Building SaaS with a full time job, finding focus and pacing

[Andy Black]

Check out @eliquid ‘s thread. Check out Rob Walling’s stuff. Go through @Bekit ‘s stuff. Happy to have a quick chat sometime if you want.

 

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[adiakritos]

Hey @Bekit , thanks for the encouragement and your write up, I really appreciate it!

I'll give this some thought and come up with a plan. There's a few things here that I've thought of, and others I haven't. So I gotta just get it all organized and from there.

I had told myself I was going to give my biz partner until the 20th to show me he's serious and come up with something, and he did yesterday. Basically, he's pulled up a list of 15k prospects in a few cities, and he says there's at least 100k we can pull but it's taking some time to gather the info. He can only do so many in a day. And with that list of 15k initial prospects he wants to market to them directly via phone and email.

There are a few upsides to this that I really like:

- we can talk to real people on the phone
- we can cold email blast them and get some potential leads that way
- we can grow at a pace that won't cause huge problems on the software side
- we can start making money faster without giving affiliate or sales commissions to anyone

With that money we can turn around invest in ads, publishing content...etc

If I don't work with him in the end I think I'd do something along the following lines:

- Work with an influencer to give the software an initial boost even though a big chunk of my margins would go in affiliate commissions. That's ok in the short run. That would be a pretty fast spike in usage and would likely cause some dev turbulance, so I can ask off from work before our promo and be ready to crush any bugs that come up. THEN, I'd offer a referral incentive to the existing customer base, since that would bring in more users with hopefully a decent viral effect which would cost must less than the affiliate commissions. Hopefully at this point, I'd be able to leave my job and work on it full time and create content. From there, I'd focus on building the ad -> lander funnel, and once that is predictable, I can also shift $ to creating the longer term SEO stuff, and if growth is simultaneously high enough I'd also hire a dev to help me build and innovate faster. Something like that. The list I'd have at this point is my customer base, which I own, and they are all paying customers. I paid for them through commissions lol but they're still mine! hehe so from there I can with what I've seen other marketers do like create facebook pages and direct all the users there where I can see them talk among themselves, share ideas, report bugs, generate content I can use for marketing...etc

As for the competitor, he's got a massive following because he's an authority in the space. So he just ran a promo to them and the rest took care of itself. I know this because I asked him on facebook via private message. It's mind-boggling how crappy his software is. The reality is that he likely will have a lot of churn with that software. And I guess he positioned it in a way to protect his own authority in that's the case.



@Andy Black thanks! I'll check out Bekit's stuff shortly. I read through a lot of eliquids posts and they're absolute gold. And yes, it would be awesome to chat for a little.

 

[Deleted50669]

Honestly I feel tired and defeated right now. Another year of my life invested and now I again feel overwhelmed by the idea that I have to shoulder the entire project and software and do my full time job.

And I come here looking for something, some kind of salvation or inspiration but I never find it here.

So I look inside myself again and I dig deeper to ask myself WHY and I doing this? The vision of freedom I have that I want so bad seems perpetually out of reach.

And I get mad because some people get lucky earlier than others, and I still work extremely hard but I don’t know what I don’t know.

How do I attract the right partners to help with this? How do I show them my F*cking ruthless grit and skill set? I software takes a lot of time to do right. I want my powers combined with someone equally as passionate and hard working as me who has their super power in marketing. It’s necessary for my niche because the market switches fast just because someone else has some other shiney new feature. So the key is getting to a point where I can drive a small dev team to build and innovate very quickly and my marketing partner will need to have solid creativity.

I’ve been on this forum since I was about 23 and I’m 28 now. I’ll never stop trying. I will get up again and keep moving forward toward my dreams.

I have a great asset I’m what I’ve created, all it needs is that push into the market. Do you have any idea how it feels to know that your competitor made a much shittier version of your product and sold it to 600 people within 45 days? And here’s I am with this Bugatti by comparison just parked in a garage?

It’s like being 5 feet from gold, SEEING AND KNOWING it’s there and then running out of gas on your machinery.

Arrrrgggggg

I will F*cking get that gold god damn it!!!!

Dude I feel that. I'm even earlier in the SaaS process than you. Keep your eyes on the target, and don't take them off. Not many people are willing to endure the sustained hell of business development + full time job, it separates the boys from the men. But it will pay off if you do not quit. Eventually you will learn enough and adjust your strategy enough to find success. It is inevitable, as long as you press forward.

 

[eliquid]

Hey I sent you a private message not sure if you saw it. It was a while ago but anyway, thanks for linking here.

Havent seen it, maybe I missed it

 

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[adiakritos]

Dude I feel that. I'm even earlier in the SaaS process than you. Keep your eyes on the target, and don't take them off. Not many people are willing to endure the sustained hell of business development + full time job, it separates the boys from the men. But it will pay off if you do not quit. Eventually you will learn enough and adjust your strategy enough to find success. It is inevitable, as long as you press forward.

Thanks man, I really appreciate the encouragement.

 

[adiakritos]

Havent seen it, maybe I missed it

All good. Your write ups on that thread are very very insightful. Really awesome that you took the time to do that. I'm re-reading it now.

Like yours, our market is sorta stingy in that competitors are very visible and the market jumps ship to new different services very quickly because of whatever shiny new feature. So the core strategy we'd need to follow, unless we pivot to a different harder-to-reach market, would be to focus on a cash-generating MVP with something unique first (or work like a phuckin maniac and leap frog), leverage that as much as possible in the beginning, and reinvest to create a longer-term innovative competitive advantage OR niche down even more. The winning strategy in that game seems to be "stay ahead of the competition always".

Knowing this, it's easier to see where our weaknesses are and how we can potentially overcome them.

I'm going to re-read your thread and Bekit's threads and take notes to really get a deeper intuition on what to do about my situation.

 

[adiakritos]

So, we are pivoting. Don’t know which direction exactly yet but away from the initial market.

Someone came out with a superior product that seems to have been in the making for like 2 years prior with a team of developers. They are like a black hole in the universe sucking up all the market share because their product just simply rocks.

We could niche, or we can pivot.

We’re deciding to pivot.

We’re also much more aware of the buying behavior of the current market and what it’ll take to compete effectively. As a part-time single developer TIME and speed and quality production keys it seems.

That being said, we’re takikg what I’ve created, tweaking it, taking a page out of our championing competitors playbook, and repeating what they’ve done in a different space. The strategy is much clearer based on their results.

All this teaches me the valuable lesson that Mark Cuban talked about long ago... to be the freaking PHD of your market. Know everything. Because when you know everything you can anticipate the future more easily. And when you can see the future you can make better decisions and finally you can win and win and dominate rather than react to surprises.

Anyway. Now I have something to stand on in a new direction. We’re not starting from scratch anymore.

 

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[adiakritos]

The one question I have at this point is:

if we pivot, what’s preventing other teams from entering the spaces we go in to with superior marketing and product?

Nothing really. And we’d be in the same position again.

So I wonder if it’s better to just stick to the same market, niche down, focus in on improving our product, and going at it like that.

The difference is that by pivoting to other markets, namely brick and mortar businesses instead of mostly digital ones, we’d be hitting supposedly harder to reach markets who aren’t as picky about small things and who aren’t exposed to competitor products as often.

At least there we can gain a foothold, I can leave my job, and double, triple down, reinvest and grow fast enough to build a moat, as eliquid puts it.