Denis Shatalin 2022

$10K
ROADMAP
4 steps to scale your SaaS
 STEP 1: SELL
$0-$500

Problem

At the start, some startups get obsessed with pleasing a certain customer
group. The issue is that it’s tough to identify the customer group before we realize
what we want to do. It’s unclear how broad it should be, and that we’re talking to the
same audience throughout our validation stage. When we talk to 10 b2b salesmen
and get various results, it’s unclear if we should group them by experience, salary,
number of calls they have each week, or something else.
Other startups stick to the product. They ship the prototype and then start
pushing it to potential customers. I usually lasted for 4-8 weeks before I dropped my
products using this methodology. I shipped something I’d partly use myself, and
something I thought people would use. As a result, no one did. 90% of products die
after founders ship them into nowhere and don’t find any customers within a few
months.
I always prefer to stick to the problem: “difficulty in finding b2b leads”. There
are thousands of profitable products solving this issue for dozens of customer
groups. When we focus on solving 1 problem, it’s a higher chance we’re going to find
the proper solution after a few iterations. It’s best when the founder experienced the
problem too. In this case, we’ll need less time to validate that it really exists.
To hit the first $500, we shouldn’t jump from one problem to another every 6
weeks. Instead, we’ll focus on a single issue we’re confident about and will pass half
of this milestone before even building anything, by doing presales.

Ideal customer profile

To make our first money, we have to find our ideal customer profile. These are
going to be people who need our solution so badly they’re ready to pay for it. We’ll
try 3 different segments and see which one converts easier.
 After we put down hypotheses of our potential buyers, we brainstorm where
they hang out and plan our reach-out strategy. We make a product demo with Figma.
It will have 3 screens showcasing our 3 core features. It’s important we don’t embed
extra stuff into our demo because we want to know exactly what people need. I
included community, extra APIs, and other stuff into my demos, which resulted in me
misunderstanding what people really bought from me. The retention rate dropped
within weeks and the product was gone. We want to identify one core feature and
sell it.

First sales

Our first 20 sales will be super personal outreach. The majority of founders
are shy to call their potential users. They run ads, get the offer wrong and drop their
startup after 4 ad campaigns. It’s better to overcome shyness and jump into 40 calls
than gift our $3000 to Facebook and $30k to the software development agency.
We’ll look for groups, subreddits, Twitter accounts where our ideal customers
hang out and send 20-100 messages daily. We won’t be trying to sell anything in our
first message, because our current aim is to get insights in a call. We have to answer
if our problem is a problem at all, who has it, when they experience it, how much
they currently pay to solve it, and if our MVP is useful. For two of my products, I tried
to answer these questions in surveys. I spent months building something that 8/10
respondents never opened, and others wondered how I thought it would help them.
In case our SaaS is B2B we use Sales Navigator + Phantombuster +
Hunter.io to send thousands of emails and schedule loads of calls quickly. My
products were B2C and I did Reddit outreach myself. Now there are products that
automate Reddit DMs like prospecdit.com.
In our message, we outline where we found the person, how we want to make
their life better, and show that we’re struggling without them. Here’s the message
that got me 13% of people into calls:

Hey! I've found your profile in r/startups comments and decided to reach out. I
want to create a product that will help entrepreneurs overcome challenging periods,
and want to make sure I'm building something useful. Earlier I was adding features
relying on my own perspective, but got lost. As you hang out in this subreddit, your
ideas could really help me cut through the fog. I'll ask a few questions to see what
works/doesn’t work for you. How about we have a Zoom chat so I learn your way of
going through challenges?

Everything gets easier when we run our call like an interview, not like a sale.
We ask questions to validate there is a problem, when they experience it, and how
much of a problem it is for them. It’s important to ask if they’re currently paying for a
solution because they’ll be more likely to pay for ours. Here’s the list of questions we
used with the founders of the language learning app:

1. What do you do?

2. Are you learning German? Why?
3. How long have you been learning German?
3. What worked/didn’t work for you? Why?
4. Describe the ideal way of learning German.
5. What were the top 3 obstacles when learning a language? Why?
6. What’s the biggest struggle you face, that costs you a lot of effort and nerves?
7. (!) What have you done to solve these obstacles? + Have you paid for any of the
solutions?
8, 9, 10 - are follow-up questions for the 7th.

When we feel that the person may benefit from our product, we simply show it
to them and ask for their thoughts. If they like it - we offer the first 3 months for the
price of 1. Yes, I remember that our product isn’t ready yet. I told about it to all my
early users and sold it for 25% of the price, which gave me bad data. In case we sell
it as a complete product, we “apologize for the bug” and offer to return the money or
wait for “a few weeks” till we fix it. It’s ok to return the money because we tested the
main thing: there are people who’re willing to pay for it. We build the MVP while
collecting money.
Some founders try SEO before having 5 paying users. But how can you plan
your SEO strategy without knowing who needs your solution most? Going after our
first users is the fastest way to get traction. First startup that partnered with me for
founder coaching was Feedbucket App, SaaS helping web developers manage client
feedback. Product had 0 users, and it was the first SaaS for the founder. We
identified top 3 buyer personas, laid out our call structure and sent messages. We
closed the first B2B sale in 17 days, 7 of which were their free trial. Then we got 4
more by the end of the first month. We closed all these while founder was working on
startup part-time.

Launch

We hit $250 MRR with 1-1 sales and have initial users. We ask for their
feedback to confirm we emphasized the right feature. We make sure they’re
returning to the product, fix bugs, and stabilize it. We use data from 40 calls to start
closing people over chat. We continue browsing groups and accounts with our ideal
customers, and when we see people struggle - we refer to our product. This way we
reach our first $500 in profit.

STEP 2: SELL
$500-$2000

Feedback hoover

This is a dangerous stage because we’ll quickly kill our product by introducing
the wrong features. Our vision has to align with our users’, and that’s why we get in
touch with customers every week. I once buried a product because pivoted it into
something early users didn’t buy.
As we make $500 profit, we learn that not all user feedback is equal. We
prioritize feedback the following way:
1. Active paying users
2. Paying non-active users
3. Active non-paying users
4. Occasional non-paying users, friends, relatives
 We’ll quickly kill our startup if start building on all the wise thoughts instead of
identifying the user journey of those who bring us money. We set up analytics to
track user experience and personally reach out to every person who canceled a
subscription.

Converting website

Now we have enough information to make a converting website. We know the

problem we’re solving, who has this problem, when they face it, why they use our
product, and what they love about our product. Our job is to put that into concise
headings and back them up with many testimonials. This is what the person should
see in the first 3 seconds on your website:

- Title: The value we provide [Get SaaS B2B leads fast]

- Subtitle: How we create it [30000 emails, names and links are 5 minutes
away]
- Visual [product screenshot on the right; show what they’ll get. Check Stripe’s
page for reference]
- Proof [company logos / 3 people’s pics; “4.8/5 from 700+ users”]
- An easy call to action [Get started for $1 / Get leads now]

And here’s the structure for the whole website:

- Value
- Problem trigger
- How we solve the problem
- Solution explained
- Testimonials
- Powerful offer

Problem trigger example: Ever felt you’re a step away from the right leads for
your SaaS? Lead.io gets you 3000 emails in 30 seconds. We don’t forget to install
website analytics (I use Plausible.io) to start tracking where our customers come
from and HotJar to monitor their behavior.

Neat UX/UI

We track the way users behave in our product, what are their frustrations,
where they feel lost, and fix all that. It’s not enough to solve the problem, now we
also have to make the experience pleasant. We remove Comic Sans, emphasize the
most important blocks, and make it look sexy.

Ready to go viral

Sad truth: bad product with amazing marketing kills amazing product with bad
marketing. We make our product easy to share and easy to notice. Shout out to
Loom, Crisp, and other startups that got it right. The earlier we find where to drop
“made with Lead.io”, the easier our journey will be.

STEP 3: SELL
$2000-$5000

Get them back

Good job with getting further than 95% of products, but we’re not done yet.
We shouldn’t allow anyone to leave our product without getting the main value. After
people sign up, we get into their brains with useful emails. The first email they get
from us includes a nice gift and a warm notice. We follow up with another useful
email, something they’d even pay for, like “6 simple steps to get 100 new leads every
day”. There, we drop our product name and say how much we’re excited about
making their lead generation easier. In case they left the product without getting the
main value (i.e. left AirBnB without booking a flat) we follow them up with emails until
they do. Yes, we make it easy to unsubscribe. No, we aren’t idiots for sending 5
emails because we want to make their life easier.

Time to value

Of course, we have been decreasing it from the very beginning. We never

asked people to go through 5 screens before they finally can realize that there are 0
flats for rent in the city. Ideally, we offer value on the first screen. Some makers want
users to suffer and push 30 features into their faces. Sadly, everyone simply leaves.
The only exception is when I record Startup Roasts for YouTube and make 20 clicks
to see that I should book a demo (real case).
We want people to refer our product as often as possible. They can’t refer it
when they don’t remember it. They will remember it after they get value out of it. Our
job is to build a narrow one-way tunnel where it’s impossible to get lost. We build it
carefully, relying on feedback from paying users. A 7-year-old kid can figure out what
our product does and who it helps.

SEO

We open AhRefs, see search requests relevant to our product, check articles
that bring traffic to our competitors, and plan what to write about. The earlier we start
with SEO, the sooner we’ll reap the benefits. We’ll start with 5 articles that will get us
extra signups in a couple of months, and then we’ll be adding more.
Initially I thought more articles means better SEO. Not really. It’s best for us to
have top 1 article for the most relevant search request than to have 50 mediocre
ones. Let’s say we are a SaaS that puts LinkedIn Sales on autopilot. We want to
rank first with “How to get sales with LinkedIn: complete guide”. We’re looking for
1500-3000 words. The goal is to have the best piece on the topic so visitors stay
long and share it with others.
 STEP 4: SELL
$5000-$10000

Partnerships

Partnerships are a fast track to success. We boost our marketing by

partnering with newsletters, influencers and communities that have our audience. I
know a founder who scaled SaaS to $40k MRR in 6 months by nailing affiliates.
We start building rapport with strategic partners at our MVP stage and offer
50% for every customer that they bring. This tactic unlocks us hyper-growth
opportunities which are not possible when we handpick every user. Our first strategic
partner should have enough audience to get us beyond $20K MRR and the first five
partners should help us make the 20-60K jump. It’s important to get through 20-60K
quickly because that’s when we’re gonna be hiring support, marketing, and
engineers.
When we select our strategic partner, we look at our goals:
Goal: $20K MRR
20K MRR / (our Average Monthly Revenue Per User) = # of users we need
them to provide us.
ARPU = $10
20 000 / 10 = 2000 users that they have to generate us.
Now our aim is to get noticed by community owner or influencer that can
provide us with that. If we want 2000 users, we should be looking for audiences
10-15 times larger. Good story is once we get one strategic partner, we can get
another. Our partnership chances are much higher if they don’t have their own SaaS
and were considering to partner with one. We never want to show up as needy.
Instead, we want them to notice our product and feel they’re missing out by not
partnering with us.
 Ads

Amazing. Our product has little time to value, it’s easy to share, UI is sexy, we
generate traffic with SEO, all people in relevant groups know what we do, we run
affiliates with newsletters and influencers, we get people back with email marketing,
our website has decent conversion, we systematically collect feedback, know why
people unsubscribe, solve the pain point in seconds, and this means we finally spice
it up with ads!
Depending on our audience, we choose Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube,
or combine them. It’s better to try many ad sets at the start to find the right targeting
and offer. Videos convert better. We reinvest 10% (30%?) of our profit into more ads,
run A/B tests, and improve conversions.

Riches-to-rags

Even though our socials are now full of Porsche pics, we still can mess it up in
weeks. We regularly reach out to people to get more feedback. We listen to our best
users, and we pay even more attention to those who unsubscribe, drop out and
leave negative feedback. SkyEng, a platform for learning English, is making millions
of dollars, but their CEO still spends 4 hours every Friday reading negative feedback.
He knows that once users are gone, his Porsche is gone too. We don’t want this, so
we continue carefully adding features based on user requests. We look for more
partnerships and marketing opportunities. Money makes money, and fortunately, we
already make some.
 THANKS FOR READING
THE $10K ROADMAP!

My mission is to help founders bring cool projects into our world, and I’ll be
happy if you found useful tips for scaling your ambitious project. Let’s connect on
Twitter @denis__shatalin and stay in touch!
If you found useful tips in this Roadmap, tweet your thoughts about it and tag
me. I’ll be happy to feature your post on the Gumroad page.
My last SaaS was a service helping founders overcome obstacles. It was a
platform, guides, and 1-1s with me. I kept spending money on developers until users
told me what was the most valuable. They said these were one-on-one calls with me.
That’s how I became a full-time founder coach. I feel amazing that finally found a
combo of what I truly enjoy and what’s helpful to others. If you want to speed up a
startup’s growth and grow it beyond a hobby level, just apply for my transformation
program at denisshatalin.com, and we’ll get you sales fast. I don’t charge equity and
give you a hand whenever you need. Founders come to me while taking part in 2
accelerators because of my extreme commitment to their success. There is no
accelerator that will care about your success as much as I will. My goal is to give you
all the skills for turning startups into viable businesses with sustainable cashflow. I’ve
done it for myself, repeated success with Feedbucket and UI Jet, and welcome
committed SaaS founders to partner with me. The system just works. See you
inside.

Wish you great success with your venture!

Talk soon,
Denis Shatalin