非技术创始人零代码打造SaaS，3年做到14万美元月收入并350万美元退出

Hey everyone, how's it going today? So, I'm here to talk to you a little bit about what it's like for a non-technical founder to scale. Um but first, before I do that, I want to just take a little audience poll real quick. How many non-technical founders are here by show of hands? It's actually a little bit more than I thought. So now, on the reverse, how many technical people and technical founders are here? Show of hands and keep them raised.

Okay, perfect. Now, if you don't like marketing and you don't like outreach or sales, put your hands down. Okay, so a good portion of you put your hands down. So we're going to go into that. You can The rest of you can put your hands down now. So we're going to go a little bit into that um and how to kind of some of the growth tactics that I used as a non-technical founder to be able to scale. But this applies for technical founders who don't like talking to people, who don't like doing the outreach, who don't want to do that outreach.

So there's several ways to do that. So first-time founders, I want to address you first, the people who are in the idea phase, the people who are in the pre-revenue phase, or the small revenue phase. People who are there um not having an experience, it's not an excuse. You can succeed with drive and persistence. So, no previous SaaS experience, no social media following or online presence, no funding, no financial backing, and doing whatever it takes to achieve financial freedom.

Does this sound like any of you? I feel like it sounds like a couple of you based on some of the conversations I've had. Well, if you said yes to any of those, you're not alone because if I can do it, so can you because I can literally code zero. So, I'm a bootstrap SaaS founder, non-technical, zero coding skills as I mentioned. I built an influencer marketplace. I hired a 1099 dev to do all the coding, everything, infrastructure, back end, front end, full stack dev.

We scaled to 140k MRR within 3 years. Pretty much I was running the business side, he was running the technical side. And exited recently for 3.5 million. I know it sounds crazy, but it happens and it's I didn't expect it either to be honest. Um the scale didn't happen overnight. It actually took it took a while to kind of get the stride, to polish the software, to polish the pitch, the acquisition channels and find out what worked while staying bootstrapped and maintaining a much smaller footprint financially because obviously we don't want to be spending all the revenue.

Um so I already had product market fit, but talking a little bit to the pre-revenue, the small revenue, here are some questions to ask yourself when starting a new SaaS. And one is what is is what I'm offering better than what's already out there or filling some gap? So the reason I already had product market fit is because I was running a business an existing business beforehand and I saw that the the platforms out there that I needed to facilitate my business were just not up to par or feature-wise, they were too expensive, they were too complicated.

There was a lot of problems with those systems. So I said, "You know what? I'm going to hire someone to build a solution that I think would be great for my business." So we instantly transitioned our customers to the software platform that I built and it was an MVP and it was complete garbage. I mean, it would crash all the time. I had one dev build it. It was he wasn't even on board at that time. This was just a freelancer that I hired and essentially he gave me a line of code to restart the server every time it crashed, which was every couple of hours.

Um so but but it was a it was a feature not a bug. So we um we started scaling more so because we were using the system and we believed in it so much and we our customers saw it and our customers started becoming customers of the platform itself. So, I started focusing on that full-time. And the more people started using it, I was giving away the system for free in the beginning. And I was like, you know, there's got to be a way to make money from this because I can't First, it was 10 people, then it was 100 people, then it was 500 people.

I'm like, I got to start charging for this because something's wrong here. But, we were just using it for our own product. The other thing is, do you know your target audience and how easy it is for you to reach them, particularly without ad spend? So, my target audience was built in because they were my customers originally, and then other people doing similar activities of selling, you know, cut digital content, financial information, you know, access to events, tickets, courses.

And then, does it save people time, money, or energy? And is it enough of a moat or add-on to provide 10x the value of the sub? And I know 10x sounds pretty crazy, but that's really the goal that you want to shoot for in terms of the value that you're giving to the people that want to use your product. If you could shoot for that 10x value, it'll be a no-brainer for people to sign up for your system. And can I make the product easy to use and easy to understand?

And so, part of the problem that I've seen with a lot of developers that I've spoken with is they tend to over over-engineer things, over-develop things, and that's not everybody, but some. And for getting started, you want to make it as easy as possible and self-explanatory as possible. So, that way you don't have the customer service issues, you don't have the you get a higher conversion rate. So, if you said no to any of these things, you may want to spend a little bit more time researching before you start investing in building something like that.

So, now let's get into the post-revenue founders that are here. So, these are five tactics to use to scale, especially if you don't like talking to people. And if you hate doing marketing, there are ways to do it. And I know it feels like a dirty word because, you know, it's salesy and pitchy, but it needs to be done, it it doesn't need to be traditional. So, here are the five tactics you can use to scale without having to personally do the outreach.

And I know there's one missing, but the fifth one's obvious. You all already know what it is. So, the first one is brand ambassadors. Leveraging your customers is a growth hack. So, the way to do that is to know your product and to develop your product so well. So, originally my platform, uh going back doing a callback to the first talk that we heard here at MicroConf, there's sales-led growth and there's product-led growth.

Well, because I had a crappy MVP, I had to do sales-led growth in order to afford the funding to do product-led growth. So, sales-led growth, most of you are product-led growth, I'm assuming. Um so, the first thing is to track every single thing about your customer. Feedback, satisfaction, demographics of who's using your platform, personas, NPS scores I found were extremely useful. Also, gathering this data at the beginning sets you up very nicely for an exit because a potential buyer looking at your business, seeing customer satisfaction, it also directly correlates to retention and churn and all of the other things.

And then you can use this data to reduce those numbers, to reduce the churn, and ultimately get a higher valuation, which is what I think most of you want to do if you're heading down the path of an exit. Giving away things it to build loyalty is one of the best things that you can do when you're starting or at at mid-revenue, small revenue. Trials, rebates, digital downloads, special pricing for certain uh types of groups, specially certain verticals that you're going after.

This is my personal favorite, revenue share partnerships. So, you're paying for customer acquisition using future dollars instead of current revenue, which I think is fantastic because in most cases it's revenue that you wouldn't have had anyway. So, who cares? And so, the key to a successful campaig

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