Discover the best b2b saas sales model for building services with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

three years ago i started my own sas company sas stands for software as a service like slack or dropbox now i haven't built anything close to what they've built but i've been able to scale this business to almost 100 000 a month consistently and get to 50 000 in monthly recurring revenue it's by far been the hardest thing i've done in my career and this business almost made me go bankrupt in this video i'll share with you the four-step formula i used to reach this level and how i built this software without even writing a single line of code and by the way i'm no expert on this topic i've only been in the game for a short period of time but i have made some significant progress with my company so hopefully my story can help you out with whatever you're trying to build so first let me show you what i built and the four stages that i follow to get to this level this is my app viral vault what we've created here is the all-in-one toolkit for a beginner looking to start their own online store every single day we provide two new products with everything you would need to go out there and sell them on your own store along with a dedicated community where me and my team of coaches answer everybody's questions but this video is not to sell you my software is to tell you exactly how i built it so here are the four stages i followed to get to this level it starts with research then the testing and mvp stage then building out the software finally the scaling phase now there are a ton of parts that go into each of these phases and i'm going to break it down as simple as possible by telling you my personal story on how i went through each of these let's get started with phase number one and i'll tell you exactly how i researched the market and found this golden opportunity so before doing anything else the first step is to find a problem this will make the entire process so much easier and thankfully there are thousands of problems that you can solve the best way to start this process is by picking a niche i think this is so much better than trying to solve some broad massive problem especially considering you probably don't have a lot of money or a big team to approach those type of problems i decided to build something in the e-commerce niche specifically for people who want to do shopify dropshipping because i was running my own drop shipping store at the time i was fully immersed in this community i was in pretty much every facebook group you could imagine i was in a bunch of discord group chats i was watching almost every youtube video that i could find and since i was doing this it made it so much easier to spot all the problems that i could potentially solve so with whatever niche you decide to go into make sure you are fully immersed in that space and you're going to be seeing opportunities left and right the way i actually stumbled upon the idea for viral vault was simply asking people in this community what problems they had at the time my youtube channel had around 20 000 subscribers so i had a few people in my comments and in my dms and i would constantly ask them what's the biggest struggle they have with creating their own shopify store and after asking literally hundreds of people the most common issues i found were that people were struggling to find products and they had no idea what to do with the products they found from other research softwares so at the time me and a business partner of mine decided to go all in to build the all-in-one toolkit to help people find products and more importantly start their own store with those products so the one problem that we decided to focus on solving was creating the easiest way for a beginner to start their own shopify store and that is where everything began unfortunately ideas are worthless without execution so here's exactly how i built the first version of my product without spending any money stage 2 is all about figuring out the cheapest and simplest way to build out a basic version of your idea the goal of this is to validate your idea without spending a ton of money or in my case not spending any money at all skipping this step can be extremely costly so make sure you do it if you don't you could end up spending months and thousands of dollars building something that nobody even really wants so what i did was actually use clickfunnels to build a basic version of this app let me show you guys what i created so as you can see this first version back in october 31st of 2018 was not looking that hot we were providing products every single day as you can see here but it was kind of all over the place so we had everything separated we had the descriptions in their own tab we had the video ads in their own tab it's really a mess when i look back on it but it kind of got us started and it didn't cost me any money to build this clickfunnels is not made to build any type of apps but somehow i made it work and i think that should be the goal in this phase is get creative think outside of the box and figure out how to do this without spending the bag so as you can see the first version of my app was pretty horrible but it allowed me to test it in the market and see if anybody was interested in buying so i used my youtube channel which was much smaller at the time a bunch of facebook groups and my instagram to do the first launch of this app if you know you could even call it an app at that time and sure enough on the first launch i was able to get over a hundred people to join and this pretty much validated my idea overnight which made me much more confident to build something better over the next couple months i kept improving what we had on click funnels and promoting it to my audience so that i could raise money to develop a much better version of the app and after six months my team and i had raised around 30 000 from the revenue we generated from this business i was super hyped i was ready to build this thing with the money we had collected and then my business partner at the time decided to blow up the product and run off with the 30k we had generated but that's a story for another time unfortunately that situation left me back at square one though i was extremely motivated to continue building it so i kept pushing forward with the money i had made from my shopify store and my youtube channel and this ended up being the most challenging part of my entrepreneurial journey thus far so let's talk about how i built the app when it comes to building the real version of your software there are a couple ways to do it you can learn to code yourself which i don't really recommend unless you have a real passion for that you can actually partner with a developer 5050 where you handle all the marketing operations and business side where they focus strictly on development this is a decent idea but you're giving up 50 of your company so that's up to you or the last option which is what i did is simply hiring a development team now this isn't a cheap option the other two options are much better if you're very low on cash flow but this worked the best for me thankfully i had a friend who referred me to an amazing team based out of russia who actually had a project manager in los angeles where i was living at the time this was the perfect fit because i was able to get cheaper work than if i had hired developers in the us but i was still able to get a very high level of support and development so we went straight to work i created a mock-up of what i wanted on photoshop and sent it over to them you can do this as well or simply hire somebody to help you with this process i just really like photoshop i've been using it for years and then they quoted me on a price and we went straight into building this app and this is where things kind of got difficult for six months straight i was spending 10 20 30 000 a month to build this app and not getting anything in return because of what had happened with my partner all this money was coming out of my own pocket from the money i had earned over the last couple of years and i even paused my shopify store and youtube channel to focus on this full time this was without a doubt the most difficult time in my career so far even though i had validated this idea i was basically starting all over again but we made it through fast forward to july of 2019 this is a month i will always remember this was the month we had officially finished the first version of our app and it was finally ready to launch so i did a huge live stream event on my youtube channel eager to see a flood of new customers a life-changing amount of money and everything i ever dreamed of and it completely flopped in the span of 48 hours only 30 people had subscribed and i was in the hole over a hundred thousand dollars from the development process i panicked i was depressed stressed anxious pretty much every emotion you could imagine i felt it during that time but after everything me and my team went through to build this there's no way i could have given up on it so i just decided to figure that out here's exactly how i saved the business and scaled it to where we're at today to scale this business i tried everything i tried facebook ads youtube ads organic marketing with blogs email marketing everything you could imagine i tried it i spent tens of thousands of dollars in coaching from alex becker and a few others for the entire year of 2019 i was basically killing myself trying to make this work putting in 8 to 12 hours every single day and nothing was working at all i was literally spending thousands of dollars in ads in coaching and of course to pay my team of six employees and getting nothing back in return it was a really difficult time and at the end of the year i even tried to make a pivot by selling some type of high ticket mentorship program and selling my software on the back end i was losing my mind so i was ready to try anything to sell this product to no surprise this flopped as well fast forward a year later to july of 2020 and this business had pretty much ruined me financially every single month we were losing money and i had spent almost 300 000 of my own cash to try to make this work i even ended up moving out of los angeles and going back to florida at this point i had pretty much given up but i have to say thank you so much to my team for motivating me because they're really what got me through this and it was also at this point that i realized a very important lesson that you need to apply if you're going to launch your own sas company it's so much easier to do if you have some type of cash flow business or job that you can use to fund the project and your lifestyle i would never recommend to build something like this with your savings or the leftover cash you have on hand this is super dangerous as you can see by what happened to me so i went back to my roots and built a shopify store which actually is the brand i'm running still to this day over the last six months of 2020 i just put all my time and energy into that brand and was able to stack up a hefty amount of cash which made me confident to try my software one last time in december of 2020 my software was pretty much dead we had like three thousand dollars in recurring revenue with ten thousand dollars in expenses it was doing nothing except for burning a hole in my pocket but surprisingly enough this is when everything took off you know i realized i was trying to promote my software in so many different ways but i was neglecting the golden goose that i had all along my youtube channel all that it took to grow my software was making the best videos possible and providing as much value as i can to the world i figured if i did that people will naturally want to check out what i'm offering and maybe even subscribe if they like the product and since my shopify brand was starting to take off i had a bunch of ideas and content that i could make around that so that's exactly what i did over the last 10 months i've posted a new video every single friday and been able to grow my channel from 29 000 to almost 200 000 subscribers and this helped my software take off and i just want to say this thank you so much to anybody out there who has been supporting my channel it means the world to me you guys have absolutely changed my life and i wouldn't be where i'm at today without you to you watching this video your support means more to me than you even know so my piece of advice to anybody out there that's looking to start their own sas company is to build an audience and market your product organically it might not be the most scalable way but it's free your customers are going to be loyal and you know exactly what they want because those are your people you can serve them as best as possible which has been my main focus the whole time and as you can see it's starting to pay off in my opinion youtube is definitely the best way to do this you need to study your niche you need to post relevant highly valuable videos that actually help people and you should very subtly mention your software you shouldn't make your whole video about selling your product or people are gonna hate you i promise that's not the way to do it make good videos drop value and people will show love to whatever you're selling we've helped thousands of people start their own store over the last couple years and things are just getting started this is my number one passion and i'm gonna keep doing this for as long as i can it means more to me than any amount of money we could ever make which is why i sacrificed so much to build this product when i could have easily pivoted to anything else a couple years ago so based on our current numbers my business is valued anywhere from 2.5 to 3 million dollars if i wanted to sell it tomorrow but instead of selling it i'm going to keep improving this because i truly love what we built i truly love my team and i get super excited every time we get a testimonial sas is not easy but i truly believe it is one of the most lucrative business models you can get into but just be prepared for quite the journey thanks for watching nothing better than having it all except having it all losing it all and getting it back again no writing on the wall but still i know how to read a room i don't need a casket when i die i need a tune