S5E21 – How to grow your B2B SaaS to 10K MRR? Advice from 20 experts
Are you building a B2B SaaS and aiming to hit 10K MRR? Then this episode is a must-listen! In this special episode, we’ve gathered insights from 20 experienced guests from Season 5 of the “Grow Your B2B SaaS” podcast. Each guest shares their top advice to help founders like you reach the crucial milestone of 10K MRR. Hosted by Joran Hofman, founder of Reditus, this episode is packed with practical strategies for scaling your SaaS business in a sustainable way. Get ready for a wealth of expert tips you won’t want to miss!
Slow Down Before You Speed Up
The first piece of advice comes from Kevin Tye, who stresses the importance of taking a step-by-step approach when scaling beyond founder-led sales. His advice? “Slow down before you speed up.” Many founders feel pressure to scale quickly due to shareholder expectations or personal goals, but Kevin suggests focusing on converting sales outside of your personal network first. This means creating a real need for change in your potential customers’ businesses and clearly demonstrating how your product can solve their problems.
Product-Market Fit First
Ferdinand Goetzen, in episode 2, highlights the crucial need to achieve product-market fit before pouring resources into marketing and growth. He talks about the difference between an “ideal customer profile” (ICP) and an “interesting customer profile,” emphasizing the importance of zeroing in on your ICP. Ferdinand shares a cautionary tale about Insighted, a company that had to pivot and refocus on its ICP before it could scale and achieve a successful exit.
Do Things That Don’t Scale
Tim Schumacher, who has helped grow over 20 B2B SaaS companies, shares a classic piece of advice: do things that don’t scale early on. In the beginning, personal outreach and deeply understanding your customers’ pain points are essential. This hands-on approach helps you build a product that genuinely solves customer problems, turning your offering into something they need—not just a “nice to have.”
The Power of Talking to Customers
Joran Hofman, in episode 4, reiterates one of the most valuable lessons for any founder: engage with as many customers as possible. These conversations are vital for gaining insights into their challenges, which can help refine your product and sales approach. Direct feedback from customers is crucial for validating your product and ensuring your sales pitch speaks to real needs.
Embrace AI for Scaling
Jacco van der Kooij talks about the role of AI in scaling a SaaS business. While AI can significantly improve operational efficiency, Jacco points out that it can’t replace the human creativity needed for strategic direction. Founders, especially those with an engineering background, should use AI to automate scalable processes while relying on human ingenuity for the bigger-picture planning.
Urgency in Customer Success
Mike Dry emphasizes the urgency that founders need in the early stages of growth. This urgency helps you navigate the “valley of struggle” and eventually reach a sustainable level of revenue. By focusing on customer success early on, you can leverage it to build momentum and position your business for long-term growth.
Manual Effort in Go-to-Market Strategy
Alex Urquhart advises against relying too heavily on automated growth hacks like SEO, suggesting that founders should embrace manual efforts in their go-to-market strategy. Personal outreach to potential customers, understanding their objections, and refining your messaging are all key. Building a personal brand and leveraging your network can be powerful growth drivers early on.
Mastering Message-Market Fit
Diane Wiredu emphasizes the importance of getting your message right. Founders need to ensure that their product solves a real problem that customers are willing to pay for. Understanding the competition and crafting a message that sets your product apart from alternatives is essential for standing out in the market.
Validating Your Product
Chris Out advises founders to validate their product before getting too attached to a specific delivery method or mechanism. It’s vital to ensure that customers are not just interested in your product but are also willing to pay for it. Transitioning from a service-heavy model to a more SaaS-oriented approach should be based on real customer validation.
Founder’s Direct Involvement
Tom Hunt shares his advice on the power of founders staying directly involved with customers. Through simple automated emails inviting users to book a call, founders can increase conversion rates and gain valuable feedback. These interactions can provide critical insights to help shape your product and its roadmap.
Selling the Vision
Gilles Bertaux presents a unique strategy: sell the vision of your product, not just its current version. By showing a prototype of what the product could become, you can get customers excited about the future and secure their buy-in.
Leveraging Content and Brand Authority
Several experts across episodes emphasize the importance of building brand authority and using content to connect with your audience. Personal branding and active community involvement are powerful ways to create trust and expand your reach.
Reinvesting in Growth
Adam Glazer discusses the importance of continuously reinvesting in your business. Founders should avoid treating their company like a lifestyle brand and instead focus on investing in marketing and talent to drive scalable growth.
Embracing AI Tools
Angeley Mullins talks about using AI tools to boost efficiency and reduce costs. Founders should explore AI solutions to streamline operations, but always ensure they’re using these tools to support their broader business goals.
Testing Assumptions and Positioning
April Dunford advises founders to constantly test their assumptions about both their product and the market. By understanding who truly values your product and why, you can position your offering more effectively and create better go-to-market strategies.
Building a Founder Brand
Sam Dunning stresses the importance of building a strong founder brand, especially on platforms like LinkedIn. Engaging directly with your target audience through content and conversations can build trust and help drive early sales.
Focus on Product Stickiness
Melissa Rosenthal wraps up the episode with advice on focusing on product stickiness and customer satisfaction. Ensuring high retention and low churn is key for scaling beyond the 10K MRR milestone and setting your business up for long-term success.
Conclusion
This episode offers a comprehensive roadmap for SaaS founders looking to scale their businesses. With insights from a range of experts, listeners gain strategies on everything from customer engagement and product validation to leveraging AI and building a personal brand. These core strategies are essential for achieving sustainable growth and setting the foundation for future success.
Key Timecodes
(0:00) – Episode Introduction: Are you growing a B2B SaaS and looking to hit 10K MRR?
(1:11) – Episode 1: Kevin Tye on scaling beyond founder-led sales.
(2:16) – Episode 2: Ferdinand Goetzen on building a sustainable SaaS business.
(3:12) – Episode 3: Tim Schumacher’s playbook for early-stage SaaS growth.
(4:13) – Episode 4: Joran Hofman on affiliate marketing for B2B SaaS.
(5:19) – Episode 5: Jacco van der Kooij on molding a go-to-market team.
(6:21) – Episode 6: Mike Dry on leveraging customer success for growth.
(7:33) – Episode 7: Alex Urquhart on building and scaling a micro SaaS.
(8:30) – Episode 8: Diane Wiredu on mastering message market fit.
(9:23) – Episode 9: Chris Out on transitioning from agency to SaaS.
(10:14) – Episode 10: Tom Hunt on starting and growing a B2B podcast.
(11:05) – Episode 11: Gilles Bertaux on going global with your SaaS.
(12:58) – Episode 12: Ryan Allis on outbound strategies for SaaS growth.
(14:09) – Episode 13: Andrew Davis on hiring your first marketing leader.
(15:26) – Episode 14: Greg Head on building SaaS without big VC funding.
(16:22) – Episode 15: Chris Cunningham on leveraging social media for growth.
(17:31) – Episode 16: Adam Glazer on setting up a SaaS affiliate program.
(18:47) – Episode 17: Angeley Mullins on AI tools for efficiency.
(19:57) – Episode 18: April Dunford on positioning for explosive growth.
(21:01) – Episode 19: Sam Dunning on building a profitable SaaS SEO strategy.
(22:26) – Episode 20: Melissa Rosenthal on building brand authority.
Transcription
[00:00:00.000] – Speaker 1
Are you growing a B2B SaaS and looking to hit 10K MR? You definitely want to listen to this episode. At the end of every episode, I ask my guest, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who’s just starting out and growing to 10K MR? This episode combines all the answers from Season 5, which are 20 guests, so it will be packed with value. My name is Joran Hofman, and I’m the founder of Reditus, and the host of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. That’s enough about me. Let’s just dive right In episode 1, I talk to Kevin Tye on how to scale beyond founder-led sales. The main advice is slow down before you speed up. Too many people try to scale too quickly or they have shareholders that expect the return. The main thing is here is slow down, learn to convert, and you have to learn to convert past your network. Because of your network, it gives you a false representation of the value. You have to be able to sell beyond your network. So Slow down and crawl. Crawl, walk, run. Once you can figure out how to convert, the first one is always the hardest, but the second and third are just as hard as the first.
[00:01:11.480] – Speaker 1
Because this is dark zone where you go, I think I’m doing everything right. I feel like it’s right, but they’re not buying. It’s just that they need to go through their stages on their side. That’s the first one to 10K MRR, is first and foremost, learn to convert and through a repeatable process that specifically creates demand. You have to be able to create a need for change in a client business and a need for your product second. Without creating that need, it’s a real difficult. Now, if you’ve got a market with a lot of momentum, that need has been created by your competitors or something else. There may not be an opportunity for you to position your subject matter expertise or your unique value proposition in a way because they already have an understanding of the problem and they’re being drawn to the gravity of a competitor. You have to still figure out how to create the need for change in your direction. And that starts with framing the problem that shows in a unique way that shows your unique value. In episode 2, I chatted with Ferdinand Goetzen on building a sustainable SaaS business and the key strategies for long-term growth.
[00:02:16.360] – Speaker 1
Zero to 10, you don’t need marketing and growth. It’s very difficult to actively invest in marketing and growth before you’ve got product-market fit. Get your product-market fit first. Icp niche, because this is another thing people say, Oh, I’m bootstrap early-stage company. I can’t afford to pick and choose my ICP. There’s a difference between ideal customer profile and interesting customer profile. Having a clear ICP doesn’t mean that you say no to other business, but it means that you’re very clear in your messaging, you’re very clear in what you choose to build. There’s a great story, the story of inside I met the founder of Insighted because we had the same VC back in the day. He told me the story and I could never share it. Now he shared it on a public podcast. So I can share it, you can check it out. I think it was the big exit show. Essentially, they built customer success communities for B2B companies. They sold to 50 different industries in 10 different countries, companies from small startups to big corporates. They got to a few million ARR within a few years, and then they raised a Series A, and then they had to completely scrap 75% of the team.
[00:03:12.120] – Speaker 1
Then they said, Okay, let’s look at who really gets it. They didn’t look at who brought in the most revenue. They just said, Who really gets what we’re doing? Because they were getting tons of customer support requests, no idea which one to prioritize. Sales was pushing for the big deals, of course, but the big deals were churning. There was this whole mess of information, and they just went, Okay, we’re going to go after customer success managers at European B2B SaaS companies with 50 to 500 employees, mid-size B2B SaaS company CSMs. He went in and he spoke to a thousand of them, I think, just hundreds of them to just understand how they think and how they operate. Back then, I think from the almost 5 million ARR or 4 million ARR, only 200K was this ICP. They just basically pushed aside a huge chunk of their revenue. Within two years, they more than doubled their growth, exited with only having it raised one round, close to 100 million. They got to 10 million ARR in two years just by making that focus. Why? Because suddenly they knew that out of the 90% support requests and feature requests, only 10% mattered.
[00:04:13.180] – Speaker 1
He told me sales was hounding about a certain integration that took months and months to plan and build and argue about. And this small group didn’t care about that. This small group had very specific needs, very specific problems. Suddenly the product became better. It became clearer what the value is. The messaging became The positioning became better. The differentiation became better because nobody was focusing on this small group. Then they got acquired by Gainsight, and now Gainsight is one of the most successful companies in the CS. In episode 3, I talk to Tim Schumacher and his playbook of growing 20 plus B2B SaaS companies. The 10K, so that’s super early. That’s the first couple of customers. Then it’s the classic do things that don’t scale advice. You talk to customers, you build things individually for customers based on their request, but always in mind with what other customers also like this feature down the road. But it’s really a lot about individual outreach, individual listening. You do everything yourself. You do customer service yourself, you do customer success in sales, you do everything yourself. And you really try to get to those first couple of customers.
[00:05:19.770] – Speaker 1
It depends, of course, on the customer size, 10K. That might be just one customer, it might be 10 customers, it might be a thousand customers. But you get to that really a lot of individual a lot of work and a lot of really listening to which pain are you solving, and you really need to solve the pain. You should never be a vitamin, but you should always be a painkiller. Listen to the pain of the people and how you can really solve it. Once you’ve found those first 10Ks, then I think you’ve at least found initial product market. In episode 4, I chatted with myself Joran Hofman on affiliate marketing for B2B SaaS companies. The standard advice of growing the 10K MORs, the hustle, do things that don’t feel and talk to as much customers as possible. But that’s exactly what I would recommend others doing, and don’t skip this step. I think especially talking to a lot of customers is going to help you to build a strong foundation for 10K plus MR. As you can learn from their challenges, build features based on feedback, but also use the information in your sales process towards other prospects.
[00:06:21.830] – Speaker 1
Talk to as much customers as possible. You can’t talk to them enough. You’re going to learn so much from it. Talk to also prospects, customers, churn clients, learn why are they leaving, why did they actually sign up, why did they move to paid, what convinced them to do so. The more you talk to your customers, the more you can use it in your paid ads, in your SEO on your website, in your sales pitch, it’s basically anywhere. It’s super important to actually, maybe even, first of all, validate the product you’re building if they’re interested into it. The biggest advice is talk to your customers. That’s it. In episode 5, I interviewed Jacco van der Kooij on how to mold your go-to-market team into a revenue factory. First step there, embrace AI. This is not only because it’s low cost, it’s because it’s going faster. Now, You use AI to scale, but you need human beings to be the creative mode. Ai will not help you to learn what is the right GTM motion. A human being will. You have a quality human being in your scale via AI, but you need to embrace AI as quickly as possible.
[00:07:33.270] – Speaker 1
It is just inevitable. I guarantee you that most founders, especially when they’re engineers, are already on that trajectory. They’re going to look at go-to-market motion and they go, Yeah, finally, that’s the way how revenue architecture depicts it When you have an engineering mindset, it’s easy to create a future scalable system, automated system. In episode 6, I chatted again with Mike Dry on leveraging customer success for SaaS growth. I think probably the key bit of advice is just to get moving as quickly as you possibly can. Urgency is key at that early stage. The quicker you get to a decent amount of monthly revenue, the more you’re building yourself an opportunity to have the opportunity to do all the things that we’ve talked about today, because that’s where the fun starts, I think. There’s the fun bit in the beginning when you have a really interesting idea and it’s probably the last time when it’s the perfect idea because it’s not yet met, not yet encountered reality. Then you’ve got a valley of struggle, and then you get to a point where you have enough revenue so you can actually look over the hill. I think just climbing that as quickly as you possibly can is the goal.
[00:08:30.570] – Speaker 1
However you go about doing that and giving yourself the opportunity to succeed, I think that’s the main piece of advice I have. In episode seven, I chatted with Alex Urquhart, How to build, launch, and scale a successful micro SaaS. Not being afraid to be manual with your go-to-market, because I think I understand why we want to just automate it or do the magic of SEO, and all of a sudden, all these people start flooding to our products and these great words that I’ve even mentioned in this podcast around PLG and growth loops. But I think in the early days, I genuinely don’t I see a way around it just being very manual and not being afraid to… I still stand by this. I think everyone needs to at some point, 6-12 months, ideally 2 years, go work in sales and go do it from the front ends. Go pitch people in the meeting and figure out how to get around objections and figure out your positioning because you’ve got to say it on the spot or go to a conference. I did it for a customer the other day and I would have pitched it 30 times in a row.
[00:09:23.410] – Speaker 1
By the end of it, I was watching their reactions and what was going to work and not work. I got back and then rewrote a big deck for a lot of their product messaging for website in a bunch of different areas. It was just so much clearer and saved me so much time. It was exhausting and uncomfortable in certain areas, but just not being afraid to be manual, not being understandably. If you’ve got investment, you’ve got runways, holding out on it as much as you can, I think bootstrapping as far as you possibly can, because then you retain all the creative freedom. And I think sometimes markets need time. There’s a couple of industries I work with now where they need a bit of time before the product, they educate the market, or they build up awareness and attention, so the interest It does take time. You look at enterprise products, you’ve got sales cycles of 6, 12, 24 months long. I think you’ve got to have that patience to really see it come to fruition. I think being manual on that, I think the first 10K, and I’d even say this is probably a precursor to all these ones.
[00:10:14.280] – Speaker 1
I mentioned a little bit before, but I really think now is to be a successful founder, you’ve always got to have a really good personal brand is becoming super important. And so I always try to say whatever you’re in, if you’re a developer, if you’re a product marketer, or a product manager, or sales, whatever you’re in, start creating your own content, just become known a bit and just get your name out there. Because if you’re someone like yourself, you’ve worked really hard for this podcast, fantastic. If you hypothetically were to launch a product tomorrow, you’ve got an owned audience already. And that’s 99 % of the heavy lifting. There’s something now that people are saying it used to be products 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago was the differentiator to success, but now it’s your distribution. Can you get in front of the right people fast enough in a short period of time? And if you’ve got that personal brand, you’re going to come at it with so much more trust. You’ve got a bunch people that like you, admire you and trust what you say, then endorsing a product is just takes out 10 steps.
[00:11:05.710] – Speaker 1
I think looking at your personal brand, not being afraid to do things manually, getting incredibly involved in the communities. If you are a marketer making marketing products, great, you’ve probably already got a network. If you’re not, then this advice probably goes twice for you is just get involved with as many areas you can. I think I was saying to you the other day, it’s working with a client now and they say they’re not marketers and they say they’re not salespeople, but they are so active in the community in this particular industry. They travel to all the capital cities in Australia and they do speaking spots, networking events, coffee meetups, and all these things. And they are now renowned throughout the whole community. And I haven’t spent a cent as far as ads spend. Of course, traveling and effort, but they’ve built this personal brand now that people come to them and say, hey, I spoke to Simon, who met you two years ago. He loves you guys. He wants to be a part of it. And when we’re looking at scaling, doing things like regular webinars or regular newsletters or content pieces, they’ve already got this huge audience.
[00:11:58.120] – Speaker 1
And we’re just nurturing them now. We’re not trying to start from scratch. I’d say the whole crawl, walk, run, distribution. I think there’s a quote and I can’t remember who the person said it, but they said the first time founder is obsessed about the product, second time founder is obsessed about distribution. And it’s once you, you can have the perfect product in the world, but until you can get out there in people’s eyeballs, and definitely attention is becoming a very scarce resource. So spend the time to create that attention first through your personal brand is one of the biggest lessons learned from me. In episode 8, I chatted with Diane Wiredu on mastering message market essential strategies for B2B SaaS success. If you’re trying to get to 10K, yeah, maybe first, this isn’t really messaging, but just make sure that you solve an actual problem that is painful enough that people want to solve that problem and they are willing to spend money to solve that problem. I don’t know, you’ve done hundreds of episodes now, and so if someone hasn’t said that, I don’t know what they were doing. Probably that’s been said. But that’s the key.
[00:12:58.780] – Speaker 1
That’s the foundation of everything because we can’t market a crap product that isn’t valuable anyway. So I would say starting there. To understand if you even do solve a painful and a problem, I guess that still comes back down to actually speaking to buyers and customers, too. But if we think of a messaging, in those early stages, growing to 10K MRR, I would say understanding what the competitive alternatives that you are really up against with those early customers is key. Is it doing nothing? Is it them hiring a consultant or an agency? Is it building something themselves in Excel, or is it actually hiring a competing product? I think April Dunford talks about phantom competitors and making sure that you are not competing against phantom competitors. A lot of early stage, they say, Look at the market, these are all our competitors. But in sales calls and in the buying process, those guys never come up. Your actual buyers are never actually looking at you versus those guys. They’re looking at you versus option one, two, and three. In those early stage is really having that super dialed in as to what are people, what is their current old way and what are they considering?
[00:14:09.120] – Speaker 1
What are they evaluating you against is key because then in your messaging, this is where you get really specific and speak about how you are different and how you solve those specific problems. At that early pre-10K MRR stage, just competing in that decision-making, that list-making phase, it is really key. You can be wildly off in your messaging if you haven’t really dialed in what people are really evaluating you against. In episode 9, I chatted with Chris out, going from agency to SaaS and the strategies for growing your SaaS side hustle, within the agency. The most important thing, it’s not validated yet, so don’t get in love with your mechanism. Just make sure that clients are really happy to transfer you that money. If that means that 5% of the organism that you serve is SaaS and 95% of service, okay, that’s already a great start because then you can transition towards how can we do this delivery with more SaaS and less service. But the most important thing, it’s not validated chat. So make sure people are really happy with what you serve because that’s the foundation you need to grow further. In episode 10, I chatted with Tom Hunt on how to start and grow a B2B podcast.
[00:15:26.420] – Speaker 1
It’s not really marketing advice, but I think it’s super important. It’s basically to have a auto email from the founder for every user that signs up free or paid with a link to a 15 minute call booking. Now, I think this helps in two ways. A, it enables the founder to actually do the selling and probably increase the conversion rate of them from free to paid or from paid to more. But perhaps more important is the founder is forced to learn about the people that are signing up to the tool and then you obviously feed that into the product roadmap. So it takes five minutes to set up and obviously you’re going to have all the 15 minute calls and Maybe after year one or maybe when you get to 10K MR, this can be delegated to somebody else. But I think it’s super important in the early days. Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile? At Redditers, we just launched the second side of the marketplace which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates which have access to the audience you’re looking for.
[00:16:22.040] – Speaker 1
We do this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getredditers. Com. In episode 11, I tell with Gilles Bertaux on the secret to going global and how startups can succeed internationally. To go beyond Ken KMR, I will probably obsess with not selling the product as it is today. That’s a bit of a counterintuitive, but one thing that we did early on was almost every prospect or customer that I had on a call, I never really started by showing the product, but showing a prototype of where we to take the product. It’s actually an in vision prototype. It was like back in the days, we didn’t even have Figma. We will show them, Okay, this is what we’re building. This is the final iteration of the vision that we have for the product. What do you think of it? Cool. You love it? Perfect. We’re going in the right direction. By the way, this is where we at. You could feel that we check maybe 20 or 25% of the checkboxes of the product that I’ve just shown, but you can tell that we’re going in the right direction. So what do you think?
[00:17:31.370] – Speaker 1
I think that helped a lot because people were understanding the direction. They were buying the direction also, not just the product. It felt almost as if you were actually selling a feature that didn’t exist, and people will buy all these features. I guess the truth is this advice also plays in. I put this advice in a big bucket of appear bigger than you actually are. I think that helped a lot. Signing the version. Also, when you create content, you create content with as many companies as you can. Just be this copilot fish that glues himself to the other fishers. So find other companies, create content with them, trying to appear bigger because you hang out with the bigger players. It’s this whole thing of selling a little bit more, being a little bit more than you actually have or actually are. And I think that helps a lot at the beginning. It creates reassurance. In episode twelve I chatted with Ryan Allis on the path to successful $100 million plus SaaS exit. Just get your product launched. Start outbounding to cold prospects that fit your target market. Start posting on LinkedIn and start doing some long tail SEO like competitor versus you.
[00:18:47.780] – Speaker 1
Start doing some paid search, similar brand terms, competitor one versus you. Those are the easy ways to acquire low hanging fruit in customer acquisition. Episode 13, I chatted with Andrew Davis on how to hire your first marketing leader for a B2B SaaS. I do feel in the early stages that insight is more valuable than cash. That might be counterintuitive because you’re so cash starved at those early stages. But if you can find out why a customer what you’re selling, how they choose to decide on it, and what customer is really successful by buying it. That is insight you could almost take to the bank. You can build a company strategy, you can build a marketing strategy on it. And so focus in those early days on building insight, building a differentiated perspective, building your raison d’être, your right to exist. If you can do that, then you can really start thinking about scale. But if you have total question marks and confusion over those fundamental questions, it’s really hard. In episode 14, I chatted with Greg Head on seven ways to build a successful SaaS without big VC funding. I’ve talked to founders all the time who are getting in the game and figuring it out.
[00:19:57.530] – Speaker 1
They’re hearing about funding, they’re hearing go-to-market, all the playbooks, content, and YouTube, and so forth. But it’s pretty simple when you’re starting. You have a product, but you don’t have too many customers yet. The real goal, the only goal, literally, is to get 10 customers that like your product and will pay for it and are likely to continue to pay. That sounds really simple and easy. But don’t think about, Gosh, how big is this company going to be? And do I need a big office? Or whatever. None of that makes sense. If you If you can’t get 10 customers that say, This product is really useful. I can’t wait for you to build more features, and I’m happy to pay for it. It’s really changing our business. We love it, then you don’t get to go to a million or 10 million or 100 million. It’s really a simplifying principle for new founders. You need to have 100 conversations to have 30 prospects to get 25 people to try your product, to get 10 people who like it. Will somebody pay for it? What are they look like? How are they different than everybody else?
[00:21:01.930] – Speaker 1
What problem are we really solving? That’s the first milestone for any SaaS family. In episode 15, I chatted with Chris Cunningham on how to leverage social media to become a $4 billion company. 10k, monthly recurring revenue. The first thing that I would do, I would get scrappy. I would almost follow something similar to we did. Right away, who’s unhappy with the competitors? Who’s the one I can pick up? Find that low hanging fruit, figure that out, and then get a few clients. Just get a few people using the tool. Give it away. Give it away free. Give it away free. Before you start thinking about, Oh, I need to charge everyone, you won’t ever get to 10K because no one’s going to use your tool enough for you to learn. So give it away free. Even if you have to lose a little money, you got to eat the money sometimes. Eat the money for a bit, figure it out. If you have to work another job, do that. But then from there, once you get people using it, obsess over them. Seriously, talk to them all the time. Build a candy board, ask people what they want.
[00:21:48.700] – Speaker 1
But we used to send these little quick surveys, two question surveys. We would start a survey of 10, and then we start voting. People are not going to fill out 10. But if we give them two, maybe three max, what’s the most important things that could change a company if we ask these questions? And that’s what we would ask ourselves and we’d send it out. We got a lot of people really got us a lot of answers. We take those answers. We come back and say, Hey, okay, we implemented that. What do you think? Show them you’re implementing, show them you’re moving fast, show them you care about their responses, put it into action and show them results. We’d come back and say, Hey, look, 80% of you want this. That’s what we’re doing. We’ll have it done in a week and then come back to them. Show them how scrappy you are and then scour them. Then what you do is once you get a lot of people in your loving and they see your mission, then all at once, send out a code, send out something. Pretend you’re out of sumo for a bit.
[00:22:26.780] – Speaker 1
That’s what we did. We just said, Hey, look, we actually realized we needed money. We We were trying to keep this free for as long as we could, but we need money to keep building and paying everyone. You get it. How about we offer you 60% off now? Knowing this rate will never be there again for a couple of years. You can get in early and say you were the early people with ClickUp. That’s what we did. Way more people bought than we expected. In episode 16, I chatted with Adam Glazer on how to set up and grow a SaaS affiliate program. The advice I would have given myself, there are two types of companies. What I call lifestyle brands, and then there are growth. Lifestyle brand is one where the founders are supporting their lifestyle, and they’re taking a lot of the profit out to support their lives. To really get to scale and get to that breakthrough velocity, you need to reinvest. That means investing in marketing, hiring the right talent, and just keep reinvesting in growth, obsessive on growth, and brand, and just creating a product that’s really valuable. In episode 17, I chatted with Angeley Mullins on how to build a brand strategy.
[00:23:33.030] – Speaker 1
I would look into AI tools, assist AI agents, anything like this. Ai tools and agents are now starting to replace SDRs. Whether you are doing cross-checking for inbound on whatever, it doesn’t matter. Look into some of these AI tools. I would say look into anything that can help you be more efficient and reduce your costs so you can take that extra money and throw it where it will really matter. On the reverse, for those founders and CEOs and early go-to-market teams that maybe are already on top of their AI game, I would tell them, remember the critical thinking. Using AI is great. I think it’s the future. It’s here to stay 100%, but make sure that you do not forget your critical thinking. Ai is only as good as the influence. If you haven’t started using it, start using it. If you’re already on top of your game using it, just remember the critical In episode 18, I chatted with April Dunford on how to position your B2B SaaS for explosive growth. I would say they should really be thinking about who loves my stuff and why. Do I have assumptions about that? When I built this product, did I build it with certain assumptions in mind?
[00:24:50.140] – Speaker 1
And then how can I test those assumptions? Let’s say I built this product and I decided this is a product and it’s going to help quick serve restaurants do fast turnover on tables or something. And the competition is pen and paper or whatever. When you go and you sell some deals, is that true? Does it do what you thought it would do? Is it quick serve restaurants or does it turn out it’s actually more sit down restaurants or a different restaurant? Are you really competing with what you thought you were competing with, or are you seeing that people are doing something you didn’t actually anticipate? How can you use that information to get more effective in your go-to-market stuff in the future? So, hey, we learned that it’s not really quick serve restaurants as these other guys, so we’re just going to target them. Hey, we learned the value was actually more this than that, and so we’re going to tighten that up. Understanding what your fundamental go-to-market assumptions are and then trying to test those assumptions and build on that, I think is really important. If you do that effectively, then I think you get to a great product with really solid positioning in the market much quicker than if you’re just taking your victim as you find them.
[00:25:56.010] – Speaker 1
In episode 19, I chatted with Sam Dunning on how to build a profitable SaaS SEO strategy. I think you could probably in this day and age work off founder brand, LinkedIn founder brand. So that’s a bit of a buzzword at the moment. What does that actually mean? That means I suppose I’m going in with a bit of a bias mindset because I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time, and that generates a good chunk of business for us. So I’m going in for it. Let’s pretend you’re a founder and let’s pretend you’re, I don’t know, in connecting with your ICP, connecting with your dream clients each week. You’re posting useful content to your dream clients. You’re talking about the problems you solve. You’re talking about conversations you’re having. You’re answering common questions. You’re positioning your product as a solution. You’re doing case studies, you’re doing examples, you’re standing out, all that stuff. You’re engaging with prospects, you’re posting useful content. Maybe you’re having conversations with your ICP or striking up convos in the DMs. I think that can get you to 10K. I think that’s quite smart. But if you’re brand new, and let’s say you’ve never done LinkedIn, you’ve never touched LinkedIn before, then you might be better off then in that case, building that in the background and then maybe scaling with either paid or SEO is going to take you a bit longer compared to paid if there’s demand for your offer.
[00:27:10.080] – Speaker 1
For people listening, we had Adam Robinson. I interviewed him live in Austin. Found a pot, he has a Nice. Great episode. I’m just the LinkedIn profile from Sam right now. He has 32,000 followers. It will take time to get there, but if you keep posting consistently, it will start growing over time. Don’t expect quick result here either. There is another way. I suppose you could also go 10K from network. Let’s say I’d imagine most founders have probably got some background in their product or their use case, leveraging existing connections. So whether that was past customers, past prospects, people that you’ve worked with in the past, past customers, past friends. Connecting with those can get you a few thousand MRR, just striking up conversations, say, Look, I’ve started up my own thing. Would you be open to having a chat? And then if they don’t know someone, they might be able to refer you to someone I think being proactive and making sure you’re having conversations, your prospecting daily as a founder is important, and that can get you a good few thousand MRR. In episode 20, I chatted with Melissa Rosenthal on how to build up a brand authority as a B2B SaaS.
[00:28:16.000] – Speaker 1
Focus on the product, focus on the stickiness, focus on your first customer set, make sure they’re happy, see if there is a viral coefficient within them referring other people, and really do 10X on that. Going from zero to 10K MRR for any a Seltster platform is probably the hardest thing you can get to. Then the 20K, 50K, that’s going to be the hardest point in your entire, probably, existence because you have to prove that the product has value, that it’s sticky, that your retention is high and that your churn is low. It’s all about customer experience, getting the pricing right, getting the viral coefficient and the growth levers. And from there it becomes easier. We are low millions of ARR. We’re still establishing all of these things, but in a way where we don’t know what our our nos yet. We don’t know what our stickiness is yet. We haven’t built out more than 5% of our product vision. So we’re in this interesting place where we have a premium product. We do have a significant amount of ARR, but we don’t know all these things that sometimes self-serve platforms, fully self-serve platforms, learn very early on.
[00:29:18.660] – Speaker 1
Not that they fix everything, but I think it’s focusing on all the things, no matter where you are, it’s focusing on all those very core things to start, because if you don’t have those as fundamentals, then you’re never going to grow correctly, and you’re never going to be able to scale well. This is the end of the summary episode. As this is season 5 already, you could listen to the summary episodes from season 1, 2, 3, and 4, or of course, dive into a specific episode of a person you liked. Before you do any of these things, could you give us a quick follow, and could you leave us a review on the platform you’re currently listening? It’s going to help us to boost the algorithms. Also, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Jorn Hoffmann, and I’m the founder of Either way, thank you for listening, and see you in season 6.
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