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• Someone earlier was telling me
  • They’re looking to build a product
  • Interests: programming, selling, kung-fu
  • Programming: Python, and Go
    • Go sounds obscure. You should start a product around that!
      • Then I Googled it. 15 million results
  • Every market is crowded
  • So rarely will you find a product that’s brand new, never done before
    • If it doesn’t exist, there’s usually a reason
• Harpoon
  • Would show your finances, expenses, forecasted revenue…
  • Shows graphs and charts showing you more information about your business
  • Had a landing page. Lead magnet. Purchased ads
    • 3k signups before launch
    • Had a great launch
    • But
    • They signed up… and then churned. Quickly
    • This wasn’t the tool for them
    • What’s going on?
      • “I don’t want to enter my payment information twice – once into my accounting tool, and then again into your tool”
      • We had to create a product people wanted
  • Googled startups. Rob Walling’s book came up (Start Small Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide To Launching a Startup)
    • Quote from Rob’s book!
      • “Building a general purpose, small-business, online accounting application is a really bad idea for a self funded startup”
    • Similar quote in Justin Jackson’s content
    • We ignored it!
      • We’re going to take on Freshbooks; Harvest; FreeAgent
        • And LOTS more
    • Decided to go ahead anyway
• Why did we do it?
  • We wanted this tool ourselves
  • None of the existing tools had the goal-tracking features that we wanted
• We thought we had a “niche”
  • Just focus on solo freelancers
• Decided to stay simple – just US dollars
  • But our traffic was coming from all over the world
  • Had to add
    • Currencies
    • Number formatting
    • Dates
    • Custom tax names
    • Multiple taxes
    • Multi-lingual invoices
    • In over our heads!
  • Fixed these gradually
• Started to see growth towards the end of 2015
  • New features were bringing people in
  • Looked like a hockey-stick in 2016!
  • …But wasn’t

• Lesson #1: build what people need

• We didn’t on our first revision. But we got there

• Lesson #2: Find a way to let them know about it

• • You probably aren’t the first one to do this - No matter what it is
    • Jazz
      • Fixed melody at the start and end, but improvisation in the middle
      • Any instruments, any size of band
      • Building a SaaS is similar
        • Any team size
    • Find AND EMBRACE your unique
    • 1. Be better at solving a problem
         • E.g. email marketing
         • There were a lot of options
           • But Drip was better. Simple. Easy to get started.
    • 1. Be unique in your solution
         • SendGrid – adding some tools that the others don’t have. Unique
    • 1. Leverage your advantage
         • ConvertKit – Nathan was an authority in content marketing, so he incorporated his knowledge into ConvertKit to make it better at solving professional bloggers’ problems
• “The only assets you have against bigger, wealthier competitors are raw talent and time. Corporate America isn’t as nimble as you” – Gary Vaynerchuk, #AskGaryVee
• Measure everything
  • Decide scientifically what’s working and what’s not
  • Know what to double down on
  • When we want to test out something new:
    • What is the main idea?
    • What are we hoping to accomplish?
    • How are we hoping to accomplish this?
    • What are we measuring?
    • What is the timeframe?
    • How do we know if it’s a success?
    • What would failure look like?
    • What was the result?
    • What are some key takeaways?
  • We use Basecamp. You can use Notepad. Evernote. Anything
  • Can also use a Gantt chart
• Recycle as much as possible
  • Say you write a Quora answer
    • Repurpose it as blog post
      • → LinkedIn and Facebook
      • Medium
        • To instagram
          • To twitter
        • To Twitter
        • → Quuu
      • Guest post
• Even though SaaS is crowded, “I still see people executing and just making it happen” - Rob Walling
• I think you have what it takes to make it happen
  • Just try things
  • Get creative
  • Put yourself out there
• Q&A
  • “Were you able to get anything from your competitors?”
    • Two schools of thought. Some (like Gary Vee) say I don’t even know what competitors are doing.
    • We keep tabs on a few of our competitors, but we don’t try to match them feature for feature
    • We listen to our customers. If there are patterns in our customers needing things that other tools have
  • “Examples of things you tried that didn’t work well?”
    • Twitter, and Twitter automation
      • Grew our follower base, but didn’t increase signups
      • But it’s worked for others
    • Just have to try stuff
  • “How did you land your first 10 clients and convince them your product was better?”
    • Content marketing and paid ads before we launched
    • Even though many churned, they were still on our email list. So as we improved we could keep them up to date, and won some of them back
    • Our network of friends and colleagues
  • “The recycling idea was amazing. What % of your income/leads/etc comes from that experimental third-party social media / recycled content?”
    • Not a great % yet.
    • We still find the best return for us at this stage is launching a feature and emailing our list about it. As we plug the feature holes, people are waiting for those features, they join. That drives the most sales at this point.
    • But the content marketing / recycling is bringing people into the LIST in the first place. So it’s all kind of circular.

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