AI has lowered the bar to entry into markets meaning more competition for your customers.  This has the potential to cannibalize the market. 

How should you respond?  Let's discuss.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is something that I've been referring to as the AI mote problem. Now, if you've heard me share any of this terminology before, you probably have an idea of what I'm about to say, but what it is, is more context around how you should be thinking about strengthening your value proposition for your B2B SaaS, given the remarkable capabilities of the AI tools which are arising.

Very quickly in popularity and their capabilities in terms of enabling people to be able to do significantly more with their SaaS applications much faster and more cost effectively. Now, before we had access to these tools, converting inputs to outputs generating remarkable outcomes may have required significantly more coding, solution design, engineering, innovating.

The challenge with these tools, the good and the bad is that they're capable of remarkable things, and they can do that relatively quickly. So you can plug in an AI tool into almost any component or feature in your product and make it better, if not significantly better, not just much more quickly, but also more cost effectively.

Now, that has raised the bar for what all of our tools need to be capable of in order to compete successfully within our respective markets, but at the same time, That has also lowered the bar to entry into creating a product that is more capable faster and more cost effectively. So that raises the competition is really what I'm trying to say.

Different way to say it is what I started this episode by saying is it's a moat problem, as in AI has created a potential scenario where there's no moat around what it is you want to build because potentially what you've built, leveraging AI is something someone else can. Probably just as quickly cost, effectively, easily, all that kind of stuff.

So if it hasn't taken you very long to build whatever you were leveraging with the AI technologies, then more than likely someone else is either working on it or maybe working on that relatively soon. So I wanna talk about what you do if you find yourself in a situation like this. Well, it all depends on the problem that you're trying to solve, right?

We always go back to that. It essentially d. Everything or the, the most that it can for any individual B2B SaaS application project. The problem that you're solving is also going to help you with defensibility, that key element which will prevent potentially more people from cannibalizing the target market in your space.

Because you've selected a particular problem, perhaps in a niche or in a horizontal that is, doesn't have as. Competition for that target market. Now, you can always go more niche and you can always find a subset of a subset. To continue to make your tool more specialized and to dive deeper into whatever target market it is you're competing.

That's always going to be preferential and helpful, and is always gonna be probably the most effective strategy to increase the defensibility of what it is that you're building. The other thing that does is it enables you to benefit from, you know, the expert scenario as in where the you, the more you are specialized.

The more that is typically in demand, as in think of it from the perspective of if you have to have a knee operation, right? Who do you want to work on your knee? Do you want the generalist who works on basically all potential health related problems? Or do you want the specialist, somebody who only works on repairing knees?

Right? That's a pretty easy way to think about that. The other benefit to that is, number one, there's typically less specialists. Also makes supply a little bit harder to come by. Uh, at the same time, because they're so specialized and in demand when they, that problem is out there and needs to be solved by someone in their target market, that also raises the prices for what it costs to acquire their services.

And you'll stand to benefit from those same elements as well. So if you're concerned about the AI mode problem, it's real. I've seen it and I'm continuing to see it, and we're gonna talk more. These types of strategies that you can lever to leverage to go deeper into your respective niche to increase the defensibility for your B2B SaaS.

Everyone is thinking of leveraging AI as an internal component of their B2B SaaS, but you can and should take it way beyond that.  AI can help you build your B2B SaaS business.  In this episode I talk more about how.

Free product-market fit course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is the other side of how AI can help you succeed in B2B SaaS. Now, I've talked quite a bit about how AI these days enable you to do significantly more, much faster, which enables you to provide a stronger value proposition and the dynamics of that.

If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen on one yesterday cuz it will walk you through some of those elements. But what I want to talk to you about today is the other opportunity. That AI has for you in terms of helping you build and get better at succeeding in B2B SaaS? Now, where I am at, I launched a B2B SaaS product in the first quarter of 2023.

And I'm planning to launch at least two in the second quarter of 2023, which demonstrates just how far we can move and how quickly, but also an acceleration of progress. So what I want to be able to do is working with a few members on my team is not just launch valuable B2B SaaS products, get better at it along the way, and also get faster.

And that's what I want to talk about in terms of how AI can help you. Now, I've already been using tools like Chat G P T to help me create better content, right? Gimme a story relevant to this or that, or whatever story I'm trying to tell is find me a good case study cuz those examples are really helpful.

I found ChatGPT to be very helpful for that. Oftentimes, and I've read so many case studies on different B2B SaaS companies that have been successful and unsuccessful, and I try to bring those to you as antidotes, but I don't always remember the names cause there's so many. I remember the stories largely relatively vividly, but sometimes I forget the name of the company or when it happened or whatever.

So really helpful for from that perspective, but it goes way beyond. Tools like Chat, G B T these days can help you with all of the components of the process of designing, building, launching, and then succeeding with B2B SaaS, all the way from finding those problems we're solving or helping you find those problems we're solving to and through building the actual application.

And we've been experimenting with that with great results so far. Now a step in between, which I'll talk about as well, is when you are figuring out the positioning and how you're going to market your unique value proposition for the problem that you wish to solve. To your target market or your icp, your ideal customer profile, your AI tools can be very helpful in this regard as well, too.

Everything from how to workshop that, how to say it, giving you ideas, not necessarily copy paste, but giving you the inspiration to figure out, how do I articulate this? I've got all these pieces. How do I put 'em together in the right way? All the way to and through even the code that you can essentially eventually copy and paste or whatever.

Add to the website that you wanna stand up. So your landing page, which is going to communicate that value proposition to the target market, the AI tools can help you with that. Then when you get to building, you can now relatively easily and quickly get code that works perfectly fine for your, for your product from these AI tools by asking.

And input to be translated to an output. So you can build B2B SaaS applications piecemeal. Now, by getting those components, or as I like to refer to them, Lego pieces from the AI tools, by prompting it or asking those tools what it is that you need. Think of it like building a building, but. Modular fashion.

So with like Lego pieces, each piece goes into a certain spot and enables you to build modular home much more. And that can be much more flexible and agile, but also faster. And that's the key. It's really the speed because a lot of the stuff that we're doing in B2B SASS is reinventing the wheel.

Everyone's building like an off module and a dashboard and all this kind of stuff, a payment gateway, et cetera, and wiring all that stuff up is not. The, that's not what's gonna make your product unique, right? What's gonna make your product unique is how. You are uniquely solving the problem worth solving for your target market, and those are the internals.

Everything else should essentially be done as quickly as possible, and there's pretty much universal standards at this point in terms of what people have come to expect from an experience perspective. So anyway, the point of this episode is to go beyond just thinking of using AI for the internals of what your product can do.

Leverage AI to actually help you build or go from your idea stage all the way to and through launching your actual product.

AI gives B2B SaaS founders the ability to do SO much SO quickly.  I want to talk about why this is good and bad plus how you should be thinking about building your SaaS to be defensible.

Free product-market fit course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is how AI is the lowest hanging fruit opportunity at the moment in B2B SaaS. Now, I've talked about this. I've recorded episodes on it and I've written about it. AI is capable of doing way more, way faster. Right now, the tools that are out there and available will enable you to create experiences that took previously significantly longer and way more capital to produce.

That's a good thing in one regard, in that it lowers the bar in terms of how hard it is for you to create a more powerful experience. So to do more with your B2B SaaS application. However, the challenging thing there is, it's easier for everybody else as well. So you need to strike a balance here in that you need to figure out how to make sure that your value proposition is strong enough to be defense.

But capable enough to provide your target market with enough value. Having said that, I believe AI is still the biggest opportunity for all B2B SaaS applications out there, ones that have grown and scaled to epic levels like HubSpot, and ones that are brand new people that are working on iterating and bringing new products to market.

Now, I'm probably gonna be producing quite a bit more content on this topic because I'm leveraging AI extensively. Uh, in certain instances, and this is something I had traditionally not done, I'm almost looking for applications to use AI from the start, but in reality, what I'm doing is I'm still starting with those problems, and what I'm doing is I'm looking for how AI might make our ability to create a value proposition to solve the biggest problem we're solving for our target.

Faster, more cost effective, easier to use, all of those types of things. And AI is capable in all of those ways. I've got a laundry list. I mean, I typically always do, but I've got a solid list of products with real potential that are in my backlog, several of which I'm gonna be releasing over the remainder of this year, and I'm gonna be bringing those updates to you as we converse over the podcast.

What I want you to take away from the message from this episode is that if you aren't taking a closer look at its capabilities, you really need to be, you need to check out all of the AI tools out there. You know, start with Open AI's Chat, G P T. That's a great place to get started and then extend into some of the others as well.

Also, figure out of the tools that are out. Whether you're going direct to the key component, like the one I just mentioned, or you're gonna be building off of APIs that are also leveraging AI tools, right? Because in the end, what really matters to your target market is how easily conveniently cost effectively, consistently are you solving their biggest problem, right?

They're not really gonna care all that much about the internals of your product. What people are really looking for is, can you. Whatever I have as an input and produce whatever I need as an output that enables them to achieve the outcome that they're looking for. And if you can help them make those outcomes more successful, they're gonna credit you with all of that value and that's gonna be worth something to them.

Now, how much that's precisely worth and what you should charge for access to it, that depends on your target market, the problem, the impact, the cost. And we're gonna talk about all that stuff in greater detail as well too. But I want you to start explor. AI in terms of what it can do to level up the capabilities of your B2B SaaS application.

And you need to make sure you strike a fine balance between not just doing something that almost anyone can do with AI so that your, whatever it is you're building into your product is defensible. Um, but understanding that these tools are more powerful now than ever, and they can help you move a lot further, a lot faster.

The AI world is vast and changing rapidly.  While that world is figuring itself out, I'd like to share with you what I think are the biggest strengths of AI at the moment to help you succeed in B2B SaaS.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is what I think is the best opportunity for leveraging AI to enable you to be more successful with B2B SaaS. Now, there's so much changing so quickly in the world that is AI these days that it'd be impossible to cover all of it, but what I'm trying to help you prevent is freaking out based on how much is changing and how quickly.

Worrying tremendously about how disruptive it's going to be to our way of life and eliminating jobs and all that kind of stuff. This is, I've been, you know, I'm old enough, fortunately, unfortunately, to have been through a number of different technical revolutions, like the early days of the internet and how dramatically that was changing everything.

But the long and short of it is new technology. Is invented inevitably. And that changes things typically for the better. But for the most part, the people that have a more difficult time with it are those that fight it. Uh, and the people that typically have a better time with it are those that learn it and understand how to leverage it.

Right? How, how can it make your life better? How can it help you with whatever you're trying to do? I think that's the mentality to be in yet. So having been through that a few times, that's always worked out pretty well for me, and I encourage you to do the same. But what I really want to talk about is where I think the strengths are in terms of where AI is at the moment.

Now, much like other technology we've seen in recent years, like blockchain for example, it is still kind of being figured out in terms of where it's going to land and. How it fits into the ecosystem, right? But it is definitely one of the more disruptive ones, if not the most disruptive one that I've seen because of its significant capabilities.

However, having said that, until we really have a better understanding and where it's going to land and how most people are leveraging it, I wanna share with you how I am leveraging it for the most part thus far. And that's really to create what I'd consider to be different types of transformations or conversions.

You can think of it as. As in you have something in one format and you need it in another, and the AI tools thus far seem to be great for helping you figure out how to do that. Now, one of the tools that I've been working on, that I've told you about a few times already is I have a podcasting agency and we have bottlenecks.

In that process, I created a tool to help you. Automatically get show notes in a couple of minutes from a recorded episode. You don't need to edit the file at all. You could just upload the audio file and then in a few minutes after you press the button and let it go. It produces show notes, which comes with titles and descriptions and all that kind of stuff.

I'm using AI to do something like that, that I think is a good example of. Input, taking an input and creating an output, right? Which before I had to have team members do, I had to have folks listen to the episode. I had to have folks write them. I had to have folks edit them. Right now, I've essentially automated almost that entire step, which is pretty remarkable.

So what I'd encourage you to do is think about it in this way, as in, I think one of the bigger strengths for the AI tools at the moment is being able to, Take your inputs and create the output that you're looking for in a particular step in the process for whatever it is you're trying to do. I would start by experimenting there because it's a limited scope, enables you to figure out your variables, get clear on what the tran type of transformation you're trying to make, and then figure out how to fit the AI tools into the picture to evaluate whether or not they could do a better job than however you're doing that step today.

And if they can, you just might look to incorporate that into your.

Companies like Theranos have shown that 'fake it till you make it' is all BS.  Still, there are too many people that feel this strategy has merit.  I want to tear it apart by breaking down why it doesn't work.  We'll also talk about what you should do instead.

Free product-market fit course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is the ill faded strategy that is typically making the rounds, at least somewhere in the business world of the so-called fake it till you make it approach. Now, I pretty much hate everything about this yet in business and especially in tech or software and sas, it's always making the rounds because there's always a group of people out there trying to vy for unicorn.

They want to be the billion dollar company. They want to be the next big thing, and they're willing to skip as many steps as possible in order to try to pull that off. I don't know why. I mean, I understand the appeal of course, but I don't know why this isn't looked at more objectively because of the ridiculously low success rate.

I studied the numbers on this, and the numbers are just ridiculous. I think it wound up being a 1.3% success rate for those that actually attempt this strategy and then have an acquisi. That goes beyond that valuation. But anyway, I know it's not necessarily a logical approach, so to speak, so that may or may not deter the people who are trying to leverage this strategy.

But what I wanted to draw your attention to is that this is, this tactic has been falling further out of favor. And I think that's a good thing. And that's probably a combination of things like Theranos, where. You know, founder Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to prison for 10 or 11 years for defrauding investors, combined with, you know, these economic factors as well too, in that money's no longer cheap.

So with rising interest rates comes basically like tighter wallets for the most part, and people being, especially investors being less likely to invest in just the next whatever thing. Now, having said all of that, The development of AI tools has led to potentially more activity in the space where people are spinning up just about anything that has AI in the name.

I think Y Combinator, like two thirds of their applicants are working on something AI related, which is probably somewhat predictable. Anyway, what I wanted to talk about is I wanted to issue caution when it comes to strategies like, Right. I don't think this is something that should really ever be entertained besides the fact that it's ridiculously low success rate for probably relatively obvious reasons.

It doesn't. It doesn't enable you to build a company, a business, a product with solid fundamental economics. And that's something you can do from zero without investment, you can do it totally bootstrapped, you can do it nights and weekends. You can build a proper business that's going to be financially viable.

Using the slow and steady approach. It's really like, whereas everyone else is trying to do the fake it till you. My experience has been, it's more like if you remember the story from maybe when you were younger, the tortoise in the hair, slow and steady typically wins this race, right? But you gotta know which steps you need to do and which ones you need to complete, and how comprehensively you need to complete them before you move on to the next step.

And there's not a lot of people talking about that. So I'm gonna be continuing to provide more of that type of content as we move forward because it. I've been doing and it's been working out just fine. I, you know, I'm not married to any particular concept I'm working on. I'm looking for problems worth solving, right?

That's the place to start. And then when I find one that looks like it's got a lot of opportunity for me to provide a bunch of value back to the ICP or the ideal customer profile, I look to design a UVP or a unique value pro. To capture that value provided back to the icp and then we can take a component of that as well also, and that becomes potentially the revenue that we're generating for providing for, for solving that problem, for that target market.

That's really what it's all about. And then it's slow and steady there. You can always accelerate or you can always invest more. You can always dedicate more time. Right. But I'm also an advocate for only doing that when it makes good financial sense for you.

Eventually you're going to break something in your B2B SaaS.  This may lead to some strong reactions and angry emails from your users.  After the initial shock wears off, you'll have time to fix whatever is broken.  However, the good part is that your users are engaged and now you have an opportunity to learn critically important information about how to make your product better.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is what to do if all of a sudden you've made your users angry. Now, if you get an emotional reaction like that, you might immediately think that you need to panic and pounce all over what went wrong, or find out what went wrong and scramble.

But what I want to tell you is that I want to interrupt that essentially right away and say that any type of an emotional reaction about your product is probably a good thing. Now what I mean by that is that means people are engaged. That probably means people are using your product as such. They have a good reason to get to that point at least.

So, so far that is a sign of progress. Now, whatever the reason that you've gotten some type of a strong reaction from your users, maybe something that was working broke or whatever, whatever the reason. If they're reaching out to you and sharing more details about that, that's a good thing. You want them to provide you with as much feedback as possible, because that can be really hard to get, and that feedback helps us get greater context around what I call essentially the why component of their experience, right?

With analytics and other tools, survey tools, et cetera, we can get things like what people are doing. We can get things like how they're doing it. The big missing piece though, typically, and what a lot of these tools lack is the ability to give us insight into why people are doing what they're doing. So that's.

We need more qualitative data. The quantitative tools are not great at giving us insight into that, but that information's super powerful because if we understand more about the why, we have an understanding in terms of what motivates your users to do what they're doing. Use your tool, not use your tool, and that insight's really helpful to figure out how to make your tool better and better.

So if you've gotten some type of strong emotional reaction from your users or something's broken or whenever, you can really use that essentially as almost a metric for how engaged are the folks that have access to your product. And it'll help you figure out essentially what's wrong, so that you can fix it.

So that's good too. So after the initial potential shock wears off for, oh my goodness, that I just upset my entire user base, realized that there is. There is some flexibility here in terms of them being reasonable to an extent, to give you the time you need in order to fix whatever went wrong. But the good news is that they're engaged, and the more engaged that they are, the more feedback they're gonna get.

The more feedback that you're gonna get, the better you can figure out how to improve your product from where it is at the moment.

I'm seeing more and more instances of people freaking out about AI in a bad way.  It seems many people think that all their skills will become obsolete overnight which dooms their future. 

I want to share with you why this isn't the case.  New technology still takes a while to reach widespread adoption into all areas of our life.  Let's talk about how to maintain our composure and make the most of the opportunity around us with AI.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is why you shouldn't be panicking about ai. Now, I've done some content already about AI and I'm working on another one in terms of how to leverage it when building your B2B SaaS and how to figure out how to leverage, how to get the most out of that as a tool when you're building your B2B SaaS product or company.

But I'm seeing a lot more content these days. That's talking particularly about the acceleration of the development of ai. Now, I know how this feels because I've observed it myself, and I've paid very close attention to it since OpenAI dropped chat, G P T. The updates seem to just keep coming and they seem to be significant.

I mean, we see things like going from chat G P T three to four, and the statistics that come with it, as in version three, had a 10% chance of passing the. Version four has a 90% chance. So we're seeing pretty dramatic improvements relatively quickly, which is somewhat unique for technology if you are laser focused in just this portion of history.

But if you zoom out over time, and I'm talking about decades, we've seen acceleration of technology pretty much always, you know, dating back to things like Moore's Law, for example. Technology has always kind of continued to accelerate. But the point that I'm trying to make here, I'm seeing content related to things like with the introduction of what's now being called auto GPT.

People are saying that things like learning prompt engineering is a waste of time, as in that's gonna become an obsolete skill because you can just continually funnel AI back into itself. And look, I get it. I'm doing some of that stuff as well too, but what I want to reinforce is, The skills that you're picking up and learning about how to use these tools are not going to be obsolete overnight.

Uh, I'll share an example with you about a apartment that I just moved into that I needed to wire up because I couldn't get the internet service provider I wanted, which required me to have to manage some things with the existing wiring loan. Now, a million years ago, I learned all these things because I have a background in network.

I even bought tools and I was crimping cables and terminating endpoints and basically running network cable throughout homes over however many years now. It's been a long time since I've done any of that stuff. Much of it, as it turns out, hasn't changed all that much, so those skills still relevant today, but I just haven't used them because my world has been software since forever.

However, I did need them, and it turns out I did have some of my older tools. So I ended up using them for a couple of hours and I went back to using all of that knowledge that I once gained, even though I hadn't used it in years. So anyway, I'm just sharing with you the fact that had I not had those skills, I would not have been able to solve those problems.

So they still came in handy. Having said that technology, especially in the world of AI, is going to continue to evolve. What you're learning about how to use it now is still going to be relevant. Another example I'll share is with like search engine optimization and getting good at asking questions of search engines like Google.

Despite the fact that AI has exploded and traffic to chat, G B T is accelerating and growing at a crazy pace. The vast majority of the problems people are searching for solutions still still overrule. That's why ads continues to be successful. I'm using it myself. Figuring out how to get good at search engine optimization and keyword research and all that kind of stuff is still very relevant today despite the fact that Chad G p t may be influencing that game.

So anyway, the point is not to panic about these developments. I'm seeing some people that are kind of falling into that category just. About them so that you can better understand how to leverage them to help you with what it is you are trying to do. Because there's always going to be new tools. That evolution is something that will never stop if you learn the latest but stable tools and you figure out how to leverage them in order to be faster, cheaper, better, whatever it is, that is a net result improvement for you in building, running, managing, owning your B2B SaaS.

I've been getting more questions in my slack community about where and how to find more customers for your B2B SaaS.  The real answer here is, it depends.

The answer is dependent on a number of variables like who you are building for, the problem you are trying to solve and where those prospects are searching for a solution to those problems.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is where to find your target market customers. Now, I've received this question a couple of times in my Slack community, and it goes something along these lines. It's where or how should I be advertising to get more customers for my SaaS product?

Now, the answer to that isn't Google or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. The answer to that depends on who your target market customer is, and this is usually what I share back is which problem, like who has which problem that your product happens to solve, and where is that target market persona looking for a solution to that problem?

That's the question you need to be asking yourself really, in order to get the correct answer to that. Now, depending on what it is you're building or who you're building for, which is the most important part, folks may or may not be searching for solutions to the problem they have that you're trying to provide a better solution to on a platform that you're considering.

For example, the product that I'm building now, In podcasting, I knew Google search was gonna be able to move the needle for me there because I had done that homework before I even built the product. In fact, that was critical decision making information in terms of whether or not I would even move forward with the build.

I wanted to see who was searching for what, what did that traffic cost, what was the volume like, and if it was ridiculously competitive and low volume. Or either or. I may not ultimately even decided to build the product, but for sure I wouldn't have advertised on that platform. I found opportunities and I did some searching on those keywords myself to see what the results came up with, just to make sure that I was relatively well aligned in terms of the solution that I was gonna be positioning and marketing.

When folks search for those keyword. Was that going to match with what had appeared folks that entered those keywords were ultimately looking for, and that looked like it was. Yes. I have since run those experiments and it looks like it's working out so far, but I did that homework upfront. Now, if you're doing something that, now, to be fair, what I'm building obviously is b2b.

If what you're building is more b2c, maybe or maybe not, that may be the platform for you, right? Platforms like LinkedIn are great for b. Platforms like Instagram, however, maybe Facebook, you know, Instagram might be more b2c, who knows, right? Uh, Facebook may be a little bit of both. It depends on what it is again, you're planning to build and who you're planning to build it for.

So if you're wondering where to go to find more customers or prospects to your product to try to attempt to create conversions, make sure you first figure. Who it is you're building for and where those folks are hanging out, plus looking for solutions to the problem that your product is attempting to solve.

There's SO much content out there about how hard you must struggle and that you might have to give up EVERYTHING to succeed in building a B2B SaaS.  In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, building your B2B SaaS business during nights and weekends can actually be a huge advantage for many reasons.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcription Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I'm gonna talk to you about is when and how to build your B2B SaaS business. Now, having said that, I've built multiple different types of businesses and in different ways, but my preferred option, having that experience now and having worked with a lot of people to help them build theirs, is to do so part-time when you're first starting up.

There's a lot of content out there and strategies about lean startup. They call it struggle porn, which I think is a great name for it because people seem to kind of glorify this, I need to barely scrape by before I become a millionaire overnight. None of which usually happens for almost anyone. So if you ever hear a story like that, that typically comes, those are the exceptions, obviously.

But there's so many advantages to building this business, essentially on your own terms. Right? And if you do that, and if you have a source of income, A primary job or consulting or contracting that you do also part-time. You can make sure that you have the cash flow that you need and take the time that you would like to building your B2B SaaS business, this isn't something you have to do full-time.

In fact, most of the B2B SaaS businesses I've built, and most of the ones that I've built that have been successful to the extent that I would like them to be, were built by me part-time. As in it wasn't the only thing that I was working. Now these businesses le lend themselves to this strategy relatively well because you can increase, you can create such great leverage in that B2B SaaS.

Businesses when done right, don't require a lot of human capital or the type of services you might need if you were building a traditional kind of service-based business. So that's one of the advantages. The other element here that I think is important to mention, What I recommend a lot of folks to do that come to me that want to build a B2B SaaS business, and especially if they don't have a ton of industry experience in the industry that they want to build a product for, is to go get a job in that industry.

I love the strategy for a whole bunch of reasons. Number one, you can make. Decent cash flow to cover your cost of living or take care of your family or whatever. Ultimately, you need, you've, you can use the cash flow from that job to cover those elements. Then you can carve out a piece of that to invest in building your B2B SaaS business when you're ready.

And one of the other advantages is if you get a job in. You're learning a lot of subject matter expertise and you're getting great understanding for the problems and challenges in that industry. The B2B SaaS product that I'm building at the moment, Is in podcasting. I just so happen to also own a podcasting service business or productized service business that makes the problems and challenges in that industry crystal clear for me to be able to figure out where is there opportunity to invest in building a SaaS business that's gonna create value for other people that have these problems.

Because I built that business, I know those problems intimately well. Essentially, I am my own target market, which is a huge advantage as opposed to. Seeing what you think might be a problem from afar, but never having actually worked directly in that industry, or at least as much as someone else who spent years in it may actually know in terms of the context around the problems and challenges to be solved.

So, points of takeaway from this episode are you don't need to dive head first and sacrifice everything in order to build a B2B SaaS business or be successful in B2B SaaS And. Doing it via nights and weekends and getting a job in industry can provide great cash flow and take a lot of the pressure off in terms of if and when your B2B SaaS ultimately takes off.

Plus give you a ton of expert insider information and knowledge in terms of the context around the problems and challenges in the industry for which you may wanna build that product.

I've recently optimized my search ad campaigns to hopefully drive more conversions for my B2B SaaS application.  I want to walk you through what I changed and why including some tips based on what I've learned if you intend to leverage search ads to drive traffic for your B2B SaaS.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is further optimizing your channels in terms of where you're getting the leads for your B2B SaaS. Now, in this case, for me, this is through search ads, so I am primarily getting the traffic for people that I'm trying to drive into my B2B SaaS from Google search ads.

Now, when I was beginning, and I always encourage this, I was moving pretty fast, so I set up a campaign. Essentially as quickly as I could, cuz I was doing a number of things simultaneously, like putting up the landing page, potentially working on the prototype, measuring how effectively I was converting people.

I was doing a lot. So cuz I was moving quickly, I just set up essentially the basics for the early campaign in order to run my early stage experiment to get a better idea in terms of how many prospects I was ultimately gonna be able to convert. Now. After I ran that experiment and I got the data back, which said how many folks I was ultimately able to convert and then sign off on essentially the early stage economic viability of the B2B SaaS that I was talking about building.

Then I had the information I needed in order to move forward with the build. So the build is done, the product is live. Now I'm trying to focus on converting people. Using the products to paint for the product. So that is the spot that I'm at at the moment with what I'm building. Now, in order to do that, I've already talked a little bit about further optimizing whatever channel you are using in order to ultimately get to and through this stage, which again, for me is via search ads now, because I had just set that up via the basics in the.

I, it was definitely not optimized, so I've recently gone back in there to dive in. I've been monitoring it, but I haven't done a deep dive. I recently did a deep dive and I learned quite a bit. As in number one, I'm expecting to kind of hit the throttle on trying to get as much activity from that channel as possible.

Number two, the channel is definitely not optimized because as I was looking at the details, what I saw was very different Click through rates. Depending upon what was being shown, where it was being shown, when it was being shown a number of different variables. So I wanna explain to you what a few of those were for me and the changes that I'm making based on the results that I've observed now, because I just kind of did things quick and dirty in the beginning.

Through Google it ultimately set it up with our quote unquote like smart campaign, which I would definitely encourage you to avoid because it is severely limiting in terms of what it is you can control, and that's the problem I was running into. I went in there and I was trying to make customizations to optimize my campaign and I really couldn't because it was started with that so-called smart campaign, which is I think essentially just meant.

Folks to get through the process as quick as possible. I'm trying to automate stuff for you, but it limits you in terms of what you can do. So you're very limited in terms of the modifications you can make, and that's the problem I was running into. So ultimately I replaced this campaign, but when I was evaluating the performance of it, I noticed a couple things.

Number one, Where they were displaying the ads, they were displaying them in a bunch of different locations. One of those was Google display ads, which is not what I wanted. Uh, that is like, I think blogs and stuff like that, if people place ads around there, so like you may have seen like a banner ad or something like that.

That's not what I'm looking for. So actually quite a bit of my budget was going to that. I simply, My budget going to search ads when people are searching with Google search engine and they're seeing the results, I want them to see mine at the top. So I wanted to modify that in that I wanted to remove the display ad component.

Another thing that I noticed was that a significant amount of my ad budget was going towards mobile applications, or mobile devices, I should say, as in when people were searching via Google, but they were doing so from their mobile. My application, though it is responsive, it's not really designed for someone to be using it via mobile phone.

All right? We're talking about, you know, a podcasting assistant, so to speak. You're moving files around, you're doing editings, that type of stuff. Most people are not doing heavy editing like that from their phone. They're doing it from their desktop. And this was even more obvious when I looked at the clickthrough rate and the conversions from desktop versus mobile, despite the fact that quite a bit of my budget was going through, uh, mobile platform.

Going to mobile platforms. The majority, the highest clickthrough rate was from desktops, which is essentially what I was expecting it to be. So long story short there too, I also removed the budget going towards mobile devices. I don't want to go through mobile devices, so no display ads, no mobile devices.

I wanted it to go just through Google search, and I wanted to just be displayed for folks that are browsing via desktop. So with just those two changes, I'm expecting to see some improvements, and I'll keep you posted of course, but I wanted to share with. What the process of further optimizing looks like and share with you some tips if you're gonna be using search or ads or anything like that in terms of trying to generate traffic in that too.

You know, unless you want to do, like I did a quick and dirty very early campaign, probably avoid setting it up via Smart Campaign through Google and instead give yourself access to some of those more advanced tools, cuz that'll help you with when you're ready to do further customizations.