Transcript

00:00 This guy built a million dooll SAS in just 87 days and the crazy part is. He did it using a strategy that nobody is talking about the producti Sass the way we built. SAS is the way I think everyone should build. A SAS. Andre invited us into his house in Tampa Florida to show us exactly how it works how he got his first customer and how he grew it to millions in ARR. But this story is not an overnight success. I was pretty much at the point of giving up for months. Andre struggled to make any progress burning through tens of thousands of dollars of his own money on developers and designers who couldn't deliver then on the brink of shutting down the business. He discovered something that would change everything so he relaunched the business and 3 months later it was doing over a million doar a year. The biggest secret to all the success is my in this video. Andre will share his exact blueprint on how to build build launch and grow a $2.4 million SAS company from scratch I'm Pat walls and this is starter story thank you for having me Andre absolutely. Pat thanks for having me yeah tell me about who you are and what you built absolutely so my name is Andre Heckle Jr I've been an entrepreneur for the last seven years and most recently I've built an app called list kit or sauce. In 87 days. We grew it to a million dollar ARR wow Z to a million from the launch of the actual size yeah. Wow first 87 days can you break down this business.A little bit more how does it work yes so it revolves around cold email and so cold email is you find someone's email address online and you send them a pitch either to sell your service or to get them on a podcast or a show. Like this the type of people that use it are either salese or business owners themselves. We also have a lot of Freelancers and solopreneurs on there that want to again reach out and make pitches to potential clients for their own business or agency. Just within the first 6 months we had our first 1,000 paying customers and as of right now almost a year into the business. We have over 1,500 paying customers and the pricing is really simple. It's $97 a month to get started and we have pricing that goes up obviously a couple hundred for our more. Enterprise users yeah.Let's dive a little bit deeper into the numbers behind this SAS business. What do the numbers look like here so yeah. We started the business last. July right now is June 2024 and we're about to just surpass $200,000 in Mr. The biggest secret to all this success is is my team of co-founders. I have four other co-founders. I have a CTO. I have a head of sales and I have two guys that focus on marketing and ads and then what the team beyond the team of co-founders looks like is we have 20 people in CS and in sales and then the rest of the team is on the developer team. The team cost is over $100,000 total cost to grow the business including ads and marketing and acquisition is anywhere from $150 to $175,000.

02:55 A month to maintain you build this amazing SAS business but what's the timeline here how do you get there. So I hit entrepreneurship as early as I possibly could around the age of 16 or 17 and just like anyone else getting started with entrepreneurship and no money you go with the service rep and I built an agency business around that we're primarily doing lead generation services for a really long time that was myself my cousin Dan who's still a co-founder at the businesses. We run now and Christian who's also a co-founder in Lis kit and everything else we do and we grew that business to 100K a month to us that was a massive success. But the problem we ran into is we couldn't scale. It really past that and that's when we partnered up with C Wizard or Daniel fio as everyone knows and started client Ascension that helped people do the same things we did to go from Zer to $100,000 a month with our agency by using cold Emil lead generation tactics that we used you launched this agency and then you launched this coaching program. How does that lead you to building a SAS business yeah. So SAS is really interesting right because again it takes a lot of startup Capital to start.So I think the approach is the only way to go about it. If you don't have startup capital and if you don't want to go the Venture Capital route and what that is is starting with a product TI service. So on the front end. It looks and feels like a SAS where you go on the website and you order something and on the back end. It's fulfilled manually by people when we were selling a product TI service. You had to go through a manual onboarding process so you just tell us how many leads you're looking for 100 leads. 1,000 leads 10,000 leads and that submits an onboarding for to our team. Then within 24 hours. It's being fulfilled behind behind the scenes and then it gets manually delivered to the customers because again it's low cost. We didn't have to have any development fees. All we had to do was single out what we were already doing within our agency to build leads list for our agency clients and just do that with a really fast turnaround time.For our SAS customers and number two. It allows you to prove your idea out. We didn't necessarily know that if we built a SAS that someone could go to and selfs serve that they'd actually want it that way or how they would want it or if the turnaround time mattered or if the cost mattered as much so we gathered market research through that time and then number three build cash flow right again. SAS is expensive and rather than having to guess at what the product should look like. We knew exactly what it should look like so we were able to build it. A lot cheaper than most people would have to spend to build a sass that actually works yeah. Guys Andrea is proof that you can build a million-dollar business idea with Z especially with this unique model of the product High SAS.But Andre's business comes from the foundation of having a solid idea and solving the right problem. Now imagine. There was a place where you could find this the problems to solve the blueprints to solve them and real data from million-dollar businesses started by regular people. Like you and me well. I made something cool for you. If you're actually serious about this. You can go to the first link in the description and you'll be able to download our free report of 50 solo developer business ideas that are making money right now all right. Let's get back to the interview and see how Andre actually built this business tell me about the story about actually building this and hiring people to build it and your experience with that. In the beginning yeah we were doing the product High service and reinvesting the5 to $110,000. We were making from that every month in the product development but we've never developed a product and so all that money was reinvested into developers and designers to build an app that never saw the light of day.

06:20 It was very demotivating like I was pretty much at the point of giving up like this liset thing. It's not working out. I know this idea can work. I just can't find someone to execute on the idea and so funny enough. At the same time we're building client Ascension which is our really nicely cash flowing business in the coaching space and one of our students flew out to Tampa himself. Oliver shout out to Oliver was like I have the exact understanding that you need to see this thing through and actually build it and within 6 months.That's when we launched and as you've heard already after 87 days of launching we grew the thing a million dollars AR Wow Let's talk about that that launch that relaunch of of Lis kit where you went from 0 to a million 87 days what happened how did that happen. We had a list of paying customers from coaching from our agency and from again the product TI service and talking to those customers asking them hey what would you like to see in this final version of our SAS we've tweeted about it. We just told our story the entire time from when we started it as a product as service up to the point where we spent so much money and it failed and we were ready to quit to when we rebuilt it and relaunched and so they they've been around for the roller coaster variet. We had with the company and we had a product that they have been specifically asking for so. By the time we launched we just sent. A couple of emails did a couple of live calls put some tweets out and everyone rushed to support us yeah. Let's talk pricing pricing and SAS what's been your what's been your approach or strategy around pricing yeah. So first I mean you're running a business that has to have some profit at the end of the day. So first you have to figure out your cost. We take the cost and then we go to look at what of our competitors charging and then we're asking their customers what do you like about their pricing. What don't you like about their pricing cuz. The other thing about SAS is you're not starting from scratch you're following other competitors and making small tweaks and changes to improve upon what someone else has already built. So with this kid. It's just how many credits do you want and we'll put a price per credit behind that that's reasonable to you and your business yeah.

08:19 Let's talk about growth. How did you go from zero to a million to over 2 million. Now how did you grow this business yes so I mean primarily through cold email which is what our target market wants. And that's what we provide leads for and then number two. We've primarily grown now through ads ads really help you scale past a certain point in business and number three. We've scaled through content marketing Affiliates and through our existing product ecosystem that I've talked about before with our coaching program and with our agency business yeah. Let's dive a little bit into that cold email strategy what did that look like for you when you were starting out yeah.So we were already good at Cold email because that was our bread and butter the problem is cold. Email really works if you're selling a high ticket agency service service and so what we were doing was instead of selling people on the product itself. We were selling them on 50 free leads and said hey if you respond to this email and tell us who you want leads of. We'll send you 50 leads from list kit and if they're good let's talk about how you can get more and that lead magnet in our cold email campaigns took off and now you see all of our competitors doing the same thing. Let's talk about ads you guys run ads how does that look so the problem with ads in running a sales team for a SAS is again you're selling something that's low ticket so what we did is. We realized that people signing up for list kit. Not all of them knew how to use it properly and so we came up with a setup offer where we would come into your business set up a cold email system.The same way we've set up our own system and give you the leads on a reoccurring basis. But the thing with ads is the creatives don't last very long as you start to scale like once you get past $300 $400 a day and spend you really have to create new creatives and so it's a mix of videos speaking direct to camera talking about how this software can help with your equal email campaigns or it can help you generate more leads but a lot of them are just static images as well. So we're testing almost 20 new creatives. Every week. 10 different static images 10 different variations of videos with different headlines. Different copy different people in the videos right so we're always testing. Let's talk about free trials. You mentioned that you don't have a free trial what's your approach and why I just think it. It attracts the wrong buyer or person because they're not a buyer you're attracting freebie Seekers. We knew people coming to our website. It's low ticket enough to buy and it's low commitment enough and instead of a free trial. What we did is we added a money back guarantee and so we could still frame it like a free trial but collect money right away. I will say however with a free trial. It does make sense for some SAS tools that monetize how many users they have on the platform whether they can serve them ads whether they can get data for more people right. But it didn't make sense for this kit yeah. You run this pretty big B2B SAS business.

10:55 Now it started small but now there's 40 people on the team. How are you able to hire 40 people people and keep us profitable yeah. So when people hear 40 team. Members are thinking full-time us employees are getting anywhere from $50 to $100,000 a year right for us that would not be sustainable by any means and so a majority of our team are either developers that are in countries like the Ukraine or customer success. Representatives that are in countries like Lebanon. They're the hardest workers I've ever come across. They're really good at speaking English compared to some other vas and it's cheap labor you're paying anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 a month to get someone full-time from Lebanon who's as good as or better in my opinion than someone in the US that you might have to pay anywhere from $5 to $8,000 a month.Let's talk about competition clearly you're not the first uh business to be doing helping with cold email and L and all that what does the competition look like for Lis kit yeah. So first I have to say we love our competition the way we built. SAS is the way I think everyone should build a sass is find something that's already proven proven in the fact that they have either a ton of users. There are publicly traded company that's doing very well with billions of dollars in Revenue like Zoom info and find out what do people like about them. But what don't they like about them where are the bottlenecks and because I was a user of Apollo already the one thing I knew that I did not like and other people also did not like. After speaking to them was the fact that Apollo leads were not verified and so that presented an opportunity to say okay. We can build exactly what Apollo has but change this one thing that people really care about um and that's how we built. This kid yeah as I know you mainly operate this business but you have four other co-founders can you explain that yeah. This is like I was saying earlier probably our biggest secret on how liset has been so successful is because we have the best team of co-founders. So I'm technically CEO. I'm more of the the team leader essentially. But I have Daniel and Christian who operate as cosmos of the business they're marketing Geniuses.

12:54 They do the funnels. They do the ads. They do all of the content which I want no part of not just because I don't want to do it. But because I'm not the best in the world at doing it and I think they're the best in the world. At doing it. We have the best salesperson as a co-founder. I've never been on a sales call but we have Dan who crushes at sales and he leads the sales team better than I've seen. Anyone lead a sales team and then Oliver who again is the person that came into this business when we're at the lowest of lows and actually made it work and so if you're looking to put a team together of co-founders make sure before anything else. You guys have complimentary skill sets to line this up with a business. Especially a SAS you need marketing you need sales you need technology like CTO developer type work and then you need a team leader to bring it all together and that's exactly how we buildt our co-founder team. But it's not always pretty. I mean there's always debates and things that come up amongst co-founder teams that you just have to sort out just like any relationship but in regards to finding a team of co-founders.First you need to know that you need a co-founder. What's your goal at the end of the day is it to build a massive company or to stay small and to and and that's something that people are content with which is and then figure out. What skills you have and what skills you need to fill the Gap with and find people who have those skills if you need people with marketing skills go to communities or places on the internet that are full of good marketers and start to connect with people. So I'm really an introvert at the end of the day.But you have to in this situation be an extrovert meet everyone and see if your core values align and most importantly like I was talking about earlier make sure your vision for whatever it is you're building aligns because if they can't see the same vision that you're seeing then it's not going to work work out cuz you're going in different directions so we talked about competition. How do you not only build something as good as a competition but beat the competition. One of the things that we do really well at list kit is every single customer that purchases list kit. We offer them to get on a one-onone onboarding call when I talk to a customer. I simply ask why did you sign up for this what were you hoping to use this to achieve and are they getting that or are they not getting that and if they're not getting that figure out what you can build either on the product side or or what you can do better on the customer support side to make sure that they get that not just one time but consistently overtime right because SAS is a game of keeping churn loow. So we're always talking to our customers. I think more than any other SAS company out there by offering to get on a 101 Co with them right in the beginning and that's how we stay ahead of the competitors.

15:20 What does a day in the life look like for you just like a normal day in the life yeah. So I'm big on routine uh and so every day when I wake up. I go for my morning walk specifically to Starbucks and back and that's about a mile walk and I think just getting outside listening to the Bible getting my black coffee really meditating on what the day uh is going to look like is so important and once I get back. I'm pretty much locked into meetings or deep work up until lunch and then I like to go out to lunch with some of my co-founders that live here in Tampa. I think it's nice to have that inperson connection and interactions with either team members or co-founders. So important. I'll work out either at my apartment gym or I'll either go play basketball or pickle ball and on weekends I like to play a lot of golf and then for the rest of the night. I'm either continuing to work or spending time with my girlfriend or talking to family members and pretty just simmering down and getting ready for the next day.Do you have any advice for uh young Andre or for young entrepreneurs out there. I think it's a patience game right. I told you guys I've been in this entrepreneurship game for seven years and the first four or five years. I would not call a success by any means the biggest piece of advice I'd have for my younger self is it's a game of staying very consistent over a long period of time and when times are not good get even more consistent and get even more intentional about your action items. But when times are working out and things are going well double down. Even more cuz. I think it's really easy for entrepreneurs who struggled for a really long time to as soon as they start. Seeing success kind of back off and stop doing the things that got them there in the first place and if you do that you're going to fall right back into where you were before you have to stay consistent and you have to do it over a long period period of time. Whether the results are good or whether they're not.It's an inputs game I like to say over an outputs because you can control the inputs you can't always control the outputs and so do what you can control and let I always say God take care of the rest. What do you think is. One of the you know the biggest secrets to be able to unlock success or unlock getting to that next level yeah. So I think it's really important to always be investing in yourself whether it be through personal development or coaching and I know this is like a cliche thing to say and I run a coaching program um. But I really do believe in this business model uh so some of the guys that I'm constantly learning from are Patrick B David Gary ve Taylor Welch Cole Gordon. All the guys I've mentioned to you already Ed. Mlet I only know so much so why not go to the guys that have already figured it out themselves and ask for their advice on ways about doing things. And so I always hold myself very accountable to improving and learning something new every single day that I can then take to my team and pass it down yeah. All right man thank you for having me. It's amazing what you built appreciate you man yeah. I'm proud about it and uh.

18:06 It's just got to keep it going now yeah. Man follow this advice and you will have a multi-million dollar SAS business good luck guys hey guys Pat here. I hope you enjoyed the story and I hope it inspires you and shows you that you could start something. Similar I think the coolest part about his story is this kind of productized idea that he did. He had clients that he was serving and then he found a business idea that he could productize from those Services if you're curious about doing something similar. But you're still looking for an idea well. You can go to the first link in the description and download our solo developer. Deep dive for free. It breaks down 50 different solo developers making money right. Now their business models how they price their products and how they grew those to millions in Revenue just click the first link in the description and I'll see you guys in the next one peace.