- So I'm building out this SaaS business,
and I'm on this challenge.
I want to take the SaaS business
from scratch to a million ARR.
That's this one million ARR challenge.
And in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
how we're generating leads for our SaaS business.
I'm gonna take you behind the scenes
on exactly what our funnel looks like,
and how we're going about building this out
to get to that one million ARR.
(dramatic music)
What's up everybody? Welcome back.
So, if you missed the last episode,
on the last episode, I brought you behind the scenes,
as I'm taking this Sunday SaaS application
from zero to a million ARR.
And in the last episode,
I took you into my exact process that I followed
to actually validate and kinda define my SaaS idea.
We went into what our ideal-customer profile is,
what our manifesto is,
and how we're running our Broadway show.
If you missed it, I'll link to it below.
You don't have to go to it right now.
In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
exactly how we took all that stuff,
and how we're generating leads for our SaaS application.
So, to give you some context,
here's what the SaaS application is.
It's called Sunday.
And what we do is we teach you how to plan your week,
in a very specific way.
And, once you plan your week,
the application actually notifies you
on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
to help you actually stay focused
on how you planned your week, to help you course-correct,
and to help you celebrate your wins at the end of the week.
The reason I created this is when I was a startup founder,
I guess I'm still a startup founder now.
Anyway, when I was running ToutApp, my last SaaS business,
I realized it was super important
to get your mindset right as a founder.
Half the battle was figuring out the strategy
and the tactics of building a SaaS business.
The other half was to actually,
essentially get your mind right.
And so, I started doing this thing where, every Sunday,
I would sit down, I would plan out my week
in a very specific way.
And what that allowed me to do
was actually overcome those Sunday scaries,
the Sunday jitters, that angst, the Monday morning,
"Oh my God. There's so much going on."
It help me get centered.
And so, what I've done is I've codified that into a system
that I teach people,
and we've created a whole app around it.
So you can actually go to UnstoppableSunday.com
and sign up for the application if you want to try it out.
And what it does is it teaches you how to plan your week.
So, once we started building out this app,
and in prior episodes,
I've talked through how I validated the idea
before I wrote a line of code,
and the traction that we have.
But eventually it got to, "Okay, we have this application.
We charge nine bucks a month and $99 for the year.
How do we get more people to discover it,
and how do we get people to sign up?"
And that's when we created
what I call our unstoppable sales funnel.
This is something that I teach in my go-to-market program,
to my, to the SaaS founders that I coach.
That's when I actually built out an unstoppable sales funnel
for this Sunday application.
So, today I'm gonna walk you through
how we're generating leads for it.
Now, typically, here's what happens.
What ends up happening with a lot of founders,
well, a lot of SaaS founders,
and I've made this mistake before,
is you create this application,
and it is the best application ever, right?
And then you go ahead and say, "Here is the homepage."
And the homepage is this beautiful homepage
that you've created, maybe have all the features,
and you start to drive traffic to it.
You start driving traffic to it,
and maybe 2% of people sign up,
and even less will actually activate.
Now by the way, in a future episode,
I'm gonna dig into how we track our core metrics.
So, if you are new to this,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
so you get notified for my future episodes,
where I continue to take you behind the scenes
on taking this SaaS application to a million ARR.
And while you're at it, hit that like button.
It just means the world to us.
Okay, so you have this homepage,
and you start telling people to go to this homepage,
and a small percentage of these people will sign up
because they don't really understand
what you're really solving.
It's not an immediate problem for them maybe,
and it may not even be in your ICP.
So it doesn't really work when you just do that.
So, the way I like to do it
is I like to actually really well-define
my ideal-customer profile.
And then I like to create a manifesto.
And then I like to create a Broadway show
to actually generate leads through that,
whom I then upsell to my application.
So, in my scenario, I covered this in the last episode,
so I won't go into too much detail,
I said that the people that I'm targeting
are high achievers, these are,
a lot of them are startup founders, just like you,
you're 25 to 45 years old,
and what you're looking to do
is lead a high-performance lifestyle.
You're trying to go after big goals,
you know you're capable of more,
and you need a way to actually keep your mind strong,
so that you can stay focused
on actually executing on your goals and keep 'em clear.
These are the people that really need this mindset training,
this weekly-planning training,
so that they don't get burnt out.
And I said, "Okay, I can just go in and say,
'Oh, do you want to plan your week?'"
And a lot, some of them will take me up on it,
some of them won't.
The biggest thing that I learned
was in order to actually get people to, get their attention,
I had to promise them a better way
of operating their whole life.
No one wants just a weekly-planning thing,
but people want to transform how they run their life,
a strategy for their life.
And so I created this manifesto
called "The Life-Planning Guide," for high achievers.
It's called "The Unstoppable Life-Planning Guide."
And so, this is how we actually generate leads
for our SaaS application right now.
So just to kinda set the context,
we are in the early days on this.
We get roughly 25 leads per week right now.
And out of these 25 leads, about one of them
will convert to a yearly plan.
And so weekly right now, without spending any money,
we're generating about $199 per week.
Why do I mention this?
This is sort of our anchor point.
This is where we're at right now.
And the whole point of this show,
this "Unstoppable Friday" show,
is I want to take you behind the scenes
as we take this 25 leads per week,
and we scale it to hundreds of leads per week,
and multiple people converting,
and actually generating significant revenues
'til we get to a million ARR.
So this, you're getting in super early right now.
This is not like, "We figured everything out.
Here's how we did it."
This is literally like,
"I don't know how we're gonna solve this,
but we have a framework to follow.
So we're gonna follow our framework."
So what is that framework?
We follow this framework called unstoppable sales funnel.
If you want to learn more about an unstoppable sales funnel,
if you want to actually build out
a sales-and-marketing machine for your SaaS business,
I have a go-to-market training.
I'll link to it below. You can check it out.
Or you can go to tkkader.com/gtm,
where you can actually get the training
and check out my program.
So anyway, instead of just linking people to this homepage,
what we said was, "Okay, here is our manifesto.
And our manifesto is our life-planning guide."
And what happens is, what we said was,
instead of just telling people, "You gotta plan your week,"
we said, "Look, you want to lead a better life.
You want to actually transform how you live your life.
You want to have clear plans. You want to have clear goals.
And by the way, in order to make those goals reality,
you gotta have the right mindset,
and you gotta go into every week
with an unstoppable mindset."
So that's essentially what this guide,
this manifesto, teaches.
And what I did was I created this manifesto,
and I created a set of channels where I post,
where I always upsell this manifesto.
Once people download this manifesto,
they actually go into a training.
This is a webinar training that I run every week
on how to actually create your life plan.
And at the end of this training, I say, "Hey, by the way,
you have the beginning version of a life plan.
If you want to actually make this life plan a reality,
the one thing you need to do
is actually practice planning your week every week,
and review your life plan, and review your progress.
And we happen to have an application that helps you do that.
We happen to have training that helps you adopt this.
Do you want to buy?"
And that's how we essentially sell this 199.
We sell the application and the training
on this whole mindset shift
that founders and other high achievers can do,
so they can run their lives
as well as their run their business.
And so, there's two parts to this
on how we're generating leads.
The first part is this manifesto, right?
This is our manifesto.
The second part is this piece and this piece.
This webinar that I run every week to educate these people,
and these posts, I do one to three posts every week.
I do one on Instagram. I do one on Twitter.
And this is actually kinda my, part of my Broadway,
doing this episode here for startup founders,
'cause a lot of you would get value
from having your mindset right.
You can count this as YouTube.
And what I always say is, what I basically do,
is I run a post every week on each of these channels,
and I talk about living a proactive life,
creating a life plan, and I upsell them to say,
"Hey, if you want more of this,
go download my "Unstoppable Life-Planning Guide."
By the way, if you want to actually create a life plan,
follow the link below, I'll link to it.
And what ends up happening is every week,
I do one to three posts into my target audience
in these social channels,
and they go ahead and download my manifesto.
They go through my manifesto,
and then they get invited to this training,
and they come into this training,
and they get their life plan together,
and then I say, "Hey, by the way,
this life plan is just a piece of paper.
It's just a bunch of goals.
And it's good that you have a goal, you have a vision,
you have clarity in who you want to become,
so this'll help you be a better business operator,
it'll help you transform your career,
but none of this is gonna happen
beyond this webinar that you're part of,
unless you actually follow a weekly practice.
This is why we have our software.
We help you plan your week, every week.
We help you review your goals every week.
And we notify you through the course of the week
to stay on point, to keep the right mindset,
to review your goals, and to course-correct,
and then to celebrate your wins every Friday.
And we teach you how to do all of this
inside of our application.
It's 199 per year.
Are you interested?"
And this, essentially,
is what we call our unstoppable
sales funnel.
And there's essentially three key pieces
to an unstoppable sales funnel.
The first one is an ICP.
I went a little bit more into this in the last episode.
You can check it out. I'll link to it below.
The second one is you create a manifesto.
That's my "Unstoppable Life-Planning Guide."
You can check it out down below.
And the third thing that you do is essentially,
and my drawing skills on this is getting better and better,
you run a Broadway show.
And the Broadway show is this.
You just do this one thing
that constantly pushes people through to my one funnel,
which then sells them on our software,
and gets them to use it.
Are you guys getting this?
So, what a lot of founders, a lot of SaaS founders do,
is they try to just send people to the homepage,
and they just spray paint it everywhere.
They'll do content marketing,
they'll run ads, they'll do blogging,
they'll do inbound, they'll do outbound.
And all these people show up,
and they have no idea why they need this software,
why they need it now, why it's an urgent important problem,
because they have no context.
Instead, instead of me saying, "Hey,
I'm gonna just hope that they sign up,"
and then they never come back,
what I do is I take much more of a teaching approach.
And what I say is I go in and I educate my ICP.
I figure out my ICP, and I educate them with my manifesto,
and I get more and more people
to discover my manifesto every week
by running my Broadway show, which is this guy right here.
So, this is the framework we're following right now.
We're at about 25 leads per week.
Out of those 25 leads, it's completely organic,
only one of them sign up for our yearly plan.
But it's about 199 per week.
And so, this is our start.
And what we're gonna do now
is we're gonna slowly actually scale this.
We're roughly at around 3K ARR right now,
because we've been practicing,
we've been kinda dabbling in this for a little bit,
but now we're doubling down on this.
And on this show that I run every Friday,
what I'm gonna do is take you behind the scenes
as we tackle different aspects of it.
So right now we know we have this unstoppable sales funnel,
and we know we have this manifesto,
and we know we're generating leads.
Now what we're gonna look into is, "Okay,
if we're getting 25 leads, and only one is converting,
how do we improve this?
Is there parts of the application that we need to improve?
Is there parts of the training we need to improve?
Should we actually test people on taking them
from the manifesto directly to the app to try it out?"
We're gonna start experimenting on some of these things.
So in the next episode,
I'm gonna dig into the core application metrics
and the core funnel metrics we look at
to really diagnose our unstoppable sales funnel,
and improve it, so we can get more conversions.
'Cause the big thing we need to do now is,
either I can focus on how do I get more leads,
or I can focus on how do I get more buyers.
And so in the next few episodes,
I'm going to actually focus on how do we get more buyers
instead of more leads.
'Cause I'm happy with 25 leads right now.
I don't have to put a lot of effort.
And then once we have this optimized, then we can say,
"How do we scale our Broadway show and get more leads?"
Are you guys with me?
So, hopefully you found this helpful.
If you found this valuable,
if you're enjoying this kinda new format that I'm doing,
where I take you behind the scenes
on actually applying this stuff,
firstly, smash that like button.
It means the world to me and my team.
Secondly, comment below and give me your thoughts.
Ask me questions.
If you want me to cover a specific thing
on a subsequent episode, I'll do that too.
Number three, if you're a SaaS founder,
you actually need to make sure you have a strategy
for your own personal life, as well as your business.
So go ahead and download
my "Unstoppable Life-Planning Guide."
The link to it is below.
Or you can go to getunstoppable.com/life-strategy.
If you want to just try out the app,
go on UnstoppableSunday.com,
and you can actually download the app
and check that out as well.
It's just as good.
We actually link from the app into the manifesto
once you sign up as well.
So it's all kinda connected.
And lastly, just tell me what you think
about this new format,
if you've been a longtime viewer of my channel.
I was checking the stats.
We did 1,000 hours of watch time over the last month,
which is insane to me.
So please let me know
if you're getting value with this behind the scenes.
What I wanted to do was try a different format
where it's not as talking-heady,
and a little bit more just behind the scenes
of actually building a SaaS business,
so you can kinda follow along in the journey.
And lastly, if you are building a SaaS business,
and you want to join me on this one million ARR challenge,
you want to build an unstoppable sales funnel,
check out my go-to-market program down below.
My go-to-market program is for people
that have some revenues
and want to build an unstoppable sales funnel.
We help you do that.
And if you're just starting out,
check out my SaaS school program.
This is for people that have no product, no revenues,
and need to clarify their idea, validate their idea,
and get to their first set of customers.
So you can check that.
All these links are down below, that I mentioned.
I know I mentioned a whole bunch of these.
I just have a ton of resources for SaaS founders.
And so I want to make sure you have access to all of it.
And remember, if you are SaaS founder,
there's two things that you need.
You need a unstoppable strategy for your life,
and you need an unstoppable strategy for your business.
And that's what we help you do here on this channel.
So, be sure to be hitting that subscribe button
and that bell icon so you get notified of future episodes.
I want to thank you guys.
I feel like now I'm officially rambling.
These shows are unscripted, so I run the risk of rambling.
So anyway, give me feedback.
I'm really excited to be doing these,
and I will see you in the next episode.
See ya later.
(dramatic music)