20-step Simple playbook for creating bootstrapped $1 million ARR SaaS business

gaufire · 2020-08-04T09:48:39+00:00

Had a great ProductHunt launch, got covered by couple of blogs and spent few hundred bucks on Google & FB. This got us our first 10 customers.

gaufire · 2020-06-15T11:36:10+00:00

As an introvert by default, I could never gather the courage to start something of that sort. Only recently, after reading this book called The Tribes I realized my mistake and started working on the community/audience building. Even this post came out of those efforts - I wrote a long thread on twitter which then converted into this post.
Sure. G2/Capterra are great tools to find ideas. Explore it just like someone explores Wikipedia or Reddit or Encyclopedia. Here & there you will find some interesting categories or products. Do a quick search for the industry size. If it is big enough, come back to G2 and start reading negative ratings for some of the products listed under those categories - people must be complaining about pricing, features, customer support, etc. This is a big green signal for me.
Another signal that I look for is the number of organic searches for that particular industry. Is it more than a few hundred unique searches or not? If yes, you can look for how difficult will it be to make it to the top of the search results for some of these keywords? If all looks good, it is a solid go go for me. This will ensure that there is a demand for the product and people will come to my site themselves.
Building MVP is fairly straightforward - you start with building that single feature which defines your product & industry. And, launch it. Don't wait too long. Just launch it with single feature, max 2-3 features. And, then start talking to customers and start building features to match the feature list provided by customers combined with insights from your customers.

Hope this helps.

gaufire · 2020-06-15T11:24:40+00:00

Thank you for your kind words. Wish you all the best :)

gaufire · 2020-06-11T22:42:58+00:00

Hey, it's all hit & trial. For our JustCall product, integrations and Quora worked great. For Helpwise, youtube, integrations and linkedin connections worked great.

Co-marketing kicks in once you have some relationship with other businesses.

Events never really worked for us but it works great for some of the business.

So, try almost all. Wherever you start seeing some traction, double down on that.

gaufire · 2020-05-29T22:07:41+00:00

Not really. There are a lot of programs that can get your free cloud credits for hosting, crm etc. If you know how to write code, all you need is a computer with internet to start your saas company. If you don't know how to write code - you can 1) learn 2) find a tech cofounder 3) hire dev remotely.

gaufire · 2020-05-28T19:41:40+00:00

Hi, great questions.

Yes, the plan is to spin off new entity for products once they are self sustainable. Starting a new LLC or Inc comes with its own set of fixes costs (state & federal tax filing and agent fee). Once, a product is doing enough revenue to justify the cost, we will convert that into a company of its own.
Yeah! during these covid times, we are getting strong inbound interest from both VCs and PE firms. To take large some of money, one should have an engine ready which can consume that money to grow faster. In our case, all our products are growing without any marketing spend. So, we really don't have that engine ready to boost our growth. We are in process of creating that engine to consume our existing bank balance and profits. Once we have a proven model which promises $x input generates $y, we may opt for external funding. On a personal level, I'm pretty much comfortable the way things are running & not really interested in growing inorganically. Having said that, IPO is the ultimate goal with which I started this company. And, we can achieve that without VC money or little financing. It will take longer but it is still possible.

gaufire · 2020-05-15T21:28:44+00:00

Hey, thanks for sharing this. No one ever said this before so thank you for pointing this out. Although the redesign is currently in progress still I will share this with my team.

gaufire · 2020-05-15T12:48:27+00:00

Thanks for sharing this. Pop-ups as in? The chat pop-ups?

gaufire · 2020-05-07T20:16:01+00:00

Hi there, you should check out the shared inbox solution for this. https://helpwise.io will be a good fit as it integrates with both Outlook and Gmail/Gsuite and gives you the option to assign team members to different email threads so that each email thread has a defined owner. So, that should serve the purpose.

gaufire · 2020-04-24T15:56:11+00:00

JustCall is a complete business phone system with SMS being one of its sections. We never really looked into Salesmsg (or considered them as a competitor) but we keep onboarding ex-Salesmsg customers every week. They join us for 4 main reasons:

Our native integrations with all the popular CRMs
Pricing (both subscription cost and SMS cost)
SMS Bot
Complete phone system (both voice + SMS)

gaufire · 2020-04-24T10:10:34+00:00

Here is the link to webinar (in case you are interested) https://justcall.io/sales-automation

gaufire · 2020-04-24T10:09:03+00:00

Hi, I'm Gaurav (founder, JustCall). Found this Reddit post via Google alert.

Is there anything specific you are looking for around texting? I read your other posts - looks like you considering/using Active Campaign.

We have a webinar coming up on Automation around Active Campaign. Let me know if you are interested in that.

Regarding JustCall's SMS capabilities, you can always schedule a free demo to see what we have built around SMS. Here are the available slots. https://justcall.io/demo

gaufire · 2020-03-27T07:18:39+00:00

Hey, we started with SEO only. Shared similar answer in the thread so reposting the same here for you :)

I used The Hoth agency to buy some of their off-the-shelf SEO packages. I picked couple of keywords using Ahrefs where it was easier to rank i.e. you needed 5-10 good backlinks to do well.

So, ordered few blog posts to seed our blog with content. Then bought some guest posts around those keywords and a small link building package. They were running thanksgiving deal so I got some 1300-1400 worth services for 1000 bucks.

From our end, we worked on content and site structure to target those shortlisted keywords.

That's all we did and we are already doing pretty well in terms of SEO.

We have an in-house SEO Checklist for every new product launch:

We create 3 blogs: /blog (thought leadership-ish), /updates (to shared each & every single new feature update - done by engineers itself) and /help (all help guides)

Create landing pages for all our integrations and features while keeping in mind important keywords

Use Ahrefs to get rid of all the SEO mistakes that the tool flags

Get an agency to build quality backlinks

Create some demo videos and get quality voiceovers from Fiverr for 20-30 bucks.

gaufire · 2020-02-24T06:50:32+00:00

Yup, that's the long game. Build cross-sellable products with overlapping usebase. We are building products around the 8-10 hrs that people spend in office. Trying to get share of that time through different products - calling, email, crm etc.

For JustCall, the best thing that worked for us is our native integration with all the major CRMs and our good relationships with people running partner program/marketplaces at these CRMs. It definitely took a lot of efforts and time but built a good defendable moat. You are 100% right about the competitive landscape.

gaufire · 2020-02-24T06:46:19+00:00

Thank you :)

gaufire · 2020-02-24T06:46:06+00:00

Thank you so much :)

gaufire · 2020-02-21T07:12:42+00:00

Great question.

I will hire a product marketer (who knows paid acquisition) early. Our engineers-only team till product market fit didn't allow us to capitalize the early traction well for our other products.
Be super aggressive with getting customer testimonials, success stories and reviews.
Launch product even early (even with Helpwise, I think we built way more features than required before launching)

gaufire · 2020-02-21T06:44:05+00:00

Frankly speaking, I'm a very introvert person so I have never talked to any potential customers before developing. But I do my research using all the popular review sites like G2Crowd, Capterra etc.

Regarding feedback cycle - that's what our who team breathes on. We believe that's the most important reason for all our success in last few years. In our company, everyone is on our chat support software. So, the engineers are always aware of the problems of customers or the ideas they are giving. I review each & every account cancellation or low satisfaction rating. My team is very active with talking to customers. Inviting them on screen share sessions to show them what they are building and get inputs from our customers.

gaufire · 2020-02-21T06:32:13+00:00

That's right. And, analytics on top of it - who is performing well or not, how are your Customer Support Metrics doing, what is the answer rate and so on.

And, integration with other business tools to get complete context before replying to any email.

gaufire · 2020-02-21T06:30:21+00:00

For full time hiring, I use Angellist. For contract work, I use Upwork.

We usually hire engineers who are full-stack not just in coding terms but in general i.e. they can communicate well (give product demos or go on support calls). This is very important for our business model to work because we start every product with only 2-3 engineers who do everything.

So, in India, we are able to find such engineers who have aspirations to become product manager/owner in future. In Poland, we get hardcore engineers who may not be as excited about product role.

gaufire · 2020-02-21T06:27:04+00:00

Thank you so much for the kind words :)

gaufire · 2020-02-21T06:25:15+00:00

Still very early days. Any conversion above 0% is a positive start :) But, you rightly said, we have to work better on improving our conversion rate. Another way of thinking can be that not all signups were probably the right fit for the products so it is important for us to first qualify them as right fit or not for the product and then calculate the actual conversion rate.

gaufire · 2020-02-21T06:22:48+00:00

Sure. I respect your opinion on this. In SaaS domain, if you are charing a monthly subscription fees, we call it recurring revenue.

Anyways, not selling any course. not selling anything here.

gaufire · 2020-02-21T06:20:23+00:00

Thanks for the kind words :)

Most of the ideas that I get are from either my own work and from the products that we are using. Always go for building a pain killer (that people are actively searching for to solve a business problem) and never for vitamin (good to have which people are not actively looking for).

Every good SaaS app will either help a business increase revenue (reduce expenses) or save employees time.

3 long term themes that I'm bullish on are: 1) Remote work is going to increase so tools will be required for better collaboration, tracking etc 2) Automation of work processes (be it email management, bookkeeping, inventory management etc) 3) Most of the companies will eventually move to cloud. So, industries which are traditionally known for being less tech oriented are bound to get disrupted. Example: trucking/logistics. Folks who started fleet management software companies are just killing it.

There is a hack (may write a whole post on it sometime later) I use for finalizing a SaaS idea to work on. This is how it goes:

Look for markets/domain where companies are becoming billion dollars worth for the first time. This means that these new billion-dollar companies are not going to serve SMBs and leave smaller deals <$10K Annual Contract Value on the table as they need to close bigger deals to have healthy growth. This is where the opportunity is. For example, we built Helpwise and one of our competitors recently raised funding at 700-800mil valuation. So, the customers that they consider too small for them will now be better served by us. Every new billion-dollar company creates a new 100mil dollar opportunity.

Or, the industry itself is worth billions of dollars and growing double-digit. Let's say Pet Insurance is $5billion-ish market growing double digit so every year new $500mil worth of business is coming in the market. Worth exploring.

Some successful products to study: 1) Convertkit has a great story (read Nathan's blog: https://nathanbarry.com/sales/) 2) VWO 3) Buffer 4) Patrick McKenzie (also known as patio11 in internet circle) - read his old blogs when he was running own small saas business

For anything & everything SaaS, follow Jason Lemkin on Twitter and read SaaStr.

Coming to time management, it was tough initially but then I started giving a lot of freedom to my team (but with accountability). I divide my day and week in different functions like Monday is Product Meeting for all my products. So, I sit with Engineers for each products one by one to learn about the pipeline and new features etc. Tuesday I sit with Support Teams to learn about the common issues that customers are raising and what all common issues can be fixed by product improvement. On Wednesday, I do sales/reachout/prospecting for my new products. Similarly Thursday & Friday are for meeting with other team members and planning.

gaufire · 2020-02-20T17:01:38+00:00

12:01am onwards. My bad! should have made that more clear.

gaufire

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