- What's up everybody?
Welcome to Unstoppable Friday.
Every Friday, I bring an episode like this,
where I take you behind the scenes on real life challenges
we face in scaling a SaaS business,
to this amazing one million ARR mark.
On today's episode, I'm gonna take you behind the scenes
on the exact process we followed to validate our SaaS idea.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody?
Welcome to unstoppable,
I'm so excited about episode number two,
episode number two of Unstoppable Friday.
In this channel, I help SaaS founders like you,
navigate the path to the next stage of growth,
navigate the path to product market fit and beyond.
So if you're new to this channel,
be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon.
'Cause I bring an episode like this every Sunday,
Wednesday and Friday.
And if you're back well, welcome back.
Really excited to see you over here.
In today's episode,
I'm gonna be taking you behind the scenes.
Every Fridays you know, I take you behind the scenes,
in a SaaS business that I myself am building
with my co founder.
And on today's episode, this is episode number two.
And we're taking you behind the scenes
as we navigate this one million ARR challenge.
And we're taking you behind the scenes
on how we validated our SaaS idea.
So a little bit of context really quick.
By the way, if you're excited to dig into this
and you're excited about this format that we're doing,
please smash that like button,
it means the world to me and my team.
Also comment below.
Let me know what your thoughts are
as we navigate all this and what questions you have.
I'll be monitoring the comments
to make sure I answer questions.
to clarify everything I talked about today.
So just some context.
We're building a SaaS business,
in this channel I help SaaS founders,
as part of my SaaS school
to help you scale your SaaS business.
So we have a set of principles.
And so every Sunday I help you figure out,
how to start SaaS business.
Every Wednesday, I help you actually scale
your go-to market machine.
Inside of our SaaS school we work with you,
to actually do apply all of our principles.
And on Friday,
I take you behind the scenes on how we're,
using our own principles in SaaS school
and applying it to building our own SaaS business.
So that's what we'll be doing here today.
So that's the context, our goal is to get to a million ARR.
We're about to three K ARR right now,
so we have a bit to go.
We don't know how long it's gonna take,
but we wanna get there as fast as possible.
And I'll be taking you through that journey
in these Unstoppable Friday episodes.
If you missed the last episode,
last episode, get the full context around,
how we followed our own principles
to really establish this idea.
And so you can check that out here,
we can, we'll link to it below as well,
you can check it out after this.
Today I wanna talk a little bit on how we validated
the core idea.
How we actually validated our idea
once we kind of laid out the strategy.
Now, when it comes to validating idea,
there's three things you got to dig into.
You got to think about the market,
the product and the go-to market.
And the big thing that I teach inside of SaaS school is,
if you really want to validate your product the right way,
if you really wanna increase your chances of success,
you should start by building an audience.
In order to go from that first stage,
which is zero to some revenue,
you should start by building an audience,
you build that audience to really understand them.
Along with your thesis, you go out there with your message,
and then you give them what they want.
That's how you build the best software product.
So that's what we did.
And so I'm going to walk you through,
how I really dug into this market piece
and really went from zero to one,
from nothing to some revenue, right?
And in future episodes,
we'll talk more about what we did around product
and go-to market,
and what we're doing to scale to a million ARR.
But first, for this episode,
let's dig into how we validated the idea,
because I'm a big believer if you wanna validate your idea,
build an audience first.
But here's how we did it.
How we did it was we built an unstoppable sales funnel.
This is my method that I teach inside of my SaaS school.
inside go-to market programs for SaaS founders,
to actually not just build and grow revenues
but also validate their idea early on.
And so in true form,
I applied all the principles that I teach
for this Sunday application that we are building
to get to a million ARR.
How do we do that?
Well, there's three parts to an unstoppable sales funnel.
The first part is your ideal customer profile.
The second part is what we call your manifesto.
And the third part is your Broadway show.
Let me walk you through step by step
what each of these did for us.
So firstly, I mentioned this in the last episode,
we really worked on defining our ideal customer profile.
So our app helps you actually plan your week
and live a more productive life and get the right mindset
to go into every Monday with a plan, right?
That's what what our app does.
Now, we wanted to get the right ideal customer for this.
We knew the group of people
we wanna serve were high achievers.
We knew that they were roughly 25 to 45 years old.
They and it's about 50 50 male female.
So there's no gender gap, there are gender difference there.
And we knew that there were these were people
that were capable of more.
These are people that have done a bunch of stuff in life.
But they're kind of like, I don't think this is it.
And I wanna do more.
And I know there's a better way to do this.
And I know I have goals I want, I know I wanna do more,
I just don't know how to unlock myself.
Those are the people that we wanted to work with.
And so the way an unstoppable sales funnel works,
to validate your idea, is we say,
really get crystal clear on your ideal customer profile,
and then create a manifesto
and use that manifesto to actually generate
and build an audience so that you can really validate
what software to build for them.
And so, sure enough, the next thing that I did,
was I built this manifesto.
So this is my manifesto right here for this group of people
who are high achievers, who are 25 to 45 years old,
and we wanna get them into our app,
every Sunday to practice this thing called
Unstoppable Sunday to plan their week.
We're like alright, if you,
I wanna target those people, serve those people,
let's create a manifesto or a unique point of view.
This is something we teach inside of SaaS school,
we help you actually create this manifesto,
so that you can actually go into the market,
build an audience, attract demand, drive growth,
in a very, very differentiated way.
And so for our manifesto, we figured these people,
are at a point where they really want clarity in their life,
not just their weeks, but their lives.
If they have clarity in their life,
then they'll wanna rise up to a much higher state,
they'll wanna plan their way they want to adopt the mindset
to go execute that plan that they're really excited about.
So what we started with,
was a manifesto around a Life Planning Guide.
Now you'll notice this is very disconnected
from actual software.
We weren't trying to create software at this point.
We just wanted to build an audience
and serve these group of people
and track this group of people in a very compelling way.
And so I created a very simple Life Planning Guide.
This is the actual landing page for it.
It's fairly simple as Life Planning Guide.
Everyone needs a plan.
Yours needs to be unstoppable.
That might sound familiar because I say this
in all my episodes for my SaaS business.
And we basically walk you through like,
hey, here's a free guide, it's my manifesto on.
If you're at a point in your life where enough is enough,
and you really know you're capable of more,
you really wanna go after it,
I, here's a free guide with a set of videos
that you can download.
It's my manifesto on how to live a more productive life,
how to have an unstoppable strategy.
And when you sign up for this,
you essentially get a copy of our guide.
I'll show you our guide right here.
And it's super simple.
It's not that complicated.
However, there's an art to creating these,
they look simple in the outside,
so everyone can consume them.
But there's a real art in creating these manifestos,
which is what we teach in the program.
So I created my manifesto.
It's a five step Life Planning Guide,
I welcome them into it.
I'll link them to a training webinar,
if they want real hands on help on that.
And I walk them through some steps.
And I walk them through some steps, and sure enough,
by the end of it, you'll see over here in step five,
we say hey, by the way,
now that you have this basic life plan,
you should make sure you adopt an unstoppable mindset,
you should make sure that you stay present on your goals,
you review your goals every week.
And this is a very specific way we teach you how to do this.
And guess what, there's software that helps you do this.
So click here to actually sign up.
And you can actually set up that software.
And sure enough, what ends up happening is,
we get people with who are high achievers, we target them,
and we point them into our Life Planning Guide.
And then we point them to our actual app, right?
So this is how we did it.
And because we started with this manifesto,
this unique point of view, there was no selling involved.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone to buy anything.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone to log into some software
or download anything or set up an account.
It was purely like, look, we wanna serve you,
we wanna build an audience of high achievers
who know they're capable of more,
and we wanna actually serve them
in helping them create a brighter life plan,
so that we can figure out if there's real validity
to this app we wanna build
which helps some people plan their weeks.
I guess you're getting this, is this awesome.
So, if you're with me if you starting to see the difference
in this approach here,
instead of just writing a bunch of code
and building something just for ourselves
and hoping that we can go figure out
sales and marketing later,
if you're starting to see the difference
in this approach here,
can I just get a yes, in the comments below,
and if you haven't smash that like button yet, please do so.
It means the world to us.
Okay, so we start with our ideal customer profile.
Then we created our manifesto in a very specific way.
And then we ran our actual Broadway show,
you might be wondering what a Broadway show is.
So most, most starter teams,
when they try to do sales and marketing,
they try to spin up everything,
they say, we're gonna run ads, we're gonna do a blog,
we're gonna do content marketing, we're gonna be on tik tok.
You name it, and they try to come up every week
with new fresh content, that they're gonna share.
That's different, that's really hard to do because A,
you're just all over the place,
B you don't have enough have manpower
to create that much quality content and C,
like it delivers questionable returns.
Something like 96% of startups fail
even after raising a seed round.
Do you really think they didn't do all those things,
they checked off all the boxes, what they didn't do,
was come out with a differentiated message and strategy.
So we do things differently inside of SaaS school.
For us, unstoppable founders, we say,
alright, let's actually focus
on a very specific ideal customer profile.
We call it your initial customer profile.
Then we say let's create your manifesto,
and then we say let's run one show,
with one piece of content,
with one core message.
Let's do all of these things, every week,
let's just run this every single week
to promote our manifesto.
Because we know this is, there's thousands of people,
there's probably 100,000 people,
plus that we know would be ready and willing
and engage right now and building a life plan.
So let's make it where we just run this one show.
And for us, the thing that we did was we,
we did a YouTube video every week,
and we shared something on Instagram every week, that's it.
YouTube and Instagram, we just shared that
and kept linking to our manifesto.
We kept sharing build a life plan,
you got to have a life plan, you wanna be proactive,
you know you're capable of more.
And we linked to our manifesto.
When people linked to the manifesto,
originally, we just wanted to understand
if people were interested in this,
we didn't even know the software.
And once we understood that, we said oh,
do they care about the weekly practice?
Once we validated the weekly practice,
we started doing it manually.
Once we started to understand that people
aren't wanting to do the weekly practice manually,
like with me just being on a call,
we said, okay, let's go create the software.
And we asked him like, what do you want more of this,
they said, well, we wanna be notified.
We wanna be reminded to practice Unstoppable Sunday,
and so we built all of that into the software.
So the core of this is we started with ICP.
Then we built our manifesto.
Then we ran our Broadway show,
and the Broadway show always linked to our manifesto.
People downloaded our manifesto and then engage,
start engaging with the product and engaging with us.
And we've got quality conversations
to understand what they cared about.
And get started to get this.
So that's how we validated our message.
We started with an audience.
We built up that audience, we attracted those people.
We talked to those people, we understood what they wanted,
then we started building up the product,
and we started testing if they're willing to pay for it.
And that brings us more or less to today,
as I might, as you might know,
like I believe SaaS businesses
go through certain inflection points.
And so for us, the first inflection point,
was a zero to one.
Zero to one is that can we go from nothing,
to some sort of an audience.
To them, some of them paying us for something.
So we validated that we're like,
okay, there's a real market here, people care about this,
we're getting testimonials,
people are paying some money, awesome.
Once we validated that with our unstoppable Salesforce,
then we say okay, let's actually build out the product.
Then we built out the product.
You can actually sign up for it now,
you just go to unstoppablesunday.com and you get signed up.
And once we have the product,
we said all right, let's keep running
our unstoppable sales funnel.
Let's keep bringing more people in.
And let's make sure they're activating.
And let's make sure they're actually engaging.
And once we have that,
once we get to a certain amount of revenues,
we have a little bit now, we wanna grow that.
Once we know like, okay, there's revenues,
people are activating in the product.
This is something I'll cover in the next episode.
So if you haven't subscribed yet,
be sure to subscribe button and that bell icon,
or cover it then.
Once we've done that,
then we've shift into a full go-to market machine.
And we say, you know what, we've got something,
we've got some revenues,
let's really build our really strong,
unstoppable sales funnel to really scale this.
And we'll use all the data from the earliest stages
to go after this part.
So that's what I wanted to cover today.
We didn't just start building some software
and say people are gonna love this.
We started with like, who do we want to target?
How do we attract them using an unstoppable sales funnel?
How do we build an audience?
And then how do we get that audience
to sign up for the product and use it every single week?
And then we said, how do we monetize?
And then we said, okay, cool, we're monetizing,
and now we're going into how do we actually scale
this unstoppable sales funnel?
Now that we covered how to validate your SaaS idea,
in the next episode of Unstoppable Friday,
and we're digging a little bit more into
how do we actually scale revenues?
How do we measure things inside the product?
These are all principles we teach inside the program.
So if you're going through this journey,
and you're getting value, and you're like, you know what,
I really wanna use these principles,
just like TK and his team are doing.
I wanna build an unstoppable sales funnel
for my SaaS product, I want to validate my idea.
Or maybe it's time for me to actually,
scale my go-to market machine.
If you are in that stage and you wanna come join this party,
we're having a ton of fun
and you wanna grow your SaaS business the unstoppable way,
then follow the links below,
there's two links, one is to our SaaS school.
So if you're super early stage,
you'll wanna join our SaaS school.
That helps you really hone in your idea,
putting the right pieces in place and validated.
If you already have a product and you already have revenues,
then you'll wanna join our go-to market program.
So I'll link to that below as well.
In the go-to market program,
we actually help you focus
on building an unstoppable sales funnel,
you're one growth and you do scale your SaaS business,
to scale your revenues and grow faster.
Both of them incredible programs,
just depends on what stage you're in.
And one last thing I'll give you,
is I have a 10 points SaaS business checklist.
So that checklist walks you through some core questions
that will help you understand
where you are in your business.
So I'll link to that below
or you can go to tkkader.com/saas-checklist,
that's a completely free resource
that you can dig more into.
It's a form of manifesto for me
for building SaaS businesses.
So if you got value from this video,
smash that like button means the world to me and my team.
I really appreciate you watching,
I know these videos are long.
If you enjoy this format,
if you're getting value
from this different format Friday videos,
this is very different than our Sunday and Wednesday videos,
which are a lot more concise, a lot more produced.
If you're getting value, comment below,
let me know what you're thinking.
We want feedback on how to improve these.
If you are new welcome,
be sure hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon so you get notified,
every time I drop a video
on how to build your SaaS business,
every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday
with the TK energy and that's pretty much it.
I wanna thank you for watching.
And 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.
(upbeat music)