Saas Marketer - 0-$1m ARR in 2.5 years, bootstrapped.

0-$1m ARR in 2.5 years, bootstrapped.

📈

Jun15

Here are 7 learnings 👇

1️⃣ The role of the founder

Your business is just a collection of deals.

You have deals with suppliers, freelancers, employees and of course: customers.

Your role is simply to ensure that every one of these groups of people is getting a good deal.

Take employees for example…

👉 No one has ever been asked to work late
👉 We have private healthcare
👉 We are 100% remote
👉 We have minimal meetings

The result?

No employees have left in 2.5 years.

It seems like the deal is good.

2️⃣ You will f*ck up

We have f*cked up on multiple clients.

These even ended up in legal proceedings.

When you do enough volume, it will happen.

You just need to learn how to improve so they happen less often.

3️⃣ The tennis court

Once your initial demand problem is solved… you will then develop a delivery problem.Especially if you are a people business.

You need to watch the scene from The Founder, where the McDonalds brothers are orchestrating their food delivery system on a tennis court dived up with chalk lines.

The link to the video is in the comments of this Linkedin Post.

This is the focus and obsession you need to build to solve your delivery problem.

4️⃣ On getting customers

As soon as you get your first one… do everything you can to make them happy.

Yep, even lose money.

Don’t get greedy.

You don’t deserve customers if you can’t make them happy.

5️⃣ On getting more customers

Start with JUST two channels:

👉 Word of mouth and referrals driven by your work on Step 4️⃣ above
👉 One other that you as the founder are responsible for getting to work

Then ONLY once both of these are working, you move on to the next channel, stacking them on top of each other over time.

6️⃣ Ruthlessly strip unnecessary costs

Once you have something that is making customers happy: ruthlessly strip costs from anything that isn’t directly tied to what is making customers happy.

Jeff Bezos gets this: Amazon is better AND cheaper.

If you can be better AND cheaper than your competitors, you will grow much faster.

We don’t pay for Slack, Trello, trade shows or anything else that doesn't directly increase client happiness.

7️⃣ Firing people can be kind

It’s cute to believe in people that are struggling, keeping them on too long… but ultimately it isn’t good for them, you or the business.

The faster you break up and help them find a new and better-suited role, the better off everyone will be.

Hope this helps…

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Saas Marketer - 0-$1m ARR in 2.5 years, bootstrapped.

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