(upbeat music)
- On this weekly series I take you behind the scenes
of building a real life SaaS business.
My co founder and I are taking on the challenge
of taking a SaaS business that's brand new,
and zero revenues and taking it to a million ARR
using all the principles that I teach in this channel.
So it's a behind the scenes look,
it's a raw look, it's an honest look
of everything that's going on.
And I give it to you straight
on exactly where we are in the business.
I show you the metrics, I show you the principles,
I show you the next stage of things that we're tackling,
and sometimes it's super boring,
and sometimes it's super exciting and we give you both,
but the point is we give you the real life
back behind the scenes view of what's going on.
So if you are new to this channel, welcome.
Be sure to hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon
because I bring you three episodes every week
to help you, a SaaS founder navigate
to the next stage of growth,
navigate to product market fit and beyond.
And also if you're back, welcome back,
really excited to have you here.
So on this episode, I'm gonna be talking a little bit around
this thing called heads down mode,
and I'm gonna be digging a little bit more into it.
So if you're excited to dig into
today's Story time with TK and Hey Man With TK,
be sure to smash the like button and let's get started.
But first a little bit of context.
If you are new, we are as I mentioned,
we're taking a SaaS business from zero to a million ARR.
We are building out this thing
called Unstoppable Life School.
Unstoppable Life School is a SaaS platform,
it's a training platform, it's indication platform.
It's a bunch of different things it's a B2C SaaS product
that helps you plan your week,
create a life plan and adopt an unstoppable mindset
and essentially run at peak performance.
So it's a mental health.
It's in the mental health space.
We're super excited about it.
We've got our initial revenues,
we validated the product,
we're now starting to really crank it
and really get activation going,
really get the software going.
And so we're taking it to a million ARR, that's our goal.
If you wanna learn a little bit more
about what the product does.
If you wanna plan your week and you wanna plan your life
and you wanna get your mental health right,
you wanna reduce the Sunday anxiety
you can go check it out at unstoppablesunday.com.
Now, today, I wanna dig a little bit into,
and by the way, we're on episode six on this
and all the prior episodes we've put into a playlist,
you can follow the link below to watch prior episodes,
where we've literally gone through
how we validated our market
we've gone through how we built our unstoppable sales funnel
we've gone through I don't even know what I explained here,
but it must have been really exciting.
I think this is our Unstoppable sales funnel
and how it works.
In the last episode, we talked through
how we're thinking about activating users
and what's our core loop?
And today, like I was like, okay, what do we talking about?
And I was like, I don't have anything exciting to report.
We're just kind of cranking away.
And it reminded me of this blog post
that I did even before I started this YouTube channel,
I used to blog consistently
whenever I was building out my last SaaS business ToutApp,
which we took from zero to 7 million ARR.
We sold it to a company called Marketo,
then I worked at Marketo, which was a SaaS business
and sold it to Adobe for $4.75 billion.
So it's like that was my last SaaS journey.
And even during, then I blogged consistently.
And these blog posts are actually on my blog still.
So you can go to tkkader.com.
But it reminded me of this one blog post that I did.
This was August 4th, 2012 and I called it heads down mode.
And the way I thought about heads down mode,
well, here's what got me thinking about the episode.
What got me think about the episode or that blog post was,
you know, this is how we usually hear
about the startup journey outside-in,
there's a whole bunch of fanfare,
like, oh, I'm gonna quit my job and start a business,
then you hear nothing.
And then there's a whole bunch of fanfare,
like, Oh, we launched we're super excited.
And back then, and you launched on TechCrunch
now you launch a Product Hunt and then you hear nothing.
And then like, I don't know, months, years,
maybe later, it could be a totally different business
even by that time,
you hear like, Oh my god, we're legit.
We have so much revenues,
and we just raised this large round,
or we're profitable, and then you hear nothing.
And like that was kind of like
the outside-in view that I got,
and it frustrated me, it frustrated me because I'm like,
did they just like, get that overnight?
How come no one talks about what happens between
post Product Hunt launch,
and up until when you are legit
and making tons of money and you're like, the stud.
No one talks about that middle piece.
And I felt that when I was aspiring to be a startup founder,
I was aspiring to be a startup founder
and I felt that I'm like, how come no one talks about this?
And so that's when I started thinking,
alright, I wanna actually share in my journey,
and that's what this post was about.
It's called heads down mode.
And heads down mode is kind of what you get into when,
and this graphic I found was perfect for it.
There's like the TechCrunch of initiation,
the wearing off novelty, the trough of sorrow,
the releases of improvement
the crash of ineptitude, the wiggles of false hope,
the promised land and an acquisition of liquidity, right?
And that's that piece like post launch
up until like you figure stuff out
is heads down mode and not enough of us talk about it
and that's kind of what I talked about,
I'm like look like why foreigners go silent
because there's not a lot to talk about
even though we should,
the joy is in the little things that we're doing.
And there's no amazing mind blowing news to report.
This is like today's episode,
there's no mind blowing news like
Oh my God, we did this like no,
this is the truth, it's kind of boring,
but we're just going through that Shawshank crawl
of like, how do we get this to be cranking, right?
And I talked in the blog post,
and I'll link to this below, you can read it.
We need to talk more about being heads down mode,
because this is something that we all do.
And I pledged, like I pledged over here
where I would share on my journey more
and I'll stay true to that.
I blogged every year about this.
This was 2012, I blogged almost every year.
And now I do a weekly vlog on this, video episodes.
I've stuck to that ethos because A,
I wanted to share in the journey,
I wanted to show others what's possible
and B, honestly, I was always that kid,
I don't know if you were one of those,
you had a friend or you were one of those people.
I was always that kid, when I was in school,
like middle school, elementary school, even in high school,
I was the one that always created those little crib sheets.
Like whenever a test was coming,
I would create these perfect four page summary study notes
of like, here's everything that you need to know.
It's kind of ironic that
this is what I do now for a living on YouTube.
But I used to create these crib sheets
on how to study for any exam, whatever it was coming up,
and they were in demand, like I used to type them up
and lo and behold, like at least 10 of my friends
would be like, oh, can I like get your copy of that?
And I'd be like, that's weird, but sure.
And I was happy to give it to them.
Because the value that I got
was just in the act of summarizing
and creating that crib sheet for myself,
it helped me study but it helped me
conceptualize the notes anymore even more.
And so I do this stuff because
when I share it with you guys,
it helps me conceptualize everything a lot more.
When I blogged back in the day
it helped me share what I was learning
and conceptualize everything that I was learning a lot more.
So it was valuable to me,
but it was also valuable to others.
And so this, I was like okay, I'll be sharing blog posts
and I'll like do a vlog.
I just wanna share in the journey
and share everything that I learn.
But I want you guys to know
like I committed to do this series where I'm like,
alright, every Friday we're gonna drop an episode
we're gonna show you how we're taking a business
from zero to a million ARR, right?
And not every week, there's gonna be amazing news
and I want you guys to understand
that this concept of heads down mode is a real thing.
And it's okay,
if you are building out your SaaS business
and you're kind of like in this trough of sorrow.
Just know there's gonna be the wiggles of false hope,
but after the wiggles of false hope,
there's still gonna be some dips.
And after that there's gonna be the promise land
and then you're gonna take off
but in the way there there's gonna be
crash of ineptitude, right?
That's just, that is the Shawshank crawl
to get to creating something out of nothing,
to go from zero to one.
And that's okay, we just need to be acknowledged,
like, look, I'm in heads down mode
and right now I'm in heads down mode.
So you might be wondering,
what does heads down mode look like?
Honestly, like with, like, my co founder and I,
like, heads down mode is, it's not like the Hollywood shot
like, we're like, coding furiously.
It's honestly we,
like the loop that we follow right now
and maybe like you're doing this right now
is like, hopefully you're doing this,
is basically you pick this one unit metric, right?
For us, you know, we're working on activation right now.
And basically this unit metric,
you basically measure it, right?
And then you run an experiment.
We make some tweak, and then we run it.
And then we wait.
And then we say, did it work?
And then based on that, if it's a yes or a no,
we basically then go back to the unit metric
we look at it, and we run another experiment
and then we wait.
And this is literally our lives right now.
Basically, we just keep running experiments.
And then we keep watching the metric
and then we wait
and we try to do it in a disciplined way.
And little by little, we improve our stats.
So if you look, this is just the dashboard
we give this to you inside of SaaS school as well.
This is the dashboard.
These are our core metrics
we were looking at how many leads are we getting?
We're looking at how much revenues we're generating.
And little by little,
we know that we're getting our manifesto
into more people's hands,
we're generating revenues from that.
We know that more and more people
are actually practicing Sunday on a regular basis.
And so that's also good.
And so we're just basically constantly just tweaking
and running experiments, tweaking and running experiments
and tracking the metrics.
And that's all we're doing right now.
And that's kind of what I meant here,
like, it's funny that, you know,
there's nothing new under the sun,
like, this is my third company, right?
It's not any different.
We don't have all the answers,
we've validated a bunch of stuff
and we're just going through the process.
What matters is you follow the steps and you don't give up.
It's only the people that give up that are assured defeat.
But if you keep going, then you're gonna be successful.
And for us, I've been through it enough times
my co founder has been through it enough time.
So we know when's this heads down mode,
we're basically just like,
we've already announced we're doing this,
we've got a bunch of people flowing in,
we've got a bunch of people practicing,
revenue is slowly starting to come up,
and we're just like, look, let's just do what's necessary.
First solve activation, then solve retention,
then solve referral, then go back to acquisition
and scale acquisition
because we know activation and retention is working,
that's it, that is it.
And right now we're in this heads down mode.
And what that means is, not every episode is gonna be like,
Oh my god, things are amazing.
Though some will be, some will be.
Others are gonna be like,
yep, we're just tweaking the metrics
and we're just following the process.
It's friggin boring, but oh my god, it'll add up,
it'll add up to something incredible.
You know you think about this
article I wrote this, 2012, Heads Down Mode, right?
Now I'm like, I don't know,
2012 we were just like figuring stuff out.
We hadn't even pivoted
into just focusing on salespeople yet,
or we're barely getting there.
2013 was the year we really, really cranked everything
and got the revenues flowing
and got to cash flow, breakeven
and then raise our series A.
so I didn't even know like,
maybe I thought I was in this,
you know, trough of sorrow at that time,
or maybe I thought I was right at the promised land.
But true to the timeline, August 4th, 2012
we were really under the wiggles of false hope.
And there was a bunch of fixes we needed to make
but we stayed disciplined we kept going.
And that was a year, we really,
I really learned that this whole thing
around how to build an unstoppable sales funnel
to start getting the message out there
and the category out there and to really hone in nicely.
I learned a lot after this blog post,
but it was because I went into heads down mode.
Why do I share this?
The reason I share this is the whole point of this series
is to take a SaaS business from zero to a million ARR.
And my promise to you
is to basically give it to you raw, every Friday.
I'm just gonna truly, I'm not gonna make stuff up,
I'm not gonna create the theatrics for the sake of the show,
I don't care, I don't care.
Like, this is not how I make money,
I make my money in other ways.
And so I'm here to like really, really
give you the true behind the scenes.
And so last few weeks, like we had some unlocks,
and we were solving some exciting things
we put a bunch in play,
this week, honestly, we've got a bunch of stuff into play,
our core metrics are starting to take off
and we're like, alright, let's just wait and see
and we're in this heads down mode
we're just gonna wait and see.
We're gonna see how it goes and we're gonna tweak it
It gets better then we tweak it,
if it gets better we're gonna tweak it.
And literally we are, essentially,
in this loop of we know what our core metric is
we're trying to activate more people that are coming in.
And we're gonna keep running experiments
to make sure we activate more and more
and more and more people.
And we're tethered to this metric,
and we keep going, keep going, keep going,
keep going, keep going.
And we know at some point, it's gonna click perfectly,
and then it's gonna be like,
alright, let's like scale this thing.
So this is what it takes.
This is honestly what it takes
to go from zero to a million ARR,
this is a big part of it
and there's no cool Hollywood highlight reel of this,
but this is what it takes,
you set down the set of metrics, and you set the goals
and you run a bunch of experiments
and you keep making it go higher and higher
and higher and higher and higher.
And what we hope is over the next four to eight weeks,
we really crank people converting in to the,
in from the webinar to our school enrollment,
which is our full package.
We also hope that we have more and more people
are activating.
Those are the two things we're really focused on,
how do you get more people to buy up front?
And we'll explain this in the next episode
what our two pricing models are.
And then the other thing is
how do we get more people to activate?
That's it, those are the two things we're focused on.
We're gonna keep running experiments on that.
And that's essentially called heads down mode.
And so if you're in heads down mode,
hit me with a yes, in the comments below.
Let me know where you're at.
Also, my Twitter handle is here
so there's a link below, like follow me on Twitter,
hit me up on the DMS, tell me about what you're working on.
If you wanna commiserate over being heads down mode,
I'd love to hear from you.
You can check out my website,
I have a whole bunch of blog posts in there as well,
super exciting.
These are like OG blog posts
before I started a YouTube channel.
So you can check that out from the ToutApp journey.
Also, in the next episode,
I'm gonna dig a little bit more into what we're doing
to really get our pricing right
and get more people committed upfront,
versus sort of the slow burn product-led growth approach.
So we'll talk more about that.
So anyway, that's all I have for you today
if you enjoyed this video be sure to smash that like button
if you're seeing us for the first time, welcome,
be sure hit the subscribe button and the bell icon.
The Friday episodes are a different format
I kind of just talk to you like this
and take you behind the scenes.
Monday and Wednesday I bring you more of
actionable video on specific SaaS growth topics.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and the bell icon so you get notified.
Also, if you're in that stage
where you're growing your SaaS business
and you're looking to take it to the next level of,
next stage of growth, grow revenues,
get to product market fit, all that,
be sure to download my five point startup strategy guide.
In my car strategy guide, I go into more in depth
on a lot of these principles that we're applying.
And inside of it,
you'll also learn more about my SaaS school program.
My SaaS School and My SaaS Go-to Market Program,
our coaching programs for SaaS founders
where I work with you
to actually implement all of this stuff in the proper way.
And the details are in the guide
but the guide has a whole bunch of other resources.
So I encourage you to download that guide,
it's completely free.
Go to getunstoppable.com/strategy
or just follow the link below.
If you wanna watch the prior episodes,
this is episode number 6
if you wanna see the prior episodes of this series
of the zero to 1 million ARR,
I'll link to that playlist below as well
so you can binge watch the prior episodes.
If you want me to cover specific aspects of SaaS growth,
put it in the comments below.
Also follow me on twitter @tawheed.
I'll link to it below as well.
And also remember everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business
when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK and I'll see you in the next episode.
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