# Do This Now To Recession-Proof Your SaaS Business Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy4-0fHJHLg Duration: 9 min Language: English Words: 1820 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/iy4-0fHJHLg --- [0:00] In this video, I'm going to talk about seven things you can do now to recession-proof your SaaS business. And if you watch this channel, I'm sure it's no surprise that if you stick around till the end of this video, I'm going to give you a bonus tip where I talk about how to think about preparing for the inevitable economic recovery. I'm Rob Walling. I've started multiple seven-figure companies, written three books about building startups, and invested in more than 120 companies. If you're running a company today, or you have a product that is generating revenue, you should be thinking about [0:27] how to survive the present recession. And let's be honest, we're in a recession. If you Google it today, there are different sources saying yes or no. It doesn't matter. We are in an economic downturn where we've seen the stock market decline, where we've seen companies doing layoffs. We are in enough of a receding economy that you should be thinking about changing the status quo since the last major bear market and since the last major recession. Now, we can talk about the very quick recession during COVID that lasted a month or two before all the stimulus was added, but now we are in something that has been, you know, more [0:59] of a prolonged recession. We can say it's been 6 months or more. And given that we don't know if it's going to be another 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, or even longer than that, we should be doing things that ensure our business survives. Before I dive into these, I want to thank my TinySeed co-founder Einar Vollset for collaborating with me on this list. Strategy number one is to stop screwing around. If a growth [1:19] channel is working, double down on it. If it's not, consider shutting it down. The worst thing you can do is basically half-ass it where you're not learning a ton, you're losing a bunch of opportunity costs, potentially money, and person cycles, human cycles, doing things that aren't working really well. And when everything's going up into the right and everything's growing, you can afford to be more risky, I'll say. You can afford to make bigger bets that maybe take longer to pan out. But in this economic climate, it's time to be a little more conservative than maybe we were a year ago when money was cheap and business was easier. Strategy number two [1:52] is to consider going on the offensive. Everyone else is pulling back. The big tech companies are pulling back. What that means is that people are getting cheaper paper-click ads are getting cheaper, potentially sponsoring podcasts, events, newsletters is likely to get cheaper. And this may sound contrary to strategy number one, which was to be more conservative and potentially pull back on things. But [2:13] pull back on things that aren't working. You can still try experiments. You can and should try experiments, especially if you see the prices of running those experiments falling. And then realize that if they work, you can double down. And if they don't, then you cut them loose. Strategy number three is to realize that not all churn will be because of a recession. So, make sure you have a tool installed that will help you reduce your churn. And of course, I recommend Churnkey. We believe in Churnkey so much, we've actually invested in them and they are one of the best players in the space. If you want [2:41] an app that will help you identify and reduce churn. Because again, not all churn will be because of a recession. You still have to build a fundamentally healthy business. Strategy number four is to build alternative two and comparison pages for when your VC-funded competitors implode. I've talked about this in a prior video about marketing approaches your competitors could be using against you. But alternative two and comparison pages are really SEO plays such that when someone searches alternative two big name competitor, they might land on your website. And basically you're trying to piggyback on search traffic for their name. Versus comparison pages is when you say my [3:18] company versus this other big competitor. And that's when you are well-known enough that people would be Googling to compare your product to a competitor. These big VC-backed companies who have made big bets on a lot of funding and frankly over-hired, they didn't over-hire for 2021, but they're way over-hired for 2022. A chunk of them are going to start seeing headwinds in growth. They're not going to be able to raise that next round. And when they implode, you want to be there in the search results when people are looking to migrate away. That leads us to strategy number five, which is to be quick to jump in and snipe customers [3:50] from competitors that implode. I have absolutely seen multiple founders now watch a VC-backed competitor and look, they don't need to be VC-backed or not, but if they're venture-backed, often times they are big and they're growing fast and thus they have enough customers that it's worth doing an effort like this. You should reach out to them. Email, cold outreach, LinkedIn. And you can get lists by trying to scrape a list from the internet, trying to scrape a list of testimonials. You can use BuiltWith, you can use Datanyze. It really depends on the space you're in [4:18] and and the competitors that you have. One example of this from just a couple weeks ago is there's a company called Assure. Assure helps venture funds do their bookkeeping and accounting. And while at my startup accelerator TinySeed, we don't do business with Assure, many funds do and they're kind of in a bind because they need to migrate away from Assure. And today I received a cold email asking if we might [4:39] need help migrating away from them. Luckily again, we don't use Assure, but I bet that that cold email gets a huge response because this is the perfect time to be swooping in and looking for folks who are using a service that is shutting down. Strategy number six is to take this time to fire underperforming team members. It's very likely that you have a few and you know who they are. It never feels good to let someone go. It never feels good to get let go, but realizing that in this recession it makes an easy reason to transition someone out gracefully. It doesn't look as bad for them. If you get let go at [5:11] the top of a bull market, it's obviously a performance issue, but if you get let go in the midst of a recession, it's a little more normalized and I would say less stigmatized. you get fired when, you know, the bull market's raging. The point of this strategy, of course, is to cut your burn. You want to feel like you have enough runway to run for a very long time because who knows when the recession is going to start getting better and who knows when the funding environment or just when new customer acquisition is going to start picking up again. So you don't want to have sleepless nights worrying about making [5:38] payroll. You want to have enough cushion that you can go to sleep every night and feel really good about the progress you're making with your business. My seventh and final strategy before we get into the bonus one is to audit your expenses, especially subscriptions. It's pretty likely if you go through all of your credit card statements, you're going to find a few subscriptions you no longer are using or frankly some nice-to-haves that you can pause for now. This is obviously happening. You know, we're seeing it across SAS companies that that a business who may have been paying for 6 to 12 months wants to pause their subscription, wants [6:08] to cancel for now until things change for their business. And again, when times are booming, we don't tend to make time to go through our credit card statements and look at everything that's being charged. But if you can take 5 or 10 minutes and go back through the last month or two worth of expenses, I bet there's a few hundred dollars a month at least you can probably shave off without changing the way you're operating your company. Next up is the bonus tip about [6:30] preparing for the economic recovery. Before I do that, if you've enjoyed this video, love it if you'd hit the like button, subscribe to the channel. We're putting out at least one video like this every week on this channel talking about building, launching, and growing SAS startups. So, my bonus strategy today is really to prepare yourself mentally to endure a long winter. And maybe that's another 3 months and maybe it's another 12 months. But if you're not mentally prepared for there to be a prolonged period of uncertainty, maybe it's just with your business, maybe it's with the worldwide global economy. The problem is the news cycle, the 24-hour news cycle [7:04] is just chattering so much about it that it can put a lot of fear in your heart. And so, A, I would say stay away from 24-hour news, but also realize that this will recover. You don't want to hunker down so far that you're not ready for success as things turn around. There's a famous quote from Warren Buffett, one of the richest men on the planet, and he says, "Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." We don't know when things will turn around, but we do know that they will. And if you prepare yourself mentally to grow your business slower than usual during [7:33] this time, taking calculated risks, following some of the strategies I outlined here, then you're going to prepare yourself to be that slingshot when things start to pick up again. We can think about Google and Facebook, I believe Twitter as well, they were launched during recessions. Recessions are when you might have more time to work on them, you might have more motivation to work on these things to make them work. It's when the cost to launch and manage a business and hire folks declines. It's the cyclical part of it getting a little easier economically, but it gets a little harder mentally. So, I'm saying to prepare yourself to endure this [8:06] recession, but don't hunker down so far that you're not ready for massive success as things turn around. You want to be the slingshot comes out the gate once the sun starts rising. Hope you enjoyed these seven strategies for how to recession-proof your SaaS business. I'll see you in the next video. Money. [8:27] Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts. Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt