Building a SaaS business from $0 to $2k MRR #1

What product are we going to sell and how do we start?

BowTiedDingo

Jul 08, 2021

BowTiedDingo Business Monthly Update

Keeping a Promise

I made a promise in a previous post, and now I’m fulfilling it.

Back in a post about my upload schedule, I promised a monthly update showing exactly how I would go about building a profitable business with zero experience. I’ve spent the past week organising my thoughts on this project, and actioning the plan I ended up with.

I am happy to say as of 2 weeks of work, the project is up and running, already earning money, and it is time I keep the promise to document the process. Welcome to Issue #1 of Building a SaaS Business Online.

Concept of Project

So let's talk about what this is going to entail. Our goal will be to build an online business that is earning USD$2000 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) - This meaning total subscriptions to the software equal monthly income of $2000. This project will use the skills that are talked about in other substack posts for cold outreach, product demos, and sales.

While doing this there are a number of constraints that I want to keep within.

Constraints:

Low investment:

This will be less than $100/month

Can be automated / semi automated:

less than 3 hours of work per week

What is White Label SaaS

A white-label product is a product or service produced by one company that other companies rebrand to make it appear as if they had made it. The name derives from the image of a white label on the packaging that can be filled in with the marketer's trade dress

Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.

Putting these together, essentially we are going to find a SaaS product we are able to put our own logo on and sell as our own.

The Plan

There is only a certain amount of information on the exact product I am selling that I can give without completely doxing myself, so I will speak in hypothetical terms when it comes to which software I am selling for this project. That being said I have included a number of example White Label SaaS programs at the end of this post for you to go through and choose. All of the actions we take will be universal to any of them, as long as you change the wording to fit your prospects and offering.

Each month I am going to give an update on the number of emails and calls I have made, number of sales, current earnings, templates and scripts I am using, etc.

This will continue until we reach our goal.

Current Status

This post is a top line overview, not a lot of details on exactly how things are done. I will point you in the right direction with enough detail that you should be able to figure it out. If you want more specific information you can leave a comment asking your questions on this post and I will be happy to answer. The main focus will be moving forwards giving specific details on how I scale this project.

Tech Stack

What tools have I used so far?

Namecheap.com ($7/year for domain)
Webflow ($12/month for landing page)
Google workspace ($12/month for 2 emails (One for sales one for customer service))
Stripe (free)
LinkedIn (free)
Canva (free)

That is it, keeping things as simple as possible for as long as possible. Only add more tools when it financially makes sense and you honestly need them to scale your business.

Steps Taken In Order

Choose your product - A google search and some research will help with this, I have also given a list of options you could use or use as inspiration below.
Once you have a product choose a domain name and register it. Get one where the .com is available. I used www.namecheap.com
Sign up for the white label program, sign up for your payment platform (or your software provider might handle payments), and connect them together.
Create your logo. I used www.canva.com
Create your landing page. I used www.webflow.com and a free template
Connect your website to domain name (Namecheap and webflow have tutorials)
Connect landing page to software (Your software provider should have details on how to do this)
Start outreach.

Email Template

So at this point I’ve sent 1000 emails and am already profitable, how? Well actually that is the beauty of this, I didn’t put a lot of effort into the email or the sales yet, I wrote this very simple email that is objectively bad, but it worked because I reached out to people who could honestly use the product I am selling. It also helps that the product is CHEAP, this will limit my earning abilities long term, but makes the sales easier. I am not recommending a low cost product, simply stating why I had direct sign ups instead of longer sales processes.

Email that was sent:

Hi XXXX,

This is (My Name) from (Company). We are a (Type of software) software that helps (Their job title) (What problem we solve and a short example of how).

If that sounds interesting you can jump in and grab a free trial at (Website) to see for yourself how easily you can (Do the thing we said we solve).

Or we can jump on a quick call and discuss how (Company) is able to make your life easier, and save you time (They do their job requirement that we help with).

Let me know.

Best,

Finding Leads

So we have our product set-up, a landing page ready, payment processing ready, and a cold email template to send out, but who do we find people to sell to and get their contact details?

First you need to figure out who your ideal customer is. An example from the list of products included below is a Social Media Management Software.

What do you solve? You make managing social media for businesses faster and easier. Who needs this? Social Media agencies, and brands who maintain social media.

This leads us to the job titles:

Social Media Manager
Account Manager (only relevant for agencies)
Marketing Manager
CMO
Social Media Specialist
CEO/Founder/Director (For agencies again)

These are the people you want to be targeting for that example.

Run a search on linkedin (Sales Navigator makes this easier) and you will find tens of thousands of people who fit your criteria.

To find their contact information you can do it manually, though this will take longer. I use a tool for this, like apollo:

www.apollo.io

Go through and save your leads names and emails into google sheets, a CRM if you want to set one up at this point, or your spreadsheet software of choice.

Email each of them one by one (Or set up a email campaign with another tool to do it automatically)

Plan For July

Moving forward this month the plan is to improve the landing page, write better email templates to send, and create a more structured outreach approach.

Improve Landing Page:

Currently there are no product screenshots, no videos, nothing that gives an idea of the platform. This is the first priority, improve the landing page to convert when leads find their way to it.

Improve outreach:

Email Templates: Currently I am using a very simple email that was written quickly for this proof of concept. It worked but with bad performance. Using the concepts written about in the cold email primer I will be creating cold email campaigns for our target audience.
Structured Outreach: Once the emails are set, I will work on building a prospecting list, sales cadences (Sequence of steps including emailing, calling, and social media outreach), and demo structure for the product.

List of example white label programs

Links either directly to the program, or lists of programs.

Recommended Tools:

Apollo.io - We are happy to say we’re partnered with Apollo! This is a tool we personally pay for a subscription to and use in every sales role. Search, engage and convert over 250 million contacts at over 60 million companies with Apollo’s sales intelligence and engagement platform.

Hypefury - Manage your Twitter like a professional! Start your personal brand and earn online.

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