Building a profitable SaaS in less than 60 days.

[flyordie]

MY BACKGROUND: Recent college grad, computer science background. Work as a software engineer.

IDEA: Service based business that helps others save tons of time and earn $$$. Won't go into too much detail, but the business model is similar to EcomHunt but in a different space. It's a "scratch my own itch" kind of problem that I know others will benefit from.

Got a TON of learning to do and problems to solve to craft my solution to the problem, and I'm using this thread to document the "process" and to hold myself accountable.

7 day goal: Know enough about my space to help 1 person
60 day goal: 1k MRR
6th month goal: sustainable income from this business that allows me to quit my job.

Follow along for more.

 

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[WillHurtDontCare]

Look at SaaS Wiz's twitter content. He's an edgelord, but he posts great stuff on how to run a SaaS.

https://twitter.com/saaswiz/

 

[flyordie]

Look at SaaS Wiz's twitter content. He's an edgelord, but he posts great stuff on how to run a SaaS.

https://twitter.com/saaswiz/

Taking a look now, thanks for the rec.

 

[flyordie]

Update #1:
Got after it this week.

Bought domain ($40), set up email list (free), set up landing page (free), basic logo design (free), google analytics & facebook pixel setup.

Bought 1 month of subscription for something needed to run biz ($40). Made simple ad creatives, ran basic FB ads to collect warm emails ($16.75). Figured out how I would solve potential customer’s needs.

Took @WillHurtDontCare recommendation about SaaSWiz. Awesome rec, thank you. Ripped thru his course in a few hours ($99). Value bomb. Learned so much. But shit. The idea I was running with originally is gonna take a lot longer and cost a lot more to produce -- a much longer path to customers and cash flow. That’s OK, I’ll revisit the concept later, but let’s focus elsewhere and get to profit quicker since we only have 60 days.

I don’t use social media, but finding SaaSWiz put me in money twitter. Realized there’s a TON of opportunity, and a lot of hustlers are offering free value. Sweet, I’ll take it.

Question I'm asking myself: "How can I make people that are already making money online more money?" Great. I have a plan.

Picked up Udemy course to fasttrack my coding learning for building a SaaS ($12). Working thru it now. Picked up a copy of “Traffic Secrets.” Reading thru that in my free time -- lots of learning about marketing, and a lot of explanations for why things I’ve tried in the past didn’t work out.

Picked up SaaS boilerplate template codebase ($265). Expensive, but it’s gonna save me TONS of hours when building. Worth it.

Consuming a lot of value now, & learning rapidly, but will need to start producing value to start making money. Plan for the week is to finish coding course and learn how I can manually solve customer’s need so that I can work to automate the solution with code.

Let’s go.

Total Spend: $472.75
Total Revenue: $0

Profit: -$472.75

 

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[WillHurtDontCare]

Remember: great marketing & shitty code >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> shitty marketing & great code

 

[Raja]

no code is a better option to test and verify the idea.
it will also help to avoid tech debt.

 

[Mark Horrocks]

Update #1:
Got after it this week.

Bought domain ($40), set up email list (free), set up landing page (free), basic logo design (free), google analytics & facebook pixel setup.

Bought 1 month of subscription for something needed to run biz ($40). Made simple ad creatives, ran basic FB ads to collect warm emails ($16.75). Figured out how I would solve potential customer’s needs.

Took @WillHurtDontCare recommendation about SaaSWiz. Awesome rec, thank you. Ripped thru his course in a few hours ($99). Value bomb. Learned so much. But shit. The idea I was running with originally is gonna take a lot longer and cost a lot more to produce -- a much longer path to customers and cash flow. That’s OK, I’ll revisit the concept later, but let’s focus elsewhere and get to profit quicker since we only have 60 days.

I don’t use social media, but finding SaaSWiz put me in money twitter. Realized there’s a TON of opportunity, and a lot of hustlers are offering free value. Sweet, I’ll take it.

Question I'm asking myself: "How can I make people that are already making money online more money?" Great. I have a plan.

Picked up Udemy course to fasttrack my coding learning for building a SaaS ($12). Working thru it now. Picked up a copy of “Traffic Secrets.” Reading thru that in my free time -- lots of learning about marketing, and a lot of explanations for why things I’ve tried in the past didn’t work out.

Picked up SaaS boilerplate template codebase ($265). Expensive, but it’s gonna save me TONS of hours when building. Worth it.

Consuming a lot of value now, & learning rapidly, but will need to start producing value to start making money. Plan for the week is to finish coding course and learn how I can manually solve customer’s need so that I can work to automate the solution with code.

Let’s go.

Total Spend: $472.75
Total Revenue: $0

Profit: -$472.75

This post got me thinking so thanks for that. I am an ex I.T. professional in the UNIX/Datbase space now retired from this. Funny I satrted looking at Saas for my current business.

 

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[flyordie]

Small update -- interviewed developers on Upwork and found one with experience in the space that can provide value to the biz. However, some shit's just hit the fan in real life, and I need to pull back my focus from SaaS for the time being. I'll be returning my focus to SaaS as soon as I can put this fire out.

In the mean time, I'm gonna make $1k from scratch as quick as possible from selling web services to local biz owners. These services will be things that anyone can do, and I'll document exactly how I'm doing it -- what's working & what's a waste of time.

Ready?

Let's go

 

[flyordie]

Major Update #2

Have a SaaS idea to pursue & have a dev locked in to help build, but I need to focus on generating $1k as soon as possible. That means no SaaS for the time being. I'm excited to return to it though.

However, I do have experience building websites, running Google Ad campaigns, and I would like to become proficient at SEO. In my understanding, being skilled at SEO == printing money.

At the end of the day:
Website Traffic + Unique Offer = $$$

And SEO essentially gets you free traffic -- all you need is a great offer.

I'd like to build that all for myself eventually, but for now, I'm going to help local businesses (who already have a great offer) make more money. It's nearly impossible to fail with Google Ads -- you will always get more traffic... it's just a matter of whether you can get that traffic at a price that is still profitable for your business. So I picked HVAC because there are a ton of small players who need help, and Google estimates that the average LTV of an HVAC customer is $42.7k. I know I can get potential HVAC customers on the phone/email for significantly less than that.

Here's how I'm approaching these businesses:
First and foremost, I know I can provide value to local service businesses through Web Design + Google Ads.

For outreach, I purchased a month of D7LeadFinder. This will help me quickly find leads so I can focus on outreach instead of browsing google. Focusing on HVAC businesses in a major suburb first -- will update on outreach results.

Once finding businesses I know I can help, I'm writing highly targeted emails to them. In my email, I'm including a slightly edited screenshot of their website, so they know I mean business. (This takes a lot of time, will see if it's worth it)

If no response on the first go, I'm going to continue to follow up a few times before moving on. I want to get on the phone with these business owners so I can show exactly how I can get them more customers.

First step: help 1 business pro-bono so I can use those results to pitch my services to other business owners.

That's all for now -- onward and upward

 

[PizzaOnTheRoof]

Update?

 

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