Hey SaaS. Here's what I want from you (re: sign-ups):
1. Show me your price, with multiple pricing tiers. The more tiers you have, the more likely I am going to pick one of them, because I will think "well this lower tier is quite the deal compared to the higher tiers!". If I am an Enterprise customer, I will disregard you as an option if I can't see a price. Don't even show me the tier at all if you aren't going to show me your price. I get immediately incensed when I see that "Contact us for pricing!" bullshit, because I know how much bullshit I am in for if I just want to get a quote, so I look for somebody else. I want to use your product right now. But I'm not going to use it if I think it will be painful to work with your company, or that you might have exorbitant pricing, or you're just looking for whales. Don't make me discount you.
2. Let me use your product, immediately. Let me run it from my laptop immediately. Let me spin up a PoC. Show me your complete reference docs immediately. Show me a toy implementation w/source. I want to know if this will [eventually] give me what I want, within 15 minutes. Do that and you will already have gone above and beyond 95% of SaaS (in my mind).
3. Let me have gradient pricing. Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0, for 5 users. Send me an e-mail when I have 7 users, informing me that I have 30 days to either reduce the number of users to 5, or it will automatically upgrade my account and charge me more (or make me confirm, or whatever). Same for the next tier, etc. (or 'pre-purchase' discounts vs 'on-demand' overage cost, etc) This gives me flexibility: I know our workflows won't just stop working when we hit a limit, and I can acquiesce to the new price or clean up old users.
4. Let me start using your product without a card on file. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right corporate person with the right corp card (if they even let me use a corp card, rather than invoicing). If you really need a card, give me 15-30 days, and then pause my account if you have to. The point is to let me get "hooked" on your product without needing to figure out which card to use first. (It goes without saying that when the card expires or a charge doesn't go through, give me 30 days to resolve it, because usually the corp card has hit its limit)
I’ve been doing the same thing with a number of projects, building chains of prompts from one api call to another e.g. for ConjureUI (self-creating, iterable UIs that come into existence, get used, then disappear) https://youtu.be/xgi1YX6HQBw how it works to generate a full self-contained react component:
1. Take user task
2. Pass it to a prompt that requests a Product UI description of a component
3. Pass 1+2 to another that asks for which npm packages to use
4. Pass 1+2+3 to a templated prompt to write the code in a constrained manner
5. Run 4 in a sandbox to see if there are errors, if so pass it back to #4, looping
It’s currently quite slow, but that’s an implementation detail I think.
- Avoid posting inane/uninteresting stuff on social media.
- Avoid engaging in debates.
- Avoid ideologies, groupthink, and assumptions.
- Avoid correcting people on the Internet.
- Avoid taking things at face value (eg. news and opinions)
- Avoid "poseuring". I am a strong generalist with a decent knowledge of and passion for a lot of different things. I'm the guy people around me come to for tough technical things. I probably take too much pride in that. When someone asks if I know subject $foo well, and I know a little about $foo, I tend to answer in the affirmative. Most of the time, this works out and through intelligence and luck, I figure it out. Some of the time I am wrong and I look pretty dumb.
Mr. Ferriss is a master at self promotion. That doesn't mean that there's not good stuff to be learned after you sift through the self-promoting crap in the book.
Tidbits I picked up:
* Throw a quick 3 page website up as a sales letter to market a $100 product. Point $200 worth of ad-sense at it over 10 days to see if you get any uptake. If you have more than 2 signups or "buy-ins", you've past the break even point and you're on the road to making money.
* Focus on developing a $50-150 priced product. You don't have to sell a ton of those products to make a decent living for yourself.
* 100 units sold * $100 = replace my monthly income.
* Focus intensely on what's going to make you cash. All the cool technology you're building doesn't matter to your business unless it helps the bottom line. This was apropos to me, because I have an acute case of... oh, look at this shiny new thing. Focusing on what makes money helps cut through some of that.
* People like to buy things. No, really. They like to pay for things. It makes them feel better about their lives. So, if you offer them a compelling reason to give you money, they will probably give you the money.
* Outsource as much as you can that isn't non-core business. e.g. Hire interns to do marketing and PR work for you. Outsource writing your copy. Outsource design work, outsource product development if appropriate. Outsource market research, outsource date finding, outsource travel plans, outsource, outsource, outsource everything away to make your life simpler.
* Filter out distractions as much as possible. i.e. no meetings, minimal email.
* Have balls. No, really, dude hacked a martial arts festival and won. Why? By hacking the weigh-in legally. He has a lot of legal cons that help you hack the publicity system. Put your balls to use by hacking a social structure and rules in a situation to your benefit. If you don't have the balls to try something, you're not going to achieve it.
* Chase the big dreams. Life is too short. If you want a Lotus Elise, test drive it, and find out how much you'd have to make a month to pay for it. Figure out how to make that money. If you want to go to Figi, figure out the cost, make the money to get there and then just go.
You're planning on prospecting into one of the most rejection-heavy domains out there with small physical business. These people get dozens of calls per day from companies they've never heard of - many of whom are trying to rip them off - and even the best ones (Groupon, Yelp, google ads, etc.) are basically just rent-seeking. Oh, and most have gatekeepers who don't care the slightest bit about your pitch.
Because of that I'd stay away from all this "smile and dial" advice. You'll have no chance. Go out there and hit the pavement and meet these people at their establishments at off hours. If you catch the owner in there at a good time - do your best to inform them of your products benefits and come up with a really good offer to get started (something that loses you money and time). Free Trial, free month of services, whatever makes sense based on the context of your business. The goal is NOT to make money or build a book of business at this point - it's to get a person happy with your software to sell to later.
If the owner is too busy or whatever - have some stuff printed out for them to read later that you can drop off. Ideally with a small gift (coffee, food, candy, etc.) and come back in a few weeks to see if you catch them at a better time (again with a gift, until they talk).
A solid entry level book would be Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount.
I have never used it for business cases, but I am in notion for at least an hour a day for personal uses. I use it for a daily planner, personal wiki, and ticker(getting things done) I am naturally unorganized, so I overcompensate. I don't think much of what I do is outside of Notion's primary use case, but maybe it is???
Daily planner
- Every morning I do gratitude, "single most important task", and quick retro on the previous day.
- Schedule out my day giving every 15-minute block of time a goal. While being burnt out I would beat myself up for "not knowing what I am doing with my life". Having a schedule allows me to say "I should be doing x, I don't have to, but that is what I planned to do with this time" it calms some of that negative self-talk.
- Space for me to document random thoughts so they don't use active memory/thought process
Personal Wiki
- I have struggled with too many tabs open, or too many bookmarks in the past. To keep that at bay I have been trying this personal wiki approach for about a year.
- I have a few top-level pages for major categories of my life like bikes, household maintenance, fitness, computers, and programming. then I populate it with different types of content like pages, notes, and databases. These are things like car maintenance schedules, checklists for cleaning, and links/formulas I need to pay quarterly taxes.
Ticker file
- Single database with a few attributes. One attribute is the "review date" that I filter by.
- I chuck random things into this so I can pull them out of my active memory and come back to them later.
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1. Show me your price, with multiple pricing tiers. The more tiers you have, the more likely I am going to pick one of them, because I will think "well this lower tier is quite the deal compared to the higher tiers!". If I am an Enterprise customer, I will disregard you as an option if I can't see a price. Don't even show me the tier at all if you aren't going to show me your price. I get immediately incensed when I see that "Contact us for pricing!" bullshit, because I know how much bullshit I am in for if I just want to get a quote, so I look for somebody else. I want to use your product right now. But I'm not going to use it if I think it will be painful to work with your company, or that you might have exorbitant pricing, or you're just looking for whales. Don't make me discount you.
2. Let me use your product, immediately. Let me run it from my laptop immediately. Let me spin up a PoC. Show me your complete reference docs immediately. Show me a toy implementation w/source. I want to know if this will [eventually] give me what I want, within 15 minutes. Do that and you will already have gone above and beyond 95% of SaaS (in my mind).
3. Let me have gradient pricing. Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0, for 5 users. Send me an e-mail when I have 7 users, informing me that I have 30 days to either reduce the number of users to 5, or it will automatically upgrade my account and charge me more (or make me confirm, or whatever). Same for the next tier, etc. (or 'pre-purchase' discounts vs 'on-demand' overage cost, etc) This gives me flexibility: I know our workflows won't just stop working when we hit a limit, and I can acquiesce to the new price or clean up old users.
4. Let me start using your product without a card on file. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right corporate person with the right corp card (if they even let me use a corp card, rather than invoicing). If you really need a card, give me 15-30 days, and then pause my account if you have to. The point is to let me get "hooked" on your product without needing to figure out which card to use first. (It goes without saying that when the card expires or a charge doesn't go through, give me 30 days to resolve it, because usually the corp card has hit its limit)