- When it comes to honing in on great SaaS ideas,
there's this weird thing that I've noticed
after having talked to probably about 500 SaaS founders
over the past 12 months.
As I've been operating different coaching programs
to help SaaS founders grow their companies,
I started noticing this difference,
there's this difference
between how a first-time founder approached picking
a SaaS idea and building a business
and how a second-time founder approached it.
And when I compared it to my own experience
in being a first-time founder, and a second-time founder,
and a third-time founder, it completely matched up too.
And as it turns out, second-time founders,
when they're on their second lap, something changes.
They approach it wholly differently on how they pick
their SaaS ideas.
So in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through what that key difference is
and how you can use that to actually pick your SaaS idea
and stress test your SaaS business.
And while I'm at it,
I'm gonna walk you through the three principles
that you absolutely need to know to make sure
you're picking the right SaaS ideas.
And I'll give you some examples on the SaaS ideas
that I think are really great to go after as well, intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up, everybody, welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK, and on this channel,
I help SaaS founders like you grow
your SaaS businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy.
Now, if you are new to this channel, welcome.
I post a video like this with actionable strategies
on how to grow your SaaS business two to three times a week
with the TK energy.
So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
that way you'll get notified every single time
I drop an episode.
Now, if you're already part of this community,
if you are part of my SaaS go-to-market coaching programs,
welcome back, my people,
it's really great to see you over here.
Now, I remember one of the earliest SaaS ideas
I was working on.
This was at a point where I had sold my first company,
but that came about in really crazy ways.
So I was really like,
"Hey, I wanna go in and really, really build
a SaaS business.
I wanna do a start-up, I wanna do it for real.
And I wanna go big with it.
I don't wanna sell it quickly."
And so I was working on an idea called Recommend.
And at that time I was still working at the company
that bought my first company.
So it was like nights and weekends,
I was playing around with the idea.
And Recommend, I fell into what I called
the one more feature trap.
So I kept adding more features, adding more features.
And I just kept working on a nights and weekends,
and I never saw the light of day.
It never earned any money.
It never got anywhere.
That one failed.
But then when I started building ToutApp,
I started to actually approach that idea
in a whole different way.
And this is the pattern that I found
with second-time founders.
And I considered myself a second-time founder
when I actually started to approach Tout,
not so much with Recommend because that HipCal journey
and the Recommend journey was kinda mashed in one.
That's for another episode on another day.
But when I approached Tout,
I stopped caring about whether the product
was gonna be really differentiated.
I started to focus on market.
And this is the big difference that I've seen
when I seek start-up founders and SaaS founders go approach
the idea phase of their company.
They start to actually,
the second-time founders actually start to focus on market
before anything else.
Now, if you've followed this channel for a while,
we all know that great SaaS businesses are built
on these three pillars.
There's market, there's product, and there's go-to-market.
And when you optimize all three of these,
that's where the money is.
That's where the success lies.
That's where the product market fit lies.
Now, if you over-index on product
and you don't have any go-to-market
and you're in the bad part of the market,
then it won't matter.
And the biggest aha moment
that I think second-time founders
regardless of whether they were successful
or not walk away with is that, look, market is everything.
Distribution is everything.
If those two are there,
then we can build the right product
and really serve the market, and it'll be fine.
Not to say that any one of these three pillars are easy,
but that's the fundamental difference that I've seen
with every single second-time founder, third-time founder,
fourth-time founder that I see
regardless of their past successes.
They have the battle scars.
They did that lap.
Even with me, with Recommend, I did that lap.
And I realized,
It doesn't matter if we're not over-optimizing
from market first.
If there isn't a proper market, a proper need,
an urgent and important problem that is craving
to be solved, my product could be the best thing ever.
It won't matter.
I could have the best go-to-market ever.
It won't matter.
And this is the power in picking great SaaS ideas.
And so that's the base context.
That's the big difference between first-time founders
and second-time founders.
But you may be asking,
"Cool, well, what are some great ideas
that have a great market?"
I'm glad you asked.
I've got, over here, I've got three key principles
that I wanna walk you through
that gives you three key different types of SaaS ideas
that you can dig into.
I'll also link you to some additional resources
that you can dig into as well
so that you can actually make sure that you don't waste
that first lap like a lot of us had to.
You can learn from us.
And you can optimize for market first
and then everything else.
I promise you, it'll save you months of building
the wrong product, falling into one more feature trap.
If you're excited to dig in, go and smash that like button.
And let's go to principle number one, idea number one.
Principle number one, idea number one
is going after timeless SaaS ideas and markets.
These are markets that are timeless
mainly because these are problems that are timeless.
Meaning human beings for one reason or another
are constantly looking for new ways to solve this problem.
What are these problems?
Well, number one,
and don't laugh.
Number one, you can actually build a to-do list app.
Don't ask me why, there's thousands of them.
But somehow, every year there's a new spin on it.
There's a new approach to it.
And human beings hate their to-do lists because it's a list
of reminders of things that they haven't done
that they committed to do.
So they're always willing to go to a new to-do list app.
And because of this, there's always a market for a new spin,
a new take, a new angle, a new sub-niche, sub-category
of a to-do list app.
And on that vein, similar to that,
you can also do note-taking apps and messaging apps.
And if you'll just look back over the last decade,
think of the number of note-taking apps that have come out,
to-do list apps that have come out,
and messaging apps and platforms that have emerged,
that have died, that have re-emerged,
and the cycle continues, and continues, and continues.
So this is my first principle on getting your eyes open
to thinking about market first.
There is always another market for our to-do list app,
and note-taking app, and our messaging app.
Whether you like it or not, it's true.
Human beings are weird, but it's true.
And this is an example of,
look, you may not be jazzed up
by a brand new to-do list app.
But maybe you are, maybe you have a unique spin on it.
Maybe you have a unique angle to it.
And if you can go after that, rest assured,
you know that there is a market for a new to-do list apps.
And so it will not go in vain.
And that's the power in thinking this way
as second-time founders and third time founders do it.
They first start to think about,
well, is there a market for it
before they think about product, or go-to-market,
or distribution, or anything else?
If you wanna dig a little bit more
into timeless SaaS ideas,
I actually did a video on three types of SaaS categories.
So there's three golden types of SaaS categories.
They're not exactly ideas,
but they're categories of SaaS businesses.
Any SaaS business that you see that successful
can be broken down into one of these three categories.
So if you wanna dig into that video,
you can watch it over here.
These are three types of SaaS ideas,
micro SaaS and bigger SaaS ideas.
This video is one of our most popular videos.
You can check it out, you don't have to go right now.
I will link to it below so you can check it
after this video.
Let's go to principle number two.
So principle number two is to actually go
after existing series B companies.
Series B is where a company is raising
a large amount of funding,
let's just say 30 to $50 million,
maybe more if it's a hot round.
And it's a company that's small, relatively speaking,
and they raise this large amount of capital
because they've proven product market fit.
They've proven that there's revenues,
but they need to scale.
So series B companies are uniquely interesting when it comes
to SaaS start-ups because they have a proven market.
They have product market fit.
But they're not big enough where they cannot be disrupted.
Meaning you can actually disrupt them
because they're at that very vulnerable stage of trying
to scale and trying to get big,
trying to blitz scale if you like that term.
I'm having mixed feelings about that term, but good example.
These companies, these series B companies are super powerful
to go after because they've already done a lot
of the hard work through their seed round
and their series A round.
And now, they're going to series B round.
They've taken a lot of the market risk out of the equation.
By the time a company raise a series B,
the market's been proven.
And what you're looking for are proven markets,
where there's clearly a need.
And you can go in and you can disrupt them.
These type of companies tend
to actually have older tech stacks,
depending on how long it took them to actually discover
their product market fit.
They have legacy baggage.
They have execution risks.
They're trying to scale really fast,
which is written with execution risk.
And so they're vulnerable.
And you can actually go after them and that idea
and pick up from where they left off.
This is one of the reasons why I'm not a big believer
in being a pioneer in a space
'cause pioneers tend to have arrows on their backs.
The first guy through the wall gets their nose bloody.
Saying you wanna use, it's true.
But this is why it also makes a really strong strategy
on why you can go after series B companies.
Now, if you want some specific examples
of series B companies that I really like,
markets, and categories, and SaaS that I really like,
be sure to check out this video,
where I highlighted the key opportunities in SaaS
between 2020 to 2025.
It's actually one of our,
also one of our most popular videos,
except this one's a very in-depth webinar that I ran.
And it's a recording of it that you can watch.
It's about 45 minutes where I really walk you through
each of the companies and each of the categories.
You don't have to go right now, again,
I'll link to it below.
I have principle number three for you.
But before I go to principle number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
(finger snaps loudly) Are you starting to see
the difference here?
There's the difference of just obsessing
about just the product.
And there's a difference of saying,
"Well, first, let's figure out where the market is.
Let's figure out where there's already demand,
and let's see if we can serve it with a very unique,
innovative, really compelling product."
This is a very subtle difference.
But if you, as a start-up founder, if you, as a SaaS founder
can embrace this shift right away,
where you put market first, then distribution,
and then product, then you will be unstoppable.
If you're starting to see the power in this,
can I just get a yes in the comments below,
also, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It really likes it when you do that,
and so do I, and so does my team.
It really means the world to us.
So smash that like button so that more founders
that don't know that they can search for this type
of content on YouTube,
this will surface up to them that much faster.
It'll just mean the world for our community.
By the way, if you're also in the stage
where you're working on a SaaS idea
or you're trying to vet out a SaaS idea,
this is exactly why I created
my 10-Point SaaS Business Checklist.
In this checklist, I've taken everything that I've learned
in my 15 years of being in SaaS.
And I've put it into a checklist that have a set
of questions that you can follow
to really stress test your idea.
I'll link to it below.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video.
But right now, let's go to principle number three,
which is just as important.
So we've gone through,
just to kind of recap,
the timeless SaaS ideas, I'll link to that video.
We've gone through series B companies
that you can kind of look at for proven markets.
The third one is to just look at your own domain knowledge.
You may still be, I mean,
I know I said you don't wanna be a pioneer,
but that's okay.
Like sometimes you have to be a pioneer.
Jeff Bezos was a pioneer.
He had to do it.
And he just went to space.
So it worked out well for him.
Your own domain knowledge could be a great source
of proven marketable ideas.
What do I mean by that?
Well, one of the sayings I have is every enterprise company
has spreadsheets that can be turned into SaaS businesses.
So if you reflect on your own work experience,
the companies you've worked at, the jobs you've had,
the jobs your friends have had, and you dig into it,
chances are there's a spreadsheet that can be disrupted
that a company runs on because maybe you're a part
of an older department or an older industry.
And chances are those spreadsheets can be turned
into a phenomenal SaaS business.
Some of the best SaaS businesses that are out there,
those golden types that I mentioned,
that video which I'll link to below,
they started as spreadsheets.
And then smart people would realize, "You know what,
let's turn this into a proper SaaS offering."
And then they made billions from that category.
So look at what jobs you've had,
what problems you can solve that you have a lot
of domain knowledge on.
Domain knowledge, meaning you have in-depth knowledge
about that job, about that role, and what is needed.
So you can solve those problems because you know
that's a real problem.
You know actual people that have that problem.
You had that problem.
And one trick for that is to find the spreadsheets
that are in your jobs and how you can turn those
into proper SaaS businesses.
Now, if you're interested in how you can actually turn
a spreadsheet into a proper SaaS business,
what are the principles around it?
I did an entire video on this
on how to turn spreadsheets into incredible SaaS business.
You can check it out here.
I'll also link to it below it.
You don't have to go here.
Let's recap first, and then you can look through the videos
that I linked to.
So to recap, number one,
number zero, if you will,
if you're a SaaS founder, if you're a founder,
don't over-index on product.
Look at market first then distribution.
That's your go-to-market and then the product.
That's the order you wanna go with.
And when you're trying to find a SaaS ideas
that have proven markets, number one,
look at the timeless SaaS ideas.
I'll link to that video I talked about.
Number two, look at existing series B companies.
And number three, look at your own domain knowledge
and the spreadsheets that were used in the jobs
that you were in.
When you do these things,
you'll instantly flip your chances of succeeding
because now you'll be operating like a second-time founder.
And you'll actually be vetting the market
instead of having a ton of effort going to a product
that there's no market for
and no matter how good your distribution is
or how good your product is.
So if you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button.
Also, if you are working on a SaaS idea
and you really wanna stress test it,
I invite you to check out
my 10-Point SaaS Business Checklist.
It's completely free.
And in it, I go through 10 key questions
that you should ask yourself to stress test your SaaS idea.
Just go to tkkader.com/saas-checklist.
It's completely free, tkkader.com/saas-checklist.
And you can get access to it right away.
Also, down below, I'll link to this,
and I'll link to the three videos that I talked about
that you should also check out as you're really honing in
on your SaaS idea, your SaaS business.
And if you're already in an idea,
I encourage you to watch these videos and download
the checklist so you can stress test it
whether there's a real market for it.
And they'll save you months and months of developing
the wrong product and help you get to the promised land
of product market fit.
And the next thing, you grow it that much faster.
If you got value from this video,
please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
I drop a video like this with actionable strategies
in growing your SaaS business two to three times a week.
So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
that way you'll get notified every single time
I drop an episode.
If you have a fellow founder, a fellow co-founder,
if you're part of entrepreneurship group
with other SaaS founders looking for SaaS ideas,
please share this video with them.
It'll mean the world to us.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, I'll see you in the next episode.
(upbeat music)