Even Dane Maxwell Would Be Amazed - Creating A SaaS Business with NO Money Like In The Foundation

[Harti]

Hey guys!
This progress thread here is all about building a SaaS business from scratch without investing own money and without coding it ourselves. Before I’ll start getting into it let me introduce myself and my friend that pursues the journey with me.

About us
My name is Harti, I am 18 years old and from Germany. Me and my friend Julian (@JayTrump ,17 years old) recently graduated from the german equivalent of an American college preparation school and now are able to choose the direction we want our lifes to go. Luckily I stumbled upon The Millionaire Fastlane months ago, read it and many more classics like Rich Dad Poor Dad and Think And Grow Rich.

This led us to the point that we saw no other possibility than to succeed in life and gain freedom by dismissing the Slowlane and joining the Fastlane.

I am extremely convinced that there is no better time for our journey than now - we have no bills to pay, no other obligations and much free time. Basically the only excuse left for us to give up would be that we don’t want it bad enough.


About The Foundation
For those of you that haven’t heard of it: The Foundation. To be honest I am not sure if I can give you an adequate summary of how incredibly awesome @D. Maxwell, his community and the mindset they teach is but the main thing I got out of it is this:

Success is the result of the correct mindset (thus the removal of limiting beliefs), maintaining good and healthy habits and most important execution.

Be an expert in the area of defining problems and put in other experts to solve them.
And finally (I think @IceCreamKid would agree): Stop focusing on yourself and start focusing on how you can help other people. To ensure an abundant life go out and love the hell out of them.

This list is just the tip of the iceberg - you can find so much value for FREE just in this forum it is not even funny. In order to get into the right mindset everytime I struggle I love reading the posts of @IceCreamKid , @zen******* and @JasonR . I found that the more I read them, the less they seem differentiate from each other. Success is replicable and The Foundation even enhances this through practical frameworks on how to create the SaaS business you want.

To make this clear: We are not affiliated with The Foundation nor have we had any personal contact with Dane Maxwell (unfortunately). The things we present you are publicy available or our personal opinions and conclusions.


About our process
Since Julian and I strongly believe that creating one business gives you the ability to create the next one we like taking notes on every bit of information we can find.

In order to understand the principles of The Foundation correctly and to get every important aspect which is available for free we started listening to and reading about every. single. interview. we could find featuring Dane Maxwell and his disciples.

We summarised the main points of everything we got our hands on and now we want to share it with you: CLICK ME.

This document is updated almost daily (unfortunately not finished translating) and we would love to hear feedback about this. The further we progress the better this is going to get. My personal goal is to give back as much value as possible and at the same time get back on the right track through your feedback if we drift away from it.

So this is it, thank you very much for reading up to this point. To make this whole thread even more valuable and interesting for you to read I will always try to outline the main points we learned from our current actions at the end of the posts and/or thoughts regarding to the process.

In the next post I will start by giving you our current status and the problems we are facing right now.
Harti

 

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[Harti]

To give you an overview on how we want to proceed we want to orient on The Foundation program which says:

Month 1: Finding a market and choosing a problem you want to solve.

Fortunately this is the part where the most information is available for members outside the program. This process is called Idea Extraction and Maxwell talks about this A LOT. I want to share with you the two most important quotes for me on this topic (you can find the rest inside the gdoc in the op):

There is always an unmet need in every market. You just have to dig long enough.

One of the things we like to talk about is selling insulin to a diabetic instead of sugar cookies. A diabetic will not go off insulin, but you know, if you're selling a sugar cookie, you're in risky territory.

The approach you have to take here is that you want to help companies by finding a real painful problem that costs them money and solve it cheaper.

Now immediately two questions came up to me: How do I choose the market and how do I find the problem?


Finding a market
The Foundation has criterias which the market needs to pass in order to be acceptable:

• There must be at least 5.000 - 10.000 companies in the niche

• The niche must already use software (or else the learning curve will be too sharp)

• The companies must be profit/growth oriented (so they are willing to invest in the software we are going to build), the $100.000 mark in revenue is given

• The companies can be contacted by E-Mail and phone

I think there are some more but this should be the most important.

After a lot of research Julian and I chose the logistics niche because the criterias are met and one special reason: Our list of companies in this niche in our area is so big that we have a lot of abundance when it comes to finding the problem. We can visit them and meet the people face to face instead of phoning. Through this we can build our idea extraction skill by trial and error in the real life without running out of companies.


Finding a problem - Idea Extraction
You should also really use google for that part because Maxwell explains it completely but basically you find problems by asking questions.

It's really simple. You ask questions like crazy until you understand the problem yourself. Which means you have them repeat themselves a lot.

The most important point is that you don't actually go through the entire list of questions when you talk to people. The most important thing to do is to dig after you get the initial answer. So what else, and tell me more, are for finding the gold.

He published a looong list of questions you can ask but in my opinion you won’t need that. What Julian and I are going to do mainly is this:

“What is the most important area in your business?”
“Do you associate any pain with that?”

Nearly everytime there should be a yes and then we proceed with the two gold shovels in the quote: “What else?” + “Tell me more.”

Do this until the problem gets really specific (they will want an All-In-One solution but thats not our aim) and let solutions arise in your head.
Today is Sunday, yesterday we completed out list with businesses in our area. Tomorrow we will start preparing E-Mails to set up phone calls / meetings.


Limiting Beliefs
A limiting belief that I have to reverse at the moment is my fear that the executives won’t take us seriously because of our age. I will think and write about this tomorrow and would appreciate feedback about that problem.

Harti

 

[Gsuz]

Looking forward to this! Good luck, guys.

 

[IceCreamKid]

A limiting belief that I have to reverse at the moment is my fear that the executives won’t take us seriously because of our age. I will think and write about this tomorrow and would appreciate feedback about that problem.

I once felt that people wouldn't take my seriously because I look like I'm 18. What turned things around is this...

I TOOK THE TIME TO SHOW THEM THAT I WANT TO UNDERSTAND THEM.

The bottom line is this: most people are angry, frustrated, upset, etc about something in their life so if you could be that ONE person who genuinely wants to know how they're feeling then they have a brief moment of, "Oh shit...I can drop all of my feelings onto this person? I love it!". You are suddenly seen as unique in their eyes because very few people want to understand how another person is feeling.

True story: At the C&B meetup in Texas I gave a presentation on my biz and laid out how anyone can replicate it in their local area. I briefly discussed one problem I was having. Hours after I gave my presentation, many guys went up to me and said, "You should expand your biz this way. You should do this. You should do that".

I have no intention of scaling the biz outside of California because I'm pretty happy with my current lifestyle, yet NO ONE took the time to UNDERSTAND that. They'd rather push their thoughts on me and tell me what I should do. Their intentions came from a good place though. =)

Anyway, one guy actually took a quirky angle. He asked, "So what exactly do you want out of your life?". BOOM. The guy wanted to understand me instead of force his beliefs down my throat. Instant genuine friendship. I'm pretty sure we're going to be doing some real estate deals in the future together.

People first, then money. It works. A lot of people miss this message in my posts because they're so focused on finding that ONE strategy. That ONE tactic. When you stop caring about money, it comes.

 

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[Harti]

Thank you so much @IceCreamKid for your answer. I love reading your posts, they are really resonating with me on a deeper level.

 

[Harti]

Day 1: Sending E-Mails to companies in our industry

So today we finally took action after writing things up on how to proceed for weeks. We mailed to 47 business in our local area in the logistics niche with the subject Strange question? and some modified text from The Foundation.
The thing is we did this manually because we couldn't find free software for that. We wrote this in a personal manner and inserted every business by hand. That took nearly 30 minutes so it was okay - we just wanted to get started.
If somebody could recommend us a solution for our problem I would be very grateful.

The next days we will not stop acting - we are going to cold call executives and watch out for other methods to find people to interview - feedback would be awesome here, too.

 

[JayTrump]

Day 2: Reply and sending more E-Mails

After our first try of sending Mails to companies in our industry we received one answer. The owner explained that he is having struggle to get his money from customers in time. This sounds like a big problem because no one likes to run after already earned money. So we replied to him and asked him to explain this pain in more detail. Furthermore we asked him for a phone call. We hope we can talk to him soon.

On the other hand we spend another 30 minutes to write E-Mails to more businesses.

The next days we will start cold calling, instead of mailing. Do you have any advice? If not - we will try our best and keep you up to date!

Cheers, J.

 

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[wijnand]

The foundation sounds awesome, I will check it out, thanks!

Good luck with your progress, I will follow this thread.

 

[RoadTrip]

If somebody could recommend us a solution for our problem I would be very grateful.

Check out ToutApp, it's subscription based but works really well for this purpose. You can make templates, check response rate per template, check out who clicked on links in the email, etc. There are some free offers out there as well but I have not found them to work as well as ToutApp.

The next days we will start cold calling, instead of mailing. Do you have any advice? If not - we will try our best and keep you up to date!

I cold called about 400 companies in several industries in my country. I also sent a lot of emails but since it takes up so much of my time to find the correct email adddress (no info) and response rates were generally low, I started cold calling directly.

The cold calling works but takes many calls to finally find someone able to talk to you. I believe that out of every 10 calls I got one owner to take the time to talk to me. And that's mainly the smaller companies who you better not call because they are small for a reason. Fortunately, it seems that I have found a need now but still need to further validate this.

If I would need to do it all over again, I would definitely do it differently. So to save you all the trouble I have been through, I would suggest you to find the most succesful companies in your area through a Google search and contact them through email or LinkedIn. Once they reply, you setup a call and ask for references. This is very important since the succesful CEO's generally know more people with the same problem.

Good luck with your journey. Looking forward to the updates!

 

[Harry321]

An excellent way to assess the foundations and legitimacy of your business, good luck!

 

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[Harti]

Day 3: Cold calling

This morning we were able to setup a phone call in about 3 weeks with the executive who answered us in the first place. Overall we are not very happy with the results - one answer from 47 sent mails is not much (2%) but we won't stop.

We followed the advice of @Senergia and created a list of the biggest companies nearby. After that we cold called 7 companies with a pre-made phone script. We talked to one IT consultant who understood what we asked for and we’ll talk to him tomorrow, again.

While calling we identified a problem we have: Since we are no experts in the industry and have nearly zero knowledge about it (what we know is that goods are transported from one place to another and some more superficial stuff) we didn’t know what to ask for. We had no starting point and the people we talked to couldn’t name problems by themselves - even after we digged deeper.

Where we also need help: We are not sure if we should talk to the CEO or the IT. We wanted to talk to the CEOs about three times but they don’t have time for us (which is kind of understandable).

The response rate is okay - it always depends on how good your human skills are. Like @Senergia said it is way better then cold mailing.

Harti

 

[RoadTrip]

Good job on the progress!

Based on my experience the best guys to talk to are either the CEO or some other employee dealing with the daily operations of the company (operations, business managers or in the logistics industry, the planning department). You best bet will remain the CEO because he will ultimately be the person suffering the most from the loss of money and time and will be the person paying for your solution. If he doesn't know the specifics, he will point you to the correct person in the organization to talk to.

IT has been specifically hired to solve IT problems so I don't think they will be very eager to tell you about their inability of identifying IT problems to solve ;-)

 

[Harti]

Thanks

Fortunately the IT consultant was very open to us and seemed happy about the call. He even could summarize our request in one sentence - better than we were able to: Removing stumbling blocks.
But this seems like a valuable lesson: You need someone on the phone who has an overview about the stuff going on.

There we face the problem that we sound like 18 on the phone (we recorded every call). This might be a limiting belief but it kind of feels like we are kids stealing the big CEO his time. Even though we call to help him in the end it's still like "We want something from you. Talk to us!"
@IceCreamKid , you already wrote something about this. Do you (or somebody else who is reading this) see some wrong thought patterns and stuff we could do differently?

Harti

 

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[Dillon Carter]

This is an amazing thread, I cannot wait to see how this turns out. Please keep us updated. I am going through your Doc now and it is very in-depth. Keep making progress

 

[Harti]

Day 4: Cold calling + insightful conversations

Today we shifted our work time from 3pm to 10am and worked until 1pm. Yesterday I found this thread by @MartinH which saved us TONS of time since he is basically on the same stuff that we are. Thank you Martin for your journal, I hope we can talk to you soon.
Additionally we had a 50 minute call with @GregH , an ex member of The Foundation and it was incredibly insightful! I wish I had hit the record button but that idea came to me after we hung up.

One of the many valuable things we got out of it was that we already have every bit of information we need. MJs book and the posts of IceCreamKid and zen******* deliver a great foundation for our journey regarding to the mindset.
The most important thing about our thinking is that we shouldn't focus our efforts on finding a problem that is solvable through software. Instead he talked about the philosophy every post of IceCreamKid is about - the focus must shift to listening to people with presence and an open mind. Stop thinking about a solution, it will come automatically once you digged deep enough.

Extremely motivated we started cold calling after our conversation with two things differently from yesterday:

1. We used another script - "I am an university student that writes a research paper about your industry..."
2. We didn't sell ourselves. Since we were "just students" it wouldn't have been appropriate to try to sell something. Instead we just listened to them.

Out of 5 calls we did in an hour we didn't get put off once. Instead, three of them told us to call later this day and we even had a 20 minute conversation with a CEO and gained more knowledge about the logistics industry.

We didn't find a level 4 problem or did good idea extraction but that's not bad. Through stuff like this we are building these skills now.
So we are going to do the three calls later and will see what's on their mind. In one hour I will talk to the IT consultant from yesterday.

It's not even 3pm and the day has already been extremely productive.
If you are on the correct road the only factor that determines how long you need to get to your destination is you. Take action and start running.

I will update the thread this evening after the other conversations.

Harti

 

[Harti]

So we went on with our stuff. We cold called ~4 more companies, among this one we cold mailed on day 1. This is valuable: She said that she recently read an E-Mail about the same stuff that I did say but she deleted it directly because she is not in the position to answer this and their inbox is full of other important stuff.

This means if you cold mail keep in mind to write directly to the person that is responsible for your matter. If you are not sure about this tell them to just forward it to the correct person.

We came to the conclusion that cold mailing is not worth the time, we will proceed with calling.
For those of you who struggle with a high rejection rate: Just imagine that the only thing repeating in the other persons head is "what's in it for me?" and naturally you will be more friendly and more interesting for them. If you then go another step further and try to fix their problems you can bet you will get attention and quality answers.

Another thing was very interesting: One guy took his time and talked to me intensely. Since I was very present and wanted to understand his daily rhythm, his most important task and his problems we found something after like 5 minutes. I talked to him 5 more minutes in order to verify this is something that costs time and then offered him to call him back after thinking about a solution.

The next steps we'll do before calling him again are thinking about a solution (to be honest this seems quite simple, but not necessarily easy to implement), asking other companies about this and most importantly: validating if this is as painful as we think it is.

What I could have done better is not just hanging up after 10 minutes but going on digging even deeper. But I was so happy and felt so validated that my mind was like "fast, hang up before something bad happens!".

Harti

 

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[RoadTrip]

What I could have done better is not just hanging up after 10 minutes but going on digging even deeper. But I was so happy and felt so validated that my mind was like "fast, hang up before something bad happens!".

The same happened to me initially but eventually you will get better. What I also highly suggest is that you learn the SPIN selling concept. It is based on building rapport and after that asking the correct questions so that the customer will recognize the impact of the problem himself.

Check out the following link on SPIN selling:

http://wolfram.org/writing/howto/sell/spin_selling.html

 

[Mr.International]

I love seeing people think outside the box at such a young age. Keep it up.

 

[Harti]

Day 5: Cold calling + MEETING & focusing on different problems

Today we also started working at 10am because we can not really do much on the weekend.
It has already been extremely successful because I was able to talk to a CEO for 20 minutes. He really gave us some insights into his company and the industry. In the end he even offered us to visit him - this is going to be our first in person meeting.

After that we cold called some other companies and found out that most of them are using really elaborated software to manage the transport to the customer (for those of you who forget - we are in the logistics niche). In the future we'll focus on backend problems instead of customer related stuff. What we found out is that there is nearly no standardization possible without sacrificing customer satisfaction. Automating supplier communication is not something the companies want. Thus the problem we found in the one company is invalid.

To sum the week up we cold called 41 companies and wrote 47 cold mails.
We got 1 answer from the mails (2%) and had approximately 7 successful and very informative calls (17%). This is why we recommend to cold call to save time and energy. PLUS the fact that cold calling improves your social skills and will help you in the future.

Our problem at the moment: It's hard to summarize the problems of the different companies and find out where these interleave because the logistics industry is very versatile. We are not sure on how to proceed. Some tips would be nice.

Harti & @JayTrump

 

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[IceCreamKid]

To sum the week up we cold called 41 companies and wrote 47 cold mails.
We got 1 answer from the mails (2%) and had approximately 7 successful and very informative calls (17%).

Those numbers sound about right. The real ice cream is found from following up. If they don't respond to your initial email, continue following up throughout the week. By the 3rd or 4th follow up, your response rate should be around 20%. It varies based on your niche.

 

[Harti]

Day 6: It's Called Saturday Not "WastedDay" - How To Get Closer To Your Goals On Days That Seem Useless

(I started studying the subject of copywriting some days ago and decided to let in flow into my posts. Maybe improvements will be noticeable over time. )

So yeah, it's like the headline says: Even though cold calling is no option today I received the gift of additional 24 hours to get closer to my goals. A while ago I had promised myself I wouldn't waste one more day until I have achieved what I want.

Today I prepared and sent the E-Mail to the CEO that offered to meet us - I really hope he has time for us, getting his insights in the industry would dramatically accelerate our speed. Thinking about that made it clear to me that it should always be your focus to meet up with the people. Phoning is nice but not a way to understand the complex relations invaluable for your success.

To further improve our success rate on the phone I watched this video about getting past the gatekeeper - very recommendable - and read three more hours than usual (at the moment it's Felix Dennis - How To Get Rich).

And this is also my tip for days where you can not take action directly: Do it indirectly by educating and improving yourself on the areas you are working on.
It surely is nothing new but if I prevented one person from making an excuse today I'm happy.

Not that I would refuse a tip from you IceCreamKid but from the experience we got up to this point investing time in cold mailing feels wasted. It's totally like you said:

The real ice cream is found from following up

and I am confident we are going to accomplish that.

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 7: The ONE Thing You MUST Know To Succeed In A World Where Nobody Wants You To Step Up

So today is Sunday and again no day to cold call. I took some time and informed myself about techniques/services to make cold mailing more efficient. MailCheat(Chimp) looks like an awesome service for sending out newsletters but no way to simplify our more personal approach to cold mailing. If anybody could tell us how we can make the process easier after we fished the e-mails from the companies homepages we would be very grateful.
At the moment we are collecting the addresses + names on a spreadsheet, open the mail web interface and pasting the content + E-Mails and names inside.

I also opened George Leonard - Mastery again and thought about his idea of bad approaches to success coming from short term thinking. He characterizes three types of people that fail:

• The Dabbler. In this context you could compare him to the guy that has initial enthusiasm but in the end is jumping from opportunity to opportunity as soon as obstacles come up.
• The Obsessive. The guy that is extremely dedicated and takes massive action but can't stand the phases where he sees no results.
• The Hacker. He tries to skip the process - maybe he will see some results but they are based on a flawed foundation (probably his success is also highly dependent from other people).

Very glad I rediscovered that today. There will be phases where we won't see results but this is okay. It's part of the process.

Harti

 

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[ped89]

Nice thread, looking forward to seeing your progress.

Don't know how useful you will find this but here is what I did when I was going through IE to simplify it and get people on the phone.

Use a VA to find you email addresses, will save you a tonne of time to focus on the important job - connecting and talking to the decision maker.
You can get a good data entry/web researcher via odesk for $1 per hour when its a task this simple.

Have a link to your Linkedin Page at the bottom of your email so that they can see you're not a spammer.

Use Toutapp (as someone mentioned) to ease the process. You can also split test new subject lines, sending times and more importantly you can see when they opened and viewed your email. IF you want to be agressive when they open your email put the call through, less aggressive would be call them straight after they respond to your email (if they do).

If you're contacting businesses that have gatekeepers (receptionists etc.) then try calling before they get into work, or after they have left the office, usually 9-5 but the boss will often start earlier and finish later.

Looking forward to seeing more updates from you guys!

 

[Harti]

Use a VA to find you email addresses, will save you a tonne of time to focus on the important job - connecting and talking to the decision maker.
You can get a good data entry/web researcher via odesk for $1 per hour when its a task this simple.

Thought about using a VA for that, too. This would be a nice way to get introduced to outsourcing work. Is there a big difference between elance and odesk?

Use Toutapp (as someone mentioned) to ease the process.

Didn't forget about that post but I'd rather not pay $30 per month for a service like that in the beginning.

Thank you for your post, everything is appreciated!

Harti

 

[ped89]

No worries dude.

Pretty sure Tout has a no credit-card free trial (thats what I used when I did it).

Elance tends to be more expensive. Odesk often has very poor candidates so you often need to filter through more to find a killer.

Pete

 

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[Harti]

Day 8: It works but it feels wrong

So there were 47 more companies on the list we created and I called 6 today. I was able to setup a meeting in 2 weeks with an owner of a respectable sized company delivering goods to well known stores and is also working internationally. Normally this would be a reason to feel good but somehow I get the feeling that this industry was not a good choice.

I talked to a bunch of companies now and the things there were telling me are so different and all over the place I am not sure anymore. My social skills got enhanced so much and the time was surely not wasted but It feels like this is such a big industry - who am I to be able to change something? Additionally I have to work on my own for the next time which doesn't make it easier.

Also I thought about hiring a VA for the E-Mail list but since I still have 41 more companies to call this wouldn't make sense now.

Sorry for not being more clear but I hope someone knows what I am talking about!

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 9: More cold calling

Today I went on cold calling but didn't have a good conversation. I think it is because my commitment to this industry isn't there 100% anymore. Can somebody drop some sentences, please? Do I just have to practice more? Is this industry just too big?
In two days I'll have the meeting with the one CEO, idea extraction should work better live.

Fortunately I am probably able to talk to a fastlaner (sold his company for 20 mio €) in person in some weeks. Hope I will get some practical tips.

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 10: Preparation + cold calling

Today was no special day. I have not really successful cold called several other companies and we prepared the meeting tomorrow. I really hope that will turn things around and helps us finding a direction.

Still unsure if this industry is the correct one but until there are numbers on the cold mail list we won't stop.

At the moment I invest really much time into learning copywriting. It opens up a new world I think it's awesome.

Harti

 

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[Harti]

Day 11: Conversation with CEO

Didn't have much time today so the thing we did was talking to the CEO for 1.5 hours. The conversation was really insightful - we now understand much more about the industry - but every time we went into idea extraction mode he started getting into a monologue and digressed.
We'll see the next days how we proceed.

Harti

 

[Harti]

Day 12: Illness + Reflection

Even though this is the first day we didn't do much I still want to post. At the moment I am sick because of an immunization and have fever so I was laying down since yesterday.. We reflected about the conversation and decided to change industry.
We collected a list of industries we have contacts in but there was no THIS IS IT moment. It's very annoying that the progress was stagnating so much the last days but not being 100% fit simply sucks.

At least I didn't stop reading and learning copywriting.

Tomorrow we attend an entrepreneur fair and listen to some speeches, I am looking forward to that.

The task for the next days is choosing an appropriate industry. The thing we learned up to this point is that choosing an extremely big one is not optimal for our aim.

To be honest some words of you would be nice, didn't hear anything from anybody in a time..

Harti