- When you're a SaaS founder,
one of the toughest things you have to master is your
ability to zoom in to the critical details,
to make sure everything works in the detail level,
and then being able to zoom out
and think about the broader strategy.
But so often, I know this happened to me
when I was running Tout App.
I would get so bogged down into the details.
It would be hard for me to zoom back out
and actually think about the strategy
and then go back and zoom in
and think about the details.
And in that we end up,
we're getting to actually create a longer term strategy
to actually zoom out
and think longterm about the business,
which is just as important as a startup founder.
So in this episode,
I'm going to walk you through the exact process
that I learned to adopt,
to think strategically about the business.
So think about the longer term
without losing sight of the details.
Intro
(upbeat music)
What's up, everybody welcome to unstoppable.
I'm TK and on this channel,
I help SaaS founders like you
navigate the path to the next stage of growth,
to accelerate growth with an unstoppable strategy.
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welcome,
be sure to hit the subscribe button
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every single time I drop an episode,
which is about
two to three times a week, these days.
Now, if you're already part of our community,
if you're part of my SaaS go to market coaching program,
and you're watching this,
welcome back,
it's really great to have you here.
All right.
So you're a SaaS founder,
and you're thinking about
how to grow your SaaS business.
One of the toughest things to do
is actually be able to zoom out,
take a step back and think strategically about the business.
This was really hard for me
and I had to learn it the hard way
to develop this muscle,
to be able to zoom in, zoom out,
zoom in zoom out
to be able to context switch between meetings,
having to go into a meeting where it's a feature review,
and then having to come out
and go into a meeting which is a financial review
thinking about the next 12 months.
That was a hard thing to nail.
One of the biggest things that I learned
was you have to actually develop the discipline
to think strategically about your SaaS business
so that you can drive growth.
Now I'm going to dig into exactly
the process that I follow to drive growth,
to create a strategic plan.
But first,
let me just kind of highlight
the thing that you have to master.
The thing you have to master is
there's essentially three planes of thinking.
Normally as startup founders, which are,
and I've done this too,
we're stuck in the details.
We're just thinking about the next seven days
or this month
or this quarter,
this really important feature we have to get out
or the board meeting that's coming up next week.
And of course the board meeting deck
is going to be ready tonight before.
Cause that's just how it goes.
We're so stuck in just thinking about the details
and the next seven days.
That's just one plane of thinking.
And what you have to realize and master
is the ability to remind yourself
that you need to actually think across
three different planes.
The first is the immediate term,
the short term,
the second is thinking about the next 12 months.
And then the third is thinking about the next five years.
Now, if someone showed this slide or this,
this index card to baby TK,
he would immediately say,
Hey, listen,
I don't even have to think about the next five years.
We may not even exist in another quarter.
If you don't raise the next round of funding.
I totally get it.
What's important though,
is for you to understand that
in order to navigate the path
to the next stage of growth,
you have to actually visualize the next stage of growth.
And this is not some sort of
fruit fall law of attraction thing,
this is just a practical thing.
You have to carve out time
where you force yourself
to think about the next 12 months,
even if it's for an hour every week
or an hour every month.
And you have to carve out the time
where you think about
if what you're doing right now, pans out.
If what you want to do over the next 12 months pans out,
then what,
what happens after that?
And even if it's for an hour, once a quarter,
you have to think about the next five years
and the bigger vision around your company.
This is just something you have to master.
You have to master and remind yourself,
this is what I had to do,
I just set up calendar invitations every,
every third Thursday of the month,
where I would say, okay,
I have to think about the next 12 months
and our strategy going forward.
And every board meeting
which was once a year quarter,
we would think about the bigger
longer term vision around the company.
It would carve out time to prepare for that.
This is your first thing that you just have to
have to prioritize.
If you don't do this,
you're just going to be stuck in the mire details
and you might be optimizing
for one thing right now
or you think you are,
you'll miss the bigger picture.
You won't have a broader strategy.
And all of a sudden,
all the problems,
all the opportunities that come up,
when you think around the second plane,
the next 12 months,
you'll totally miss.
You will actually not be able
to capitalize on those
or avoid those.
Where there's opportunities there's a risk
if you don't carve out this time.
So that's really the first thing
I really wanted to highlight here.
You gotta know how to carve out the time
across these three planes of thinking.
Once you've done that,
then it's like, okay, TK,
how do I create my strategy?
I'm in my every Thursday,
every, every third, Thursday of the month, right?
Like I'm sitting down, it's an hour, maybe two hours,
maybe it's an offsite.
Whatever works for you,
you got to create your strategy
or you going to tether yourself to it.
You got to revamp on that strategy.
How do you do it?
So it's no secret.
I believe every SaaS business
actually is built on three pillars.
The first is product strategy.
The second is market strategy.
And the third is go to market strategy.
When you optimize on all three of these things,
you optimize for your business,
you actually accelerate your growth
and you actually have a sound strategy.
That's the power of this.
Question is, how do you do that?
So I always think about
these three things in separate pieces.
I believe that you can have an unstoppable strategy
and an unstoppable strategy
always addresses these three questions.
Market, product and go to market.
Now to help you along with this,
I actually have a five point star of strategy guide.
And inside of that,
I have this one page strategy template.
It's this worksheet that you can actually download.
You can download the guide.
I'll link to it below.
You don't have to go just yet.
Let me explain what you're gonna find in there.
I always break down the questions you need to answer
for each of these three pillars.
You have your market strategy,
you have your product strategy
and your go to market strategy.
And then I also go into a little bit more detailed
when I'm creating my one page strategy
on two supporting pillars for every SaaS business,
which is your fundraising strategy
and your exit strategy.
All I'm asking you to do is carve out the third Thursday
or whatever day works for you every month,
where you actually revamp the strategy
and revisit the strategy.
So that it's fresh in your mind.
When you actually do this,
what you'll end up doing
is you'll be able to cross through
these three planes a lot easier.
When you're making a very, very detailed decision,
You'll be thinking about
because it's fresh in your mind,
your 12 month strategy.
When you're thinking about that,
you'll actually make a better decision.
When you're taking time away
to think about these questions
and creating a strategy,
you will think about the risks in the space,
the opportunities in the space,
which will then allow you to navigate the ship
on the day to day and way better way.
You can start to get this?
Now they're so specific questions to answer
across this broad buckets.
I'm going to cover this next.
But before I do that,
let me just pause here for a second.
This was a game changer for me.
I wish someone sat me down
with my first dollar of revenue
that I earned at Tout App
and taught me this
because I had to learn this the hard way.
Carving out time to do this
and answering these very specific questions.
It's through battled heart and learning
that I got to these set of questions.
And I know these seems simple,
but I've the countless number of founders that I work with.
I'll ask different questions
and they'll always have pause.
So like, well, I never thought about it that way.
You wanna know why?
It's not because,
it's not our fault.
It's because things like market strategy
or what's your positioning
or what is our exit trend?
They all sound like simple English words.
We assign this definitions to them
but the details of them
we don't think about.
So we're like,
Oh yeah, our ICP is XYZ,
but we don't really go in with the discipline
to really define them.
It's the founders that take the time
and have the discipline
to really, really flush this out
are the ones that win.
But no one talks about that
because when you sell your company
for bajillions of dollars
and you're on the stage at SaaS
or a tech crunch,
no one's going to talk about,
the nitty gritty work that they did
to actually make it the company work.
So if you start,
if you're starting to get this,
if you start to see the importance of this,
go to smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm,
and let's go move on to some of the detailed questions.
Okay?
So for market strategy
and I go into a lot more detail into these
in my startup strategy guide.
So I'll link to it below.
It's completely free.
But some of the questions that you really want to answer
and be able to summarize in here
is who is your ideal customer?
What's your ideal customer profile?
What segment of the market are you going into?
Are you going into mid market,
upper mid market,
lower enterprise,
enterprise SMB,
whatever it may be
and what makes this an urgent
and important problem for our market?
How do you know that this is an urgent
and important problem, right?
These are just some of the questions that
you absolutely must answer
in your one page strategy.
For your product strategy,
there's some specific questions I highlighted as well.
Do we help our customers make money,
save money,
or reduce risk?
Easy.
It's an easy question.
It's not a complicated question,
but you'll be surprised how many people
have to think about this.
They'll have to think of like,
well, I think it's this.
And by the way, if your answer is productivity,
go back to the drawing board.
That is not a good strategy.
That's for another video.
And then, some simple stuff,
are we still a vitamin
or are we actually turning into a pain killer?
A lot of startups start off as a vitamin
and then turn it into a painkiller
by constantly revisiting their strategy.
So this is an important question to answer
and keep track of.
What is our core product loop.
What is the first aha moment in our product?
And also what is our core atomic unit?
Now I have some specific training videos
that you can check out.
I've done some videos on answering
some of these specific questions.
Just download my startup strategy guide
and I'll link to them specifically.
That way you don't have to go fumbling for it right now.
It's in this YouTube channel.
And then the last piece is you go to market strategy.
You go to market strategy.
What is your primary growth engine?
Are you doing inbound,
outbound,
all bound?
What is the strategic narrative?
How do we attract people?
These are some really good questions
that you just need to sit down and answer
and then you have to keep revisiting
as you make better and better decisions
as you review the data,
as you review the results, right?
And then lastly, I won't go into too much detail on this.
There's your fundraising strategy,
how we will be funding the growth in the business,
are you bootstrapped?
Are you VC?
How do you think about your next round?
What does your next pitch deck look like?
What milestones have you hit?
And also your exit strategy,
who are the top three most likely buyers?
who are the people already selling to your customers?
How can you partner with them?
So you can lay in the inroads.
So all great questions to answer it in here.
Now to summarize,
there are three planes of thinking
that every founder must go through.
There's the immediate term,
next seven days,
the next 30 days
or however you look at it.
There's the next 12 months.
And then there's the next five years.
So often we get stuck in the now
and we forget to look at the forest.
We get stuck in the trees.
I think I'm using that right.
Anyway,
it's super important that you learn
to zoom in zoom out across all three of these planes.
The better you get at zooming in zooming out,
zooming in zooming out,
the better decisions you're going to make,
the more growth you're going to have for your SaaS business.
And as always,
every SaaS business is built on
product strategy,
market strategy
and go to market strategy.
Now, you know the overview.
Now you know what you need to do.
If you need some help,
go download my startup growth strategy guide.
It's my five point startup growth strategy guide.
I'll link to it below,
or just go to getunstoppable.com/strategy
Inside of it,
I give you
a whole bunch of training videos
that you can watch for each aspects of these.
I also give you the template for this
one page SaaS strategy worksheet.
All of that is in there,
and it'll help you start to kind of
put down some answers to this.
There may be the right answers,
they maybe the wrong answers.
We don't know,
but it's a start
and tethering yourself to one page strategy
is half the time battle.
And then you can go run experiments,
see the results
and tweak your strategy
and keep getting better and better and better.
And that's how you're gonna accelerate your path
to the next stage of growth.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to hit that like button
for the YouTube algorithm.
Also be sure to hit the subscribe button
in that bell icon if you haven't already,
and also comment below.
What are your thoughts?
How do you go about your strategic planning process?
What other questions would you add
to this one Page SaaS strategy worksheet?
I'd love to know from you.
And also if you have a fellow founder
or team member
or a friend
that would get value from this video,
please,
it would mean the world to us
if you share this video
or tweet this out,
there's a click to tweet link below as well.
I wanna thank you for watching this video.
Hopefully you got some value.
Remember everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business,
but when you are with us,
yours is going to be unstoppable.
I'm TK
and I'll see you in the next episode.
Oh, and by the way,
in the next episode,
I'm actually gonna be talking about
how to build a go to market strategy.
So we're going to be zooming into this.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
so you get notified.
All right?
All right. I'm TK.
I'll see you the next episode.
(upbeat music)
I don't like that one either.
I think I'm using that right.