D. Maxwell
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I've got lots of questions ;-) I love The Foundation's website and your sales video is awesome.
First, the tough one: Why package and market your system as opposed to scaling one of your existing SaaS offerings to 7 figures a month or building a portfolio of 6 figure SaaS apps?
How do you approach growing MRR while minimizing churn and building a loyal customer base? E.g., do you find that you put just as much or more into retention as you do into acquisition? Do you find that retention is easier because of the specificity of the idea extraction process? Have any of your students built a partner channel?
Are most of the apps that you and your students produce aimed at the small business market? Have you or any of your students broken into the mid-market or enterprise space? Have any of your students grown into or past mid 7 figures annual revenue? What about in terms of subscriber count, whats the largest you or your students have achieved? 1k, 10k, 100k, a million?
How do you handle outages? Do you credit customers for downtime or throw them perks or anything to offset the pain of an outage? What works best in your experience?
How do you set up your students to deal with operations, do you outsource it or are most of the apps of small enough scale that they are just running on a basic hosting account? Do you teach your students how to setup an operations team and tiered customer support processes?
What is your opinion on data portability, APIs and integration? Are you an advocate of the walled garden approach or open access? Do you put up barriers like fees for a data extract, etc. to slow folks from fleeing to competitors?
Have you run into compliance issues with differing laws in different countries or are your apps focused on the US market? Do you explicitly block users from countries with potentially "difficult" laws like Germany, Belgium, Ireland, etc.? Do you have any students using cloud platforms and how do they deal with this issue?
Do you teach your students anything about scaling, and scaling the technical stack as the business scales? Or is the focus of your course just on the "entry" and launch? Any plans to do a follow on course for your graduates to deal with the next stage of growth of their apps?
On business scaling, do you advocate doing as much as possible "virtually" over the internet, or have you used an in house solution sales team to sell subscriptions? Have you found that businesses are more accepting now of cloud based solutions or are you facing a challenging sales process?
Whats the highest ROI marketing channel you/your students have used for your apps? LinkedIn driving to webinars? Direct mail postcards?
Question: First, the tough one: Why package and market your system as opposed to scaling one of your existing SaaS offerings to 7 figures a month or building a portfolio of 6 figure SaaS apps?
Answer: My deeper reason why for living is to help others find freedom. For me I believe freedom is kindness, and kindness is freedom. Especially personally. Kindness to yourself is the ultimate freedom. It feels so, so, freeing. When I'm quiet and ask my heart what it wants, it tells me to help others find this freedom.
Financially, and personally.
Running the Foundation is 10x more difficult than running my SaaS business. I don't ever have to work again, but I choose to.
The truth is, once you reach a certain level of financial success, your focus shifts from protecting yourself to helping others.
What my heart wants is a lot of work, but I'm down for the answer, down for the journey. I work 40 to 60 hours a week on The Foundation. I work 0 hours a week on the SaaS business and take home $20k profit a month with zero zero work. My current salary at The Foundation is $10k a month plus a bonus of profit. We have a team of 10 to 15 we manage and pay. It's a different beast. Lots of work. But lots of meaning.
Question: How do you approach growing MRR while minimizing churn and building a loyal customer base? E.g., do you find that you put just as much or more into retention as you do into acquisition? Do you find that retention is easier because of the specificity of the idea extraction process? Have any of your students built a partner channel?
If you're product is like a sugar cookie to a diabetic, you need to acquire customers all the time. If your product is like insulin to a diabetic, you can acquire a customer and keep them for life. If your software is useful, people will keep using it. If it's not, they will quit. No tricks or work arounds for that. It's really straightforward and awesome in that way. Money doesn't lie. And money follows usage. Make your app so important they always use it. Like insulin to a diabetic.
PaperlessPipeline grows at a net gain of 10 customers a month, at an average ticket of $125 a month, so it grows around $1250 per month, always. PaperlessPipeline is like insulin to a diabetic. My RecruitingNinja.com platform is like a sugar cookie, people cancel that one more.
Are most of the apps that you and your students produce aimed at the small business market? Have you or any of your students broken into the mid-market or enterprise space? Have any of your students grown into or past mid 7 figures annual revenue? What about in terms of subscriber count, whats the largest you or your students have achieved? 1k, 10k, 100k, a million?
Small business market yes, but I'm excited to see someone break this mold. We have a few. This model would work in any market.
Largest student doesn't want to be named, but he is doing $300k a month by providing a CRM to private hedge funds. He's bigger than any of my businesses.
He is definitely an anomaly - smart smart guy. Sam Ovens is quickly approaching 1M per year.
But I think the more exciting metric is not how big are our students, but how many of them are successful. We've had 36 or so graduate this year with a paying customer in a product - 10% success rate. And a dozen with working companies by the time the Foundation ended.
One student is building a GPS tracking up for door to door salesmen for roofers. So cool.
Many are still building their success.
Some are slower, but one of our slower students had Zappos.com just pre-sell on as a paying customer for her software, and now she is building it. Yeah - zappos.com bought a product before it exists. So exciting.
Question: How do you handle outages? Do you credit customers for downtime or throw them perks or anything to offset the pain of an outage? What works best in your experience?
Answer: We just communicate the outage, and don't offer anything.
How do you set up your students to deal with operations, do you outsource it or are most of the apps of small enough scale that they are just running on a basic hosting account? Do you teach your students how to setup an operations team and tiered customer support processes?
Answer: We don't teach the full blown scaling aspects of the business. Most are able to host on one server with one developer doing code and support. Beyond that is where our program ends right now. We have yet to build the scaling side of the product, which is an entirely different beast! You know… how to do all that stuff you just asked about
Question: What is your opinion on data portability, APIs and integration? Are you an advocate of the walled garden approach or open access? Do you put up barriers like fees for a data extract, etc. to slow folks from fleeing to competitors?
Completely open, completely transparent. No scarcity mindset.
Question: Have you run into compliance issues with differing laws in different countries or are your apps focused on the US market? Do you explicitly block users from countries with potentially "difficult" laws like Germany, Belgium, Ireland, etc.? Do you have any students using cloud platforms and how do they deal with this issue?
Answer: No we have not. I'm not sure how to answer this question. Seems out of my area of expertise.
Question: Do you teach your students anything about scaling, and scaling the technical stack as the business scales? Or is the focus of your course just on the "entry" and launch? Any plans to do a follow on course for your graduates to deal with the next stage of growth of their apps?
Answer: This would be an awesome course to add on. Not right now no we don't. Just entry and launch up to 100 users.
Question: On business scaling, do you advocate doing as much as possible "virtually" over the internet, or have you used an in house solution sales team to sell subscriptions? Have you found that businesses are more accepting now of cloud based solutions or are you facing a challenging sales process?
Answer: Do as much as possible virtually over the internet. Sales team after you have 100 users dialed in and the app working with good support ticketing system in place.
Question: Whats the highest ROI marketing channel you/your students have used for your apps? LinkedIn driving to webinars? Direct mail postcards?
Answer: By far, webinars. Cold emails to webinars, PPC to webinars, landing page to webinars. Webinars drive on average 50% of my software revenues.
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