Saas Marketer - Fame hit £100k MRR in Sept.

£100k MRR

(100% bootstrapped and remote)

Sep14

Here are 7 things I learnt...

1️⃣ Teflon for tasks

👉 Paying invoices
👉 Sourcing candidates
👉 Running the inbound sales process

Are all things that I’ve done since day one.

But not anymore.

Andrew Wilkinson once said on a podcast interview that his secret to success was that he’s lazy, he’s like teflon for tasks, they slip off him.

My end of year goal is to be completely removed from day to day operations.

Free-ing myself up to focus on higher leverage tasks: process innovation and talent development.

2️⃣ Managee’s become managers

Employee churn is a silent killer.

You lose morale, client relationships and process knowledge with each lost employee.

For some reason, we haven’t had any significant employee churn since starting Fame, and to keep it this way we need to decentralise management.

In other words: your managee’s, need to become managers.
And you need to train them.

Here’s what I’ve found to be the managerial secret: understand what the employees want, and then give it to them.

E.g. if a new team member wants to be flexible with their family commitment, allow this (along as their work is getting done)

Or if a new team member wants to learn something from another part of the business, allow this (along as the work in their primary getting done by themselves or someone else they have trained.)

In short make the deal so good, they can’t leave.

3️⃣ Capture vs create demand

Yes I hear you demand gen clones: creating demand is a thing.

Capturing demand can get you to £1m ARR, but £10m? Maybe not.

It’s time to start creating demand.

How?

Create and distribute content that educates ideal customers about the problems that your product/services solves.

Simple… but making the content good enough so that your ideal customers actually want to consume it? Not easy.

4️⃣ Process creators versus process implementors

Fame, just like any business, is a collection of processes.

Processes need to be created, and processes need to be implemented.

Typically, process creators are more expensive to employ than process implementors.

E.g. creating an outbound sales process for a Series A stage B2B SaaS business is a HARD task, and will need to be created by someone who has experience, and is expensive.

However, if you or someone in your team creates the process, you can hire someone cheaper (but still good) to implement this process.

For example, I’ve run 2-300 inbound sales calls whilst creating the inbound sales process for Fame, so is now fully tested/documented so I can now hire a process implementor to execute.

For each role you hire for, know the difference, and assess your candidates appropriately.

5️⃣ Non-essential costs

We still don’t pay for Slack, Trello or Freshdesk (despite nearly every team member using them every day).

Why?

Because doing so would mean that in some way, that cost would need to be passed onto our wonderful clients.

And passing on cost to a client, to pay for something that we don’t think directly increases their happiness, doesn’t sit right with us.

After all, our primary value is: Client Client Client.

Choices like this enable us to increase the “consumer surplus” or the “brand” value of our service: the difference between what a client pays, and what they get.

This “goodwill” seems to find its way back to us in the form of inbound demand that we cannot attribute (reducing customer acquisition cost), until we’re told “Oh yes, someone mentioned that you were good in a Slack community I’m part of.

6️⃣ Don’t fuck up the momentum

Peter Thiel famous told the Airbnb founders to not fuck up the culture.

But what he I think he really meant was: don’t fuck up the momentum.

Past product market fit, a business starts the transition from the jet ski to a cruise ship.

Ops, finance and hiring becomes more important.

You, as a founder need to ensure the business keep going in the same direction, and you need to make this crystal clear to your team and your clients.

You also need to keep growing at all costs, which may mean reducing profitability in the short term.

Changing direction, or a slow down in growth, confuses and demoralises. Which could lead to the dreaded employee churn.

7️⃣ A culture of documentation

Working procedures are only as valuable as their “last updated” date.

If someone stumbles when moving through a process, updating the documentation to clarify, will save time and frustration for every future execution.

This compounds up to the point where you are your team execute significantly faster and cheaper than all competitors.

Enabling you greater profitability or even better: to reduce prices to speed up growth.

Hope that helps 🤓

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Saas Marketer - Fame hit £100k MRR in Sept.

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