if you took away my audience all my followers all subscribers if you empty my bank account and you remove my entire network all connections I have and then ask me to build a SAS from scratch this is how I do it using four essential steps if you're new to this channel welcome here I'm Simon horvick and I run three bootstrapped SAS products two of them which I built from scratch and one that I acquired in this video I'm gonna distill everything I've learned and bring you with me back to square one and show you how
I would go about launching a SAS from a blank slate let's do this the first thing I would do is to find the ideal problem to solve and yes this means that there needs to be a demand we need to make sure there's a market for what we're building and that people actually want the tool we're going to build but that's pretty obvious we need to take a step even further back the first thing I would look for is a problem that's a good fit for me as a Founder we call this problem founder fit
and we need to address this way before we start thinking about whether the market needs our product so here's questions to ask yourself can you dog food your product which basically means are you yourself the ideal customer profile when you start building a product you should be able to eat your own dog food you should be so familiar with the problem you're trying to solve that you become a prime user of your own product this will make it much easier for you to truly put yourself in the place of the user you're building for you
probably heard people saying that you should get out and talk to users and that's totally true you should and if you already speak the same language as the users you're talking to it becomes much easier to really hone in and understand their needs and struggles and there's another benefit from dog fooding if you're building something that you yourself need and want to use you're much more likely to stay motivated and passionate about the project which leads me to the second question are you passionate about the problem you're solving if you say the sentence I'm here
to make it easier for people to X or I'm here to put an n2x do you get excited about that is that some thing you would identify yourself with I know how much hard work grit and determination it takes to bring a product to Market if I were to start all over today especially without any network or existing audience I would make that sure that I was passionate about the problem because there's going to be a lot of struggles and emotional roller coasters ahead of me as a Founder you have no boss no one to
tell you what to do and when only commitment you have is your commitment to solving this problem make sure that commitment is strong enough to carry you through the tough times finally I would ask myself what are my unfair advantages everyone has unfair advantages it's like playing Monopoly but you're allowed to cheat makes it much more fun right find your unfair advantages and use it and know this doesn't mean that you have to be some kind of prodigy or have super special talents we all have some unfair advantages it could be your expertise your experience
in a specific field of work deep insight into something that not a lot of people have or could be that you just happen to know someone who knows someone anything that can give you an edge in fact this is a bit of a closing Circle because I would argue that if you're able to dog food your own product and you're passionate about the problem you're setting out to solve you already have a huge unfair Advantage right there one of the SAS products I run feed hive social media management tool this all started on Twitter back
in 2021 six months before I started building this tool I have been busy creating a social media following I was looking for a robust social media management tool for aspiring entrepreneurs but all the existing tools were lacking in various ways so I was building for myself first and foremost I was definitely going to be dog fooding my own product at this time I had really started to understand the power of having an audience and I wanted to scale to other platforms so I was very committed and passionate about solving that problem and at the time
I had managed to build an audience on Twitter of more than 30 000 followers in just a few months I realized that I was actually reasonably good at marketing myself on social media which definitely came to serve as an unfair advantage in fact there were a handful of other Founders who had spotted this same opportunity at the same time but none of them were really that much into social media and none of other tools exist today these Founders simply didn't have the same unfair Advantage so when I was building feed hype I could check all
of these boxes and if I were building a new SAS from scratch I would definitely make sure I could check these boxes again today so grab a pen and a piece of paper list down all the problems you currently have yourself that you would love to have sold then list down all the problem domains that you're particularly excited and passionate about and finally list down all the unfair advantages that you can think of that might give you an edge now cross reference all of these items and try to find the ideal problem to solve once
you make sure you have problem founder fit you can go on to test your problem and the solution in the market I have another video where I show you exactly how to do that I'll leave a link to that video in the description below alright once you've nailed that ideal problem the next step I would take would be to create one organic distribution Channel that I could use to reach users I would focus on a single Channel and I would make sure I knew it very well this means that I would have to become familiar
with it and know how to navigate it even when things become more unpredictable there are a lot of great organic channels to jump onto here are a few examples blogging and SEO content on social media a YouTube channel an email newsletter list a for instance on Discord or Facebook group or simply by Word of Mouth my personal experience with social media and YouTube has been absolutely outstanding especially this very YouTube channel right here it's a perfect place to reach a lot of people and if you can find a way to create value help other upcoming
entrepreneurs and Inspire while also creating awareness around your product and your mission then you really sit on a strong distribution channel that is a win-win for everyone that's exactly what I've been doing with this Channel and it's exactly what I would be doing again if I had to start from scratch though it doesn't have to be YouTube there are many channels you can use to serve the same purpose but it all comes down to creating content so at this stage here's what I would do I would search for small groups and communities online that are
centered around the problem I'm trying to solve and then I would pay special attention to the questions and the pains people seem to be having then it would start answering these questions and addressing these pains through content our creates short videos to go on Tick Tock and Instagram reels I will create long form videos to go on YouTube I would start blocking and inviting people to my personal newsletter and perhaps I would start a Facebook group or subreddit devoted to helping people with this problem and once I found one of these channels that seek to
work well I would skip all the others and just double down on that one and that would be the organic distribution Channel I need now it's finally time to build the actual product at this point you already know the problem you're solving very well it's a problem you have yourself and you've now spent a lot of time talking to peers with the very same or closely related problem you probably have a ton of ideas on how to use technology to solve it writing a bunch of blog posts or creating a bunch of videos to help
people with this problem will most likely have created a ton of considerations thoughts and ideas and the issue of what should I build should be non-existing at this point so it's time to build and if I were to do this all over I would build it in public build it along with the community you have been engaging with you're already an authority on this problem and people already know and Associate you with this problem domain don't worry that someone will see you building in public and steal your idea just let them because they'll soon figure
out that without your Authority your commitment and your unfair advantages in this particular area they don't have a chance to compete with you build in public and get as much feedback and ideas from your community as you can most of them will absolutely appreciate being a part of the project and you will get a board of advisors that you can ask to get a fresh perspective every time you have doubts in fact a lot of times users will be so eager to get on board with the solution that you're crafting that they'll be willing to
pay for it even before it's finished in fact I did exactly this with another SAS product link trip which is a no code link engagement Builder we sold linktrip as a lifetime pre-sales offer before we wrote a single line of code and it generated almost a hundred thousand dollars in sales in just around two months all from the power of a strong community and people being so eager about the solution we were offering that they were happy to join early I cannot recommend meant this approach enough and obviously if I were starting out from scratch
this is exactly what I would be doing at the same time I would use no code and AI to get the first version of my product into the hands of my users fast use webflow for the landing page use chat DPT to create copy use tools like bubble to create the first MVP of your app or if you're more confident with coding at least use as many open source libraries as you possibly can anything that will get a first version of your product ready faster then get it out there from this point if you didn't
already you should start seeing early users paying subscribers and revenue just around the corner finally the last thing and most important thing I would do is to expect it all to fail this is the hardest reality of building a startup statistically speaking you will fail and if I were to do this all over I would make sure that all of this wouldn't be for nothing I would create as many reusable building blocks out of all of this as I possibly could instead of just coming up with a great idea turn this whole process into an
ideation framework that you can use to come up with new ideas once you understand what your unfair advantages are improve them make them even more unfair when you're building your distribution Channel think about ways that can be reused to Target the same users with a new product in the future make reusable templates out of all your creatives make it easy for you to yet again create new videos new blog posts new content take all the code you write and see how much you can generalize and publish them as private npm packages that you can use
later if you're using no code save as many recipes and templates as you can this part is probably the most important piece of the puzzle and it's exactly what I did with my first SAS product nope not that one we need to go even further back sigmatic never made it it was a veiled product but I did reuse a ton of it to create feed Hive a year later and then I reused a ton of that to create link drip a year later again and I used it to create at least three other SAS products
in this same period but you never heard of them because they never passed the initial validation stage and because they were so fast to build I had zero second thoughts about dumping them the moment I realized it wouldn't really work Building Sales products is like playing darts you'll often miss the target sometimes you hit Bullseye and sometimes it'll be summer in between the best thing you can do is find a way to keep creating new arrows make sure you get another throw and then another one so instead of creating a SAS you should create a
small SAS Factory now if you want to learn how to validate your SAS idea using a scientific approach with a bit of help from no code and AI check out this video next if you got value from this video please give it a like And subscribe to my channel for more content like this I will see you soon for another video
