If you built a SaaS product and you've got some customers going, now you want to get to a thousand paying customers. Think about it for a second. For a thousand paying customers, for your SaaS business, for your AI business. You are now absolutely unstoppable. For a $9 a month product, a thousand customers means $9,000 a month for a $99 a month product. That's nearly $100,000 a month for a sales driven $999 product per month. That's an 11 million our business. So here's a big question. How do you actually get to a thousand paying SaaS customers?
How do you do it without being stuck in cold DM hell, or just running millions of dollars of ads and not having any profits? In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the three key phases that you go through to build out a scalable, go to market strategy. So you can accelerate your path to that thousand unstoppable paying SAS customers. Intro. All right. Here's how I'm going to break down this video. First, I'm going to walk you through the three key phases that you go through to achieve that thousand paying SaaS customers. Then I'm
going to explain to you exactly why this works. And then finally, I'm going to explain to you the math behind how all this actually starts to come together. I'll get into the specific metrics to look at and some business decisions you want to make as you're building out your scalable go to market strategy. Now, the reason I know this, the reason I can walk you through each of these phases and why it works in the principles, is because for my last company tout AB, we amassed 100,000 registered users. Out of those 100,000 registered users, we
had 10,000 paying customers. Out of that 10,000. We got to a million and are in the beginning as a six person team, purely as a self-service business. Then we raised our series from Jackson Square Ventures and Series B from a recent Horowitz, and we built out a sales driven motion on top of that to scale beyond that, to the 10,000 paying customers. So I know the path when it comes to a sales driven product and also a product led growth product as well, After selling cloud app to Marketo, a market leader in the demand generation
space, I joined as their SVP of strategy. That was a 450 million for our business, and I learned even more principles on how to drive scalable growth. did a two year transformation, and we sold Marketo to Adobe for $4.75 billion. After that, I started this company, unstoppable. This is my coaching, an advisory company for SAS and I founders, and I've helped hundreds of founders add millions of dollars. They are using these principles that I've learned, and I'm going to walk you through each of these three phases. The key principles that you need to know and
the why and the math. So if you excited, dig in, go and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it. Okay. So phase number one is when you are going from the 0 to 1. And this is what I call the warm network phase. This is where you barely have a product and you kind of have a thesis. You don't have any success stories. You don't have any customers, you don't have any revenue. And you really are trying to accelerate your path to revenues and customers and success stories so
that you can actually start selling to strangers. You're not going to be able to sell to strangers yet. Most likely no. So the first phase and every single company that I've started and every single company that I've actually helped scale went in the 0 to 1 phase. You're really focused on your warm network. Now, your goal here is to escape out of the warm network as fast as possible. Because if you get too comfortable in that warm network, you'll never hit a thousand paying customers. You actually have to get out of there as fast as
possible. Now there's three key things that you need to focus on in this phase for your scalable go to market strategy. The first thing that you have to really define is the urgent and important. Problem that you're solving. The urgent and important problem that you're solving. Now, some of you may be past the 0 to 1 stage and you're like, I really want to jump to phase two because I already figured this out, but bear with me for a second, because sometimes I hear from founders are like, oh, I'm in 5000 or $10,000 in MRI.
I'm like, cool. And they're like, I'm ready to scale. But I'm like, cool, what's the problem that you solve? And what's the messaging that you've used to get new customers and strangers to buy from you outside of your warm network? And very quickly they're like, crickets. sometimes people think they're ready to scale, but they're still in the 0 to 1 phase because they've never sold to a stranger. So one of the biggest things you really want to nail down as part of the foundation of your scalable go to market strategy, as you're building this company
is really understanding what is the urgent and important problem that you're solving for the first set of customers that you are getting now, in order to really land this first set of customers, three things need to be true. One, you have to be solving an urgent, important problem. The second thing that needs to be true is that they need to be early adopters. So if you're going and talking to a company that doesn't tend to try early things, doesn't experiment, doesn't have an R&D budget, doesn't take risks, then they're most likely not going to buy.
So you want to make sure you're not wasting time with them. The third thing that needs to be true is you need to be able to communicate a clear value proposition about your solution. You need a one line sentence that clearly explains this is the problem that we solve that's urgent and important to you. And this is why we solve it ten times better than the competition. And the competition may be another software product. It may be just apathy saying, hey, we're not going to do anything, we're just going to use that spreadsheet, or I'm
just not going to take the risk in trying this out, because I might lose my job if I try it, but if I just keep the status quo, I'll still get a promotion this year. So you want to make sure you have a clear value proposition to explain exactly why you're ten times better than their status quo. You do these three things with your Warm network. Then you should get to your first set of paying customers. Now, this is the caveat here. you want to make sure that you're actually charging money. bunch of times. I've
talked to founders who have a bunch of customers, but none of them are paying their pilots. But there's actually no money being exchanged. And what typically happens is you get a friend out of your warm network, and they love you, and they don't want to tell you your baby's ugly. So they say, yeah, dude, we'll totally try it out. And you're not charging them for money. You're like, okay, cool, let's get started. Send us all these things and we'll onboarding. We'll do everything for you. You're really trying to make sure they get a great experience.
And then crickets again. Why? Because people don't realize, founders don't realize, and I learned the hard way, is when people pay, people pay attention. And your software can't do things on its own, it needs their engagement. It needs to be involved. And it's more important than ever, especially in this phase. Number one, you get engaged. Customers. so it's super important they charge money. It's good to do one of two things. One, it's good to filter out the people that are just being nice. And it's actually not an urgent, important problem. You're better off knowing early
on. That way you can pivot, more importantly, it's going to get more engaged customers because when they give you money, they're like, hey, I got to show ROI for this, so let's get to work and you'll get more engage customers. We're just going to give you more data to help you get the product right, get the messaging right, and really learn from this experience. You want to make sure you're actually charging money. So this is going to get you from 0 to 1, which is your first set of money. the way you're going to do
this, I'm going to actually put this in blue. The way this comes together. Now, remember I told you in the beginning of the episode you didn't start a company to call DM all day, but in order to get to the fully scalable go to market machine, you're going to have to DM. So, the thing that you'll want to do is DM, email, organic social. Those are the three best ways. And then you can do texts over here also. Know the three best ways to actually mobilize your Warm network and say, hey, here's what we're working
on. This is the problem we're solving. This is why we're ten times better. Is this something worth your time? And you very quickly in your warm network, you should be able to get to the people that you're solving the problem for. Now, this is also intentionally one of the things to watch out for. If you don't know a single human in your warm network that you're supposedly solving this urgent and important problem for where your solution is ten times better than anything else that exists, you are essentially lying to yourself. So stop wasting your time
and everyone else's time. Because if you don't know a single person, then you're creating a product for a theoretical problem and a theoretical person, and you should really stop doing that. that's a pretty good early warning sign, which is why I always say for the 0 to 1 phase, you want to get through it as fast as possible. You want to get to your first set of paying customers and money being exchanged as fast as possible in this phase one. And the way to do it is to direct message, text, email, organic, social and just
mobilize a warm network and say, hey, here's what we're doing. That's ten times better than your status quo. We're going to do a pilot. We'll actually onboard you. We'll set everything up for you. We'll set you up for success. We'll take any feature requests that you have, just do whatever it takes to get them the result and show that it's ten times better and just barrel roll through to that first set of customers and people paying. This is what gets you to phase two, because phase two is where you really find out if you've got
product market fit and a real business. So phase two is what I call the strangers phase. This is really where it gets fun. Now, by the way, for those founders that are watching right now where you're like, oh, I thought I had product market fit and I have like ten K, 20 K of Mbsr but they're all really from my friends and I'm not really sure what my urgent, important problem is. like what my value prop is. Well then just pause for a second. It's okay. It just means that you're not fully ready to scale.
But if you do have friends that are using the product and paying for it, then go ask them. Go find out what is the urgent, important problem solving for you. How would you describe this to another customer? And is there a stranger that I don't know, but you do that you would recommend this to you and very quickly you'll find out if you're still in phase one, you're ready for phase two. Phase two is strangers. it's that first time you get that contract signed or that stripe notification, and you look at the name and you're
like, oh my God, I did not know who this person was a week ago or five seconds ago. Whatever it may be. Two reasons. One, it really proves that you can build trust with someone. problem you're solving, the way you're communicating, the problem you solve, and how you solve it ten times better. It's building trust. Someone that you don't know is looking at it and saying, okay, this makes sense. Here, take my money. it doesn't even matter if it's a dollar, but it means that there's trust and there's signal. So you want to get to
this stranger phase as fast as possible the longer you stay in this warm network phase, the higher the risk that you're building something that is not going to scale to a thousand paying customers, because you're building for a very small group of people that you know, unlike you and trust you, but you'll never be able to actually break out of that. So it's very, very important that you really barrel roll your way through from phase one all the way to phase two as fast as possible, and it should be as fast as possible. now how
do you actually sell to strangers? Right. You have to build the trust. They have to like you, they have to trust you, and they have to believe that, hey, this is worth it and it's better than my status quo. They have to actually do stuff. So there's a couple of things that really go into this. This is where a real scalable go to market strategy comes in. And one of the things I've learned is people kind of skip phase one. They don't know about phase two, and they jump to phase three, where number one, they
hire an agency and pay 15 K a month to say, oh, go figure out my messaging. Or number two, they hire an SDR or even worse, load an automation tool. And I know all about automation tools because we pioneered that whole space, with 15,000 contacts and just start spamming people. they confuse scaling with just volume. And that's not that's not what scaling is. Scaling. Scaling is when you take what's working and you double down on it and you increase the intensity. It's not just spraying and praying. That's not what scaling is. this phase two, phase
is really less about scaling and more about showing predictability. Because once you can see predictability in your activities and the revenue that's coming out of it, once you see the predictability, then you can double down on that and scale. So it's really important to show how you can get predictable in getting in front of a stranger. And saying a series of words, and therefore building trust and earning revenue and creating impact for them. That's what phase two is about. until you do that, you're not ready to scale. Even if you do that with five people,
that's better than never doing it. And then trying to scale and hiring an agency and guess what? An agency can't figure it out for you, because in this environment, people have more money. But people don't have as much revenues and product market fit happening. We're not getting more product market fit than ever before, even though they have more cash to spend. If you could truly spend your way out of getting the product market fit, then every company would be successful. So it's really important to actually do the work and really nailing the product market fit
and the message market fit in this phase. Number two, now how do you do this? And this is really you know, you want to go from your roughly ten customers out of your warm network to 50. You're like 50 is a good benchmark. There's some math involved here. And I'll explain what that math is. And that number might change. Don't get too fixated on it, Okay, now, in order to build a go to market strategy, there's three key things that need to come together. And this should be coming in from what you've learned from phase
number one, if you've done phase number one the right way, the first one is your ideal customer. Profile. You want to define your ideal customer profile. And I'm not talking about going to ChatGPT and saying, hey, create my ideal customer profile so I can go get a thousand paying customers and just copy and pasting, because again, if it was that easy, then every founder would be doing it right. So you really want to go to a proper ideal customer profile exercise to understand what is the segment of the market where we can really win and
your early wins, your existing customers and what you've learned from them should inform that. And actually, in fact, really informs and defines that for that first ideal customer profile. And you keep iterating on it as you get to more stages of growth. The second thing that, you really want to pull together are success stories. So ideally from this ten customers that you got out of your warm network, you really want to collect success stories? This could be testimonials. This could be like them just typing up a thing and you screenshot it. Ideally, it's you getting
on a call with them and recording an entire interview explaining their success story. And that way it's long form and you can slice it up into smaller pieces, or you can share the whole thing, but it becomes fodder for you to get more customers. It's real proof points they can put on your website and everything else. So you want to collect success stories. The third thing you really want to work on, between the success stories and your ideal customer profile, is your messaging. Messaging, positioning. And strategic narrative, narrative. And I'll explain what this is in
a second as I write all of it out. Okay. Your messaging, your positioning and strategic narrative. Now, here's the thing. In order for you to get in front of strangers and actually get their attention and then get them on a call or to start a trial, you have to use words. There's a sequence of words that you have to put together, whether it's on an ad or, cold email or an organic social post or a cold call, or at an event in a booth or at a dinner where you know your ideal customers are hanging
out. You need to know what sequence of words to use. You also need to know who your ideal customer is and what their urgent and important problem is. So these two things are super important to define at this stage, because if you don't get intentional about it, you will not win over strangers, not at scale. You're not going to get from 10 to 50 and you want to move as fast as possible. Again, the key here is to go from this stage where you're selling to strangers, predictably, to the next phase, as fast as possible.
That's how you want to do it. So in order to do that effectively, you need a scalable go to market strategy. And the pillars of that is your ideal customer profile. It's success stories. Even if it's 1 or 2, that's fine. Anything is better than nothing. And also your messaging, your positioning, your strategic narrative, those are the key things that go into really defining your go to market strategy with these pieces, you actually want to figure out how to take your message and get it in front of your ICP on a consistent basis. So for
this now you start to get a little bit more scale. You don't have to stay stock in DM howl or just cold calling like, you can actually get a little bit more leverage. So the number one thing I like for this is organic social. You figure out where ICP hangs out and you figure out how to get in front of them with your message. I like LinkedIn, I like YouTube, I like x, and, those are great for organic social media. Not as good because you have to pay. There's very little organic. You can kind of
get an Instagram, it really depends on if your ICP is there. So that's a decision you'll have to make. You can continue to do outbound. But very targeted create a dream 100 and get very targeted. And you can also start to think about SEO Geo because you'll have now you'll have your messaging to understand, well, how do we attract these people, and also referrals, with your happy customers. So you could do that as well. Now, obviously referrals are going to be capped because you only have like ten customers and half of them are going to
refer you. And then half of those are going to close. So great. You got three more customers. Cool. Organic social is your most successful one. It's going to get you the most yield, and it's going to be the quickest way to actually test out your go to market strategy. Because it's one thing to actually say, this is my ICP and this is my message. You don't know. You don't know if it's going to work or not. You need to show that predictability. You need to show that, hey, we can get leads and we can get
opportunities or trials and we can convert to revenue. So you really want to do organic social to test it really quickly and iterate on it based on the data. So you can actually start to get real revenue going. And the big thing you're looking out of this stage again is more revenue. So if this was $1 sign, this is $2 sign plus you're looking for predictability. It's okay if you're just getting one new customer a week or two new customers a week. It's okay. At this stage in phase two, we're actually less concerned about the
scale of the number. We're just concerned about the predictability, because we know that once we have predictability, we can scale it because you're using channels that are scalable, you can actually figure out how to scale the message to your ICP. Once you know, there's predictability. And that's what you're really trying to do. Okay. Let me pause here for a second. By the way. That's phase one and phase two if you're new to this channel, if you're watching me for the first time, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics on
how to grow your SAS and my business faster. So if you haven't already, be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon that we all get notified every single time I drop an episode. If you're already part of this community, my people, welcome back. It's really great to see over here. And by the way, if you're getting value from this, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell icon, and also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. Now, I mentioned a few key principles here and
concepts here. if you want, more in-depth guide on how to think about your ideal customer profile, your messaging, each of these channels, then also be sure to grab a copy of my five point. I and SAS Growth Strategy Guide. It's an in-depth guide that goes in-depth on how to think about building a scalable, go to market strategy. You don't have to go anywhere right now. I'll link to it in the description below. I also tell you more about it at the end of this episode. Let's go on to phase number three, where all these things
start to come together. Once you start to get that predictability. So what's going to happen is you use your warm network to get from 0 to 1, like get your first ten customers. And if you don't know anyone in the Warm network, then you're solving the wrong problem for the wrong people. Sorry to tell you, once you get through that as fast as possible, then you get into strangers. You want to get to strangers as fast as you want to go pitch strangers. But once you get into that, you want to be very clear about
what's your ideal customer profile, where the strangers you really want to pitch this to, you want to have some success stories and you really want to dial in your messaging. This is what we call a go to market strategy versus execution. Execution is sending the 15,000 emails, hiring an agency to run the ads, posting on, LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever it may be. That's all execution. But if you don't have the right strategy, the execution won't work. Which is why we have phase number two, where you really dial in the strategy and you test it
and use the metrics to figure out if it's working or not. And how do I tweak it. That way you don't waste months on the wrong thing. You don't waste months on an agency. don't waste months on a junior marketer. And by the way, you can't outsource this stuff. You just can't. This is stuff you have to figure out. This is what founders have built for the best founders on this. We call it founder led, go to market founder GTM. They're the ones that really succeed. Okay. Once you have this, then it gets really fun.
You get into phase number three. Phase number three I save my green marker for this. Phase number three is what I call the world domination phase. World domination. what do you have in this stage? What you have is strangers buying your product. Maybe not at the clip that you want. You're like, T.K., I'm at like 20 customers. 30 customers. I need to get to a thousand. I want to be unstoppable. Cool. But the thing that you really built and remember with SaaS businesses, SaaS businesses and AI businesses are very different than services, businesses, services, businesses.
Like. Listen, we're going to give you this outcome and we'll take care of everything for you. Trust us. And you can use AI in the backend or software in the back end. But people are just basically trusting you. It's the services business and the margins are different and they're great for cash flow. SaaS businesses, they're actually like assets. You have to invest in them. You have to get the foundation right. And then this scale like crazy where a service is businesses cap out. So in order to get to world domination mode, you've actually created the
predictability. You actually start to understand, you create this predictability and you start to understand, this is my ideal customer. Whenever I say these words in front of my ideal customer, they trust me and they want to buy. And I'm getting more and more success stories. Cool. Now you can get into world domination because now it's actually super simple. All you have to do is scale your message to your ICP. You have what we call message market fit. That's what you get out of phase two. When you say this message, you get customers. That's message market
fit. You say the message to your ICP, you get customers. So then it actually becomes super simple because you have message market fit. The biggest thing is ads. And there's a few different ways ads is number one. And the second one is outbound. So one is inbound which is ads, the other is outbound. You go to them cold call cold email ads. Let's talk about that one. The reason I always say in phase two to organic social is because you can take that content. used to be that, needed like a whole bunch of followers for
organic social to work. Now, every single social network or organic social network has switched from that whole model to a for you page. So the stuff that you see in your feed is not just people you follow, it's things that the network and the algorithm, things you'll find valuable. So you could have no subscribers, no followers, no connections. Whatever platform you can post on organic, social, you found all that go to market and the algorithm will immediately show you and reward you if it's valuable content that your ICP cares about. So they vote and you
get immediate data. You take that data once you know it's working, once you know it's creating leads, not just likes. Well, you say, cool, then you can go to these networks and hey, listen, this post did really well. I will pay you $100 a day, $200 a day, $1,000 a day, $10,000 a day, whatever it may be. I will pay you to get this in front of my ICP every single day, and then you can scale infinitely from there. Now there are things to figure out on. Are you going to make the ads profitable? Which
is what I'm gonna explain in the math section. So we'll get to that. But you can scale infinitely. The other thing you can do is you can get very specific on your ICP. You can map out a thousand, target accounts or target customers, and you can load it up on outbound. You can get very personalized on the messaging because you know what messaging works for your ICP. So the work that you do in phase number two, to get to that predictability now goes into world domination, because you can now rely on these scalable channels to
say, I am not uncertain. I know that this messaging, this positioning, this strategic narrative, this offer, this landing page works with my ICP. These two are the variables. And when I have those two locked in, I can now double down on world domination. Now this is where a lot of people make that mistake. Remember, I was telling you, they kind of don't think about phase one. They skip phase two and then they go hire an ad agency to say, hey, go figure out what my ICP is and what my messaging is, and that agency will
take your money. They will take your money. They're like, cool. It's like five cam month, for our retainer. And whatever your ad budget you want it to be. And sometimes agencies will take a bigger retainer than what you're even spending on ads. I've seen that crazy. And they're like, yeah, we'll just test it out and see what works and see what sticks. You could do that. I have met zero founders, zero founders. I've coached hundreds of founders. I met zero founders. I actually got success with that. They just got burned by the agency. And it's
not the agency's fault. It's your fault for doing that, for thinking that you can just find your way to message market fit and product market fit by testing ads. The real way is to do this piece, the sell the strangers using organic, social and the less scalable channels to really get the messaging right, an ideal customer. Right. And do these things based on phase one, which is your warm network. You build one on top of one and then you scale and there's no speed limit. By the way, there is absolutely no speed limit on going
from phase one to face two to phase three. You just have to go through it and you can barrel through it. In fact, the higher the skill level that you get as a founder, the faster you can barrel roll through. Phase one. Phase two, phase three. more domain knowledge a founder has, the faster they move through. Phase one, phase two, phase three. So this can all move really, really, really quickly. And the goal of this is basically get to your thousand customers, and beyond and scale infinitely. Now there are some, considerations on how much you
can spend and how fast you can scale. We were talking about that in the math section. Let's talk about why why this works. By the way, before we go into the why, if you're getting value from this, go to smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. If you're seeing the power in this framework, can I just get a yes in the comments below Now let's talk about why There's three governing principles that I'm trying to, instill here. And that's what makes this three phase framework work really well get your thousand paying SaaS customers really
fast, even when you're starting from scratch, with a scalable go to market strategy. The first thing is, making sure that you charge money. When people pay, they pay attention. I'm intentionally making it where you ask for money upfront, even if it's 5K or 10K or $5, you have to decide. And we'll talk about your average deal size in the math section, because that changes the dynamics on how you go through these. But you want to charge money. You want to charge money because that will validate in phase one whether this is an urgent and important
problem. Because if it's not an urgent problem, they're not going to part with their money. So that's a quick way to validate it. Otherwise you'll waste months doing stuff for free, only to realize the strangers are never going to pay you money. And your own people were too nice to tell you that. Number two is, Sell strangers. One of the things that I'm trying to get you to do as fast as possible is go out of your warm network, your cozy, warm network where everybody loves you and you're you're a genius to strangers. Because until
you sell a stranger, you don't really know if you're wasting months building the wrong product or trying to scale the wrong company. So you want to make sure that you're getting to selling strangers as fast as possible. And the third thing, the principle that I'm teaching you is you want to test on organic. Then scale. You'll notice that I start with very organic channels on the phase one. It's like, look, just go to your network plus organic social message them personally. Reach out to them, email them, be super custom, be super unscalable just to go
to 0 to 1 as fast as possible. out of that you'll understand what the urgent, important problem is, who the early adopters are. What's your clear value proposition? Then get into phase two again. Focus on organic social. Get the referrals. You can be capped on referrals. There's only so many referrals. It cannot be your primary strategy. But it it helps. You want to do organic social. You can do some outbound. You can do some SEO Geo again organic. You're getting data very quickly. and using that data you're flushing ideal customer profile. You're collecting your success
stories and you're getting your messaging down. And then once you have some predictability there, then you're saying, cool, now I'm going to scale with ads. Here's my money. I know this messaging works. I know this funnel works. I know this workflow works. I know this offer works. I know the sales process works. And then you scale with ads and you can scale with more outbound. One of the caveats with outbound, a lot of times founders don't realize, like, hey, you got to burn your brand if you just don't get this stuff in order, and you
just email 15,000 people and your ICP is 20,000 people, they're like, oh my God, it does. These guys suck like I've heard from them before. So you don't really want to spam everyone until you are a little bit more certain. So it helps to do the organic first. That's why this whole system works. And again, there's no speed limit. You can go through this as fast as possible. What matters is you do each of these steps. Now, know all of this. There's this question of the math, and this is the math, where a lot of
times, you know, founders don't really do the math. But know, it's my job to make sure that people do the thing that they don't want to do, but they really should do. So the math here is there's a question of your average contract value. It's one thing to say 1000 customers. That's awesome. But how much is that thousand customers? How much are they paying you? So and this really depends on the scale of the problem you're solving. So your average contract value could be $9 per month. It could be $99 per month, and it could
be $999 per month. could be any one of these if they're paying $9 a month and you have a thousand customers, so times a thousand, I'll, I'll do a little arrows. And I give you this math in the beginning. This is nine K per month and this is 99 K per month. And this is like let's just round up. It's okay if we round up like a million a month. Huge difference. One of the things that people don't realize when it comes to this is it changes everything. If you get one customer and immediately you
get $1,000 a month, well, that's actually a lot more money for ads, That's pretty cool. Who doesn't want to charge a a month? probably got a one year deal. But there's also a catch. There's a give and take. So, you know, if you look at your ACV, let's just say $9 is right here. And this is 999. Well, a $9 a month product. Once you get into selling strangers and into really world domination, it's probably going to be self-service. But as you start to go into the $999 a month product, it's going to be sales
driven. If you remember, in my last Company Town app, we started with a self-service motion. People did a trial swipe the credit card and boom, it was amazing. And we kept running that till we sold. And even after that, I remember one quarter, we were a little short on hitting our target at Marketo, and the self-service revenue out of town app helped us hit the number. It was awesome. Like and the CEO is like, dude, that's awesome. I'm like, I know it's it's pretty sweet. But we had also moved over to a sales driven model
where you have to pay for salespeople. So obviously when you do sales driven, your costs go up. You know, your customer acquisition cost is up, but your ACV goes up too. And so there's a give and take. Now, I'll tell you right now, it's harder to scale a $9 a month product with ads. It just is. So you'll probably have to rely on SEO Geo unless you are going for massive volume. You know it's possible to do it. And 99, it's way easier to do it a 999. But at the same time, the deal cycles
take longer and you have salespeople, so your costs go up. There's a give and take. So while a thousand customers is a great benchmark, and it can really vary depending on the urgent and important problem you're solving. And this is another thing to remember. It's really not about which one you want. Like of course everyone wants $999 a month, or maybe you want the $99 a month. No salespeople or some something in between, right? But most people want a $999 a month with no salespeople, which is the hardest thing to do possible. But the hardest
thing to do So for example, like, in my business we actually have no salespeople, but we actually put out so much trust into the market with our marketing. Like the like our my long form YouTube videos. the time someone wants to buy from me, they already trust me. So we don't need to get on a sales call. So it's like, that's possible. It's possible, but it's harder. It's more like an elite level game. But ultimately you kind of have to decide, it's not about what you want. It's also about the scale of the problem you're
solving. the bigger and more urgent and more important the problem, the more you can charge, the more value you're you're creating in the market. Therefore, more people will pay you more, and the faster they're going to buy and the more you're going to stand out. And so it's sometimes important as you're embarking on this journey, as you're looking at scaling, you should think about your pricing strategy. This is one of the things, I work with when I work with the founders that I coach inside of my go to market program, we're like, we think about
pricing strategy quite a bit, and every single time we've revamped the pricing strategy, win rates actually went up, ACV went up and growth went up. So you want to be thoughtful about it. And it doesn't have to be a one shot thing. know what? How do we started with a $30 a month plan and then we up sold them into teams through the sales process. So you can do some sort of hybrid. You can always increase prices. The first version without apps start at $30 a month. By the time we sold the company, we were
doing $125 a month. It was insane. And that work and our sales force license cost at $125 a month and a total app license cost $125 a month, which is crazy, but the market paid for it because it was such a valuable platform. So that's one of the things you want to think about in the math what's the urgent, important problem you're solving and how much should you charge for it? what's that going to look like as you're going through these phases, you want to find some sort of sweet spot. These are the two extremes.
Obviously there's some sort of a sweet spot in between that really brings together what's the urgent, important problem? How are we ten times better? How much can much can we charge? And using that, is there enough cash flow coming in so that our unit economics makes it where we can really scale? In some cases, you're actually not going to be able to scale unless you get investment, because that's just how much you got to put in to scale it at this level. In other cases, you can structure in a way where you can scale because
you make your money back so quickly. And therein lies the nuances of building a truly scalable go to market machine. And these are all things that you want to think through. But fundamentally, let's recap to get to a thousand paying SaaS customers fast from scratch with a scalable go to market strategy, here are three phases that you go through. First, you go through the warm network phase. That's how you go from 0 to 1. Then you exit that phase and you get in the stranger phase. In the stranger phase, you want to go from about
ten customers to 50. And again, these numbers can slightly vary depending on your average deal size. Out of that, you're going to get predictability. And from that you get into the world domination phase. And the critical component in all of this is what I've outlined for you in the middle. You want to make sure you really nail your ideal customer profile. You want to make sure you really nail your messaging, your positioning, and your strategic narrative because that's how you really get a go to market strategy working the better. This is and the better this
is, the more efficient you're going to be in the world domination mode, because your message is just going to be so good, so efficient, and your target is going to be so great. These ads are going to be that much more effective and maybe even profitable within 30 days, depending on how you structure it. And so now you know how to actually get to a thousand paying customers using the three key phases that you have to go through. And what you may not know is how do I actually really navigate phase one? How do I
craft my value prop? Or maybe you're in the stranger phase. You really have some customers and maybe a couple customers. Success stories. How do I think about my ideal customer profile? how do I capture the success stories? How do I really nail my messaging? How do I get the scale or go to market strategy going? Maybe you have some predictability, but there's some pieces missing you can't quite get into the world domination mode. you really thinking about like, what are the ads? What are the outbound? Do I have these right? I had the right metrics.
It's scary to start investing in ads. You don't know if you're going to see that money again. And so you want to make sure you're instrumented in the right way. So you're scaling with certainty. So if you're in this stage where you're figuring all these pieces out and you want to learn more about all these pieces and how they all come together, then you should grab a copy of my five point I and SAS growth strategy. Got inside of this guide. I give you the step by step principles that you can learn on how to
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