In episode 716, join Rob Walling for another solo adventure where he answers listener questions. He shares how he would position against incumbents, when to change an H1, and how choosing a tech stack affects your business valuation. Rob also weighs whether to skip a “Step 1” or “Step 2” business and start directly with a standalone SaaS in the Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping.
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Topics we cover:
- 4:07 – How directly should I position my product against incumbents?
- 8:25 – Making and testing changes to your H1
- 12:22 – Identifying and qualifying niches based on traffic
- 18:07 – Should I skip a “Step 1” or “Step 2” business to start a SaaS?
- 20:16 – How a tech stack affects valuations
- 27:29 – Differentiating between B2B and B2C
Links from the Show:
- Apply for MicroConf Masterminds before June 12th 2024
- Ask a Question on SFTROU
- Episode 673 | Lifetime Plans vs Subscriptions, Testing an Idea With a Landing Page, and More Listener Questions
- Start Small Stay Small by Rob Walling
- The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling
- The Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping
- Similarweb
- Vertical SaaS vs Horizontal SaaS – Which is More Profitable?
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!
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Is your outsourced development team dropping the ball? Maybe you’ve worked with a team that just couldn’t grasp your vision and needed constant oversight because they weren’t thinking strategically. Or maybe you ended up wasting hours micromanaging, often needing to jump on late-night calls across massive time-zone differences to get alignment. And in the end, they delivered a sluggish app with a frustrating UI that didn’t come close to the solution you had envisioned. If any of that sounds familiar, you need to reach out to our sponsor, DevSquad.
DevSquad provides an entire development team packed with top talent from Latin America. Your elite squad will include between two to six full-stack developers, a technical product manager, plus specialists in product strategy, UI/UX, design, DevOps and QA, all working together to make your SaaS product a success. You can ramp up an entire product team fast in your time zone. And it rates 75% cheaper than a comparable U.S.-based team. And with DevSquad, you pay month-to-month with no long-term contracts. Get the committed responsive development team that your business deserves. Visit devsquad.com/startups and get 10% off for the first three months of your engagement. That’s devsquad.com/startups.
You are listening to Startups for the Rest of Us, I’m your host, Rob Walling. In this episode, I answer listener questions, some really good listener questions today ranging from how to position against existing incumbents, how to evaluate H1 landing page changes, the impact of a niche tech stack on company valuation and more. I’m actually running low on questions, so if you have a question for the show, you can email at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or just head to the website, startupsfortherestofus.com. Click Ask a question in the top nav. And of course, as always, audio and video questions go to the top of the stack. I’m planning to have fan favorites back on the show in the coming months to answer questions. Folks like Derrick Reimer, Ruben Gomez, Craig Hewitt, Asia Arangio. So get your questions in if you’d like them to be featured on the show.
Oh, and I want to make a request. I get a lot of early-stage questions about idea validation, choosing between side projects. “What should I do? How do I launch?” I would love to hear some later-stage questions. If you have 5K MRR, 50K MRR, 5 million ARR, write in with a question that you are facing. You can remain anonymous. I realize at a certain point what becomes hard is you have a team and you don’t want to write in with a question that could potentially backfire on you that your employees could hear, or there’s a lot of things to be concerned about at that point. So this is an open invite if folks send in later-stage question. And I just mean anything after you have some type of product market fit. Think of the SaaS Playbook stages of like, “Oh, I’ve built something and people are generally paying for it, but I want to grow this. Here are some things I’m facing.” I would love to have those questions and bump them to the top of the stack.
Before we dive into the episode, I wanted to let you know that our MicroConf Mastermind program is open for applications. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about how important masterminds have been to my entrepreneurial success, but finding the right founders to join up with can be hard. Over the past few years, our team has successfully hand-matched over 1,000 founders into Mastermind groups by looking at your revenue team size, strengths, goals, and a few other data points to make sure your peer group is the right fit. Once matched, you’ll also have access to our mentorship series, a three-month program where you can connect with some great minds in sales, business development, marketing and more. If you’re looking for accountability, honest feedback about your business, and the opportunity to make new friends that care about your success, you can learn more and apply today at microconfmasterminds.com. Applications are closing soon, so make sure to get your application in by June 12th. Again, that’s microconfmasterminds.com.
So with that, let’s dive in to my first question from Mackenzie.
Mackenzie:
Hey Rob, this is Mackenzie. I’ve been listening to the show for the last couple months and I really appreciate the content. It’s helped me out a ton. I have a question for you about positioning. I just finished up episode 673, and in it you talked about positioning TinySeed against other VC funds and also how you position Drip against Infusionsoft. And I’m wondering if I’m in a similar situation, especially as the smaller guy punching up at larger incumbent competition, how subtle or how direct should I be with calling out who we’re competing against and how we can do better? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks.
Rob Walling:
I really like this question. Thanks for sending it in. The answer is it depends, but I’m going to tell you what it depends on and kind of the decision tree that I personally would go through and went through when I was positioning TinySeed or Drip or HitTail or whatever against a large incumbent. First thing I ask myself is, is mentioning their name going to be helpful? Does everyone else in the industry know that when I say the name of my big competitor that everyone will know who it is? So if you’re competing against Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Intercom, Jira, even Infusionsoft in the right circles, everyone knows who they are and everyone, I will say… I’m saying everyone very generally, but a lot of people know, “Ooh, yeah, there’s some issues with this tool.”
So Salesforce, what would be the complaints? Way too expensive, way too complicated, hard to use, hard to get on board. The sales process is not great. I believe it’s annual contracts. There’s all these things you could list. And if you’re going to be the not that, the anti that where you’re going to have monthly plans, you’re going to be easier to use, you’re going to be a lot cheaper, you’re going to basically the zig when there’s zagging and it’s helpful because everyone will recognize the name, then consider mentioning them.
Now, I will say this is not legal advice because one thing that you can get into a potential danger point is that obviously it opens you up to a cease and desist of mentioning another company by name. Now, do they have any leg to stand on if you’re being honest and truthful and forthright in your marketing, if you have a comparison page that really does compare the two, honestly? Yeah, they don’t really have a leg to stand on if you’re doing that, but if they send you a C&D and they’re a kajillion dollar company, you don’t have the money to defend from a lawsuit.
So usually what happens, I’ve seen a few kind of versus pages get cease and desists. Sometimes I’ve seen founders just change the page, alter it slightly. Other times I’ve seen them take it down because it’s not worth a headache. Knock on wood, I have yet to see one actually go to a full lawsuit because it’s just not worth it, because as everyone knows, in lawsuits, the only people that make the money are the lawyers. So that’s a little side jag there of obviously it’s kind of a warning, right? If you’re going to mention competitors by name, this is a danger. I will admit, knock on wood, I have never had an issue. I’ve never received a cease and desist myself. And I did mention competitors, I mentioned really large competitors that probably just didn’t care. So it was like Infusionsoft, it was Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Silverpop. These were big, big companies and I just don’t think they were paying that close of attention.
I also didn’t say much about them. I would say, “If you are tired of expensive, clunky solutions that lock you in for an annual contract like…” And I would list them out. So in my opinion, it was not huge, huge risk to do that. However, in your shoes, if no one knows this company name, if mentioning them isn’t going to send them more traffic than the notoriety that you’re getting by mentioning them, then no, of course I wouldn’t. It just doesn’t make sense. You’re only using it. You can be vague is what I’m saying, is you can say, “If you’re familiar with the big gorilla that does this and has all these bad things about it” that I’ve probably already mentioned, but if… You don’t have to name them by name is what I’m saying.
All things being equal, I would lean towards naming them if you want to know the truth, but you do have to weigh the pros and cons of potential liability, which again, I think is low, but it’s not legal advice. But I found the more specific you can be about positioning against specific incumbents I think is pretty helpful. So in the end, it’s up to you. It does depend, but those are the factors that I would be thinking about as I made this decision. So thanks for that question. Hope it was helpful.
My next question is about evaluating H1 changes on your landing page.
Edward:
Hi Rob, I love your podcast and I listen to every episode. I’m Edward and [inaudible 00:08:40] productivity SaaS. I often hear that many startups are changing their H1 on the landing page very often, and I always wondered how are these changes tested. Are these companies and startups, are they running A/B tests or they simply waiting and seeing what happens? I understand it’s also something like changing your positioning and so on, but I would like to hear about how this has actually evaluated these kind of changes. Thanks so much.
Rob Walling:
So interesting question. I’m curious what these startups are that are changing their H1 on their landing page very often because that sounds like they don’t know what the (beep) they’re doing. In all honesty, don’t change your H1 often unless you are flailing, things are not working, you don’t have product market fit, your positioning’s off, and then, “Okay, I’m changing it to try to figure out how to drive more trial signups or more customers or whatever.” But once you’ve locked in on something that’s generally working, you don’t change this often because your H1 becomes part of your positioning. And you don’t want to change positioning often because it confuses the market. So I guess that’s my first thing, is if you’re looking at Indie Hackers on Twitter who are launching 12 products to see what sticks and they’re just spinning around changing a bunch of stuff, launch, launch, change, change, they don’t know what they’re doing.
So look, I’m not saying I actually like the Indie Hackers website and the podcast and all that. I’m not trying to disparage that, but just when I say Indie Hacker, I do mean the dev who’s launching a bunch of side projects hoping that something works and they tend to not know what they’re doing. So this is where you have to be careful about who you are watching, who you’re observing and who you’re taking guidance or mentorship from. Even if it’s not direct, but you’re taking signals from folks who don’t know what they’re doing, that can be confusing.
If you look at companies that have their positioning relatively locked and they are building a great business and they have some semblance of product market fit, like for example, go to tinyseed.com/portfolio and go through 20 of those companies and just for kicks, monitor their H1s and see how often they change. I would be shocked if any one of those 20 companies dramatically change their H1 in a three-month period. It’s just not something that people do that often.
Now, with that said, I will say that I’ve done plenty of split tests and there are folks who are especially low touch funnels where it’s high volume and it makes sense that you can actually split test. There are some companies, some SaaS companies that do in fact change their H1 subtly. They don’t change the entire value prop, they don’t change their positioning, but they’re changing wording, phrasing and what have you in the H1 and H2 to see if it drives more people to click through or to sign up for a trial or book a demo.
If we’re thinking about those folks, and my answer to your question is, if they have enough traffic, they should be split testing. That’s what I used to do. I split tested probably 10 different products websites where I was split testing the headlines or the messaging or all this stuff, but they were high volume plays. If you’re getting a thousand uniques a month, even 5,000 uniques a month, it’s tough. You just can’t get a lot of signal and a split test takes a really long time.
So for folks who don’t have that much traffic, they are probably just winging it and they’re probably taking their best guess and doing what we call a poor person split test, which is where, “Well, how many trials did I get in the last 60 days? How many do I get in the next 60 days?” Close enough. “Is it perfect?” No. “Is it the best you can do if you only have a thousand uniques a month and you’re selling something that’s really expensive so that your end is very low, meaning the number of people coming through your funnel is low?” Pretty much. So I hope that answers your question on three fronts. One, you shouldn’t be changing it super often unless you are actively split testing. Two, split test if you have enough traffic. And three, if you don’t have enough traffic, you can do what I just talked about with the poor person’s split test. So good question, appreciate you sending it in. My next two questions come from Evan.
Evan:
Hey, Rob, this is Evan from Seattle. Love the show and have been listening for a few months now. I’ve been fortunate enough to save a year of expenses from working a FAANG job, and I’m about to leave that job to pursue entrepreneurship on my own. I found that my full-time role took too much time and mental energy for me to balance full-time work with the family and also working on a side gig. So I’m doing this without a step 1 business under my belt, but have some scratch my own itch type ideas I’m pretty eager to explore.
Two questions for you. First, is there a modern equivalent of identifying a niche based off of the 5K spend for a magazine full page ad? With print falling off, I’ve been thinking of what equivalents there might be. Maybe a subreddit community with X number of subscribers?
Second, I’m starting from scratch. And while I’ll be full-time on my solo work, total time is at a premium since I’ll have only about 12 months of runway, I’m debating if I still want to go through step 1 and 2 of the stairstep approach if I don’t have a short-term goal of building enough money to quit my job since I’ll have already quit it. I wonder if that might pivot my approach to only pursue step 1 ideas that could conceivably expand into my entry to standalone SaaS, or if I skip step 1 and 2 altogether and jump in head first and save the extra time, the maybe three to six months I’d have spent on step 1 projects. I don’t think I’d be as passionate about those step 1 projects longer term, but I also want to make sure that I’m being judicious with learnings since this will be new for me. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Rob Walling:
Thanks for those questions, Evan. So with regards to the $5,000 rule of thumb, I think Tim Ferriss had that in for a work week. I think I might’ve quoted him in Start small, Stay Small. I don’t remember. I had some loose rules of them in Start small, Stay Small, obviously 14 years old now, so I don’t know. I don’t necessarily hold up over the test of time as things change. The thing to keep in mind is these are all just rules of thumb. It’s just not a hard and fast rule. It’s just guessing at how many people are interested in a topic.
So I actually really like your idea of finding a subreddit with a certain amount of people. And I’d be curious what you think that number is because I’m not familiar enough with Reddit. I mean, I’m on and I click and look around, but I don’t know enough about Reddit to know if a subreddit with 5,000 versus 50,000 versus 500,000 is a big or small one.
The other thing to think about is if I’m selling a product for $10 a month versus $1,000 a month, well, you need a lot fewer people. The market doesn’t have to be that large in order to make it work. I do like that idea though of thinking about or seeing a community like a subreddit and looking at the engagement. So I think you’re onto something there.
Another couple thoughts that I have is you can use tools like SimilarWeb or Alexa. I’m sure I just activated a bunch of people’s Amazon assistant, but it’s A-L-E-X-A.com. In fact our digital Amazon assistant got its name from this website. And from these sites, look, they’re not perfect, they’re directionally correct, but you can estimate traffic to certain websites. And so you would want to look at larger competitors in this space and realize that, “Oh, if a SaaS application’s getting 10,000 uniques a month, it better be a really high price point. If it’s getting 100,000 uniques a month, if you’re a developer entrepreneur building a lifestyle business, could you build a business on that?” For sure. I built really great lifestyle businesses on much less traffic than that. And if a competitor is getting half a million or a million uniques a month, then you know or you at least have an indication that, “Oh, there’s a lot of traffic here. How can I kind of siphon some of that off?”
You can also look at tools. Say again, competitor research like tools like Crunchbase to see funding raised in employee headcount of competitors. Or if you’re going after what I’m calling orthogonal SaaS… All right, so we have vertical SaaS, which goes after a particular niche. This would be accounting software, but it’s designed specifically for freelance web developers or for psychologists. That’s vertical SaaS. Horizontal SaaS is something that any business can use, and that is SavvyCal, which is the best scheduling link on the internet, which any business can use, or SignWell, which is of course the best electronic signature app. That of course is a horizontal play.
Orthogonal is where it is raw-based or title-based. So it’s focused on a specific title within a company. So for example, HR software like applicant tracking systems or something that helps you evaluate developers and hire developers which may be targeted at say HR or might be targeted at hiring managers or like software development managers. Those things are aimed at a particular role or a title, and I call that orthogonal SaaS.
So with that said, if you’re going to be going into a vertical or orthogonal SaaS, you can look, and you’re in the US, you can look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And so if you look up how many architects there are in the US or you look up how many hairdressers there are or accountants or whatever, that can also give you an idea of, “Oh, there’s 5,000 versus 100,000 of these types of businesses.”
And look, if you’re bootstrapping SaaS and you want to get to a million, 3 million, 5 million in ARR, you just don’t need that many. You don’t need that many companies. You’re not building a venture scale business where it’s like, “Well, my total addressable market has to be a kajillion dollars.” It’s like your total reachable market or your term as you’ve been hearing me say on this podcast, it just doesn’t have to be that big if you’re trying to replace an income or build a six or seven figure ARR company.
So anyways, those are the kinds of signals that I’d be looking at. And I don’t have hard and fast rules about them, but you get the idea. You can start comparing the data from one niche to another from one role or title to another.
And then Evan’s second question was about having 12 months full-time and should he do step 1 and step 2 businesses. Because realistically, step 1 and step 2 are designed to get you out of employment so that you can focus full-time on your entrepreneurial efforts, and he’s already there. So my answer is, I do think this kind of depends. I don’t have a hard and fast rule or strong advice for you on this. What I will say is step 1 and 2 businesses tend generally to be easier to grow quickly and get to 5K a month or 10K a month. Building a full-blown SaaS, it just takes so much longer. All the stuff, it’s just, I won’t rehash the stairstep method here. But a step 3 business, a standalone SaaS, it usually just takes you a lot longer because you’re not injecting yourself into an ecosystem. It takes you a lot longer to iterate. It takes you a lot longer to build and just get the thing out the door because it’s more complex, there’s more functionality and there’s a lot more to it.
So that’s the pro and con. In my book, I’d be thinking, “Okay, by 12 months I need X amount of revenue per month coming in, or I need to get a job. What’s the quickest way there?” And I would really be thinking about my, if I have any unique advantages like, “Do I have an audience? Do I have a network? Do I have a unique set? Do I have a unique knowledge of a space?” And it’s okay if you don’t. That just kind of helps. Decision making gets easier when you have some constraints. But for me, I think I’m on board with your idea of, “Hey, maybe I’ll do a step 1 business, but I make sure that it can probably get to whatever my revenue goal is.” Let’s say it’s 10K a month, that’s something you can live on in most cities in the United States anyways. Then maybe using that as a constraint of like, “Well, I’m only going to go after step 1 businesses where I think they can get to that.” I don’t think that’s the worst idea.
And in your shoes, I probably would veer more on the step 1, step 2 approach of kind of get something out quickly, get it into a marketplace, see where there’s traction rather than building a standalone SaaS, which as we know just takes a lot longer to iron out all the kinks and to find product market fit. So thanks for the question, Evan. Hope that was helpful.
My next question is from Gio about the impact of the tech stack on company valuation.
Gio:
Hello, my name is Gio. I love the show. My question is about using more of a niche technology to build your SaaS and how that affects things when it’s time to sell. How might a potential buyer evaluate a company that’s built with more niche technologies that they aren’t as familiar with and that aren’t quite mainstream?
So for instance, people usually use JavaScript, Python, Rails, maybe Java and other mainstream technologies to build their product and to build their business. But for example, I’m a closure programmer and we are a niche community. We are very healthy, smart, vibrant community, but we’re not exactly mainstream, although it’s used in many companies, it’s [inaudible 00:21:11] tested, it’s a very robust language. A potential buyer may not be familiar with it. Commonly, they’re not familiar with it, so they might have questions like, “Will I be able to hire for this? Is this a risk, basically? Is this a technology risk?”
And while from my perspective, me being familiar with the community, with the language, it is not. And maybe even I would consider it an advantage in a certain sense. From another person’s point of view, from a potential buyer’s point of view that might be a disadvantage. So, provided that the business is actually doing well, might the technology choice of the business impact things when it’s time to sell? I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that both in the context of a micro SaaS as well as a more full-scale SaaS, let’s call it. I was wondering, so how a choice of a niche technology might impact a buyer’s valuation or decision to buy or not to buy? Thank you very much.
Rob Walling:
All right. So once again, the answer of course is it depends, but here’s what I don’t do on this podcast. I don’t say it depends and then just waffle and kind of give a generic advice. When I say it depends, I try to then say, “Well, what does it depend on and what are kind of the buckets that it would fall into?” And so in this case, it does depend. It depends on the exit price, I think in general.
A rule of thumb, a generally directional thing is that if you are selling an app for under 100,000 dollars or under 250 or some number that’s low six figures, you are likely selling it to a technical individual because at that sale price, there’s not enough money to hire full-time developers. So even like micro private equity or an investor or someone who doesn’t want to day-to-day be in the business is going to be very unlikely to acquire that business.
It may even go up to, I’m trying to think, it depends on multiples and all this, but let’s say it’s up to a quarter million, 350,000 or whatever. Oftentimes it’s going to be someone who needs to write the code themselves. And so in that case, I think the tech is going to be very important. And if closure, as you say, is a niche technology, I think it’s going to be a major disadvantage.
I think if you are selling in the half a million to, I don’t know what number would this be, 10 million, 20 million, I think it becomes a concern, but it becomes less of a concern because I think your buyers at that point are going to be strategics or private equity and they care more about the business fundamentals. But here’s the thing they’re going to be concerned about. The biggest thing, it’s what you brought up. They’re going to say, “Can we find developers for this tech?” So if it truly is some crazy niche, I know closure is not this crazy niche, but imagine some tech that if I said the name of the stack, I said the name on this podcast, most people don’t know what it is. That would be a problem. Because if a private equity is going to spend 5, 10, $20 million, they want to be able to maintain that. And if they just can’t find people, that’s a problem.
So the question here is, how many closure developers are there and is it a growing technology or is it a mature technology that is sunsetting? Because every technology has its lifespan and its lifecycle that it slowly rides over the hump. So if it’s a dying technology and you’re building it now, or it’s not super popular technology and you’re building it now, will it be less popular 2, 3, 5 years down the road when you go to sell, making it even harder to find developers? That would be something I’d be thinking about because I think that’s going to be your big concern at that point.
Now, let’s say you’re selling for the sake of argument. I don’t think it’s relevant here, but hey, anything can happen and I wish you the best of luck. Let’s say sell for $100 million or 200 million, a huge, huge nine figure exit. At that point, the tech matters a lot less because think about just saying, “I’m going to spend $100 million on the business.” You’re buying the tech, but really you’re buying a lot more than that. You’re buying the user base and probably the revenue stream and you’re buying the brand and you’re buying the team, and you’re buying all this stuff that’s actually worth more than the tech. Unless you’ve built OpenAI, if you’ve built a CRUD SaaS app, the tech can be rewritten at that point.
And there is a certain price point where that just flips, right? And again, I don’t know. It depends on the buyer, it depends on the process, it depends on what you build. It’s all these depends. But at five or 10 million and it’s a small app that can be rewritten in three months, then how much does it matter if it’s in closure? But if it’s super complicated and it’ll take two years to rewrite, that number has to be higher. The exit price has to be a lot higher before someone’s like, “Cool, we’ll buy this and we’ll just rewrite it and migrate everybody over.”
So I hope that my thought process there is helpful at kind of these three different exit multiples or exit prices and how they impact it. I want to tell you a little story. I purchased an app called HitTail. It was a SaaS app, SEO long-tail keyword tool. And that’s the one that I grew into the lifestyle business. It was pretty life-changing in terms of making 30 grand a month more money than we’d ever had or ever seen. And that was written in classic ASP. And it was built in ’06, which should have been built in Dot.Net, but it was built in ’06 and I bought it in 2011. Classic ASP. Think about this. Think about this 11-year-old web technology, VBScript. I happened to know it. I had coded ASP for a year back in 2000, and so I was in there fixing bugs and changing things.
It was, as I said, a certainly sub $100,000 purchase and I was going to be in the code. If that had been written in closure, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. But with ASP, I got a good deal on it because I knew ASP and not a lot of other people did. So then I grew it to 30 grand a month and I started thinking about selling it. I talked to a few people and no one wanted to buy it. They said classic ASP is a deal breaker at this size.
So once Drip started getting going, I hired a couple developers and I had one of them rewrite HitTail in Rails. That instantly made it a much easier sell. Now, I paid a developer, I don’t remember how many months it was to be honest, three months, maybe four months. I paid them as a full-time dev to do it and migrate the data. One day we pointed the DNS and the design look the same. We didn’t have to even have to inform… I think we informed customers there’ll be downtime while we do a switch, but we tried to exactly replicate everything in Rails. And that made the business infinitely more sellable. I did wind up selling it in 2015 as Drip was taking off and I couldn’t focus on multiple things. So for what it’s worth, that’s been my firsthand experience dealing with exactly this question. So thank you for that question, Gio. I hope it was helpful.
My last question of the day comes from Riley.
Riley:
Hey Rob, my name is Riley. After 15 years as an army doctor, I’ve swapped my stethoscope for the startup scene. I’m a huge fan of your podcast and have turned others on in the SaaS Playbook. So thank you for all the insights.
My co-founder and I are launching a freemium platform aimed at tackling the bias, paywalls, and inefficiencies plaguing health and scientific publishing. It’s a space where clinicians and researchers can collaborate peer review and publish globally with premium features for those diving deeper. We’ve got monthly plans starting at $15 a month and higher plans for those who want advanced features. My question is, do you see us as more of a B2C or a specialized content service? Eager to hear your perspective. Thank you as always.
Rob Walling:
The way I’d think about this, Riley, is if the clinicians and researchers are going to be paying out of their own pockets using their personal credit card, then yeah, you kind of are selling to consumers. This is a nice to have and it’s coming out of a personal budget. If you are in fact selling site licenses or multi-seat licenses, doesn’t sound like that’s what you’re thinking of, but you’re thinking about selling it to actual clinics or universities or places where researchers work and you’re selling to the actual businesses, well then you need to charge more, and that would then be more of a B2B play.
I’m not going to dive too deep into my thoughts around doing freemium. I’m not sure if that’s the right play. I just don’t know this space well enough and I don’t know exactly what you’re doing so it’s hard to say. Maybe freemium is the best play, maybe a free plan, a time-limited free plan or a usage-limited free plan. But if you’re thinking freemium of like, “Oh, you can read up to three articles per month for free, five articles per month, and then it’s paywalled,” it’s fine. I don’t have a major aversion to that in this case. $15 a month is rough, though. That is going to be, you’re going to have some pretty high churn. You can’t afford to market at 15 bucks a month. You can’t afford to do ads. You can’t afford to do anything except for free things. You can’t afford to go to in-person events. You don’t have the money. You don’t have the lifetime value or even the annual contract value to be able to afford to do anything.
So that’d be the biggest thing, is it’s like, can you do a bunch of free online marketing and convert people? Freemium alone probably isn’t going to be it. But you know your space a lot better than I do and you know your reach. I don’t know if you have any competitive advantages, you have this massive audience in the space or big network with a bunch of people who are going to promote you. It changes things depending on where you’re starting from.
You say you do have higher plans for those who want advanced features. Maybe that said, I would be thinking about selling, certainly having a dual funnel if I was going to do that. Meaning you have the $15 a month plan and then you do have an enterprise Call Us plan where it’s like, “Get a license for a thousand seats of this.” That’s where most of your money in my opinion is going to come from, at least based on looking across my 192 SaaS investments. So thanks for that question, Riley. I hope it was helpful.
If you have a question for the podcast, head to startupsfortherestofus.com, click Ask a question in the top nav. I really encourage you to send in some later stage question. Not even that later stage. Anything, I don’t know, a couple grand a month and up to millions a year in ARR. I’d love to hear those again, can keep you anonymous if you prefer. Thanks for coming back this week and every week. If you keep listening, I will keep recording. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 716.