# Got Your First 100 Customers, Now What? Scale SaaS Past 1,000 Customers

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL_chL7nXwU
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 2563
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/pL_chL7nXwU

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[0:00] you have your first hundred customers now what this video is going to talk about how to scale your SAS from 100 to a thousand customers and Beyond I'm going to dig into actionable tactics and strategies to get it done I'm Rob Walling startup founder with multiple exits offer three books on building startups and an investor in more than 100 companies in a previous video I talked about how to get your first hundred customers we'll link that video up in the description but that video was so popular that we wanted to do a follow-up about what's next after you have 100 customers if you recall in the

[0:31] first video we talked about marketing before you start coding doing some validation building an email launch list launching and then doing one-time early stage marketing approaches so things like product hunt Hacker News Reddit even getting involved with some q a sites and maybe doing you know an app Sumo deal a daily deal something like that so in this talk I want to talk about the next stages you reach that 100 customer Mark you feel like you've built something that people want and how do you then 10x that business I'm only going to talk about marketing I'm not going to talk about scaling up your support operations developers basically

[1:03] everything else you need to grow to a thousand customers because there's a lot to it and this would be a very long video I might break YouTube If I actually went into everything that it takes to get there there's so much information involved in getting to a thousand customers that I've actually written a book on the topic it's not out yet but I'm going to be releasing it early next year if you're interested in being notified when that book goes live head to robwalling.com just my name.com I have an email list there sign up and I'll be sure to send to that list when I launch the book next year so the

[1:33] interesting thing with recording a video like this is a thousand customers at ten dollars a month is 10 000 mrr and a thousand customers that a thousand dollars a month is a million mrr that's 12 million a year and so your price point really dictates a lot about your business right it doesn't just dictate how big the business will get at a thousand customers it actually dictates how you can market usually the higher your price point the better because the lower your churn and the more marketing approaches you can use if you're charging five dollars per customer per month there are four or five ongoing marketing channels that you can use

[2:09] everything else is too expensive if you're charging 500 a month that palette expands to uh you know give or take 10 12 marketing approaches and if you're charging 5 000 a month then the complete gamut of 21 B2B SAS marketing approaches that I know exist are all available to you at that price point so that is something I ask Founders to keep in mind when they're thinking about what type of business they want to build and who they want to sell to much of that will dictate how much you can charge and therefore how much flexibility you have in marketing your product well you can scratch and Claw and as Paul Graham said

[2:44] do things that don't scale to get to 100 customers that's not going to get you to a thousand whether you're charging ten or a thousand a month getting to a thousand customers requires a repeatable process it requires a flywheel to start spinning you have to find one or more marketing approach approaches ongoing that are repeatable that bring in new leads month after month and that start to build like a flywheel the faster you get a flywheel gets going the more momentum it has that's what you're looking for to get from 100 to a thousand so usually this involves some kind of experimentation where you have to look at the entire palette of all the

[3:19] marketing approaches you could be using and then you decide which one or two am I going to focus on for the next month or two as I experiment to see if this works in my space with my price point and with my skill set so the two questions I typically ask myself are what skills do I have I'm assuming I'm a single mostly bootstrap founder if I have a team then I ask what are the skills of the team what have we had success with on past projects if we've stair stepped our way up here do we already know how to do some SEO do we

[3:46] already know AdWords those would probably go to the top of the list if I already have the skills and the second question is what are competitors doing what's working for them and it's not that I want to try to copy their approach but realistically if you have competitors who've been in the this space longer they've probably tried if they're smart they've probably tried a lot of approaches and you can potentially have your short list your early shortlist be based on things that you think might be working for them once we talk about that you can then prioritize it using the couple questions I mentioned above and you can use a

[4:17] framework called the ice prioritization framework often this is used to prioritize which features to build into your product but I found it pretty useful for deciding which marketing approaches to use and Ice stands for impact confidence and ease of implementation so you literally just throw these into a spreadsheet and you take your best guess at what impact you think this could have on the company you can make it new leads or new customers as long as you use the same impact metric for all the marketing approaches but your confidence that this will work that you can make it work and then the ease of implementation and obviously

[4:51] with each of these three the higher the number the better and I've seen different ways of using ice where you just add the three together I've seen it where you multiply the three to together so that actually gives almost a logarithmic right or an exponential score and then you sum it to the right and you get a single number for each of these approaches that you picked up and these aren't just high level approaches like I wouldn't just put SEO as an approach I would put Google SEO or I would put Amazon SEO or I would put particularly going after free Tools in this space or I would look at you know

[5:20] YouTube SEO there's some very specific things that I would be thinking about and not just high level I want to take a moment to highlight the sponsor of this video lemon.io it's hard to find good Engineers especially if you're trying to reduce your burn rate lemon.io delivers vetted senior results oriented developers all at competitive rates as a subscriber of this channel you can get 15 off your first four weeks working with their Engineers stop earning money hire developers smarter head to lemon.io slash microconf some of these take a long time to work they're slow and others work very quickly so SEO often takes a long time cold Outreach often

[5:57] works really quickly within a month or two if you hone your message well so I'd be thinking about picking one slow and one fast at any given time sometimes if you're doing this nights and weekends you can only pick one you only have the time to do that and that's fine but if you've raised a small amount of funding you have a small team you can often run a lot of these experiments in parallel and that's where I say having money in your personal life saves you hours having money in your business saves you years right it gains you years that you don't have to sit around and wait and

[6:26] run everything in a sequential process you can actually parallelize some of these so realistically the five pillar SAS marketing approaches I see used most often in B2B SAS are SEO content cold Outreach integration marketing and pay-per-click advertising so in your shoes I would be thinking about okay these are the most likely to work there's a bunch of optional approaches too like doing affiliate marketing using captera which is something I just talked about at microconf remote having a viral Loop building free tools which is a usually an SEO play even going to in-person events this is where if you're 50 a month you can't afford it if you're

[6:59] 5 thousand dollars a month you can and I see a lot of Tiny Seed and microcomp companies doing very well at in-person events because that in-person connection is very valuable obviously there are more approaches in me listing them here isn't super helpful but the idea is that you figure out do you want to learn one of these yourself do you already know it or are you able to hire someone to help with it certain things are a lot easier to Outsource to a freelancer or an agency than others SEO tends to be a long arduous relatively complex process and the founders that I see succeeding with it usually are learning a good

[7:34] chunk of that themselves because SEO people are very expensive versus cold Outreach you can find productized services and agencies that are you know relatively inexpensive if you have a small amount of funding that you can just straight Outsource that to it run a three-month test see if it works if it does you keep going and if it doesn't you bail on it and that's a great way to run an experiment that doesn't take a ton of time for you pay per click advertising is often when you can find a freelancer to run for you AdWords Facebook Instagram these things are easier to Outsource than like I said SEO

[8:05] going to in-person events doing YouTube and podcast tours you know these are things that the founder more than likely has to be involved in so you have to factor that into you know the level of effort that you're going to have to invest as you choose these approaches and then as you find an approach that works you have a decision to make you can double and triple down on that approach which usually is a pretty good idea assuming that there is more volume there but as you tap out the volume of that approach it is wise to continuously be running these experiments as I said it's like a rinse and repeat and the

[8:36] more that you learn about your market and your customers and your competitors and you see what people are doing and that's working in the space and you build up your skill set you actually refine your ice prioritization framework you you can change the numbers realizing oh this is probably going to have a higher impact or this worked and a thing that's very similar to this you know Facebook ads work so will LinkedIn ads work maybe I try those next in addition to just driving traffic marketing and bring new leads to the site you need to be looking at your entire funnel whether you have a sales process with demos or

[9:05] whether you have a free trial that's low touch and eventually leads to customers becoming customers without having to speak with them and to teach you more about funnels I recorded an entire video focused on that topic called best customer acquisition funnels for a SAS startup and this is the ping pong back and forth of driving traffic driving leads monitoring your funnel and making sure your numbers are within the rules of thumb where they should be otherwise you have to optimize that piece because if you bleed people out of your funnel or you're churning them out of the bottom of the funnel frankly if people are churning out after they sign up no

[9:37] amount of marketing is going to help you so there is a constant balance between marketing and monitoring and improving your funnel in a minute I'm going to tell you about a really interesting marketing approach that I see working that only a few B2B SAS vendors I know are using before I do that if you enjoyed this video please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel I have videos coming out like this every week all about building launching in growing SAS so the marketing approach that I see a few Founders really succeeding with are Partnerships and the idea with Partnerships is to think who has access to the audience that you want

[10:10] to reach talked a little bit about Affiliates mentioned above and that is one way of partnering with someone you go to an influencer you go to someone who has a YouTube channel or a podcast and you say I will pay you 20 or 30 ongoing commission if you promote this product that's one way to do it but there's so many other partnership opportunities and I don't see enough people taking advantage of these for example if you sell to Realtors what are the local membership groups trade groups for realtors and is there a way to partner with them whether you do a talk at the event whether you sponsor the

[10:42] event you somehow get in front of those people because they already have access to those Realtors another example is to find a complementary piece of software or even an info product that is teaching people how to do something that your product does so if you know someone who has a big audience of folks buying their ebook a course on how to do email marketing and you have an email service provider obviously there could be a partnership formed there years ago I ran a SAS SEO keyword tool and the complementary piece of software to this keyword tool was rank trackers so I reached out to several rank trackers and

[11:16] all of them said they would be willing to do partnership and frankly it was a non-affiliate deal it was just the info marketers called a joint venture or JV partnership where I emailed the hit tail audience and said this rank tracker is good of course I verified that before I was became a user of the tool but I said I use this I recommend it no affiliate link just sent people over and they did the same for us and that was an extremely profitable and very inexpensive way to get exposure to someone who had access to an audience that I did not but I knew that they were

[11:44] ripe to use my tool I hope this video was helpful for you on thinking through how to get to 100 to 1000 customers and Beyond I'll see you in the next video

[12:09] [Music] foreign

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