How to Start a SaaS Business (Find the Pain)

About this video

Dan outlines four ways he has found pains worth solving with a SaaS product, a process he says he has used across five companies, the last three of which he exited. One, spreadsheets: ask people to show the spreadsheets they use to run a workflow, which reveals throughput opportunities — though some use spreadsheets only because they are cheap — illustrated by his friend Laura building Meet Edgar from a social-media scheduling spreadsheet she taught clients to use. Two, your own pain: Spheric, started when he was 24, came from wanting to work with world-class technical people; Flowtown in 2009 from his home-builder brother doubting customers were on social media; and Clarity.fm from wanting to be more available to entrepreneurs. Solving your own pain gives domain expertise and the customer’s voice. Three, custom solutions: dev shops and consultants have already been paid to build code for five or six customers that could be extracted and brought to market as a product. Four, trends: ride a growing industry trend and build the modern version of existing tools for it, noting an industry growing 25% per year doubles every three years and positions you for acquisition.

Key takeaways

• Look at customers’ spreadsheets — manual workflow trackers often signal a SaaS opportunity, as with Laura’s Meet Edgar
• Solve your own pain to gain domain expertise: Dan cites Spheric, Flowtown (2009) and Clarity.fm as companies born from his own frustrations
• Mine custom solutions: dev shops have already-built codebases with reference customers that can be extracted and productised as SaaS
• Draft behind a trend — building tools for a fast-growing new industry lets its growth carry you and makes you an acquisition target for incumbents
• Beware false signals: a spreadsheet may exist only because the user is cheap and a solution already exists, not because a new product is needed

Episode details: published March 9, 2020 · 12:52 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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