SaaS Founders

“Usually they're, like, done going about it alone. At this stage, they usually feel pretty lonely if they're around one to three million isolated, and they want a thinking partner, they need help, because usually their lives has become miserable, and overall, t…”

“It's very difficult for them to let go because they realize that they think that it's saying no, no, I'm not going to do this. And actually the reframe is we're not saying no, we're just saying not now. It's about sequencing, right?”

“Once they hit the 20, 30, 40,000 MRR, Life's good. They don't have to worry about the day to day as much, and you don't have that kind of like broke fire burning under them as much. So they kind of just limit themselves naturally for that, or they'll like natu…”

“The companies who are making money hand over fist and still have a like very backwards view of technology, some of those are the best ones to go after. They're the least imperative to get the timing exactly right, or they, they're not nearly as critical on the…”

“This is a micro trend that I think is going to accelerate this year is founders giving the keys to their friends, not completely quitting, like eight months after an accelerator that didn't work out, but I mean, it's just, I'm at 40,000,050 1,000,020 million, …”

“If you're pulled towards it, if you're intrinsically interested in doing it, do it. If you're not, don't. And I would say for SaaS founders, if you're not, absolutely don't, because you have to be so ingrained, engulfed, just like in it, in the culture of your…”

“There's no excuse. We all use the same LLMs. There is no excuse for you to not have an agent as good as the new kids.”

“I find almost every founder gets the ratio of enterprise to bolt on wrong, right?”

“I've worked at dozens of teams at this stage, and the founders, they're the best marketers. They know the company. They know the client. They know the customer. They know how everything works. They know what messages land broadly. Maybe it's not totally dialed…”

“The reason that I think that you shouldn't think too much about your marketing team at this point is because you're gonna make the wrong hires. You're gonna lose touch with your customer. You're gonna slow yourself down. You're gonna burn a lot of money. Let's…”

“I do think that when you get to about a million or two, it depends on a bunch of stuff, the type of business and all this stuff. I think this is when a founder can think about handing off one of those three. Marketing, sales, or product. Now, it's not delegati…”

“Going back to those people is going to be infinitely easier than trying to develop a new market and find a new kind of go to market that works for them.”

“If you're going to be a SaaS founder, don't build your audience, build your network. Because if you build a network of folks who have audiences, that's the killer play right there.”

“You know, it always works a roadmap presentation. It always works. Tell your top customers, and this works for prospects too. Hey, I'm coming to Dallas. I'd love to just show you what we're building over this year. I'd love to show you and get your feedback. I…”

“There are anomalies where that can happen, but for most of the founders that are watching the show that might feel they're struggling, it is user by user, and you really do want to be on the phone. If you're not picking up the phone, trying to get your users I…”

“And what I found out, and the lesson that I've now learned, is you don't need as many users as what you think you need to get a big valuation.”

“So the third thing that you should, for the most part, never do, is build a second product because your first one has stopped growing.”

“The biggest mistake I see from like, Two-ish million to ten million that founders make is they over-diversify. They cross a couple million in revenue. They finally have something. It's more than beer money. It's real. And they're like, okay, well, we're strong…”

“Predominantly what brings people to this, like we got to solve this, you know, scalable customer sort of growth or, you know, acquisition is they think it's marketing. They think, oh, we need more traffic to this website. We need to find out where people are. …”

“I think a lot of people, not a lot of people, but some people are going to get out competed by this low hanging fruit. But the flip side is like you say, The low hanging fruit isn't in itself a moat.”

“I feel like not every SaaS app itself needs or can use AI inside of it as a feature. But I do think every SaaS company or every SaaS founder could be using it internally pretty much.”

“I think that you really don't need to worry about this, particularly on your way to 10 K in MRR. I think it's much like all other aspects of building a startup. You need to sort of create good problems. And I would turn my attention to this personally, probabl…”

“And the reality is that as a SaaS founder, no matter what people say, you don't have that balance because you have to focus because it's a short life cycle. And in order to scale to the level, To see the outcome you need to be hustling.”

“As a founder, I think you should give up free at the, you should try to never give it up no matter what the team wants. Cause your product always gets clunky when you do.”

“If you're a SaaS company and you have to keep on your contractors or your development team a little longer, like really expect to keep them on through the acquisition and not like cut them before thinking everything's going to go smoothly.”

“Splinter off a part of your product that you can sell on lifetime deals. You can sell on one-time deals, and then put people into an upsell funnel to send them the main product.”

“One, if you can recruit people better than you should still be the CEO, and two, I think you have to have a curious mind.”

“We see that most founders don't know why people are canceling. They're more focused around the product onboarding, which is totally understandable.”

“So the biggest downside I see versus the old days is folks stick with two junior team for too long.”

“What I'm seeing in the SaaS space is that founders tend to be tech savvy, but not business savvy, and that's not a slight against any founders. It's just the way founders in this space are, right? So SaaS founders are very good at identifying a need in the mar…”

“In terms of other SaaS founders growing their sasses, I feel like a lot of them will spend an absolute ton of time making these giant support articles and all these videos when you guys could just package this up in a course and use that as your front end offe…”

“You have to be the first VP of sales. For the simple reason that if you, first of all, well, two simple reasons. One, you can't attract anybody good when you're that early. A VP of sales wants to make money and want to make a lot of money in their stock, but t…”

“My recommendation is that the founding team, whether that's If the engineer is the sort of CEO person, the partner, sell about a million dollars worth of product before you go out and sell and hire your first or second salesperson. You want to get to about a m…”

“While operationally that may be a good time to sell, that's when I sold it, basically a million a month in revenue, it's the worst time to sell. So never sell at that point unless it's twice the maximum amount of money you would ever want.”