How I Make $40,000/month with my SaaS (All Secrets Revealed!)

so welcome to this video in today's video I'm going to share how I make forty thousand dollars a month with my SAS product so we'll discuss how I grew my SAS product called upvote a feedback software product for the B2B SAS space to over forty thousand dollars a monthly recurring Revenue in just three years so we'll talk about how we made one thousand dollars in pre-sales during the MVP stage how we acquired the first 100 customers how we grew to ten thousand dollars mrr and how we scaled beyond that to now forty thousand dollars a monthly current Revenue so a little bit about me I'm Mike a Serial entrepreneur mainly building software products so I scaled my previous product vindi a home improvement Marketplace to over a million dollars in ARR that's annual recurring revenue and I'm now building and scaling up voting I'm also the founder and initiator of the zero to SAS community and later this month I actually launched a full-on course on building and scaling your SAS to seven figures go grab that limited deal it's now 99 we'll raise it to 149 dollars soon so grab that deal but yeah let's dive into the fun Port now so how I make forty thousand dollars per month with my SAS product so the first thing I wanted to discuss is how we made one thousand dollars in pre-sales during the MVP stage so when I started working in uploading in 2018 the first thing I did was validating the product's idea and why is this important and I can stress this enough this is really really important well billing my previous products and failing to meet product Market fit so it means when the product finds the Right audience that is actually willing to spend their money I learned my biggest lesson ever validation is key you know without validating you're going to waste your money your time and your energy so it all starts with validation now how did we do that specifically it was actually very simple so we registered our domain name of voted.com we used a service for crafting a landing page so you can use WordPress card Squarespace whatever we created visuals and texts to explain the products as purpose so we highlighted pain points and address the problem or product or solution with solving and we embedded a sign up form you can use email octopus or any email service for that so this was actually the exact landing page we used back in 2018 was a very simple landing page with just a logo I promise so instant feedback instantly better products and a signup form and the visual of the product now bear in mind the product wasn't billed yet so this was just a design of the future product The Next Step would be to get customers to your landing page to sign up in the first place we did that by spreading the word so in this phase we needed potential customers to sign up if they were interested in a product we were building so we started promoting on beta launch sites so for example battlelist.com this is our exact launch back in 2018 we also joined Facebook groups and participated actively so one group that worked very well in particular was this SAS growth hacks group so this is a group with Founders CEOs and professionals and SAS so you know we started participating in conversations even sharing our journey and just connecting and building relationships basically we also started posting on LinkedIn Twitter Instagram basically every social media channel out there basically what you need to do in this stage is get your MVP in front of your desired targeted audience and now before you do that let me share another valuable lesson I learned the hard way make your target audience as small as possible so basically test your solution to a small audience and expand later on I always like to say dream big start small for example if you were to build a CRM for Home Improvement professionals start with targeting painters first so firstly create a CRM that works for painter specifically and once they see the value and start paying for your product you can expand to other professionals like gardeners roofers Etc so don't make the mistake of building a product for everyone start small this is very important can't stress it enough after we validated the idea and acquired hundreds of signups from interested people we started talking to those people so in this phase it's important to uncover their true wants and needs so here's the thing once you start building your product you think you have an idea of their wants and needs but once you start talking to your customers actually talking to them I'll guarantee you you will uncover their real pain points and Flash news they will be different so you know ask them questions to uncover their real core problems or the features they're most likely willing to pay for you start roadmapping this so next after you find validation from potential customers you can start building the actual product and by building the product I mean in very slim and small version a version one now in our case after talking to potential customers we uncovered they needed two things specifically a simple and straightforward way of collecting feedback and this resulted in building a feedback board so this is actually an image of our current feedback board but back in the days of building version one we just had a list of feedback and a submit form we didn't have you know filters search functionality just strip it down to a small and slim version just to test the next phase of validating the second thing they wanted was a way to structure this feedback so this resulted in building a simple CRM in which they could filter and structure feedback now the first version of our CRM was very ugly which is actually a good thing if I learned one thing you just have to ship and go you can always refine later on so this was actually our CRM design very ugly but it worked from here you have a working product with some active customers now we gave away the product for free for one year in exchange for testing and providing feedback to a hundred customers and this was actually very very valuable because this way we could easily determine what to build next and this actually resulted in customers signing up and paying for the product during this private data period because the product became too good not to pay for this resulted in the first thousand mrr before we actually launched publicly so lessons learned during the stage validate your idea launch as soon as possible on board better users actively involved them by you know asking for feedback and uncovering their real pain points talking to them create a payment option early on is a very underrated one as well because you know making it possible to upgrade and pay you would be surprised how many customers actually want to pay you know for example to support you but also to just skip the better period and have the product in its full potential so next up how we acquired the first 100 customers so after the better period we grew to five thousand dollars in monthly recurring Revenue within just a couple of months now how do we do that firstly we launched the product publicly so again it's just a matter of bringing it in front of your desired target audience and I do want to mention what worked for us doesn't necessarily have to work for you but you know we did a launch on product hunt if you're a SAS product or a tech savvy product this is definitely something you should consider because yeah this is definitely a platform where tech savvy entrepreneurs and users can be found now one thing we did as well was launching in Facebook groups so I talked about joining these groups earlier on during the MVP stage and building the first version and one benefit of joining early on is that the people in the groups are now trusting you your familiar face so when you launch your product they will even root for you and they will definitely help you launch in a more successful way so we emailed potential customers as well all the time in private beta we left the signup form open on our website and you know this resulted in a couple of hundred signups we could email after the launch we also launched on social media channels of course and all of this lab to acquire the first 100 customers so the next stage how we grew to ten thousand dollars in mrr the first real Revenue milestone firstly along the way we tested different acquisition channels so we tested ads on Google we tested paid ads on Facebook and Instagram we did promoted tweets LinkedIn ads and a couple of advertising and sponsorships particularly the number one thing I learned test the channel measure the results the conversion rates and either double down or strip so by doing so this resulted in us focusing on mainly three things that worked So Paid ads in Google is specifically targeting unhappy customers over competitors so we created these alternative to ads which targeted unhappy customers of from our competitors they will search in Google and click on our ad and make the switch now this is a good example if you Google Salesforce Alternatives you get ads by monday.com and funnel.io and a couple of more software products that are trying to convince you to switch to their product you see these alternative two ads all over the place for basically every software product out there we did the same for our product to convince unhappy customers of our competitors to switch to a voting we also created comparison Pages for competitors on our website and you'll both be targeting unhappy customers with those pages but also customers that are in the discovery phase of buying software so for example if you go to uploaded.com you scroll down to our footer and you click on compare you see all of these comparison Pages we created for basically our main competitors so if you click on one we'll immediately compare the pricing points and you know features stuff like that and at the end you can switch to our product if you're willing to leave the current software you're using so yeah another lesson I learned acquire early tangible growth by focusing on the current market and your competitors it's really just an easy win a couple of winning strategies as well content creation so create valuable blog posts covering questions and problems potential customers have in the space and once you rank organically in Google with those articles people click through read your article and hopefully sign up don't forget to add a call to action so if you go to a blog post you read and at the end of the blog post you get this call to action that makes you sign up for a product hop on podcasts and interviews is something we did as well so share the journey even if it's early growth and the numbers feel small there are tons of podcasts out there that are willing to share your story so don't be afraid to get the word out websites like starterstory.com will publish interviews with you which also result in backlinks to your site which enhance your content SEO strategy so you know even early on during the MVP stage I hopped on podcasts I did interviews sharing specifically our MVP learnings and lessons it's highly beneficial now how do we scale beyond that to now forty thousand dollars mrr after the initial growth it's mainly a matter of doubling down on what works meaning if you're now putting in a thousand dollars in Google ads raise it to 2 000 if you're doing SEO and you'll start ranking higher and higher Outsource your blog content to copywriters and instead of publishing one article a week you'll now be able to publish four you can also start leveraging your brand all that content and all of your media efforts will pay off you'll start to gain Authority in the space you can leverage this by publishing free info products like courses ebooks Etc to attract even more people to your product now SAS specific there are a couple of winning strategies I wanted to share that quickly brought real Revenue growth billing Integrations is one so people want to use and incorporate your software into their existing workflow this is really good to understand so creating Integrations for example for zapier intercom slack will make sure that well firstly they can easily onboard your software into their existing workflow and thus you'll see a higher trial to paid conversion rate but a big plus you'll get discovered through these Integrations marketplaces by new potential customers so for example we build this intercom integration now once a user starts looking for feedback in intercom's Marketplace upload is one of the Integrations that pulls up once they start using this integration they have to become a customer and a vote as well resulting in new customers signing up for a product listening to customers is actually my number one and favorite hack why well SAS is an iteration game keep that in mind SAS is an iteration game what this means is that you have to develop a flywheel and it basically looks like this you talk to customers you discover the pain points you build new features based on that feedback you promote the product acquire new prospects you talk to customers again discover the pain points build new features this is basically a never-ending Circle that will make sure that you're building the right things for your customers you spend your money on the right things you stay on top of new demands and needs you spot Trends early on you can endlessly promote your product because each new feature is basically a new launch opportunity so for example an integration like intercom makes it able to acquire a completely new target audience now what about the rest of course this is just growth in a nutshell there are more things to cover like legal stuff working with budget hiring for example employees and contractors this is actually something I teach in my course that will launch later this month like I said earlier in this video Zero to SAS and you can grab the limited deal for 99 you'll get lifetime access to the course and the community so this is what you'll get you'll get the course you get the community and all of the resources available will raise the pricing to 149 soon so go grab that deal Link in the description and yeah I hope this video was valuable to you this is how we scaled forty thousand dollars in monthly recurring Revenue if you have any questions make sure to leave a comment subscribe for new videos and with that being said until next time

Channel: Mike Strives

Views: 32,106

Keywords: SaaS, Software-as-a-Service, saas growth hacking, saas growth marketing, saas growth strategy, software marketing, successful saas, saas ideas, saas ideas 2023, saas business idea, what is saas, how to make money with saas, make money with saas, make money with software, monthly recurring revenue, mike strives, saas course, learn saas

Id: kfo76tODdZU

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023