky hadn't really built the business they talked about and so the idea of learning and not just being successful but knowing why you're successful and knowing that you could repeat that again or actually repeating

2:22it again showing that you have the skill to do it multiple times this is something I've always held on to pretty tightly as someone who has been with a doer and a teacher not just a teacher not just someone who had a middling success and then you know claims I started the biggest startup and had the biggest exit anyone's ever talked about I'm really sensitive to the the people out there who oversell what they've actually done and the folks who oversell what they've actually done usually got lucky and usually don't know why they're successful that's the problem so let me tell you some people who are not in this

2:55Camp right so people who are successful and I think could do it 20 more times if they had the time Jason Cohen Heaton Shaw Rand fishkin Ruben Gomez David canel dares sha I I can go on they learned what it took they had to grind they had to make mistakes and then overcome those mistakes and figure out what is the thought process what is the approach what is the troubleshooting if you never make mistakes are you smart or are you just lucky if you make mistakes and overcome them you learn you become just a little bit better as a founder and so that's the first thing I don't

3:27like about this hoping one sticks is I don't think there is much learning in launching and getting lucky with one out of 10 one out of 20 and then writing that if that were to be successful I question if you can ever do that again you know if you just caught lightning in a bottle so the lack of learning and really truly understanding why you're successful I think is one thing the other thing is often times in most cases I've talked to literally thousands of Founders now many of whom are successful and some of whom are not most of the time the thing you initially launch with

3:58is not the same product that gets you to product Market fit most of the time you launch with something you think the world needs and you miss the mark sometimes by 5% sometimes by 95% but great Founders then ask the right questions have hypotheses and they they just pivot around they add a thing they make a guess they change their positioning they this is all they don't just willy-nilly do it but they learn and they take those learnings and they build them into the product and the positioning and the marketing and the sales and slow they grind to the point where they've built a business that

4:33people want and are willing to pay for and are saying shut Up And Take My Money sometimes that process takes months sometimes you get lucky I I know there's someone out there one in a thousand who what they launched actually did get them to product Market we see those examples on Twitter right we see the examples on product hunt or Reddit and we say oh my gosh they did it I can do this too it's totally feasible and it is totally feasible one in 100 one in a th000 whatever there's some minuscule number of times where it's truly what you thought the market needed was what they

5:00actually needed most of the time it takes you 6 months to get there from launch 12 months 18 months 24 months takes a long time and it takes a lot of grinding and there's a lot of uncertainty and that in my opinion is the worst part of being an entrepreneur the worst part of starting any company and let's specifically say SAS companies or products that people want the worst part is the uncertainty when you still don't know if you've built something people want and are willing to pay for and so that's the part that people want to avoid because it's painful but that's the part that I believe makes you a

5:31great founder those are the moments those are the days weeks and the months that you grinded out and you come out the other side if you find it if you suddenly see your churn plummet trial to paid going through the roof and people searching for your brand name in Google and you know you have you've caught the rocket ship you're starting to catch what I call escape velocity once you've made it there you can look back and be like wow that was hard and it took a long time but I'm a much better founder for it and now I know know why I'm successful and I think I could do this

6:02again I love having that confidence right of the the repeatability of it it's a disservice to a lot of those ideas because I think a lot of ideas you launch and you get the bump and you get the dopamine rush and everybody turns out and you don't then know how to Market you never make it past that the starting line to me launching a product is the starting line people who think about as a Finish Line have never I don't know never built a multi-million dollar product because really launch is the starting line where you start to learn you start to learn what you done right and mostly what you've done wrong

6:32and usually you've done quite a bit and that's where you then gain the skills and you actually start doing repeatable things that if they work will be skills that you take with you for the rest of your life I think if you're of the mindset that you should launch and see what sticks I think you're probably giving up too early I think you're doing yourself we certainly you're doing your product or disservice because it could be successful with work with the grind and I think you're doing yourself a disservice because you're never going to learn the nuts and bolts the blocking and tackling as Dan Andrews would say of

7:05building a business and that grind and actually getting there when I look when I say grind I don't mean 70h hour weeks I just mean doing things that are hard and you kind of don't want to do they're new they're uncomfortable and they're uncertain and you might waste time because you might try a marketing approach and it doesn't work but then iterating and building those features and getting to product Market fit it is incredibly rewarding and that's the process that can take you from being a entrepreneur a brand new entrepreneur to someone who knows how to build great products and great companies the video you just watched was pulled from an

7:39episode of startups for the rest of us to get the rest of the episode including an additional six things that I think are big mistakes for Founders click the link in the description or look for episode 685 of startups for the rest of us in whatever app you use to consume podcasts this is a new format for the channel where we've pulled a little snippet a spicy t from the podcast and put it on the YouTube channel I'd love to hear your thoughts feel free to leave a comment below and let us know if you liked this video if you'd like to see more or if it's not your cup of tea and

8:09if you want to know what process I would follow instead of throwing a bunch of apps at the wall and seeing what sticks you're going to want to watch this video thanks for watching