- So on this channel, I always share
stories about how to build, scale
and exit SaaS businesses.
I take all the lessons learned
from my journey with ToutApp, the last
company that I started, which I raised
money for and then sold.
So this video's a little different.
I'm actually starting a new SaaS business,
and I started working on it last year,
and as part of this new SaaS business,
I'm doing things slightly differently.
So in this video, I'm going to show you
the three steps that I took to start
this brand new SaaS business from nothing.
Intro.
(dramatic music)
What's everybody?
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK, author of the book "How To Punch
"The Sunday Jitters In The Face",
entrepreneur and I also run the SaaS Start Up School,
where I help entrepreneurs like you
go from starting, building and scaling,
and then even exiting your SaaS business.
If you're an entrepreneur and you're building
out a SaaS business, you're looking at starting,
I also bring you a video on this channel
every Sunday, and every Wednesday
to help you do exactly that.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon if you're new,
so that you get notified every single time
I drop an episode with TK energy.
On this video, I'm going to be walking
you through the three steps that I took last year
to start my brand new SaaS business.
I haven't really talked about this much,
because I've just been doing videos,
sharing my journey from building ToutApp,
my last SaaS business, which I raised money
from Andreessen Horowitz, scaled it, exited it.
So this video is a little different.
I'm starting something new.
It's really exciting, it's very different
but it is a SaaS business.
And before I wrote a single line of code,
before I wrote anything, before I built
any products, I did these three things
to actually start my SaaS business from nothing.
So I'm going to be walking you through that.
So if you're excited to dig in,
go ahead and smash that like button and let's get started.
In case you haven't figured it out,
I am a engineer, I do write code,
but through my ToutApp journey
and my Marketo journey, I learned
to embrace sales and marketing.
So one of the biggest things that
I learned, even in my ToutApp journey,
because there were failed products
that I had before ToutApp took off,
I learned that before you actually
write code to build a product,
you've gotta write code to build an audience.
So that's the main principle that
I teach founders now that are just starting out.
Write code to build an audience
before you build a product.
So naturally, when I started on this journey
to build this brand new SaaS business,
which in case you're wondering,
I haven't talked about this before.
This is the first time talking about it in this episode.
I followed a very different path.
I took what really worked well from ToutApp,
and from any other SaaS business
that I coach now, and I started to apply it
for my own SaaS business.
And that's what I'm going to be digging through.
So this is sort of my blueprint
for every time I start a SaaS business
and I work with the founder,
especially if you're in the super early stages.
If you're in the super early stages,
usually it's a founder that has a technical background,
they're at a really boring tech job,
and they're like I finally want to make that plunge,
I want to start a business.
And they have some side projects,
but they want to really make a go at it,
they want to make sure it's a real business.
So I always start with this framework.
If you're a long time viewer of this channel,
some of this will look familiar,
because I've actually talked about
what I call my unstoppable sales funnel.
I've actually talked about building an audience first,
but in this video, I'm going to really
dig into the three steps you actually need to follow,
which I followed for this SaaS business.
Step number one, let's dig right into it,
is I actually got really specific about my ICP.
Here's the thing, I knew that I wanted
to start a SaaS business, but I didn't
want to do a venture backed one, not yet.
What I wanted to do was start a self sufficient,
profitable SaaS business that solved
a very specific need, and that's regardless
of whether we choose venture down the line or not,
that's how every business starts,
that's how every SaaS business starts.
But instead of writing a line of code,
and what I thought the market needed,
I followed this framework, and the first step
was what was the ICP?
And for me personally, through my journey
of being a CEO at ToutApp, and being
an SVP of Strategy at Marketo,
one of the things I got really
passionate about was personal development.
I realized that when you're a start up founder,
every quarter, the company is different.
Every quarter, you have to grow,
and so I really embrace personal development.
And as I embraced that journey,
I learned that personal development
isn't really taught in schools,
and you don't even know about this thing
called personal development, unless you really seek it out.
And so I realize that what I really
wanted to serve was people that were high achievers
before they discovered personal development.
People that wanted to get more out of life,
they wanted to accomplish big things,
but didn't have a system to operate
at that high performance.
So I quickly realized that my ICP
was people that were high achievers,
and obviously when it comes to an ICP,
there are a lot more details into what makes up
high achievers, but I did that research
and I really feel like okay, I really want
to serve this group of people who want
more out of life, but haven't discovered
the secrets to high performance yet,
and so that's who I wanted to target.
The second thing I did was I wanted
to identify the macro trend.
The macro trend is what is one big thing
that's happening to my ICP that
is actually top of mind for them.
It's a conversation that's already
happening in their minds.
It's a problem they're relatively aware of,
but there's not really a solution,
not that they're aware of.
And so one of the things I realized,
and this was from my own journey,
before I started my own company,
was I kept having the Sunday scaries,
this is why I called it unstoppable Sunday.
And if you've been a long time subscriber
to this channel, you'll know that
I did probably about 50 videos
just on how to live a more proactive life,
how to accomplish your goals,
how to have an unstoppable Sunday.
That's how this channel actually started.
And so I realized this thing on the Sunday jitters
and the Sunday scaries was a real thing.
That was my macro trend.
And when I actually did research
into this macro trend, I learned
that nearly 80% of employees experienced
the Sunday scaries at one point or another.
And on top of that, not only are you feeling
the Sunday scaries on a Sunday afternoon
going into the Sunday night, Monday morning
you are two times more likely
to actually experience a heart attack
if you're a young male, because of that transition
into that work week.
So I started to realize there was a real
macro trend around this.
I knew who my ICP was, my ICP was people
I really wanted to serve, I wanted
to serve these high achievers, I wanted to give back,
and I realized that there was a transformation to be had.
I realized, and this was from my own journey
as a start up founder, I realized that
if I spent 30 minutes every Sunday
to really plan out my week the right way,
to acknowledge where I am and to think about
what's worked well over the last seven days
and celebrate some wins, if I just
did that for 30 minutes every Sunday,
I would actually punch the Sunday jitters
and the Sunday scaries.
I would go into Monday with a plan,
and I would start to shift from
reacting to everything that was coming my way,
and instead I was living more proactively,
and this is one of the key things,
this mindset thing was one of the key things
that actually helped me transform
into a CEO from just an entrepreneur or an engineer.
And so I knew that if I could just get
people to start practicing this thing
called unstoppable Sunday, every Sunday,
if I could get them to just plan their week,
they would not only get rid of the Sunday scaries,
they would actually become better people,
they'd be able to actually accomplish their goals.
So I built out that transformation.
I said let's call it unstoppable Sunday,
and let's actually teach people how to plan their weeks.
Out of these three things, once I figured out
my ICP, once I figured out the macro trend,
once I figured out the transformation
that I wanted to bring to these people,
out of these three things came out my manifesto.
And I got on Instagram, and I got on YouTube,
and I got on my blog and I started
to actually share content every single week,
and I linked them to my manifesto.
And my manifesto was nothing crazy.
It was just a PDF file, it was a PDF document
that outlined like hey, if you want
to accomplish your biggest goals,
the biggest way you can start is by planning your week.
If you plan your week, then you go into
every week with a proactive mindset,
and when you do that for a few weeks,
you're going to actually set goals,
you can go after a five year vision,
everything starts to come together.
And with that manifesto, I just posted it online,
and I ran the standard marketing practice,
before I even wrote a single line of code,
I started to build an actual audience.
Nearly 9000 people have downloaded
my life planning guide so far.
If you're interested in getting
my life planning guide,
it's getunstoppable.com/life-strategy.
You can go check it out.
I'll link to it below as well, if you're interested.
And in fact, I kind of forgot that
I wanted to build a SaaS business last year,
because all of this was going so well.
It was going so well that I turned it
into an actual book.
So in the interest of this channel,
"How To Punch Sunday Jitters In The Face",
I actually took the life planning guide
and I wrote out my whole story
of how I discovered it, and my journey
as a starter founder, and I put it into this book.
And I self published it, and up to today
we've sold nearly 4000 copies of this book,
and it's become a best seller on Amazon
across seven countries and 12 categories,
which is also insane.
But that's neither here nor there.
Because I did all of this, I ended up
with an audience, and because I ended up
with this audience, I was able to actually
have quality customer conversations
with this very engaged audience.
I was able to email them, I was able
to chat with them, I was able to bring them
into webinars, and I was able to actually survey them.
And as I surveyed them over and over and over,
and as I talked to more people and more people
and more people, something emerged
and product actually emerged.
And this is the classic strategy
that I followed, and I ended up following
with ToutApp, and I ended up following
with this new SaaS business as well.
Instead of building a product,
I built an audience first, and because I built
an audience, I was able to ask that audience,
in my ICP, what their most press problem was,
and that's how unstoppable Sunday was born.
So this is the new SaaS product.
After actually building an audience
and having all this conversations with them,
they told me what they valued most.
And so we quietly launched unstoppablesunday.com,
I think it was about two weeks ago,
Steven and I are working on this,
and I'll have to introduce Steven
at some point on this channel,
it's going to be super awesome.
And we launched it, and we launched it
as a nine dollars a month product,
and the beauty of this is we didn't write
a single line of code until we actually
built out an audience, we built out our ICP,
we built out our manifesto and that allowed us
to really vet out whether this product
was going to be valuable or not to the market.
And as soon as we built a product,
we hit up our audience, and we said hey,
do you want to use this, and of course
everyone started signing up,
which has been super awesome.
Now this is still early days,
we're still working on scaling it,
we're tracking product market fit in the right ways.
But one of the things that I realized
from my audience was the thing
that they value the most, high achievers,
forget being proactive, forget building a life plan,
The core thing they wanted to start with
was they wanted to be able to plan their week,
and when they planned their week,
they wanted to be reminded through the week
on what their plan was, and that's what
unstoppablesunday.com does.
It's very simple, it's a very simple SaaS product.
You are reminded every Sunday to go into
the product, and you're guided through
planning your week, and once you plan your week,
it says cool, you're awesome.
On Monday it literally emails you
and texts you saying hey, I hope you have an awesome week.
On Wednesday, it reminds you and says hey,
this was your plan, you should go look
at it again and make sure you're on track,
and if not, just course correct.
And on Friday it asks you hey,
did you have some small wins or some big wins?
Let's reflect on the week,
and then on Sunday, again, it reminds you
to plan the week, and over and over
the product helps you plan your week
and shift into a proactive mindset.
So let me pause here for a second,
before I tell you how this all comes together.
If you're starting to get this,
if you're starting to get the mantra
of hey, you should write code to build an audience
before you build a product, let me just
get a yes in the comments below,
because I want to make sure you're with me.
This is wildly different.
I meet so many entrepreneurs that have built
a product and are now trying to build out
and go to market funnel.
But if you start with this simple process,
this simple three step process,
you can de-risk yourself, and you can also
save yourself a lot of time in building the right product.
And by the way, if you are actually
embarking on this journey of building
a SaaS business, or starting a SaaS business,
and you want to get this framework
and figure out how to get started,
I actually have a 10 point checklist
on how to start a SaaS business.
So I'll link to it below.
It's a 10 point checklist, so you can follow that,
but watch until the end of this video,
and then I'll give you the URL,
or you can follow the link below as well, all right?
So the question becomes how does this all come together?
Well the way this all comes together
is originally, this ICP and this macro trend,
and this transformation helps me really clarify
what I'm trying to build and who I'm trying to serve.
And before I write any lines of code,
this manifesto, which is just a PDF document
and a lead magnet, I call it manifesto
because it just means more, this is like your guide
of your point of view on the market, right?
What should exist before you create the software.
This manifesto gets vetted with an audience.
If an audience surrounds it, then you know
that there's something real here,
and when that audience is there,
then you can ask them like hey,
if with build this, this and this,
and we solve this problem for you,
is this important for you or not?
And you'll learn that so much quicker,
because you'll have an engaged audience.
Because we have an engaged audience,
because we have this manifesto,
number one, we're able to actually
acquire leads at a very low cost,
because we're not trying to sell them software,
we're first trying to teach them something.
And as we teach them something,
we can then say hey, by the way,
we can help you solve this problem,
are you interested?
And then they get the software.
So that's how this is all coming together.
I'm really excited about adding this new
element to the channel.
So in this channel, I bring you a video
every Sunday and every Wednesday
to help you start, build, scale and exit your SaaS business.
And I thought all right, a lot of this is coming from
my ToutApp journey, and my Marketo journey,
I wanted to add one more element
where I'm in the journey with you.
I'm building a small SaaS business,
and the principles are all the same,
whether you are trying to build a massive
venture back business, which I know
I'll do at some point, or you're trying
to build a small SaaS business
that's profitable and grows, they're all great.
The principles are very similar
in the early days, and so I wanted
to add this element to the channel
where I share along with the journey.
So if you're new to this, be sure to hit
that subscribe button and that bell icon,
because I will be posting more videos
where I keep you updated on how this is going
and how this is progression, because there's a lot ahead.
On top of that, if you are thinking about
starting a SaaS business, whether it's a micro
SaaS business, it's a bootstrap SaaS business,
or you want to go after a venture back SaaS business,
I've done all three.
If you're interested in that, be sure
to follow the link below for my 10 step
checklist on how to start a SaaS business.
You can also go to TKKader.com/SaaS-checklist.
If you go there, I'll give you my 10 steps
to starting a SaaS business, and I'll incorporate
this framework in there as well.
All right, so if you're starting to build
a SaaS business, these are the three steps
to absolutely follow, and more importantly
if you want all the 10 steps, be sure
to download my 10 step guide, my checklist
for building a SaaS business.
If you got value from this video,
please smash that like button,
and also if you're part of an entrepreneur group,
a start up group and you know a friend
that is also thinking about starting
a SaaS business, and they would get value,
please share this video with them
or tweet this out, it would mean
the world to me and my team.
And lastly remember, I drop a video
like this every Sunday and every Wednesday,
so be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon, so you get notified
every single time I drop a video with the TK energy.
I'm TK and remember, everyone needs
a strategy for their life and their business,
but when you are with us, yours is going to be unstoppable.
I'll see you on the next video.
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