Here’s How I Built And Launched A SaaS Company For Less Than $40k

February 07, 2017

By Today’s Industry Insider

About 6 months ago I decided that I was going to build a SaaS company from scratch. I had recently sold my company and found myself in discussions with a number of startups around making angel investments. This didn’t get me too excited so I wanted to see if I could build and launch a SaaS company for the same amount of money that I would have otherwise angel invested into other companies.

My thought process was that if I could pull it off then I would own 100% of the company, and have full control of my own destiny, rather than simply cutting a check and owning less than 1% of the company.

My background is primarily concentrated on small businesses, selling products like leads and back office software. In the past 6 years I’ve had thousands of conversations with small businesses discussing everything from how they operate to where they are spending money on marketing. Through these conversations I realized that a lot of businesses are leaving money on the table by not knowing where their phone calls are being generated from, not answering the phone all the time, and not knowing how to close a prospect once they are on the phone with them.

It was through these conversations and the success of the Twilio IPO that I decided I was going to build call-tracking software.

Now that we have launched and have paying customers, I’m sharing the tactics I used to build and launch a SaaS company, along with the documentation that I created during this process including email outreach scripts, user stories, product requirements doc, and other tools I used to make it happen.

Step 1: Finding a Designer

In my opinion, design and user experience (UX) is one of the most important aspects of SaaS. Good design will go a long way to not only convert customers but also help them engage with your product and ultimately retain.

To find a designer I used Dribbble, a community of designers that showcase their work. There are other similar sites out there like Carbonmade or Behance but I’ve used Dribbble in the past and felt more comfortable there.

You must be a paid member of the community to send a message to designers, which costs $20 for the year. After coughing up the twenty bucks (obviously worth it), I took about 6 hours one day and searched for designs that I loved.

I would search for things like “b2b dashboard”, “saas dashboard”, etc:

After browsing through hundreds of designers and portfolios, I narrowed down a list of my top 10. Since not all of them would be available to take on a new project, I decided I needed to contact them all in hopes that at least a couple of them would be able to work with me, at which point I would then select my favorite.

I sent them all this entire message:

Of the 10 messages sent, I received 8 replies. One of the designers was not available …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog

      

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