Turn Your SaaS Side Hustle into a Full-Time Gig in 2023

0:00in this video I'm going to talk about how to turn your side hustle into a full-time gig in 2023 and if you stick around to the end of the episode I'm going to tell you something you probably won't think of on your own that's super important to do after you've made the transition to working full time on your product I'm Rob Walling I'm a Serial entrepreneur I've invested in more than 125 startups and now I've written four books on entrepreneurship the fourth one is called the SAS Playbook and it's coming out later this year so in this video I'm going to focus on product side hustles it is harder to transition to

0:28full-time working on products the revenue is not as easy to generate and so we might look at SAS products maybe we'll talk about ebooks and courses honestly the path is pretty much the same there's very little difference between a software product an information product or another kind of product and today I'm going to cover three topics I'm going to start with talking about how to be effective when working around your day job the second one is how to grow your company to the point where it supports You full time and the third is how to make that transition from being part-time nights and weekends to full time so first let's

0:58talk about how to be effective while fitting your hours around your day job common phrase you'll hear used in this context is nights and weekends that implies that you work a day job eight to five nine to five I realize that you may be watching this and maybe you work the night shift and so nights and weekends is is a term I'll use it just means fitting those hours around your full-time job something that I found helpful as I was going through this journey I would carve out what I called founder time and I would go into founder mode you can call it whatever you'd like

1:25but I was able to mentally switch into a mode that turned my brain off from social media I didn't watch movies I didn't hang out with friends I knew that if I had two hours tonight for example to focus on my product that I wasn't gonna get distracted by all the distractions that can commonly get in your way and when you're in founder mode you're not thinking about the laundry you're not thinking about what's on TV and you're not thinking about checking Twitter or Facebook the key to getting into this mode is to be disciplined and then to strive to be effective to actually work on the things that move

1:57the needle and in the early days it's hard to know what's going to move the needle so you have to use your Founders gut instinct and take your best guess but the key thing is if you only have two hours to work you don't have the luxury of wasting time or procrastinating so while watching a YouTube video about how Metallica wrote Enter Sandman is awesome and it's something I do in my free time founder time is not free time this is not the time to be seeking videos of Paul McCartney playing his epic bass lines it's a time where you have to relentlessly execute I've used this

2:23phrase in the past Relentless execution relentlessly executing just means when I sit down to work on my product my goal is to get to working on it full time it's to grow this to the point where it pays my salary or it covers my living expenses you don't get there by accident be prepared that you're going to have to sacrifice some things maybe like going out with friends or not doing your hobby for a year or two I would say don't sacrifice your time with your kids or your spouse because that has long-term ramifications everything else is gonna have to have Flex around your founder time I have many hobbies I play the

2:57guitar I love playing tabletop games I love playing gun and Dragons I stopped to those hobbies for about a decade and I wouldn't recommend everyone do it for that long but while I was building my companies I needed to be focused and I needed to execute and then once I hit points where I was able to sell or I was able to take breaks then I would resume those Hobbies now a decade's a long time to do it I would hope you don't have to do it for that long there's more information out there about how to succeed with side projects like this YouTube channel and there are just

3:24easier and faster ways to get there than there were when I was coming up I started working on stuff two decades ago there wasn't social media there weren't as many ways to kind of move fast and get to the full-time income so hopefully you can get there faster now if you don't have a significant other or kids it's an easy trap to just work all the time to come home from work at five or six and then work till midnight and then work the weekends you can do that but honestly I would try to be smart about focusing on the things that matter and ignoring everything else and if you do

3:52wind up with a significant other or you do have children you're gonna need to learn it so I would focus on being effective rather than looking at the the vast sea of time that you have ahead of you because I think if you feel like you have amazing time abundance it can lead you to either procrastinate or just to work on things that don't move the needle I had my first entrepreneurial success online my wife and I had a six month old baby at the time and I had to be extremely productive in a handful of hours I got to work on my side projects and usually we would put the baby to bed

4:20at seven o'clock say and I had two to four hours depending on the night sometimes no hours if friends were coming over and so you have to be relatively meticulous about planning out in advance what am I going to work on tonight because what you don't want to do is sit down and not know what to do next not know what makes you effective and so I would separate planning from execution and for planning I would get in planning mode put stuff in an Excel spreadsheet and basically just work down those tasks when I was in execution I didn't have to think about what to do

4:47next I just worked down the tasks with all of this in mind this is why this stair step method is so powerful and step one businesses are ideal for this phase because you don't have a lot of time and step one businesses remove an entire half for the business all the marketing stuff that you have to do it's just gone because you have this single traffic channel usually built in a Marketplace and you know with info products I mentioned at the top we might talk about info products you can still build in udemy and Udacity and these other marketplaces that actually bring customers to you and you don't keep all

5:17the money but a step one business is about gaining experience and revenue and confidence and skills and doing that on such a limited amount of time each week is why step one businesses are so awesome for this point in your entrepreneurial Journey the final piece of making this work around your day job is if you have an office in your house with a door that closes that's amazing I did not have that luxury and frankly I think a lot of you watching this don't I had a desk in our living room I put headphones on sometimes my wife would watch TV sometimes she would go to bed

5:44we talked about this being a shared goal for me to be an entrepreneur she and I were both all in on that and you can make this work as well if that's your situation lastly something that really helped me in the early days was I learned to delegate talk a lot about this when my first book starts small stay small but I started hiring virtual assistants or less expensive developers so I could hand off tasks and work would get done while I was sleeping even if I wasn't making a tremendous amount of money by the time I was making a thousand dollars a month from my side

6:12project I was spending a thousand dollars on Outsourcing but work could get done while I was sleeping and that allowed me to move faster to get to that point where I transitioned to full time so topic number two is how to grow your product how to grow your side hustle to the point where it covers the monthly amount you need to be bringing in to handle your budget basically you have two choices to double down on what's working or to find New Growth channels doubling down on what's working implies if you're doing some SEO and that's where most of your traffic comes from you figure out how to get more SEO

6:41traffic you go up the funnel down the funnel you invest and you go deep if for some reason you can't double down on what's working if there's just no more water to be rung out of that sponge so to speak then you might have to look for new marketing channels and of course when it comes to SAS I have my big five marketing channels SEO pay-per-click cold Outreach integration is a partnership chips and content marketing these are just the five most common B2B SAS marketing approaches then there's others that are still super important Affiliates in-person events engineering is marketing I have a full list of the

7:1120 B2B SAS marketing approaches in my new book which is at sasplaybook.com now those are the SAS approaches what if you have info products and courses usually it's about growing your audience right it's about diving into social media guest posting SEO branching out to a podcast or YouTube or Tick Tock podcast guest appearances these are all ideas that you can Branch into growth doesn't happen by accident right you have to be disciplined and you have to focus on it and don't try a bunch of things at once if you have a channel that's working Double Down triple down keep going until you have all the traffic that you think

7:42you can get from it once you Branch out into other traffic channels it becomes a big experiment a lot of stuff doesn't work and that can be demotivating if you're working nights and weekends and sometimes realize that your product may just have a natural Plateau at two thousand dollars or three thousand dollars a month and it might never equal your full-time salary or the amount you need to live and that's where you think about moving to step two in the stair step get multiple products you either start another one or you acquire another one often you can do it in the same Marketplace or App Store that you're

8:10already operating in and then you stack those to get to that point of full-time income I've talked a lot about growth in other videos on this channel too that I can recommend are about how to find your first hundred customers and another one is about moving from 100 to 1 000 customers finally let's talk about how to make that transition to working full-time on your product I remember vividly the first day that I didn't have to report to anyone else no full-time job no Consulting clients and I knew that I was going to do that for the rest of my life I could never go back I had

8:41become unemployable in the middle of the day I sipped coffee while looking at books in a Barnes Noble and I was in heaven but how do you get to that point there's a big question around this it's when do you make this transition and it really depends on your risk tolerance so for me it was about 15 years ago and I needed eight thousand dollars a month to pay the house payment we were living in Boston at the time which is pretty expensive my wife was a post doc so she made a stipend but didn't have large full-time income so I was the the majority Breadwinner you might say and

9:12so I needed 8 000 a month to make my expenses now as a consultant I had been making 20K a month and as a full-timer I was making about a hundred and ten hundred and twenty thousand dollars that was years prior but I didn't need to make that much money to quit the day job because our expenses were less than what we needed and so I looked at it as the moment that I hit 8K a month in product Revenue I can quit my day job now keep in mind as you have revenue from your side project you should be stockpiling that income not spending it on cars or

9:40Vacations or whatever but you stockpile that because you can quit the day job even before your product Revenue exceeds your expenses if you have enough cash in the bank so let's say you need eight thousand dollars a month and let's say your product income is at four thousand dollars a month so you have a deficit or a burn of four thousand but let's say you've saved up forty thousand dollars from product income and it's sitting in a bank account 10 months of Runway it's maybe not a bad gamble do you think you can grow your product up to 8 000 a month to cover that deficit over the

10:06next 10 months before your cash runs out for me that's a pretty safe bet and what I ended up doing is when my products hit 6 000 they were growing pretty steadily and I figured within three or four months I'd be at 8 000 and it turns out I was one thing I'll note is if you're in the United States Health Care is definitely more of a concern than you want it to be because it's very expensive ideally if you have a spouse that still works you can use the health care provided by their job or you go to healthcare.gov it's not ideal you're probably going to pay more for a plan

10:32that isn't as good as what you'd get from your employer but these are the trade-offs unfortunately we're forced to make in the United States something else I want to add a lot of people don't think about is don't burn Bridges whether it's at your day job or with Consulting clients there's a chance you might need to go back and work for them again or maybe they'll hire you as a freelancer if you need a little bit of extra income to kind of make things work in the meantime the nicer you are here and the better you make that transition for them the more likelihood that down

10:57the line maybe you work together again if that's something that you need when I transition to working on my products full time I actually went from five days a week of work to four days and then down to three days and it worked super well because it cut down on my stress of having reduced earnings and it also helped my day job transition over a longer period of time to take all my responsibilities and give them to other people in a minute I'm going to talk about something super important to do after you've made this transition but before I do that I wanted to let you

11:25know about microcomp connect it's our online community of more than four thousand Founders bootstrapped mostly bootstrapped it's a great community that we heavily moderate and there's a ton of great conversations on all things SAS and growth and marketing and Entrepreneurship and there's even local channels for different cities it's a great place to hang out ask questions give some value and get some value back okay so once you've made this transition to working full-time on your own products it's a huge milestone something a lot of people forget to do is to celebrate it the road is hard the road is long and the Road has a lot of ups

12:00and downs celebrate these moments when you can and when you have them this is something I didn't used to do a great job of doing and at the encouragement of my wife she would take notice that something amazing just happened whether it's launching a book launching a new conference launching a new batch of Tiny Seed startups each of these Milestones is a chance for me to celebrate a victory with myself with my team and if you forget to do this you can start to run out of steam over time because you don't remember the good times you remember the hard times but if you celebrate it can drive them home in your

12:31mind as being these amazing parts of the journey and keep in mind to celebrate it with those who contributed whether you have a team whether you have a significant other all of these people are involved in making this happen and moving from nights and weekends to working full time on your own side hustle is a pretty amazing Milestone and worth celebrating I hope you enjoyed this one on turning your side hustle into a full-time gig in 2023 I'll see you in next week's video

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