Resources
- Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com/)
- UberSuggest (https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/)
- Saastr (https://www.saastr.com/)
Transcript
Josh: [00:00:30] Hey Nate thought we’d start off today with a tweet we made from our searching for SaaS Twitter handle. So we got a lot of likes on it. There were 19, and it is a reply to a tweet by James Wood that his question was. What’s the most challenging thing in building a SaaS business for you.
So knowing that I do a lot of the replying on there, and I think we’ve been put that in our profile. I responded with fighting the urge to build another SaaS at the same time, internal voice must focus and double down on current success, shiny and new isn’t better.
Nate: [00:01:09] Yeah. Well, I think that’s because it’s such a truth, like when you’re working on something and you’re getting a little bit down in the dumps because you don’t have a lot of new customers, then it’s really easy to look at some shiny new object and be like, Ooh, I want that thing. Can I add this new framework?
Can I. You know, pivot to this new idea. I think that’s a real temptation for a lot of founders.
Josh: [00:01:33] Yeah, totally. It’s the grass is always greener. And I think for all of us that like to start things, it’s just getting that new feeling of starting something new and it may not be that there’s anything really wrong, even. I know you mentioned maybe not getting customers, but I mean, that’s not the case for us now, but for, for referral rock, but at the same time, I get ideas all the time for different random things.
And I sort of put them in a list somewhere to never be really often looked at again. So
Nate: [00:02:08] Yeah. So is that how you kind of fight it? You just put it on a list and say, okay, one day I can deal with these later.
Josh: [00:02:15] I kind of, I just, I write them down in a list. I have I have a notion doc for it now. If it gets. Obviously a little more serious, like at the idea comes up multiple times you know, might write a little bit more on it and then still kind of file it away. Maybe it’s in a note with a bunch of other notes of ideas and if it warrants its own special note with its own title, that that might be something.
And if I buy a domain, then that’s a little more serious, but it could still all be tucked away at that point.
Nate: [00:02:42] yup. Yup. All writing it down is a good way to compartmentalize for sure.
Josh: [00:02:48] My wife tells me I’m good at that, that in selective listening. So, you know,
Nate: [00:02:55] Aren’t we all.
Josh: [00:02:56] yeah. So, so anyway, so I thought we’d talk a little bit about well actually extending our conversation from last week. So we talked about niches and I think we had a little fun with the, how big is this market quiz? I know You, you weren’t, you weren’t happy with how you felt about the end results.
And I think you want to get a little bit further into it, but one of the questions that started there was, you know, you, you asked me about how I validate different markets and things like that. And I tried to keep us on the rails cause I had a couple other quiz questions. I definitely wanted to ask you, but I thought we’d dig into that a little bit.
And maybe anything else you felt about the last, the last weeks? Talk about, about niches.
Nate: [00:03:38] Yeah, that sounds great. And yeah, that was like a huge hole of the, on there with like how, how do you know that this niche is good or not, because sure. You can find niches, but it only matters if they’re good ones. Right. And I think you kind of hinted that you had some sort of a method that you like to use.
Did she have, did you want to share that a little bit or would you rather, like I’ve got some ideas and you can tell me if I’m, you know, on the right path or not?
Josh: [00:04:02] Yeah. Either way, if you want, I mean, I could tell you my process. Although I would sort of pre face that with I am, I have, I am not actively searching for ideas. As we probably started with this Twitter quote at the top, I can, I can use extra distractions, like, yeah. Just don’t need any extra distractions at this point, but.
If I was hunting, I would look at markets and I think something I naturally do a bit is go through a certain process. So would you like to hear my process or would you prefer to say how you do it? Which is fine too. And we can swap, however, you’d like.
Nate: [00:04:36] Well, maybe we’ll start off with how I think it should work. And then you can interject as I start talking maybe,
Josh: [00:04:43] I mean, it doesn’t mean mine’s right. It’s just like, you might be, you might say I have something I’m like, Oh, nevermind. I’m not doing my process anymore. it. So, so go for it.
Nate: [00:04:51] So I guess like probably like really high level on a, a market. Like, so, so we’re, we’re, we’re validating a niche. So we we’ve, we’ve looked around at the different markets where we’ve found a company or something that we find is interesting and that’s kind of piqued our curiosity. And so we say, Hey, I could do just like company X, but I’m going to change slightly.
And that’s where my niche is going to be. And so I think one thing to look at first is just like high level where’s that market. Kind of moving, like, is that something that’s growing or is that something that’s kind of, it’s getting smaller. And that niche that you’re aiming for is that how, how is that trending?
Is it going up or is it going down? Are people offline or online for that? What do you think so far?
Josh: [00:05:36] I have that in there in my order of operations, but it is probably further down in terms of like, The, I guess what’s the word I want to say timing, or just like the current, like which direction is this market going?
Nate: [00:05:50] Yeah.
Josh: [00:05:51] yeah. Or trend, maybe trend is like, where’s it, where’s it trending? Okay. So I do have that, but I haven’t further down.
I actually, earlier than that, my very first thing, and I don’t know if this is, is, is going to Google right away is my number one is just, Hey, let me just search to see. What else is out there? How big is this, this space? So that that’s number one for me of the my, my first step in kind of whenever I come up with an idea or, or looking at a product and I’m like, or like you said, found a, found a interesting company.
I’m like, huh? I wonder how big that space is. I’m my natural first one is, is just Google and see what comes up in the query results.
Nate: [00:06:33] And so when you Google, are you looking for like, is there a giant enterprise in this market or is there lots of competition or like what, what are you looking for?
Josh: [00:06:44] I think it’s just, just getting. Getting my head in that space. So it is like, Oh, there’s an enterprise one. Okay. That’s interesting. Like, there’s probably a lot of different ways to look at it, but I’m just like getting a lay of the land. So digging my head into it. It’s like, Oh, there’s these couple things then I might navigate to Capterra or G2.
Oh, is there a name for this space? Like, what is this actually called? Am I even searching for the right thing?
Nate: [00:07:08] Yeah. Okay. So like just kind of trying to get background information, see what’s out there, that kind of
Josh: [00:07:13] Yeah. Yeah, I go, I go, I guess I go a little bit broader than even thinking about where the market’s going yet. Just mainly, mainly because I want to just like, what is the general size now? And at this point, I don’t know if there’s anything that really. It’s like an information, information gathering phase.
I don’t think it’s anything that just like throws me off. One of the other information things regarding the Google searches I use H H refs. So I go and look in, or do you say H refs? I don’t know. What, what do people say? It’s like, you read it all day, right? So
Nate: [00:07:43] I dunno.
Josh: [00:07:44] I go to aHrefs the, that the SEO kinda tracking tool or monitoring tool also.
And just go look at. Like traffic numbers they’re reported at. Cause I’m only gonna see from what I see from Google, it’s not going to tell me volume and there’s other ways to track volume, but I think volume is also a volume is a good indicator and also level of competition for keywords. So that kind of gives me a general idea of like also just scoping research on that market.
Nate: [00:08:14] Yup. Yup. So I’ve, I’ve, that was one of my points as well. And one thing I noticed with a troughs, because I don’t have it is it’s quite expensive. Is there any other tools that you would recommend around that or.
Josh: [00:08:26] Hi, I think there’s, I think there’s weight like keywords everywhere. I don’t know. Is that a paid one? I don’t remember.
Nate: [00:08:34] I can’t remember. I know Neil Patel has like a little tool that you can use.
Josh: [00:08:39] Uber suggests that ones. Yeah, I think because it’s free. It’s also has a lot of capacity Rica, Pacha things like it, it gets annoying to use. So I think there’s a good amount of free free ones out there too, of just like, just to get a general frame of reference.
But I’ll be honest. We use HRS for referral rock a lot, so we have a paid account. So it’s kind of just a natural that that’s a business expense at this point.
Nate: [00:09:06] Yep. Yep. Totally. Yeah. So sweet. That was my second point, which was SEO research. So phew. Had sort of, right. And the next on my list, I had to research competitors. And so that would be like go to their homepage, you know, find the people when you search them, search your market on Google. Look at what, what competitors come up, look through their, their pages to kind of see how they’re positioned, see kind of MRR numbers or number of employees, if you can find that stuff.
Any thoughts on that?
Josh: [00:09:38] Yeah, I do look in that area. So I also look into, I had listed here, like look up revenue, look up funding. So you might end up on a. Crunchbase or other references that, that just might just give an idea. Anytime I look at those, I do factor in time. So when was the date of these? So like scaling out my brain, if, if they, if they had the funding round, like two years ago and where were they, where are they at now?
Type of thing. So then it gives you an idea of just. I guess, I guess, referencing it back to what it would be today. So I’m just scoping, scoping some of that. So they may not be doing too well, for instance, if they took funding like three or four years ago and they haven’t had funding since, because most people, once they’re on the funding track, you’re kind of on it on a, probably about like a two year to clip or faster sometimes.
So.
Nate: [00:10:28] right. So you’re kind of looking at funding as like a health indicator. Like how are those, how is this company doing?
Josh: [00:10:35] Yeah. Yeah. And, and are they still around, are they still like, you know, how, when was their last blog post? I mean, depending on these ones, you know, just like kind of just starting to just gather some of these just like signals, right? So they’re all different, different signals. And again, I, at this point, I don’t think I’ve made a determination yet.
It’s just gathering like where. Yeah, what’s, what’s out there at this point,
Nate: [00:11:01] so when you’re kind of looking, is there anything, any red flags when you’re looking at competitors that kind of say to you, this market might not be a good market to enter. Go ahead.
Josh: [00:11:11] Based off of based, purely off of the competition. I mean, I think that my, my, I would say my brain starts to gravitate not necessarily based off of the competition. And I think it gets back to. What is the positioning? What is the nice, what is something, you know, potentially different. And also, I probably look at the broad space in general and is like, well, okay.
You know, we kind of already, probably might’ve ruled this out or not. Is this something I’m interested in is always a factor. And I’ll be honest. I’m kind of a little, I feel like I’m always interested in everything. So that’s not really something that weeds things out for me personally. But I also like to look at, is this a feature, not a tool or, or, sorry, not, sorry.
Is this a feature? Not a solution type of thing. So
Nate: [00:11:55] Could you
Josh: [00:11:55] oftentimes, yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Nate: [00:11:57] I was gonna say, could you dive into that a bit more? I, I’m not sure. I understand what you mean.
Josh: [00:12:01] Okay. Yeah, like what I mean is oftentimes some differentiation starts with, Oh, this, this Podcast recording software is just needs like this is what would make it different. It would have this feature or something like that. So I try to think about that because could they easily build that feature or maybe there’s a reason they didn’t build that feature or also like how easy is it for once I gain traction on it and someone starts to see that, then they just build the feature because they’re already.
Further ahead. They already have more market share. Like could I be easily squashed? Can I, can I build more of a compelling thing towards that, that isn’t just like a, like a check box or something else that someone could add on quickly?
Nate: [00:12:47] okay. So you’re trying to like position you’re, you’re trying to think of, can I position my software to have like a different way of thinking about the problem or like have a, a unique way of approaching the problem rather than adding, you know, five extra features to X existing software.
Josh: [00:13:08] I think that’s a way to think about it. I’m definitely trying to think about the positioning off the bat, but where I am. Trying to throw a red flag for myself. If I, if I realize that positioning is just a feature, so that’s, that’s the like the stop sign. So that’s probably the first stop sign that I’m thinking about is like, can this easily be consumed by someone like easily just checked off and done by someone else that ha is basically in a better position to do it.
Right. Do they have leverage in that? Where at this point I’m going from zero. I have. No leverage. And if someone else is in a more leveraged position, a bit better positioning, and they just do X, then all of a sudden my lunch is eaten. So like I’m looking at this as a reason to not pursue it in that case is because like, as soon as I’m out there is that is the idea really?
Or the feature idea is that the differentiation, because that may not necessarily hold water, you know, six months down the road.
Nate: [00:14:08] Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned a minute ago. Whether the idea is something I’m interested in. One thing that I often think about is, are the type of people who buy this software, people that I want to work with or people that I would work well with. And I’m just thinking that like, there are You know, certain industries that can be very hard-nosed or there could be certain industries that are very they need a lot more customer support.
And if you pick those things well in this phase, then you can kind of land yourself in a spot where you’re going to grow a lot better.
Josh: [00:14:41] Hmm. Okay. That’s another one that I probably haven’t factored in before. So similar to, yeah, probably, maybe for the same reason, like And maybe that’s something that would rule me out later on, like yeah, I’m not, I haven’t really put that in as a factor for me, but it might be a strong one for you if there are, if there are definitely people out there that you’re like, I don’t want to talk to XYZ type of person.
I don’t know.
Nate: [00:15:03] Okay. Next I had on my list to kind of go around and look at forums and like talk to people on Twitter. Find those types of connections.
Josh: [00:15:14] Oh, so you’re already jumping into like, can I, can I get more insight into this, into this market?
Nate: [00:15:21] Yeah. Did you have anything before that?
Josh: [00:15:22] So I did have bow is the part where I did have the. Where’s this market going. So you had that as your first one. So this, this, this is, this is where that comes into play for me next, which is yeah, like, is this a growing market? And, and again, this is probably one of those ones where the size of the market is important.
Like it should be something and not super small, anything that’s super small. I’m probably. Like where there’s barely any searches on or it’s, it’s hard to search for. I mean, that’s kind of a, I know I’m a big SEO believer. So as a distribution channel, but if I can’t search it or it’s not easy to search for, it’s kind of a non-starter for me.
I don’t know why. Well, I do know why I probably just answered that question.
Nate: [00:16:11] Well, I think you’re, you kind of go one of your go-to methods for getting customers is SEO, right? So it makes sense that you would approach it that way.
Josh: [00:16:20] So, yeah. I think like a market could be big and, but I could also be filled with incumbents and old people that are still doing on prem stuff. Maybe it hasn’t jumped onto the SAS trained yet, or is very, you know, they don’t want to jump to the SAS train because it would Cannibalize their own earnings or other things like that.
So, so that’s not necessarily like a bad thing. I think you, Oh, you did mention in the last episode you were like, yeah, if I do this and I’m just going to end up on page six,
Nate: [00:16:49] Yeah, that that’s a real fear, right? Like I think in the, like you’ve mentioned in that, that conversation early on just being a prettier or just being more accessible is not, what’s going to get you ahead. You need something that’s more like a, something stickier. Right to get you up, up in the search rankings.
Josh: [00:17:12] well, I think like we talked about like, that’s still part of that differentiation and positioning part of it that I think is within that market. So if you like that market and you’re finding an edge, right. I think that that could be important, but for me, The fact that I would start on page six, like isn’t a worry.
And maybe it’s my, again, my, my my pulling myself more towards the SEO stuff. Like, okay, I can get past page six. Like I’m not too worried about it. I mean, the one I would want more worried about is if you are looking at Atrius and they do rank keyword difficulty. And the keyword difficulty is like 90, which it’s on a, I’ve done a a hundred point scale.
So if I’m looking at anything in like the, you know, probably below 70 range, like I have a reasonable, like, Oh, okay. I can figure out something, at least for the main, the main term to what you would do to look for that type of software.
Nate: [00:18:10] Yeah. Okay. And so then I guess after that, I kinda went down the, like the more information gathering. And so I just got progressively more difficult things to do. So the first part being the, the forums and talking to people on Twitter, like I was talking about and then like landing page or surveys, that type of thing.
And then, you know, finally going towards the MPP. Type of phase. Do you
Josh: [00:18:35] interesting. Cause I, I don’t have any of that on my list yet. Like, so I’m still on, like I had some other things on, on the direction the market’s going. So one of the things I think about is trends, right? Like we talked about, is it trending in which direction? So Because I do think all of these, at least digital and SAS markets will grow, right?
Like just naturally there’s more people coming online. There’s more, especially in B2B, there’s more businesses that are coming online or businesses that are starting today that might be digitally native versus like, you know, a carpet cleaning business that was started 20 years ago or 10 years ago. Like they have their playbook.
They’re just running their playbook of placing ads until it doesn’t work anymore. And now if a carpet cleaner starts today, the first thing they’re doing is probably like, I need some Yelp reviews. I need some other things. So those are the digital natives that are coming in and as their markets grow, you know, there’s just more, more businesses that are thinking digital first.
Nate: [00:19:35] Yup.
Josh: [00:19:35] And then you have other ones, like you have these trends of like, we talked about podcasting and other things, but it’s hard to bet on trends, right? It’s hard to bet on these things that everyone says, this is going to be the year of IOT. And I think I’ve seen the year of IOT for many years. And I think we talked about that last time and said, okay, who would have thought like Alexa and those things were what was going to be the killer killer product or killer idea to launch that area.
Nate: [00:20:02] Yeah. I feel like even like the smart home systems are kind of the, there was an error like that we’re feels like we’re kind of in that era a little bit where it’s not so much just IOT, but more specifically it’s like smart home devices or something like that.
Josh: [00:20:19] Yeah, I don’t know if you, even around that time on the internet, you’re young in, but if you’re, do you remember any of the X, 10 stuff? Does that ring any bell? Okay. So back in like the early two thousands, like X, X, 10, I don’t even know if the site is still around. Like one of the very first internet stuff you could see was like smart home is coming.
So this was like, and it’s like here now, but only in the, probably the past, maybe three or four years, but they were talking about it in like the late nineties and early two thousands, like at a year now it’s going to be this thing and. You know, 15, 20 years later, finally, it’s a
Nate: [00:20:57] Yeah. Well, and that’s the thing with trends too, right? Is that they could really easily be. Over-hyped like, even if I look at now, like we have a lot of access to smart home technology, but still it’s it didn’t take off quite the way. I might’ve thought that it would if you had said, you know, smart home technology or that’s the thing that’s happening right now,
Josh: [00:21:16] right, right. So yeah. Betting on trends for me, I’m a little more conservative. I’m kinda like, eh, I’d rather just have something that will. I’m not going to ride or die by that trend. If that trend doesn’t grow, like who needs another factor that can kill my business.
Nate: [00:21:33] Yep. Yep. So what else did you have before you started getting into the more difficult things? Right.
Josh: [00:21:39] So the one I have now is it does sort of align based off of, if you think about the way I’ve already done my mental validation or this, this is the next step, honestly, is. Distribution. So I know we talked about that and I tried to make a little point of it is like what did type forum and buffer and all these different ones have in common.
And I did mention, you know, they were small then no one thought they were necessarily markets or thought they were potentially small markets then, but they all figured out distribution along the way. So for me, the next step is not. The MVP, not the, the forums and getting customer interviews and feedback, and like basically getting the pulse of what those areas are for me.
It’s how am I going to get distribution? So it goes into like the, how would the, you know, maybe it is an SEO strategy. But I do firmly believe without distribution, you’re kind of, or a, or a way to get towards some distribution. You’re sort of at a non-starter for a business.
Nate: [00:22:44] Yeah. And that totally makes sense. That that would be why a lot of us build software that nobody buys. Right. Because the distribution is what gets you that in a lot of ways. So do we want to did you want to run through a couple of different distribution methods or.
Josh: [00:23:01] Yeah, I mean, we could talk a little bit about some, I mean, we talked obviously a bit about SEO and that is my. Near and dear to my heart and how I look at this. And I think it is a very common idea. One for bitch trappers. So definitely talk a little bit more about SEO, but what other ones have you have you used in the past?
Nate: [00:23:21] Yeah. So I’ve used marketplaces in the past. Like with status list, I had that on the Heroku ad-ons marketplace. And that’s pretty nice because like, basically you’re paying for traffic by doing revenue sharing of some sort And I thought that was pretty neat. The other one I’ve done a little bit of like teeny tiny is a little bit of content marketing.
Just writing blog posts and specific posts around the topic that I’m trying to sell.
Josh: [00:23:46] that sounds like Sao.
Nate: [00:23:48] it sounds like,
Josh: [00:23:50] Well, yeah, actually. So how do you, how do you view that differently? When, when I say as SEO,
Nate: [00:23:55] so I kind of viewed SEO as like optimizing my page with keywords. And like headings in such a way that the search engines are going to pick it up really well. Whereas I view content marketing more as like, I’m going to write lots, I’m going to write lots of content about the topic that I’m selling and post that in different places to kind of make a name for myself or reputation for myself.
Josh: [00:24:23] Oh, I see. Okay. So I see what you mean. So it’s just like for you, and that is just, it is more of like being able to use that as an asset to post, to show value in different areas where people might be hanging out, that could be customers.
Nate: [00:24:40] Yeah. And so that part of that we’ll be posting on other platforms, but then also posting on your own platform.
Josh: [00:24:46] right. To have it circle back to that. So it’s like, you’re posting this. You might post, Hey, here’s some thoughts I had on the idea. And by the way, you know, I wrote a bigger, more in-depth article over here, that type of thing.
Nate: [00:24:57] Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: [00:24:58] That’s a, it’s a good technique to start off, right. To just kind of starting to, to get potentially some eyeballs.
You know, there’s a lot of places where right now, communities, people hang out, you know, Reddit, product, product hunt. Where, what, what kind of places did you post to.
Nate: [00:25:14] So I did to dev dot T O a, which is kind of like a developer forum type thing. And then I also did a bit too medium while back I’m not sure I’d post there anymore, but that’s a another topic. Did you want to some other. Methods of use for distribution also is like online ads.
So I did try some ad-words I’ve also tried some, some Reddit and those I found to work fairly good. And it’s kind of fun because you can just kind of optimize your funnel. Yeah.
Josh: [00:25:44] right. And you could just kind of tweak it, turn it on, turn it off. It’s instant, instant feed to, to some attention for your
Nate: [00:25:54] Yeah. So you had kind of mentioned that those other companies they all had, like, they really nailed down on one or two distribution channels and that really kind of worked for them. Did you have any thoughts around like why that worked for them or like why they would choose that?
Josh: [00:26:11] I mean, I didn’t do enough research to find out like how sight form really got off the ground. But I would, if I was to gander right now, I would say Eddie. I think a big reason they probably got a lot was, was from their product itself. You know, some products could be a little more inherently. I don’t, I always caution to use the word viral.
I, I, you know, obviously with being in referral marketing, there’s some elements of that gets overused and. We often have to kind of talk customers down from that it’s like this referral marketing is not necessarily like, mean things are going to go viral, so to speak. But I think there’s, there’s some vitality to type forum based off of you doing the form, seeing it, seeing powered by type form at the bottom.
And it’s a naturally. Shareable product, because it’s a thing that you’re going to create a form and you’re going to send it to 10 people. Maybe you’re gonna send it to a hundred people. And all of a sudden you’ve got a hundred people that are looking at this differentiated experience and going, huh.
That was neat. That was different.
Nate: [00:27:14] Yeah. Yeah. So they kind of, they already kind of had that position. And so that was a natural distribution channel for them.
Josh: [00:27:24] Yeah. And I don’t know honestly how much well that, how, how much that was thought out by them. Right. So. Some of these things and just, you know, you come up with an idea and it might have some of these natural baked in types of things. So it’s probably just an amount of awareness at this point. Like how are we going to leverage that?
Or, Hey you know, who did the original things, the powered by? Was it like Hotmail, some things like that. And obviously social networks now, you know, those are inherently viral because essentially they’re trying to get your friends on there and it has no value unless four people were on it or chat.
Well, not chat software, messaging, software, things like that.
Nate: [00:28:03] So if you were kind of evaluating your idea, how would you go about choosing a distribution channel or would you even choose.
Josh: [00:28:13] I mean, as a, I guess as a bootstrapper my mind is probably set on search engine optimization and SEO, but for me, it’s it dovetails into what you’re doing with content marketing, because it’s. I view those as like what you’re doing as not repeatable, right? Like you would post something you would do that.
You have to promote your article, but I’m would rather like look for associated keywords. And I view this definitely as something like a, you need to get in the game for at least search intent. Like again, we started with are people searching for this type of product. And I guess I have a firm belief that.
It’s not terribly difficult to get in that conversation. That’s what I always call it. Like, how do you get, okay. It’s, you know software for, I don’t know, calibrating your webcam or something like that. And there’s once you do write three or four articles, like start garnering some expertise around it and post onto profiles on Capterra and all these other places.
Like people that are looking for that can find you. So that’s kind of where I start any of those. And I go and look at what is the feasibility? What is the traffic, how big is that market? All those other things. So as you kind of saw it, like I said, going through those steps I went through before, I’m kind of almost already self-evaluating for for the potential for SEO.
So
Nate: [00:29:44] Yeah. Yeah. You’re really doubling down on that. That’s interesting. Have you, have you tried any other distribution methods or have you really just gone for SEO?
Josh: [00:29:53] I’ve I mean, I th I feel like there’s other ones to layer on. I mean, I like SEO because once you get it, once you set it down, it’s the gift that keeps on giving, right? Like, so any of those things, it’s a re if I put in a little, I put in some work, just like SAS, in general, you put in the work, you lay like a base layer and.
The stuff is going to work while you sleep. Right. So I that’s where I start now. There’s other things you do to kind of feed it to, so the, it might be guest posting. You might be answering Quora posts that again, feed to your other articles, but it’s a continuous process of starting to just monitor and get that steady organic traffic and starting to have a baseline, a hundred people visit a day, or maybe it’s a hundred people a week.
And. Now it’s 150 now, can I find another associated keyword that is similar or worded differently or it’s a long tail and all of these types of things. So I think it’s, it’s a great way for bootstrappers because it can just build on itself over time and you don’t have to spend, you know, a lot of money on it necessarily you can do it on your own.
So it’s ideal for me. So I kind of just it and I’m have learned to be pretty decent at it. So I kind of just stick to that before I have any other like layered strategies on top, which there will be,
Nate: [00:31:18] yeah, and as Josh likes to say, you’re building an asset.
Josh: [00:31:22] yeah, true. That’s that’s in that asset class, so
Nate: [00:31:25] There you go.
Josh: [00:31:27] cool. So So based off of last week’s conversation in this week have any of these changed, how, how you’ve thought about searching for an idea? I mean, I know last week, one of the big, like shocks to you into your system was like, How far you are off on some of these.
And I think in further chat you were even asking like, how, how do I, how do I calibrate myself a little better? Right. How do I, how do I like narrow this down? Where other places I want to start? Like, where else do you find, you know, you found all these revenue things, where do you find those? How do you, how do you, how do you, how do I start?
Like basically taking some reps at this and, and tune this up.
Nate: [00:32:07] Yeah. And I think one of the things that came out of that discussion too, is to kind of there’s a couple of different podcasts and stuff like the Saster podcast where you get founders on there talking about their revenue and even just Google searching to find publicly available funding are great ways to kind of.
Poke around and test, see if, see if there’s something there. And I think one of the great things also with the, that SaaStr site is that they have a lot of company profiles on there. And so based on the company profiles I can, I can test, you know, try one out. Like let’s, let’s look at one on there was PagerDuty let’s look at PagerDuty.
Let’s look at the competitors to PagerDuty. Is there, is there a space in that market, you know, and do this over and over again?
Josh: [00:32:56] Okay. Yeah. I didn’t look, I, it’s funny. SaaStr interesting. I love SaaStr content. It’s one of those ones where for a bootstrapper I think a lot of people may avoid that type of stuff because there’s a definitely a lot of VC speak there’s a lot of, you know, half the step might be like, you know, the, the first things on their bi-lines or the first things is saying how much they raise.
So they. They come from I would say like cut a bit from a different cloth in terms of like their aspirations and how, how big something can be something that could be a win for you or me may not necessarily be of interest in that area, but there’s so much good advice. And there’s so much information on markets.
Like all this stuff is out there. Right.
Nate: [00:33:39] Yeah, I think that’s kind of what I’ve been using it for is to find markets that I previously wasn’t unaware of. Because they have all those company profiles. They’re not to so much take the, the funding amounts and all of that stuff has. True as gospel, but more to just say all, okay, there’s this company out here, they’re doing some things.
Let’s go check out what that market is. Let’s go check out what sort of revenue they’re getting, because that was really my problem, right. Is like, I couldn’t guess revenue very well or the size of a market very well because I’m not very well calibrated around that.
Josh: [00:34:15] so with this new armed knowledge of finding markets and different places to search in addition to talking about these different validations. So there. Anything you’re taking away and having a, how, how it changes. I mean, I’ve mentioned not even looking at MVPs and talking to forums, is that he’s still going to go that route or is it a,
Nate: [00:34:36] no, I
Josh: [00:34:36] what do you think about that?
Nate: [00:34:37] I, yeah, I think that. The method that you kind of talked about is a lot less effort. And like that seems to be the thing that I need to keep learning is stop trying to build software and do the hard things. Let’s try and figure out the market first and the positioning and as much figure out as much research as we can before diving into something.
And yeah, I think figuring out, like, learning more about the marketplace what the competitors that are in there and how to position around that. Yeah, figuring that out first, that’s kind of the key takeaway that I’ve gotten.
Josh: [00:35:13] so I challenge you to next week with this new found skillset or testing this out at least is bring at least five ideas. To discuss and we’ll, we’ll throw down with them and see, see if they stick.
Nate: [00:35:30] okay, well, I’ve got my homework.
Josh: [00:35:33] Yep. Cool. All right. Next week
Nate: [00:35:36] Sounds good.