- So I was on Twitter, I'm on Twitter a lot,
you can follow me over here.
And I tweeted this thing out
without really thinking about it,
and that's how tweets go.
And it resonated with a lot of people.
So I figured I'd do a video on it.
What I said was, you'll never really know
if people are telling you the truth about your product
that you're building until you ask them
to swipe the credit card, or sign the purchase order.
Until money is transacted,
you're never really, really, really going to know
if your product is solving an important problem,
an urgent problem, a problem that they're willing
to spend money on, budget on.
You're never really going to know.
I don't know about you, but in my startup journey,
I've gone through months, if not years
of building products that people said, "Oh my God,
that's cool."
But when it really came down to it,
when it came down to the transaction of spending money,
which is probably the most scarce asset for them,
I didn't really know if it was going to make it.
You just don't know.
And so I learned the hard way
that there's only really one way
to validate your startup idea.
And in this episode, I'm going to dig into
the three steps, the three principles that you need
to follow, that you can use
to actually validate your startup idea,
and that way, you'll avoid wasting months
on building the wrong product that people say they want,
but don't really want. Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody?
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK and on this channel,
I help SAS founders like you grow your SAS businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
I drop a video like this with actionable strategies
and tactics to grow your sass business three times a week
with the TK energy.
Now if you're already part of our community,
if you're part of my SAS Guru market coaching program,
or my SAS Start Program, welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here, seriously.
I remember I was working on an idea called Brain Trust.
Now on this channel, I talked about Hipcamp,
the first SAS business I ever did.
I talk about Plaxo, they bought us.
I talk about Plaxo which sold to Comcast,
I talked about (indistinct) my last SAS business,
which I sold.
I talk about Marchetto, where I worked.
Marchetto bought Tout app, and then we sold that to Adobe.
Four SAS businesses all exited.
I talk about them a lot,
but there's one SAS business that I don't talk about,
It's called Brain Trust.
And Brain Trust is something I worked on before Tout
for nearly two years.
It was nights and weekends, I would literally wake up
at 6am, work on it for a few hours and go in to work,
then I would come back in the evening,
I would work on it again, and that went on
for probably about two years time.
As I was building it out, people kept saying "Oh my God,
this is really cool, this is awesome."
And I would do the customer discovery
and the customer research on, hey, if this
happened, and this happened, is this a problem?
They'd be like, "Yeah, totally."
But ultimately, when it came down to paying
for the product, when it came down
to monetizing the problem,
when it came down to driving engagement
and activation on the product, it didn't go anywhere.
People said it was cool, people thought they wanted it,
but when it really came down to it,
people didn't really want it.
Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't because
I didn't go through customer discovery
or validating the idea, it wasn't that,
and it wasn't because people said it was terrible,
like people said it was great.
It was because I took them at their word,
instead of doing the one thing that mattered the most.
I didn't ask them for money,
I didn't say "Okay, cool sign right here
and then you can use the product."
And that was the only way that I was going
to be able to validate it.
Now you might be saying, "Okay, how do I do that
if I don't have a product built yet?
What are the steps to follow."
So, I learned this the hard way,
and then eventually, I changed my ways,
and that's why Tout app was born.
I don't regret Brain Trust at all,
because it taught me a whole bunch
of things around sales and marketing
and building SAS businesses truly,
that helped me Tout that possible.
And so I'm going to walk you through the three principles,
the three steps that you can follow
to validate your SAS startup idea using landing pages
and a Lean UX process, Lean UX model.
I'm gonna dig right into it, the three steps
to follow, so if you're excited to dig in,
get going to smash that like button,
and let's dig right into it.
So the first thing you want to do is you really want
to hone in on the problem, the who you're serving
and the problem.
Great SAS ideas solve an urgent and important problem,
and these people that have this urgent
and important problem have budget to put towards this urgent
and important problem.
I'm going to put this up again, feel free
to take a screenshot, feel free to write this down,
stress test this around the SAS idea
that you're working on validating.
Needs to be an urgent problem,
an important problem and they have
to have budget allocated towards this problem.
And that's how you know you have a market
to actually go after, you have an audience of people
to actually go build,
and you have a thesis on how you're going to get
to product market fit, a product
that solves this urgent, important problem,
and can extract out this budget,
that's how you get to product market fit.
So that's step number one.
What you really need to figure out
before you do anything else, landing pages
or anything before you do customer discovery,
get to your thesis and what is the urgent,
and important problem that people have budget allocated for.
A lot of times, this is going to be dumb problems,
you're gonna look at it like this is not revolutionary,
this is not impactful.
And sometimes that we as SAS founders we think
that these problems aren't big enough,
but the truth is, if you can solve
some of the small problems, you earn the right
to solve some of the bigger problems
that you can convince them to pay for over time.
And so it's super important for you
to really hone in on step one.
What is the urgent important problem
that has budget that you can go actually focus on?
Once you've done that, the second thing you want to do
before you like write a line of code,
all of this is before you write a line of code.
On my podcast, I run a podcast now called SAS and Scotch.
It's a lot of fun, I interview SAS founders,
I'll link to it below.
I was I was interviewing a founder,
and he was a second time founder.
I'm like, "What is it that you do
differently your second time?"
He's like distribution, distribution before anything else.
Go to market before anything else.
Distribution determines our product roadmap,
and I could not agree more with him.
So before you do any writing of code,
you need to validate your thesis,
so you want to do step number one.
Step number two is you want
to develop your value proposition.
What is the one sentence you can use
to actually define your value proposition?
Why do you exist?
What does your product do?
What does it solve?
What are they going to get?
What is the core benefit?
That's your value proposition,
there's a very specific way to craft this.
It's not complicated, there's a process
to follow but craft your value proposition.
Once you craft your value proposition,
it will help you really distill down
the thesis you have on the market you're going after,
with the urgent important problem and the budget,
and how to get the attention of those people
through your value proposition.
Usually value propositions are one or two sentences
for starters.
And when you develop that, that will at least help you
have manual conversations.
Now, at scale, a value proposition isn't enough,
you need to have a proper strategic narrative,
you need to have a proper funnel,
but in this early stages, if you're pre revenue,
this is what you need to develop, just these two things,
you don't need to overcomplicate it.
Now, before I go to step number three,
principle number two, this where it all comes together
with the landing page and the Lean UX model
that you're going to follow.
Let me just pause here for a second.
I want you to comment below with a yes,
if you're starting to get this.
If you start to see the difference in approach here
where it's not about writing a line of code,
it's not about creating the profits,
it's first about really honing in on the market strategy,
and really honing in on the value prop.
If you're starting to see the difference in approach here,
that's gonna save you months, if not years
from building the wrong product, and help you get
to product market fit fast and validate your product idea.
Can I just get a yes, in the comments below.
It just means the world to us, to me and my team,
we want to hear from you. So hit me with a yes down below.
And while you're at it, smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm if you haven't already.
Also, one other thing,
I have my SAS Guru market coaching program,
this is for founders who have revenues and want
to figure out a way to go faster
with the scale go to market machine.
There have been some founders that have approached me
who are pre revenue and they're saying
"Look, we kind of have a product,
we don't have revenues yet, we want
to get into the go to Guru market program."
And I had to turn them away in the past,
because I'm like I'm sorry, just too early,
but now I have my SAS start program.
This is for founders who are pre revenue,
and need to validate their idea
and get their first 25 paying customers.
So it's a coaching program,
super straightforward to get started,
there's no application call required.
I will tell you more about it at the end of this video,
but let's go to principle number three.
Now this is where everything comes together
in this process we're going through.
And then I'll tell you about the SAS start program.
So the third thing you want to do
once you have the market identified,
the group of people identified,
and you have your simple value prop,
is you actually want to create what I call
an unstoppable mini funnel.
Unstoppable funnels are for scale will go
to market machines,
unstoppable mini funnel is for validating your idea
and getting your first 25 customers.
So what you want to do is you want to create a landing page
and the landing page, you actually want to make sure
that you put in your value prop that you determined.
You want to make sure that you're driving traffic
into that landing page with these people
that you've identified.
From that landing page, you want
to essentially collect people's email addresses
into an email list, and from that email list,
you want to ask them for a phone call
to actually talk strategy and about this problem.
Simple stuff, but on the call,
you're going to try and pre sell them on pilots
for $1,000, that's it, $1,000.
$1,000 is a good benchmark because
if people are truly dealing with an important
and urgent problem and they have a budget,
$1,000 for a business is one of those things where like,
"Okay, fine, you're gonna give us white glove service,
we're going to manually do this,
we're going to be early customers, and you give it to us
for a deal for like free for a year after that,
fine, sign me up, $1,000, here you go"
If they're willing to put down $1,000
to get in on a pilot and work with you,
and you're gonna put in your time, you know,
develop the product, you're going to get them in early,
you're going to get them white glove service.
If they're willing to do that,
then you've started to validate
that you may be on to an urgent important problem,
and they have the budget, they have at least $1,000 for it.
If they don't even have $1,000 for it,
it may not be an important urgent enough problem,
it may be kind of a nice to have,
a vitamin instead of an actual painkiller.
But if it is a painkiller,
they'll be like "Okay, fine, here's a thousand dollars,
work with us. Like let's figure this out.
We'll get in early, we'll take a bet on you."
And that's where the power really comes together.
So to recap, if you really want to validate your idea,
using a landing page and Lean UX model,
you really want to nail this, right?
You want to first figure out
what the market is, urgent, important has budget.
Number two, you want to get your value proposition right,
then you want to feed that into your landing page,
you want to be able to AB test it, you want to be able
to AB test different value propositions
as you're going through it.
So you follow that lean methodology, then you want
to pull them into an email list, you want to ask them
for a phone call, and you want to see
if you can sell them on a private pilot of $1,000 or more.
When you do this, you'll be able to make sure
that you don't waste months building a product
that no one wants, that people say it's cool
because they're lying to you.
Because until you ask them for a credit card,
or you tell them to actually sign the purchase order,
you're not really going to know
if this is an urgent important problem with budget.
So now you know how to actually go about this process
to actually validate your product idea,
but you may not know how to do each
of these different steps,
you may not know how to really, really hone in
on this urgent important problem that has budget,
you may not know how to develop your value proposition
at one two sentence value proposition.
You may not know how to create this unstoppable mini funnel
with the landing page, the email list,
and how to run these calls, you may not know these things.
So this is why I created my SAS Start Program.
This is a brand new program,
we just started onboarding founders into it.
This is for founders who have not generated
any revenues yet,
they don't have a validated product in the market yet,
this is for those founders.
And this is why I created my SAS Start Program,
and the SAS Start program will give you
all the training you need to actually build out
your core strategy, which is your market strategy.
I'm going to teach you how
to actually build out your value prop,
and we'll teach you how to build
this unstoppable mini funnel to help you drive
to your first 25 paying customers.
Now, this program you can enroll into right away,
you get access to the training,
you get access to a monthly coaching call with me,
where we do hot seats with all the other founders,
so you and I can do a hot seat together
and I'll answer your questions,
I'll coach you on your progress,
I'll give you feedback so you can drive momentum.
And I'll guide you in actually validating your product
and getting your first paying customers,
building your first version of the product
without wasting months and building the wrong product.
If you're interested in joining and learning more,
go to tkkader.com/start, super simple to get started.
I'll also link to it below so you can get more details.
If you have questions on the program,
there's a little chat widget in the bottom right corner,
in that chat widget, you can just ask your questions,
either myself or a member of my team will respond
and give you everything you need,
and then boom you just plug it in,
and you're in and then we're off to the races
on validating your product,
and getting to your first 25 paying customers,
that's our goal around the program.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button, if you haven't already.
If you are new and haven't subscribed,
be sure hit the subscribe button and that bell icon
so that you'll get notified every single time
I drop an episode like this.
Now we talk about all things SAS,
from starting a SAS business to growing
and scaling SAS businesses,
funding, Guru market, all the key things.
So be sure to the subscribe button and the bell icon.
If you have a fellow founder, a co founder
that will get value from this be sure
to share this video with them,
and share this channel with them,
we want to spread the word,
we want to build this community of unstoppable SAS founders,
and it's been incredible working with you guys,
so, remember, lastly, 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, go on over a tkkader.com/start and join the program
and I'll see you on the next coaching call.
Have a great one.
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