The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS by Clifford Oravec

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

• The stone cold truth of the matter is that most of the people pandering this advice are only doing so to build up their "guru" status.
• There is complexity in simple things.
• Building and running a SaaS business has nothing to do with your ability to write code.
• Code is the least important thing about a SaaS business.
• A business's software serves one purpose and one purpose only: To make the business money.
• Instead of coding, the vast majority of your time is going to be spent marketing, selling, optimizing funnels, and providing support. Those are the things that get (and keep) customers. Those are the things that you do when you run a business. Not writing code.
• First off, you should know that your idea probably sucks. The reason your idea probably sucks is because it's your idea.
• Your idea is only worth something if other people care about it.
• Getting your message right is perhaps one of the most important things you need to nail. Pretty much everything down stream depends on this.
• I believe that people want to so that they can , and they would pay good money for that because .
• If you , you can with so that you can .
• There are no sacred cows with it comes to building a business. I don't care how much you love your "idea". If it doesn't scream "buy me!" when you put it into this format, slaughter it and start over with something new.
• Never say you like something if you don't, express interest in something you could care less about, or mislead them [your prospects] in any way. It will come back to bite you. Tenfold.
• Just because someone else is already doing what you thought was a revolutionary concept doesn't mean you should give up. In fact, it helps to prove that there might already be a market out there for you.
• You're probably not going to get it right at your first attempt.
• We don't know better. Until we do the work to learn how to stop sucking.
• You will not have overnight success. It will suck.
• The very thought of doing cold sales makes most people clam up and break out into cold sweats.
• If you want to stop being a wantrapreneur, you better stop getting off on reading about other people doing things and start doing them yourself.
• At the very least, you should be able to sell your SaaS one-on-one, in hand-to-hand combat. Fight Club style. Mortal Kombat style. In fact, this is how most enterprise software is sold. One-on-one. Not through brilliant marketing or word of mouth.
• If you can't sell your SaaS one-on-one, you probably aren't going to be able to market it. At all.
• If you can't get people to give you an email address, you're sure as hell not going to get them to fork over their credit card number.
• Your landing page needs to incorporate these messaging elements. It needs to articulate (not nec3essarily in this order):
• Who is this for?
• What does it do?
• Why should they give you money for it?
• You also need to incorporate some sort of promise.
• Your first landing page should not have any product screenshots or mock ups. None. Zero. [...] Right now, we want to test if our messaging is something that the market responds to, and if it can stand on its own.
• If writing short and to the point is something you struggle with, read up on copy writing. I highly recommend the book The Copywriter's Handbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Copy That Sells to get a good understanding of style and approaches.
• The best features you should be building are features that people are willing to directly pay money for, or are features that enable you to reach a whole new market. Otherwise, they're just "nice to haves" IMHO.
• If you're building out landing pages and marketing sites, the vast majority of your traffic is going to come from mobile users. So. Like it or not, you need to test for mobile. I repeat: You need to test for mobile.
• How much time should you spend building out your landing page? As little time as you can possibly muster. Seriously.
• People are not going to find your landing page by some stroke of luck and good fortune. Unless you are some SEO god, you're not going to rank in Google for months. If at all.
• We need to start promoting our landing page. Those places where you found people who were willing to talk to you about their need and your solution are the best places to start.
• I want you to spend $5 a day on advertising to drive traffic to your landing page. For at least a week. [...] There's a few reasons for this. First, you need to understand how badly you suck at advertising and targeting as soon as possible. Second, you need to learn to have a healthy respect for how quickly you'll lose money on advertising. And third, paid acquisition can actually work pretty well for email capture pages.
• First and foremost, don't try to be too cute or clever. Get attention, promise an outcome, and tell them what to do to get that outcome. Period, the end.
• Pretty much all of the major advertising platform tools suck. Bad.
• If you're just starting out, I recommend that you try Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads. Not Google AdWords.
• Try to go narrow on your targeting for starters. Go broader if you're not getting enough impressions or clicks. A good first-time strategy for targeting is to target by a known interest.
• Don't over think it. Just get something out there.
• Run the ads for a week and see what happens. See what you learn. See if you get email signups. If not, step back, look at your ad, look at your landing page, look at your targeting, and try tweaking some knobs. That's how you learn. That's how you eventually "get good" at this. That's how you eventually get paid advertising to work for you.
• No, you can't just show up to a forum and promote your landing page. Big. Big. Big. No-no.
• Trust me. Don't just blast links to random forums.
• The idea behind using blogging and content marketing for promoting your landing page is that you create content that you can share. Content that is related to your solution, but not about your solution. Content that people who are in your target market would care about.
• You have to promote your blog posts and content marketing. Just writing it and hoping to get organic search traffic is not going to cut it.
• The key takeaway here is that you need to find where other people are and get your message in front of them. There is no way that people are just going to start showing up.
• And when you put your messages in front of them, try to let them feel like they somehow "discovered" you. Just like trying to convince someone of something and letting them think it's their idea. This is a powerful way to persuade people--letting them think that they "found out about this thing". Not you telling them to use your solution. Let them connect the dots.
• You should be trying to build up to at least 100 people a day visiting your landing page.
• How many signups do you need? Shoot for 100. Make no mistake though--the first 10 are going to be insanely hard to get. That's just because this is your first pass and you're going to need to tweak things, try new things, and throw lots of spaghetti until something sticks. That's the point of all of this. Finding out exactly what sticks.
• If you're not getting the results you're expecting, you'll need to spend some time troubleshooting things.
• First off, if you're not getting signups, you need to check if you're getting visitors to your page. Use a tool like Google Analytics to track your hits and where they're coming from.
• If you're not getting traffic, you need to promote more, in as many places as you can find. That or you need to start testing different calls to action.
• If your calls to action are boring or not something people are interested in, it doesn't matter where you promote them--people just won't click.
• You can get a ton of traffic, but it doesn't mean it's good traffic. Meaning, are you sure the traffic that's coming is from people that match your target market?
• I want you to understand first hand that building a SaaS startup is mostly a marketing optimization problem--not something that you can just code your way out of. And the only way you can possibly learn that is to stop coding and to experience it for yourself.
• I'm going to reiterate my maxim one more time: Code is the least important thing about a SaaS business. Because: A business's software serves one purpose and one purpose only: To make the business money.
• Since we are trying to build a SaaS startup that can make money, for us, an MVP is: The version of a SaaS application that actually generates an agreed-upon amount of revenue from paying customers with the least amount of effort and features possible.
• You need to have a market. No market, no money.
• What you build for your MVP is entirely dependent on the market you are target. Not just some random paying customers--but an honest to goodness, tangible, identifiable, demographically describable TARGET MARKET.
• Just in case I'm not clear enough: TARGET MARKET IS EVERYTHING.
• It's important that you have a "no-bullshit" metric that keeps you honest and accountable. And since we're trying to make actual money with our software, our no-BS metric should be around revenue.
• Shoot for something like $1,000/mo for starters.
• The point is that getting that first $1,000/mo is going to be way the fuck harder than you can possibly imagine at this very moment.
• Man up and learn how to charge people money for your application or go back to your cubicle cell.
• Just so we're clear: At this point in time--No freemium. No exceptions.
• Look at it this way: People pay money for things of value. If you have something of value, people will want to pay you money for it. If you don't think people will pay you money for it, that's probably because it doesn't actually provide any sort of tangible value to people. Give up if that's the case.
• In all seriousness, you need to come to terms with charging money and you need to figure out how much value people actually feel they get from your offering.
• Your window of opportunity to create the kind of life you want for yourself is shrinking just a little bit more every day you wake up.
• I need you to accept this one axiom of truth: You're gonna get it wrong.
• Your first attempt at building anything--MVP or not--is going to be wrong. It's not going to get you to your goal of $1K/mo. So you might as well just accept that fact now rather than waste good and valuable time deluding yourself otherwise.
• Your goal is to release each iteration [of your product] in such a way that it has the most possible impact at this stage in the game and which takes the least amount of time to execute.
• I typically recommend that you take no more than one month to build and release the first version of your SaaS application.
• What you need to do next is to identify the smallest set of features that can satisfy that one benefit.
• If you cannot directly tie a feature you're building as being absolutely critical in satisfying the delivery of your one benefit, you are coding for coding's sake and wasting your time.
• As a solo bootstrapper, you have to do it all--development, testing, marketing, sales, support, etc.
• Marketing and selling are going to be about 80% of your time and effort if you're serious about this.
• If you spend all of your time building features for your product, you will not make any money off of your SaaS app. Period.
• Any piece of software is a continual work in progress. It is never done. You can always change it or add to it.
• You cannot build everything on day one. Nor should you try.
• I would assume that most SaaSes that never get out of the gate are built by (albeit very good) enterprise software development professionals. Their perfectionism and trained habits in achieving 100% completeness prevent them from ever getting anything out of the gate.
• You're building a startup. It's supposed to be messy at first.
• First off, you need to have a way for people to sign up and pay for your SaaS application. That does not mean that you need to have a robust authentication and authorization system complete with self-service capabilities.
• You need to have a way for people to sign up for and log in to your service.
• You need to have a way to make sure that user information is reasonably secure.
• You need to be able to take a credit card number and charge them on a monthly basis for your service.
• You need to have a way for them to communicate with you for support and for customer service needs.
• You need to focus all of your development efforts on the things that will get people to sign up for your app, get them to use it, and get them to pay for it. In that order. Anything else at this stage is roughly the same thing as premature optimization.
• Don't waste time building features for events that haven't happened yet and (at this point) have no proof for ever actually occurring.
• The bottom line is--until you are crushed by the burden of support or people are screaming about not having those features--you're going to do shit by hand. Or wait until the last responsible moment to actually build something you need.
• Your time must be the most valuable thing to you.
• Protect your time. Protect your energy. Put on your flame retardant suit. Because even if you do everything "right"--having self-service account management, integrated billing, etc.--people are still going to flame your app for one thing or another.
• Winners use 1) what they know and 2) what they know will be a good fit.
• Winners know that it isn't the technology that makes the company--it's the business that makes the company.
• Repeat after me: I will not use anything that I am not already an expert in when it comes to technology selection or approach.
• Learn something else once you're making money and you can afford to pay yourself the time to learn something else.
• Use what you know. You've spent how long becoming an expert--use it.
• There are entire startups built off of Perl and Bash scripts making more than you do toiling away writing useless code for an inept company at your hopeless, grey, cubicle farm.
• This is not an opportunity to learn new technology. This is an opportunity to make more money off of your existing technical skills.
• Don't waste time writing unit tests. You should only write unit tests for codebases with a long-term lifespan. Your startup has not proven to you that it is worthy of unit tests yet. So don't waste time writing them.
• Don't waste time with continuous integration or continuous delivery. You can worry about that when you actually have a business paying you money to worry about it.
• How about version control? Yes, do worry about that. But as cheaply as possible. Using whatever tools you are already familiar with.
• Hosting? As cheaply as possible with the least learning curve. Unless you already do "cloud", put it on the back burner.
• Get scrappy. Get serious. Ger resourceful.
• If it doesn't explicitly create value for your target market, don't do it.
• The general disposition of people is that they don't give a shit, and that they don't want to spend money on things.
• You have to earn their attention. You have to earn their respect. You have to earn their money. And you're not going to pull that off on your first attempt or foray.
• Don't focus on fancy. Focus on value.
• Find the way to deliver more value than what everyone else is doing and you win.
• Today is the best day to start a SaaS business. Yesterday was better, tomorrow is worse.
• Acclaim does not equal profits.
• Things don't work out until you make them work out.
• Don't delude yourself--there is no way in hell that you "nailed" your product on your first go-round after having developed it in a fucking vacuum in only 30 days.
• The point of the MVP is to take the strongest possible feature-benefit combination you can think of that people would pay you money for, build it as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and put it out there to see what the fuck happens.
• Realize that an MVP is for learning.
• You need to learn what to avoid and what to double down on.
• The important thing to keep in mind is that most outcomes arise from a very small number of actions. In other words--most of what you do doesn't really make much of a difference.
• Smart bootstrappers exploit Pareto's Principle ruthlessly.
• Keep in mind: Not every potential customer is the right kind of customer.
• This is the core strategy behind escaping MVP Hell: Nailing the foothold niche.
• Focus on the core 20% and fuck the other 80%. Find your 20%. Exploit it ruthlessly.
• When you start getting results, fucking double down.
• If you want to go after some bigger returns, pay someone else to pull that lever for you while you go off in search of new riches. But never abandon it.
• Want to know the real reason nothings working out just yet? Your MVP probably sucks.
• A [sales] funnel visualizes thee different steps in sequence and helps you see where people are falling off.
• No marketing--no customers.
• The more things you ask for people to do in order to sign up, the less people you will get to sign up. IN order to maximize signups and to reduce friction, you want to require as little as possible from anyone signing up.
• On average, about 1% of your website visitors will actually sign up for your free trial.
• Onboarding is basically anything that occurs after the signup stage and is required in order to get people to actually use your product.
• The first 60-90 days after someone converts to paid are filled with a significant amount of churn.
• It makes absolutely no sense to spend any time building something that no one is even getting to.
• You can't make everyone happy--nor should you.
• You will never "know" why people are falling off. That's because people tend to fall of for psychological reasons.
• Limit how much time and effort you put into any one "fix".
• I recommend that any one fix should be able to be conceived, implemented, and deployed in the time frame of one week.
• Just remember that the reason people are bailing is psychological.
• You can't know what you need to do if you don't have a market banging at it.
• Every market is different and has different psychological and motivating factors.
• Extend the trial of anybody who is giving you feedback until they stop using your app and stop giving you feedback.