- Hey, what's up, everybody.
Welcome to "Unstoppable Friday."
On "Unstoppable Fridays," I use this very different format
in my channel to tell you about my SaaS business
that we're building.
And part of our one million ARR challenge.
This is where we're taking a SaaS business
from literally $0 to a million ARR.
That's our challenge.
We're gonna do it as quickly as possible.
We're gonna do it based on all the principles
that I teach inside of my SaaS school program
and we are gonna give you the behind the scenes
play by play on how we navigate the twists and turns
to get to this 1 million ARR.
So on this episode we're gonna cover two things.
Well, the first thing I'm gonna cover
is a little bit on the back story on how this app
came about and what it means to me,
why we created "Unstoppable Sunday,"
which is the app and the program
And the second thing we're gonna dig into,
which is really the bulk of this episode
is the actual SaaS metrics that we are using
to measure our progress,
to make decisions on what to focus on next,
to improve our core unstoppable sales funnel
and to actually navigate the path
to a millionaire ARR and navigate the path
to product market fit.
So if you're excited to dig in,
go in and smash that like button.
If you're new to this channel, welcome,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon
so that you get notified every single time
I bring you a new episode.
In case you haven't figured it out by now
I bring a new episode three times a week
to help SaaS founders
navigate the path to the next stage of growth
and product market fit.
So that's what we're all about here.
So welcome.
If you're already part of the community, welcome back.
It's really great to see you here.
So first let me give you a little bit of background around,
why and how I came to this.
So I've done SaaS businesses for the last 15 years
through various twists and turns.
I've had multiple exits I've helped companies exit.
In fact, I started and sold two SaaS businesses
and the two businesses that bought my two SaaS businesses,
the ones I created, I was part of the process
to help sell them as well.
So it's been an incredible ride.
And I knew that for this next stage of my journey,
a part of what I wanted to do was give back.
And that's really how this came to be.
During my founder journey,
I had to deal with some of the highest of highs
and some of the lowest of lows.
And what I realized the hard way was that
I really needed to figure out
how to keep my mindset in check.
What I realized was 50% of this SaaS game,
of this startup game. And it's really hard.
And there's a lot of things you've got to figure out.
50% of it is really figuring out
how to navigate your mindset.
And so I picked up a set of skills,
a set of tools that no one really handed to me as a founder.
I wish someone did, but no one did.
No one to say like, "Hey, you're a startup founder now.
Hey, you just raised $15 million of funding.
Here's how to manage your mindset for that."
No one did that.
And so I had to learn the hard way.
And luckily I was a student of personal development.
I've been a big fan of Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn,
Steve Pavlina.
And I learned a ton and I really dug into like,
how do I manage my mindset through these ups and downs
ToutApp, which was my last SaaS business.
Every quarter was different. We were growing so fast.
Every quarter was different.
Every time we raised money, like everything changed again.
And I had to reprogram my mind to keep up.
And so I realized very quickly
that mindset was an important thing.
And I picked up a unique set of skills.
One of the most important things that I learned was Sunday.
Sunday was super important.
I don't know if you encountered this as a founder,
but as founders as we go through the week,
it's like Narnia, right?
Like you're just cranking. You're just going so hard at it.
And you're trying to keep up with everything.
But then when the weekend comes,
you're almost like forced to slow down and you know,
you gotta go home
and you want the downtime and you are tired,
but you can't turn the brain off.
And I equate that to a little bit of like a Ferrari
going through a 20 miles per hour school zone.
A Ferrari is good at two things,
it can either stand still and look hot,
or it can go really fast.
20 miles per hour through a school zone is really hard.
And I struggled with that.
I struggled with that through the weekend
because I felt like I was that Ferrari
going 20 miles per hour.
It's like awkward, I don't know how to slow down.
I should take downtime,
but I don't know how to turn my head off from work.
It's hard. Like I've been there.
I'm sure you're going through it too.
And Sunday was the worst
because somehow by Saturday night I was like unplugged.
But by the time Sunday came in, because I was unplugged.
I felt all this anxiety
and it turns out that's called the "Sunday scaries,"
the "Sunday jitters,"
the Sunday, what have I been doing with my life?
Is this gonna work? Are we all gonna die?
And it's only 10:00 AM like, it's crazy.
And so what I learned
was that "Sunday scaries" is a real thing
and it doesn't happen because you're any lesser.
It happens because of that transition into the workweek.
And so about 10 years ago, maybe like eight years ago,
I started doing this thing every Sunday, I would sit down,
I would work on my mindset. It was just 30 minutes.
I would just be running Google doc and be like, where am I?
And what do I do next?
Those are the two questions I would answer.
And through that practice that I've developed,
I practiced gratitude. I paused and reflected.
I figured out what was working, what was not.
And I really set an intention
for what I wanted in the coming week.
And I did that consistently and consistently
and consistently.
And that really shifted my mindset as a founder
that allowed me to go into any situation.
There were weeks in my SaaS business,
where we almost died and I had to do layoffs.
And I was able to manage that
and go into that week because of "Unstoppable Sunday,"
because I would just be able to sit down
and just process everything.
And it somehow made me feel better.
There were weeks where it was incredible.
We had just sold a company
and we were going into this new chapter,
even then I practiced Unstoppable
before I got in front of a crowd of 5,000 people
and announced acquisition of the company.
So through those twists and turns,
I kept doing this one practice.
And once we sold ToutApp, and then I helped...
to Marketo and then I helped sell Marketo to Adobe.
Then I kind of took a little bit of downtime.
I'm like, okay, what do I do next?
And one of the things I wanted to do was give back
I wanted to give back to not just founder community,
but just people in general.
'Cause I was like, they should teach us this
in the third grade, they should teach us this on
how to plan our weeks on a Sunday.
They should teach us on how to set goals for the year.
They should teach us on how to create a vision for ourselves
five years from now.
We go about and making all these business decisions.
We create a strategy for our business,
we don't create a strategy for our life.
And so I know this is going on for a little bit,
but hopefully the backstory is helpful.
What I ended up doing was
I ended up creating, writing a book.
It's, "How to Punch the Sunday Jitters in the Face."
This is the book.
You can get it off Amazon
and essentially teaches you the principles
that I applied over the last 10 years
to get my mindset right as a founder.
It teaches the "Unstoppable Sunday" practice,
which is a planning practice, every Sunday
to get your mindset right.
It helps you create a one year goal.
It helps you create a five year vision
and it helps you adopt the right mindset
to actually go execute on those goals,
to reach that higher performance.
And I wrote this book and we self published it
and I had a little bit of help to market it.
And fortunately we've sold over 4,000 copies of this book.
It became an Amazon bestseller
across seven different countries, 12 different categories.
And the book was so successful I created an online program.
I created a sort of a training program
on how to apply all the principles.
And I call that the "Unstoppable Life School,"
So we have SaaS school, and then we have life school.
And as part of that, as we were like...
The training, we do these group zoom calls,
where I like teach people how to apply these things,
to do Q&A.
We're like we should have software.
This is a perfect example, perfect case, perfect market
for a SaaS business.
And that's when this "Unstoppable Sunday" app was created.
And what the app does
is it helps you practice Unstoppable Sunday.
It's got video, it's interactive.
It helps you practice it every Sunday,
helps you write it all down, keep it secure.
And then it texts you through the week.
It texts you on a Monday, says,
"Hey, have a great week."
Texts you on a Wednesday and say,
"Hey, check in on the intentions that you set for the week.
How did they go? And how did your goals go?"
Texts you on a Friday to celebrate your wins
And again, on Sunday it say,
"Hey, let's practice Unstoppable Sunday again."
And it gets you into this routine.
So that's what the SaaS app is.
We wanna take it to a millionaire ARR,
this whole life school business.
So that's the backstory.
And so in prior episodes I talked through
sort of like how we got to developing the idea,
like who do we wanna serve, who are the people?
So you can check that out, down below I'll link to it.
And then in another episode, I talked about
how we're going about building our unstoppable sales funnel
and unstoppable sales funnels is
what we teach SaaS founders to create,
to actually scale their revenue growth,
and we have an unstoppable mini funnel
to actually get to initial revenue growth.
So I covered that in a prior episode,
I'll link to that below as well.
And then this crazy graphic,
which I'm sure made sense when I was working
and explaining it, really goes into it
what our current funnel looks like, right?
And I'll link to that down below as well.
What I wanted to share in this episode
is now that we've got Live School running
and we've got about 30 members on it,
we've got people using the application.
The application is new.
We had the program and then we added the application.
So the application is starting to take adoption.
I wanna show you how we're tracking our SaaS metrics.
Now, for those of you who followed me for a while,
we have a specific way of tracking SaaS metrics.
If you wanna learn about that, I'll link to it below.
This is the SaaS metrics, we use the pirate framework.
It was pioneered by Dave McClure.
It follows some core business principles
that makes a lot of sense for SaaS businesses.
And so I'll link to that video below
so you can learn more about it,
but this is this spreadsheet we log into every week
on how our business is doing.
And so I wanted to give you a back,
behind the scenes glimpse into that,
because I think that'll give you some idea
of how it's trending
so that we can give you the progress updates as we go on,
as we continue to make changes.
So I'll kind of explain what we have here.
This is essentially our unstoppable sales funnel
and our SaaS business metrics.
So on the top we have our manifestos.
These are the ways
we actually get people to notice us, right?
We do this YouTube video. I have an Instagram account.
We have prior YouTube videos,
we've done around the "Sunday scaries,"
we run ads and all of them lead into our core manifesto,
which is, right now the book and the digital version
is our life planning guide.
And so, by the way, if you want a free copy of this book,
just go to tkkader.com/book,
and you can get literally a free copy.
And you can also check out our unstoppable sales funnel
as you go through it.
Free copy. I will ship it to you.
It'll help you get the right founder mindset.
So we have that.
And then as people get into our core funnel,
then they actually get into our application.
Either they're trialing the application,
we have a free trial.
That's like, I think a 14 day trial
that Steven and I put in and then we upsell them,
either to a monthly plan or the full program.
The monthly plan is just the application.
And then the full program is the application
plus the training, plus a copy of the book.
So we're treating this as a SaaS and an info business,
and that's how we're scaling it.
But it's a real solution to help you get the mindset right.
Everything you need, the training, the app, the software
and the support, everything, you get everything.
And so that's the backstory.
This is the spreadsheet we're using.
By the way this template,
we give to people inside of our SaaS school.
When you're in our SaaS school,
we'll help you scale your SaaS business.
We'll help you get your market product
and go to market strategy right.
All the principles that I'm using to grow this business
are things that we teach inside the program.
So this template
is something we teach inside of the program.
This is the template we're using, if you wanna adopt it,
join SaaS school,
you can also watch that SaaS metrics video
to understand the principles behind it.
But I wanted to give you an idea of
how things are trending.
So overall we make revenues in two ways...
Three ways, the first is through the book.
When we sell a book, it is free.
We ship it to you, but we charge shipping and handling
and we make a tiny amount of profit on that.
And that pays for running ads
and our lead acquisition cost.
Then we upsell you either through a webinar
or a video into what we call our "Life School."
"Life School," gives you our software.
It gives you our training,
gives you access to our group zoom call,
all of it holistically.
And we're just now, it's been a little weird with COVID
and my attention was turned away,
but you will see like the free books
are starting to scale up.
To upsell to the Life Program we just had to reboot.
So we'll hopefully start to see that scale up.
And then once people are in the program
or they're trialing the application,
the third way they can try it,
is they can trial the application.
If you want to trial the application, just go to
unstoppablesunday.com.
And then from there we track how many people are...
and this is our core SaaS metrics.
How many people are we acquiring?
How many people are activating.
Activating means they actually practice Sunday.
They actually follow the steps
and how many people are coming back. What's our retention?
And then what's their conversion to revenue.
What you'll notice is our big moneymakers,
is likely not gonna be the thing
where people just sign up for the app
and then start converting.
It may be, but we don't think it will be,
our big moneymaker is gonna be
where people download our manifesto,
come to our training
and sign up for a full year of the program.
And the program is like a mindset program.
We probably, like 80% of the people in the program
are founders, the other 20% are high achievers.
And they're like, "I wanna get my life plan right,
I wanna get my life strategy right,
I wanna adopt an unstoppable mindset. I wanna go execute."
And those are the people.
And you can learn more about that in the book.
And so this is kind of the beginning pieces.
Like we really started to put in a lot of effort into this
starting last week, really
to really market this and take it to a million ARR.
So it has been relatively flat from before,
Steven is looking at it right now.
And so what we're looking to do is
starting to actually put in some more ad dollars
that will get more people to discover our movement
and our manifesto, which will then come to our training
and then will actually come into the life program
and start using the application.
So it's our hope you'll see that our activation
is starting to go up.
We have more and more people practicing Sunday.
And we're migrating people from an old version of that,
there are new apps so this number will go up even more,
probably get to about the full 30
that we have on the program.
And then we'll scale it from there.
And what this allows us to do,
is every week we track these metrics,
I have time set aside every Monday
to look at all the pieces of data
and manually put it all into this one ledger.
I do that not automatically, but manually
because it forces me to really dig into like,
what are the core pieces, what's working and what's not?
Then we essentially become a diagnostician.
It's very rare that you launch a SaaS business
and it all just takes up right from the beginning.
That's why it's super important to just get it out there.
Once you get it out there,
then you can collect a bunch of data.
We collected a bunch of data over the last few weeks,
and then we made some changes last week.
We made some changes last week
and you can start to see the retention metrics are already,
the activation metrics are already going up.
And so now what we're able to say is like, okay, cool,
"So we need to obviously optimize
in more people signing up."
We had this sales presentation that was very COVID specific.
Now we're switching it to something
that's a lot more like non-COVID specific
because we're in this weird post COVID era.
And so we know that'll cause...start to come back up.
That's how we got the 30 people.
And then the other thing we need to do
is continue to improve our activation.
Like right? We want more people to be activating
out of the people that are signing up.
So those are the key things that we'll start looking at.
And every time we make a change,
we'll kind of log that in our change log over here
so that we know next week, when we look at these metrics,
if these changes actually made a difference.
So those are the core SaaS metrics that we're looking at.
We're looking at acquisition, activation,
retention, revenue. That's what we're looking at.
We're not looking at referral right now.
Those are the four we look at
and we're actually applying an unstoppable sales funnel
to get in leads, to discover the program
and to buy the software and the training program.
So that's what I wanted to give you.
I'm super excited about it.
If you enjoyed this video and you enjoy this type of format,
please smash that like button.
If you're new, hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
If you got value from this, please share it with a friend.
If you have a fellow SaaS founder
that wants to see these behind the scenes videos,
if you enjoyed this,
comment below let me know what you thought about
this new format we're trying, this behind the scenes.
If there are other aspects of the SaaS business
behind the scenes, you want me to take you,
put that in the comments below,
so we'll cue that up in a future episode.
And also remember,
you're watching this because you're likely a founder.
So I highly encourage you to get a free copy of my book.
I ship it to you. And it's a physical copy.
And all we charge is a shipping and handling fee.
I like essentially pay for the printing,
you pay for the shipping. And we make like a dollar on it.
Not even like, it's just like enough cushion
so that we don't lose any money on it.
And so this book will teach you
how to really adopt a founder mindset.
It's everything that I learned from being a founder
over the last 10 years of scaling SaaS businesses,
both venture backed also being a senior executive.
So this is essentially like, it truly is for founders
and to get your founder mindset right. It's super important.
So go ahead and grab a free copy of my book.
If you prefer Kindle, you can get it off of Amazon as well.
That's also an option.
If you want to pay the full price, the $24,
you can get the physical copy off of Amazon as well.
And then also if there's like, get the book,
what the book will teach you is
importance of "Unstoppable Sunday."
If you wanna practice "Unstoppable Sunday,"
go to unstoppablesunday.com and sign up for the application
and it'll guide you through practicing that.
That's all I have for you today.
Hopefully you got value from this.
If you did, don't forget to smash that like button.
I bring you an episode three times a week on scaling
and building and starting and exiting SaaS businesses.
So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
Again, it's really awesome to see you. Thank you so much.
I love you guys and I'll see you in the next episode.
(upbeat music)