Out of the hundreds of hours I spent consuming online content, these are some of the best pieces of content for SaaS (Software as a Service). I found these to be the best ROI for my time.

Watching Others For Learning

Watching tons of examples seems like a good way to learn and let it influence my thinking. If I watch someone make decisions or hear how they made it, it’ll influence how I act in similar situations. These resources expose me to a lot of products and most of the time I didn’t even know people pay for something like this. They help open my mind and discover unknown unknowns.

B2B SaaS Is The Way To Go

Because it’s practical, predictable and that’s where the money is. For a $10k MRR, I would rather manage 10 customers paying me $1k than 1k customers paying $10. Closing 10 business customers seems more approachable to me than convincing 1000 people to sign up through marketing. I understand the value of inbound but it’s a more long term play. For the short term, getting to $1M valuation, I’m going to rely on outbound sales.

Short Term Goal

Let’s work backwards from my goal of $1M. That’ll need a product doing $240k in yearly revenue or $20k per month. If I’m selling my product for $1k per month, I’ll need to convince 20 businesses to buy it. Can I do it in a year? I think so. Getting to $1M in 1 year seems much more palatable once I break it down this way. My eventual goal is to have a $100M exit but everyone starts somewhere, right?

Getting Ideas for SaaS

After looking at countless examples, I’m convinced I don’t need to invent the next sliced cheese to win. Innovation isn’t really practical or required, it’s okay to pick an already solved problem. I’m confident that cloning an existing product will get me to $20k MRR. This is about cloning the general idea, it will of course have differing features. These were useful in shaping my opinion:

Cold OutReach

Realization #1 - There are not just 1k-2k but hundreds of thousands of businesses out there worth targeting. Realization #2 - We can buy datasets with a list of all these businesses and filter them based on different variables. Apollo, ZoomInfo, Outreach, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc all allow doing this. There are companies that’ll make us a custom lead list. There’s even companies like Leadium which do the outreach for us and charge based on the number of sales calls they set.

Serverless and Keeping it Simple

Vercel, PlanetScale, UpStash, Axiom and Clerk cover most of the common use cases and are scalable. Setting all this up seems painful for the first time but I’m expecting it to take 15 minutes next time onwards. Vendor lock-in isn’t really my concern right now, shipping the product is. It’s a lot of setup but a simpler architecture since it’s mostly CRUD serverless functions with MySQL. If there’s a need for something faster, I’ll try DynamoDB. If async processing is needed, I’ll use Event Bridge or Step Functions.

Beautiful UI

The internet has beautifully crafted UI components that will save hundreds of hours on my end. This has been an amazing discovery for me and I’m excited to use shadcn in my next project.

Sales

I’ve seen many indie creators build a product in public, share updates on Twitter and keep hoping the customers would appear out of nowhere. I would rather take the situation in my hands and actively seek out customers with cold outreach. Apart from that, outbound sales seems to be the dominant strategy in B2B. I’m convinced that I’ll be getting all of my first 50 customers through cold outreach and sales. As a technical founder, I know little about sales, which is why I decided to catch up using books.

  • Founding Sales - Know enough sales to get the first 50 customers
  • $100M Offers - Structure offers to make them appealing
  • $100M Leads - Because I trust the author will have something useful in it
  • Sales Acceleration Formula - Watched a one hour talk from the author and was genuinely impressed by his skill
  • Traction - Rob Walling recommended this and I trust him
  • Best Sales Training on the Internet - Found it useful for understanding the psychology behind buyers in a sale.

Other Resources

  • How To Get Rich - Book - Sam Parr recommended this on My First Million Podcast and I trust him
  • The SaaS Playbook - Book - Rob Walling is the author and he said this is a 250 page version of all his learnings throughout the years
  • Hard Knock SaaS - Course - Creator bootstrapped to 8 figures in ARR and made this super tactical and practical course. My only complaint is that it’s too short, would have loved to see more content from him.
  • SaaS Wiz Masterclass - Course - Creator bootstrapped a 7 figure portfolio of SaaS products. Heavy focus on B2C but I’m more interested in B2B. Disagree with some opinions but lots of practical advice in there. TLDR; hire offshore devs, clone successful products with a twist, profit.

Long Term Goal

Just like there is a liquid market for buying and flipping real estate, there’s a similar market for SaaS but limited to the bigger companies. The creation of Acquire.com has made the <$10M category much more liquid now. Liquid enough to consider flipping SaaS businesses. Real estate can go 2x or 3x in a flip but SaaS can go 10x in a flip. In the future I imagine having a portfolio of businesses which are mostly managed by CEOs. I’ll only be involved in the formation and larger strategic decisions. I imagine keeping most of my day open for family, travelling and hobbies. Nick Huber and Andrew Wilkinson are the perfect examples of my target lifestyle.