# How to Start a SaaS Business with No Money

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huyDp-zWpxg
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 2373
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/huyDp-zWpxg

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[0:00] today i want to talk about how to start a sas business with no money and if you stick around till the end i'm actually going to talk about my not so top secret tip for how to do this in a repeatable fashion that doesn't require a bunch of luck to get it done i'm rob walling i'm a startup founder with multiple exits the author of three books all about building startups and an investor in almost 80 companies first let's talk about building sas and what actually costs the money you know why would you need money to do it first thing i'll say is that building software just writing

[0:33] the code is actually going to be the easy part it's potentially expensive if you're not a developer but that part is not complicated the complicated part the part that most people fail on and whether they're developers or founders or non-technical founders is finding customers finding customers is by far the most difficult piece of it and usually that's cheaper than building the software itself because usually as a founder you're doing that you're doing the sales and you're doing the marketing and you're signing customers up i want to say that if you don't have customers you do not have a business you have a hobby there's a lot of people that play

[1:09] business they get business cards and they get a bank account and they form an llc if you're in the us or whatever entity type is in your country and they play business they act like they're in business but until someone pays you a dollar you don't have a business all right so let's talk now about how to build a sas company with no money what do you need money for at all to build you know to build a sas company there's usually no government filings to start a company because you start with a sole proprietorship in the us or whatever the equivalent is uh in your

[1:42] country and you have to check local laws to figure out if you need to do some type of license if you start a business out of your home i'm not going to give you advice on that this video obviously is not legal advice but i've started many companies and when they're a nascent idea without customers i don't run off and form a company entity because it's a waste of time and it's a waste of money until someone starts paying you until you have revenue until you have customers i have always not gone down that road and then i formed the company later once i have a

[2:11] real business a stripe account that allows you to charge your customers is free so there's a lot of things now out there the education like this video channel other videos on youtube that are free or very cheap if you're enjoying my videos i'd love it if you click the like button below and subscribe to the channel we have a ton of content coming out on this channel we have more than 200 videos now and new content coming out pretty much every week varying from live streams to our talks at in-person events to educational videos like this so what isn't free or cheap well one is building

[2:46] the software if you're a developer then you can build it essentially for free right nights and weekends you might have minimal minimal hosting costs but usually you can build locally and you can find a cheap you know infrastructure as a service play like amazon web services or google cloud or heroku that are really really cheap to work with so if you're a developer be prepared for nights and weekends that's what most of us did to get our companies going if you're not a developer you have a few options one is to find a developer co-founder a technical co-founder as they're often referred to but here's the thing

[3:19] they are bringing all this knowledge and skill and experience and their nights and weekends and you know the ability to code you have to bring an equivalent amount of of stuff of skills and hard work to the table because showing up with an idea and thinking that that's equivalent to someone's five 10 15 years experience writing code as well as hundreds of hours of nights and weekends they're about to spend on it is ludicrous so you have to bring something to the table beyond just the idea you should be talking to potential customers fleshing out the idea you should be booking pre-orders you can create wireframes or

[3:53] mock-ups of the software you can create a landing page and drive traffic to that you can create content you can start the marketing flywheel you can build an email interest list there's so much you can be doing if you're the non-technical founder and you do find a technical founder it is quite difficult to start a sas company if you're not a developer it's possible but due to the the complexity of it and the you know upfront expense um it's something that you're really going to have to think through as to whether or not you want to tackle and again i have my not so top secret tip at the end of this video

[4:25] where i talk through ways to get around that and to kind of build up build a flywheel and to you know stair step your way up into building a sas company one thing i will say is i've heard some folks recommend that if you don't have money you can go pre-sell a solution to a group of people you get them to pay you money and then you use that to hire cheap usually overseas offshore labor to build your software product i don't like that idea i don't like it at all actually i think that pre-selling something that doesn't exist and then taking a really risky bet of something you've probably

[4:59] never done you've probably never built or launched or marketed one of these before and now you're going to essentially take cash in hand so you're kind of in debt if you think about it um you know it's not as if you've taken investment you've actually taken upfront revenue with the promise of building the software i don't like that idea your mileage may vary i think some people can make it work i think it's a really risky uh way to do it and i think the odds of it backfiring are pretty high and the odds of you getting really crappy software from from someone that you haven't worked with

[5:30] whose eight hour time difference than you i think is is is a real challenge another way that you can start a sas company you could at least build the mvp is to use no code no code is a term for a whole collection of apps an ecosystem of apps that you can string together so i'll give you just give you examples of them so zapier is an automation engine even like google sheets is often used in no code there's bubble there's air table there's notion even like squarespace is sometimes called no code because you can build websites there and you can string things together and make an interesting

[6:02] business i wouldn't technically call it sas it's more to me i'd think of it as productized service or an mvp a minimum viable product of sas but that is a way to get started you don't always have to build software in order to you know serve someone's needs and if you go in and sell you know your idea to them of i'm going to give you new seo keywords each week or i'm going to give you new leads each week ultimately you may want to build software to do that but in the short term you may be able to do that somewhat manually through human automation

[6:33] whether that's your own time or whether you're you know hire a virtual assistant or hire a contractor to get that person leads right so that you don't always need software to to do this so this is that's another option if you're a non-technical founder so i talked about how development is expensive it's usually the most expensive piece if you're not a developer then there's marketing right how expensive is marketing well if you don't have any money you're not gonna be able to do pay-per-click advertising or really any type of advertising so you're gonna have to rely on more proven uh i'll say free these are free approaches

[7:06] that are only free because they take your time and you're gonna have to probably learn one of these because you don't have money to hire someone so i'd be looking at approaches like search engine optimization content marketing partnerships direct outreach and even attending in-person events i know that in-person events are not free technically but if you especially if you're focused on a small niche like on a vertical meaning you pick oh i'm only gonna go after uh gyms or i'm gonna go at you know like boxing gyms or i'm gonna go after hairdressers or i'm gonna go after um you know lawyers those people usually gather at industry

[7:42] events and going there even as an attendee and having a lot of conversations can be it's not a freeway but it can be an inexpensive way of of engaging with your audience and and frankly making sales so what else what else cost money in a sas app there's sales there's support you're going to do those things you just have you have to buck up you need to do it nights and weekends until you have enough money to quit the day job most people i know who start sas companies or really start any type of software startup they do almost everything themselves or they fund it from their day job and

[8:16] so they are working nights and weekends that's the usual path not saying you have to do that but that is the most common path i see there are some folks who have that confluence of events where they've saved up a year's worth of of salary right or living expenses or they have a spouse or partner who's willing to support them while they do it there these are options but realistically most people i know they do start nights and weekends until they get a business because you don't know if building that business is going to take three months six months or a year or longer and so having a finite amount of

[8:49] cash that you're pulling from can can be stressful succeeding with a startup takes three things hard work luck and skill and those things can be in varying degrees if you have a lot of luck then you might need less hard work and skill to get it done but i hate relying on luck right i want to have a repeatable process that i pretty sure is going to work every time and so if we stick around for just another 30 seconds we're going to dive into my not so top secret approach for doing this in a repeatable fashion that requires much less luck than the above if you like this video

[9:20] click the like button below that'd be awesome leave a comment ask me a question and subscribe to this channel we have a ton more content like this coming out every week all right so let's dive in to this not so top secret approach i say it's not so top secret because it's it's a framework called the stair step approach and the reason that it's you know not as secret as it might be is i've blogged about it and so we will link that up in the show note descriptions below but the idea of stair-stepping is that you start with something small you don't do sas from the start because sas is

[9:53] expensive and it's complicated especially if you haven't done it so you start with something small that maybe software doesn't have to be software maybe you read an e-book maybe you build a course on something you know about you put it online and sell it maybe you consult maybe you have a productized service but you build that product to a nice revenue stream you repeat that until you can quit your day job and then you use that money or that time to invest in your sas and you you basically self-fund you angel invest in yourself this is the path that i traveled this is a path that many

[10:26] founders especially sas founders i know have stair-stepped their way up through consulting to productize consulting to maybe a wordpress plugin to sas or from ebooks to courses to teaching to sas if you want to learn software consider you know maybe you do ebooks and courses but if you really want to get into software then consider something simpler like a wordpress plugin a heroku add-on or a shopify app or something else in an app ecosystem because those apps tend to be simpler to deploy and manage and market than sas they're not going to get as big usually it's rarely going to build a seven-figure add-on in a heroku

[11:02] marketplace versus sas can obviously be seven eight nine figures but it's a great way to start small and to ease into it and to stair step your way up so that you gain the experience you gain revenue you gain profit that you can invest you gain confidence and you gain skills right the marketing skill the support skill the sales skills that you need to build and be successful at running a sas company so that's it for me today i hope you enjoyed my little conversation about starting a sas business with no money i look forward to seeing you in the next video

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