- You can study the best of the best.
If somebody is growing, they're leaving clues.
Tony Robbins says success leaves clues.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur,
investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm gonna share with you
five different businesses that I look at
or I've learned from as a software as a service,
SaaS entrepreneur, to be inspired
to help me come up with growth ideas
and be sure to stay at the end
and we're gonna share with you an exclusive training.
It's called the Idea to Exit Mini-Course.
If you want to learn how I identify
opportunities in the market, build a clickable prototype,
pre-sell that to get funding, to eventually recruit dev team
and all the process around that, be sure to stay to the end.
but let's get into the different markets that you can use
to be inspired to grow your SaaS company.
One of my favourite sayings,
I actually don't know who said it,
but it's learn wide, practise narrow.
And I like that idea
because I'm always looking for inspiration in the world
to find things that I can use inside my businesses.
I mean, it doesn't matter if Henry Ford
learned about building the assembly line
from a meat packer in Chicago.
If you are eating at a restaurant
and you see something interesting, the way they bundle up
maybe the menu, that might be inspiring, or you're talking,
you're hiring somebody to come deal with your,
some lawn care at your house.
And maybe there was something,
the way they did their promotion and the offer
that you can be inspired.
I mean, the world is full of smart entrepreneurs,
systems, repeatable systems.
If you've ever read the E Myth by Michael Gerber,
franchise prototypes where folks have figured something out.
It might be the way they deliver the service.
It could be the way they price something.
It could be the way they market it.
And your job as the entrepreneur
is to learn why, to be inspired, to take those learnings
and go narrow in the implementation
so that you can get an unfair advantage.
If you're doing what everybody else is doing,
I guarantee that you're gonna have the exact same results
as your other peers in the market.
But if you find those nuances, those opportunities to R&D,
what I call rob and duplicate from other industries,
non-competitive, that's where things
start to get interesting.
So I want to share with you five different industries
and the specific things that I took from those industries
to help me grow my software companies.
Upsells.
This is one of my favourite.
I learned this from the gym industry, the fitness industry.
I've been blessed to have two friends of mine,
Leila and Alex Hormozi are arguably the top experts
in the world of gyms.
They have a company called Gym Launch.
They help fitness studios, group studios, etc.,
personal trainers to kind of build
and scale their businesses.
And one of the things that they taught me
'cause I was involved in a CrossFit gym was how to upsell.
So when people come in to your gym,
a lot of people will just sell them a monthly membership.
It's like, oh, we have a discount.
Here you go.
But that's not the full solution.
To me, the way I think about an upsell is,
okay, if they came in for one specific problem to be solved,
I got to look at other opportunities to truly solve it.
So I've always joked that SaaS, software as a service,
really should be success as a service.
And you can look for opportunities in your offering
where you could upsell people to a higher level of service
in the initial conversation.
That might be by adding some success coaching
as part of the upsell.
That might be getting them on a better tier
that's gonna meet their needs
in regards to integration with their CRM tool.
Maybe they use Salesforce.
But I love the idea of having somebody
think they're coming in this way,
and I do this with all my coaching clients,
to buy a package, but as soon as they come in,
get on a call with them, do what I call an account review,
and then see if there's opportunities for them
to be upsold into higher tier programme.
Number two, use cases.
So one of the things you'll learn quickly
if you're growing your software company
is your product probably has different use cases.
Maybe you have software.
One of my friends, Ryan, he has a body shop software.
And some customers use him for lead generation,
others for selling their quotes,
and others for scheduling the appointments
of the body shop service.
So those are different use cases.
Well, one of my favourite industries that I learned
'cause I used to do this was consulting.
So consulting industry has this solution-selling approach
to their model because the truth is
is they can do a lot of things.
Maybe you have a product that can be a lot of things
to a lot of people.
It's not the best situation.
Maybe you've got a little what I call featuritis.
Maybe you've been building people's features.
You're like a really expensive custom dev shop
or a very inefficient custom dev shop for your customers.
So you just keep building a bunch of stuff.
So you've got, I mean, I've seen some cases
where there's a dozen use cases.
What consultant companies do really well
is even though their offering is intangible,
they kind of package them up into solutions.
So think of when you're doing marketing or sales,
that you're trying to identify a use case
and you're using that to sell your solution.
Not just trying to sell your solution broadly
in regards to the positioning that it serves,
but a specific outcome
or delivering a certain set of value to your customers.
That will increase your win rates by almost double
by just using use case selling or solution selling
and reduce your sales cycle by half.
Because you're speaking specifically
to a problem they have today.
And then once they come in,
you do what's called land and expand.
You get the deal, then you expand the account.
Number three, activation.
So when people use a new product that they're new to,
they've got to learn some terminology,
they gotta to learn how the product works,
they gotta learn the flows, the success paths,
the actions to set it up, to configure.
And I always look at the gaming industry
and like, how does the new user signup process look?
How does the level one?
See, most people don't realise in the gaming industry,
'cause maybe you don't play video games.
in the gaming industry,
the level one is essentially a tutorial level.
You can play it, but as you're playing it,
it'll pause and we'll go, okay,
now this is how you jump and you learn to jump.
And then you're doing things like, oh, this is how you duck.
And you slide underneath an obstacle.
Or this is how you jump onto a wall to be able to climb it.
And to me, when I look at a lot of software
that's struggling to retain customers,
most of the time they have an activation problem
because if somebody understood the value
served on the website, the promise you made,
and then they come into the product
and they don't stick around.
You have like double digit monthly churn on logo churn,
then that means there's probably something
in that activation step that needs to be resolved.
So you literally don't have to build anything new.
You just got to make sure the customers feel the value
that you promise on the homepage.
And that's usually done through activation.
So go and study video games.
Yes, I'm telling you to go from a research mindset
point of view and go play a tonne of video games
and make notes of how you can take those inspirations
and apply it to your product.
Number four, product.
It's been written about.
Lean Startup, Eric Ries, good friend of mine
who was an advisor to my last company, Clarity,
where he talked about lean manufacturing techniques
approached or leveraged to drive product decision-making
and creative kind of product rollout
in marketing strategies.
And for me as kind of a self-taught programmer
and systems nerd, I went deep in things like
the Toyota production system
and Six Sigma and quality assurance.
And how do you build product that has low defect rates,
and just solves the customer's problem,
and has longevity, and is creative in the solution,
that creates a platform that can be extended?
I just think if you've never studied
the manufacturing industry to really inspire,
people think like, oh, software is such a new thing.
It's been around for like 20-something years,
software as a service anyways, but manufacturing objects,
and especially when the stakes are high
like industrial design or cars where the cost of a prototype
and R&D and then trying to manufacture it.
Elon Musk said, a prototype in an MVP is table stakes,
like, rockets to cars.
He says, what's really hard
is how do you mass produce those things?
And I think that if you want to,
if you're struggling with product
and how that connects to engineering
and how do you make sure you solve customer's problems
and do it in a way that's not wasteful, right?
Where you have to rewrite a feature
or you have to rewrite the implementation feature,
be sure to go study the manufacturing industry
'cause they've been doing it for hundreds of years.
They've got a lot of cool principles, best practises.
One of my favourites at the Toyota production system
is the idea that anybody can stop the line.
If somebody discovers something being done wrong,
they have the power, their empire power to pull that string
and the whole line stops.
That means in that moment,
somebody that's their manager rushes over
to figure out what's going on to fix it
because you have hundreds of people
and hundreds of thousands of dollars of product
that's supposed to be produced everyday,
if not millions of dollars.
But at least that's a really neat way.
How do you do that in your software process?
I don't know?
I'm gonna let you figure that out.
I actually know how we do it,
especially if you're using things
like continuous integration, CI.
If you don't know what that is, go Google it.
But be sure to be inspired from the manufacturing industry
'cause it's an old industry,
they have a tonne of cool best practises and principles,
and I think you'll really be inspired by how they solve
some of the problems you're probably dealing with today.
Number five, pricing.
This is one where I'm not gonna even mention
a specific industry.
I'm just gonna say it's all around you.
Everything from my friend Matt
who runs a company called Pela Case
and the way they were doing a buy one, get one free,
the buy one, wash one case cover.
So they actually do this cell phone case.
So go check out Pela.
To just like pricing discounts,
getting people to decide to make a decision,
guarantees, the offer, the packaging.
I mean, pricing is really value metrics.
There are so many people around
and I like to study the folks that have been around
that grow the fastest
'cause there's usually something around the offer.
There's something around the way they price their product
that really allowed the market to understand it quickly
and cycle through and get success
and feel like whatever they invested to pay for,
what they actually wrote a check for, that it's valuable.
And if you can look at these successful companies,
one of the ways I do is I go look at the Inc. 100.
The Inc. 100 fastest growing companies, not 500.
Make it just the hundred.
Go look at their product sites.
Go look at their pricing.
Go look at how they communicate their offers.
Get on their email list.
Get on their ad remarketing.
Start seeing their ads and offers showing up
in your Facebook feed so that you can study
the best of the best.
If somebody is growing, they're leaving clues.
Tony Robbins says success leaves clues.
You want to get into their world
so you can be exposed to those clues
to really perfect your pricing,
because that is where the magic's gonna happen.
And it is all around us.
Anytime you see an offer, just make sure you pattern match
against people that are actually successful.
So quick recap, five industries to learn from
to grow your SaaS company.
Number one, upsells from gyms.
Number two, use case selling from consultants.
Number three, activation from the gaming industry.
Number four, product design from manufacturing.
And number five, pricing from all people around us
selling anything, especially the fastest growing ones.
That's how you will take things to the next level.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
I want to share with you the Idea to Exit Mini-Course.
Click the link below to get access to the exclusive training
where I'm gonna show you the three stages that I use
to launch new software projects, to give you the roadmap.
Maybe you've been software curious,
you've been following me for a while
and now is the time that you decide
to jump in with both feet.
Click the link below to get access
to that free mini-course to inspire you
to approach it without wasting all your money,
wasting your time or building something
that nobody wanted in the first place
but they were kind to you because people are nice,
but that does not mean they're gonna part with their money.
So click the link to get access to that.
If you like this episode,
be sure to click the subscribe button,
share it with somebody that you care about
and leave a comment.
Let me know what is the number one thing
you took away from today's episode.
And as per usual, I want to encourage you
and challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next Monday.
(upbeat music)