- Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur,
investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
This video I'm super pumped to share with you.
How to find pains that you can easily solve
using a SaaS solution.
If you've ever had the inspiration, if you're SaaS curious,
maybe you have a product you're working on now,
but you don't feel like it's working,
I'm gonna share with you guys the strategies
that I've used to find and identify the perfect solutions
to build to scale a software company.
I've done it five times.
And be sure to stay to the end,
where I'm gonna tell you how to get access
to my exclusive free mini-course called,
the idea to exit mini course, pretty straightforward.
And it literally is gonna teach you the whole process
to get through that.
Let's get started.
(upbeat music)
So the other day I was in the scaling
SaaS Founders Facebook group,
it's a free Facebook group that I run and manage
to help other software entrepreneurs
to scale their business, and somebody asked me the question,
how do I find a problem, or a solution that would be perfect
to solve with a software product?
Now here's the deal, if you don't know what SaaS stands for,
it stands for Software as a Service,
it's the software, it's the tool.
It's easier said than done.
So I'm gonna teach you today how I've been able
to identify key problems in the market,
and solve them to generate revenue
and scale those businesses.
The last three I've actually exited.
I feel super lucky to have done that.
And it wasn't easy, I'm not gonna say it's easy,
but I think there's definitely a process
that I wasn't really conscious about that I was using,
that I'm gonna share with you guys today,
to look at markets, identify opportunities,
and figure out what could potentially be
a great SaaS solution.
It's the same conversation I've had with so many
of my friends that run agency businesses.
So if you have an agency business,
and you wanna make the migration to SaaS,
this is the video for you.
Strategy number one.
Spreadsheets, it might sound weird,
but if you have the ability
to go look at people's work life
and ask them to show you spreadsheets
that they use to manage their workflow,
you will see incredible opportunities
for potentially building a software solution to increase
that work flow throughput but here's the deal.
Some people use worksheets 'cause they're cheap.
They actually don't wanna pay for the software
that already exist so don't be dissolution
that there's potentially already a solution out there
for that work flow just because somebody
created a worksheet, all right.
One of my favourite tools is Airtable.
Airtable feel has more work flowy type solutions
and I've seen so many people use Airtable
to solve their workflow problems that are either
existing SaaS businesses and maybe there's something
unique about their workflow.
A specific niche or vertical or industry
that you can decide to dive into.
One of my favourite example is my friend Laura.
She built a software called Edgar, so meetedgar.com.
And she built it because she was teaching people
how to manage their social media posting schedule
and document all their content, their historical content
and creating a very simple way to get that publish
and realise that this was absolutely a software product
that needed to exist.
Now Edgar is a multimillion dollar business
because it started with a spreadsheet template
that she was teaching her client.
So go find those spreadsheets for ideas.
Number two, your own pain or pains really.
At the end of the day, I think that it's the entrepreneurial
muscle to feel friction in the world
and want to solve it using software.
My companies are great examples of that.
My company Spheric that I started back in the day
when I was 24.
I literally started it 'cause I wanted to work
with world class people which sounds crazy
but I built a whole company just so I could work
with smart, technical talent.
Okay, I was a engineer, software developer.
I just wanted to be around other people.
The customers just financed literally the people I spent
my time with every day.
Okay, so that was the first one.
The second one was Flowtown.
It was a social marketing application
and I built it because my brother
who is in the home building.
He's a home builder, he didn't believe that his customers
were on social media, and that was the first thing
that I built to show him,
and I realise there's a lot of small businesses
that aren't using social.
This is 2009 for those that are a little young,
back then Twitter was really a new thing
and a lot of these new platforms were coming online,
so people were arguing with me like, oh, I don't think
that my customers are there so that was Flowtown.
And then more recently
even though I exited about five years now, Clarity.fm.
Clarity was a marketplace so that entrepreneurs
get advice from other entrepreneurs.
If you know me, you've ever met me,
I absolutely love talking about business.
I love supporting the entrepreneurial journey
and I wanted to create a tool for myself that allowed me
to be more available to those that needed me most
especially if people who have been following me
on Twitter on FB on different social platforms
and doing that solving that problem,
I realise there is a huge opportunity to unlock
all of this knowledge in the world
to make it available for you and that was Clarity.fm.
And the work I do now as a coach,
same thing there's no software behind it.
It's me but I love doing it but to me, solving your own pain
means that typically you have domain expertise
meaning you know the industry, you know the market
which gives you an unfair advantage.
You understand the customer pain point,
the voice of the customer so you can really work backwards
from the valley that they need to wanna pay for the solution
so having a high what's called willingness to pay.
So I just take your own pains and building that muscle
for frustrations and frictions in the world.
If you look at the origin story of all your favourite tools
that you use, consumer or business,
they usually start by the entrepreneur
solving their own pain.
Number three, custom solutions.
So again, you're gonna have to do some research
but here's how this one works.
There are companies out there
called custom development shops, system integrators,
dev shops, consultants if you want a technical consultant,
and all they do is write code to solve business problems
for existing companies.
So all these companies have logistic issues,
reporting needs whatever it is
and they hire development companies.
At the enterprise, we got like IBM Global Services,
Tata Consulting, Infosys, you have all these.
These are billion dollar companies
and all they do, for the most part is, not all they do
but they provide development resources for companies
to build custom solutions.
So if you can talk to somebody in the IT department
of a bigger company and ask them the question.
Hey, have you guys ever hired a contractor
or development firm et cetera
to build you a custom solutions?
And they say yes, say hey, I'm just curious
what problem did it solve for you?
Here's what you're looking for 'cause I'm gonna tell you.
All of these development shops would love to build
a SaaS product to become the next Salesforce
or box.net or Slack but they,
it's literally two different business models.
It's really tough to have one foot in custom development
and another foot in pure software, okay.
But where the opportunity is for you is to find
another company that's already building the code base.
They have the code base.
They have maybe five or six reference customers
'cause they've been reusing the code base
and you can extract it from that company
and actually bring it to market.
So all of a sudden now you're partnered with them
to bring it to market.
I did this recently with a friend of mine.
I had a coaching client who had a dev.
They have a healthcare development agency
but they built this other technology for their team.
We pulled it out, I partnered with another friend
who became the CEO of it.
I put some money into it and now it's a separate business
that we're all partners in, okay,
so this happens all the time.
If you're an entrepreneur,
you're driven and you're willing to put some time in,
trust me, there are so many dev shops
that have software type solutions
that they just need the leader.
Sometimes the product manager or the general manager
to run with that.
Uber is a great example.
If you don't know the quick story of Uber.
Travis Kalanick, who is the founder
and CEO with Garrett Camp.
Travis is an investor in my company Flowtown
and he had just sold his company Red Swoosh.
He had came up with the idea with Garrett around Uber
and it was MVP, first version was super, simple
and he just needed somebody to run it
and he tweeted out.
"Does anybody wanna potentially be the GM
"to my next side hustle?"
And Ryan, one of my good friends replied to him on Twitter
and said you found your guy, flew to San Francisco.
Short story long but no, fast forwarding today,
Ryan is a billionaire.
He's an amazing dude.
He got 10% of the company.
He ran Uber as COO for all the last almost decade
and that's an example of people always looking to have
technology that wanna find the person to lead it
and that could be you which could be huge.
So custom solutions is an incredible area for you to extract
a pain and have the solution already coded up,
70%, 80% done for you to run with.
Number four, trends, so this is one of my favourite things.
One of my mentors, a guy name Ken Nickerson said to me.
He said, "You know Dan, if you just find a trend
"in the market that's growing even if you're mediocre,
"you'll do good because high tide rise all boats."
And he said, "If you're good," which he said,
"You're good, you'll do great."
And that's why when I look at the history of everything
I've done from Flowtown with social media in 2009
to Clarity with marketplaces and mobile.
I've always tried to figure out what's the trend
in regards to the solution I wanna solve
that I can be part of.
But if I was starting from scratch,
if you're looking for a pain in the market,
here's what I've discovered.
Some people say, it doesn't repeat itself,
it just rhymes.
I think it definitely repeats itself
and what I've discovered is every
existing business tool today
from logistic management, shipping management, CRM,
Salesforce automation et cetera,
email marketing automation,
whatever the existing solution in the market is today.
As there is a trend,
if you wanna talk about Bitcoin,
you wanna talk about drones.
You wanna talk about 3D printing,
you go Google top technology trends for the year
and you'll find all of them.
There is going to be a point specific solution for that
so there's gonna be a CRM for drones.
There's gonna be an inventory management system for drones.
There's going to be a sales partner management
solution for drones, and the cool part about doing this
is you gotta be careful to not be too early
but a lot of those will be already vetted.
And as I said, they're the biggest trends
of the world right now,
is by building a solution specific for that industry,
you need two things.
One, you draught with their growth as the industry grows.
Some of them are growing 25% per year.
If you grow 25% per year, just so you know,
you double every three years, okay 'cause it's compounding.
So you get the drafting effect of that growth
and you become an incredibly well positioned company
to potentially be acquired by the existing incumbents
or you can keep building the company, bring it public
and be incredibly wealthy.
Regardless finding existing industry trends,
looking at the existing tool set that exists in that market
for laggards or old school versions of that
and building the modern version is a powerful way for you
to build a solution in the software space
on an existing trend.
And there's pain there because it's so new,
a lot of these people are trying
to put together spreadsheets.
See where I'm going with this?
It is all connected.
All four of these, let's do a quick recap.
Number one, spreadsheets.
You gotta find people solving the problems themselves.
Number two, your own pains, so you have domain experience.
Number three, custom solutions
'cause people have already paid to solve those problems,
and four, find an industry trend you can draught against.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
I wanna share with you a free resource
called the idea to exit mini course.
You can click the link below to get access to that
but if you wanna learn how to do
no cost product development,
build a marketing growth engine
and figure how to fund your team using customer financing,
I cover all of that.
It's a free course.
It's three parts.
You don't have to wait to watch the second and third part.
It's all in there and that is my gift to you.
As per usual, if you found this video useful,
please smash that like button.
Subscribe to my channel if you're new here
and as per usual, I wanna challenge you live a bigger life
and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
(clapping and snapping)