Episode 607 | Overcoming Plateaus, Stealth Launches, Founder-Driven Sales, and More Listener Questions

Rob: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. You’re listening to episode 607 of Startups for the Rest of Us. Thanks so much for joining me again today. I am talking with Asia Orangio and we answer listener questions about overcoming plateaus, stealth launches, founder-driven sales, and all types of tasty goodness. 

Of course, we cover all these topics from that mindset of not needing to build a unicorn company in order to have an incredible life-changing the outcome and from the idea that we’re seeking freedom, purpose, and relationships, and looking to better our lives and the lives of those around us rather than simply looking to go big or go home. 

We can build real businesses and solve real problems for real customers who pay us real money. That’s what Startups for the Rest of Us are all about. With that, let’s bring Asia to the show and dive into our first listener question. 

Asia Orangio, thanks for coming back on the show. 

Asia: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be back. 

Rob: I am excited to dig into some listener questions today. Our first one is a video question from Tom Cusack on customers onboarding videos. 

Tom: Hey, Rob. A long time listener. Keep up the good work with the podcast. My question to you is the location of onboarding videos. I have an ecommerce marketplace that I’ve built in WordPress using WooCommerce and I’m looking for vendors to come on board. 

My question to you is where’s the best location to put the onboarding videos? Should I put them right on the front, at the top where the menu is? Right underneath where it says home page, shopping, and all the rest of the basic information up there? Or should I put them in the footer someplace and have them click on them there? 

My idea is to build an individual page for customer onboarding, keep it simple, a vendor registration, help them walk through the onboarding system that is already built-in, and also the vendor adding a product page. That can be daunting for some people that are not technically capable of doing things. They are challenged, let’s say. 

I’m just looking for where would be the best place to do this. Again, keep up the good work and I look forward to hearing more on Startups for the Rest of Us. 

Rob: Interesting question. Asia, do you have thoughts on that?

Asia: Yes. When it comes to any kind of onboarding, usually the most successful kind of onboarding pop-up, videos, or what have you, usually the two things I see that work absolutely best either have a complete overlap where there is some kind of takeover of the screen and has two, three, maybe four to five steps and that’s it or you just have the pop up with the video and any extra contexts. 

If you have any extra steps for them to do after that, maybe you include that. I definitely wouldn’t recommend putting it in the bottom right corner or anything like that. I wouldn’t recommend hiding it. 

I would recommend offering it as something that people can consume right there whether you do the full page takeover or just the pop-up and giving people the option to skip it just in case they just want to get to it. 

If you do give the option to have the people skip it, then that would be a used case for tucking it away somewhere and just reminding people hey, if you ever want to come back, here’s where you can find it. I wouldn’t hide it right off the bat. 

Rob: Yeah, I agree with that. I feel like if someone skips it, as much as animations can be really cheesy, and you’re able to shrink it into a little question mark on the upper right, then it’s like oh, I now know it’s behind that question mark. I can always click there to get back to it. 

I remember when we were originally designing Drip and designing an onboarding, Derek really had a good approach to it where when you first came to a page, let’s say for your campaigns which are autoresponder sequences, it’s a blank late because there’s nothing there. What we had was a view of the fully populated page, but it was blurred out and was in the background. You can see what the page will look like if you had a bunch of campaigns. 

Then there was an overlay just like you said—an overlay that had to create your first campaign or the video was right there. I think it was embedded next to it or at least it was next to an icon that was like watching a help video or watching a tutorial. There’s a better word for it, but it’s like how to do this, learn about this or something. 

If you click that, then it plays a video and once you had a single campaign, then you didn’t really need that. It was still embedded, there was a question mark in the upper right or lower right. It was like a nice elegant balance the first time, not even the first time you went there. It was until you created it. You always had it front and center. There is no better need for that real estate, we felt. I think that’s an interesting approach too. 

Asia: The length of a video is also interesting as well. We find that anything longer than a minute or longer than a minute and 30 seconds feels very long. I’m curious if you have any perspective or strong opinions. 

Rob: I feel the same way. They’re like a marketing video honestly. If I’m in an app and I click play, then I’m loading in one screen, and it’s a five and half minute video, I’m like, ain’t nobody got time for that. Ninety seconds, maybe. Two minutes is really pushing it. 

Asia: I completely agree. 

Rob: I think that’s a good rule of thumb. Awesome. Thanks for the question, Tom. I hope that was helpful. 

The next question is from Nick See. He says, “Thanks so much for the podcast. It inspired me to actually try to start a business instead of just thinking about it. Now I’m in the mid-stages of building an MVP. My question is when bootstrapping, how do you scale a content business? That is a business that relies on human generated content for scale.”

It sounds like he’s building almost like an agency of sorts. I guess content marketing and SEO businesses are good examples of these. If you scale up your number of customers, then the amount of content you need to produce increases. 

“How do you do this when bootstrapping? What if the resource—” probably the writer and the content producer, “—you need isn’t full time? It’s more ad hoc and part-time. Where and how do you find that resource? My business is in a different space but relies on scaling human generated content in a similar way.” 

“In the early days, I can fill these requirements myself, but what would you advise when it needs to be me plus n people to fill that demand?”

Asia, you run DemandMaven, which is an agency. While it is not necessarily content production, I know that humans are a big part of what makes your business successful. What do you think about this question?

Asia: This is going to tap into all of your operational skills. If you have a mind for ops and a mind for delivery, whether that’s software delivery or service delivery, it doesn’t really matter. This is going to be for you. 

When we think about scale, things that don’t scale, and things that do ultimately scale, we know for a fact that things that scale are ultimately going to be processes. Within processes, very clear requirements, very clear roles and responsibilities. This is the human element of who do you need, what do they need to be doing, and what are the processes upon which they actually follow to do the thing. 

This is actually true for any team, but when we think about scaling, let’s say content marketing specifically, usually it starts with you doing it yourself. At some point, you have a sense for what are the units that you are trying to deliver. If that’s literary content articles or content pieces in some kind of way, you can kind of reverse engineer how long does that take and what are the requirements for you to actually do that work. 

Once you have a rough model of how long it takes you to do. Keep in mind too that if you are an expert, if you’re super advanced, you’re going to take less time than maybe someone who is less expert and less advanced. If you’re not, maybe you’re more average I would say, then you’d have a pretty accurate picture for how long it takes you to deliver x units. 

Again, units can be whatever, but in this case, let’s say articles. If it’s you doing it up first, at some point, you’ll probably hire someone who can either add extra units to how much you’re producing together or take on your units that you are producing. Then your job is probably to go then hire someone else to go do the same thing. 

This dips into hiring very quickly, but when you are hiring people, it’s going to be pretty tough, probably for them to accurately tell you how long it takes or how many units, so to speak, can you produce in so much time. 

For content marketing, most writers on average are going to be producing one to two articles every two to three weeks. Some writers are a lot faster. Depending on their bandwidth and availability, they may be able to take on more volume. 

At some point though, once you get to about the 3-4 writer mark, that’s when you can start thinking about potentially hiring a delivery success manager or someone basically to manage the writers. 

This could be a content marketing specialist. This could be more of a project manager. It just really depends on the nature of the content, the nature of your market, and also how you’re thinking about delivery and operations. It could also just be you for a while. 

When I think about how we have grown on the DemandMaven side. We have specialists who produce some desired outcome, some desired output. As we increase the amount of specialists that we have on the team, we also start to add in a management layer. 

That could be a client success manager, could also be more like a marketing success manager. It just kind of depends on the project and how the team has grown so far. That person is basically responsible for managing those specialists. 

One person can manage about five specialists or so depending on the workload. The tough part is actually hiring the second manager. That 4-5 specialists per manager, whoever, whatever that is, that’s kind of where it gets tough, stepping into that extra place. 

This is actually where you probably, from a business perspective, start looking at capital in some kind of way. Capital can of course, just be getting a loan. It could also be a line of credit, something that enables you to stretch without necessarily impacting your cash flow too much. 

This is also technically true though, for software, like SaaS. We think about management in the more basic sense. The CEO is probably going to be able to manage so many direct reports before they need to add in a management layer. We see this often with flat organizations and then transforming those into more of a hierarchy from a leadership perspective. We kind of see the same thing, actually, in software companies. That’s how I would think about it. 

The hardest chasms to cross are always going to be when you hire that first management layer and then when you stretch into the second and third management layer. Then you have a team of, let’s say, 15 specialists, writers, what have you. Maybe not even that much, depending on how big you want to grow this business. That’s when you start adding in managers and leadership. 

Then your job really just becomes about making sure that people know what they’re supposed to be doing. Also, that you are making sure that you’re delivering high quality work and of course all the other SEO stuff—marketing, closing deals, that kind of thing.

Rob: That was a masterclass basically on how to build an agency if anyone didn’t notice. You touched on so many good points there that came to mind when he asked this question. 

A lot of folks don’t know that after you have about five or six direct reports, that’s it, you don’t want any more. This is another case of that where your strategist, or project manager, or client manager—whatever title they have—can only have so much bandwidth. 

That’s where from the start, you have to price this business. Keep that in mind as you build your client base. If I can write an article, then hire someone to write a piece for $250 and I’m selling them for $500 apiece, and deliver however many over the course of a month, I’m not building enough margin for managers. 

There’s going to be too many points of downtime where oh, I need to pay this person’s salary, or we don’t have a client, or I’m going to bring a manager in and hire a good manager who actually takes it off your plate. They’re going to be expensive and so you need margin. 

That’s why agencies are often maybe more expensive than people think they should be. An agency is more expensive than a freelancer and there’s a reason. There’s all these systems that have to be in place and there’s a lot more humans involved than you might think. 

The other thing, what you just described is amazing, if you’re an operator, and that was the first sentence you said. This is all about operations. If you’re that integrator person, this is your business. 

If you are like me and you don’t want to do it personally, don’t build an agency. That doesn’t sound fun. It’s not in my zone of genius—building these processes and getting all the humans involved.

Asia: It’s a different flavor for sure. I completely agree.

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One thing you mentioned that I wanted to get into is, you said a writer might be able to do one or two pieces every couple of weeks but is that really long form stuff? I’ve worked with writers and they could do a couple pieces a week of maybe 2000 words. 

Asia: This is yes and also quality. However, I know some writers that just whip them out. I think it really just depends on the writer. There’s probably some average or standard and it’s just a matter of finding people who fit that average or standard that you’re looking to create or deliver against. I’ve seen everything from one piece take three weeks to if the writer has more bandwidth, obviously they can produce a lot faster. 

I think right now, what we’re seeing on average is about two articles a month from one person given their bandwidth. If you have someone who has more bandwidth and or is a faster writer, especially if they have to source the content, if they are operating off of repackaging content, you can typically see a much faster turnaround.

But, if this is net new, high quality, maybe more intensely researched and created, then it might be closer to the two per month. There are some content marketers out there who would pale at that rate so it just depends.

Rob: Yeah, and Nick, thanks for asking the question. I would also recommend a course that Brian Casel put together. Brian has done a couple of productized services and then scaled them up into tens of thousands of revenue. He built a course on how he did this at productizeandscale.com. A lot of what he talks about in there is about exactly this problem.

There’s the marketing aspect of it and there’s the designing the offering, but then there is how do you fulfill it if it’s going to be human powered? I think there’s some really good info in that course. 

Brian actually sold the productized course a few months back, but I know that the material is still good. Thanks for the question, Nick. I hope that was helpful. 

Next question is from David in MicroConf Connect a few weeks back. I liked the question so much. It’s pretty broad, but I like it because a lot of people encounter this. His question was, “What is the best thing to do if revenue has plateaued? Am I doomed?”

First thing I said is don’t be so pessimistic. You’re never doomed. Asia, what do you think about revenue plateaus? What’s your framework to get through them?

Asia: My first reaction to the am I doomed was definitely, of course not. If you are running a software company, you are probably running one of the most agile, reliable, and resistant kinds of companies that there are. The only other thing I can think of that’s more adaptable is going to be being a freelancer. 

What to do when revenue plateaus? When we think about the why, the outcome, the thing that we ultimately have to do is take a few steps back—take a step back and look at the overall larger picture. 

The first thing we’re going to look at is the business performing? That is just from top to bottom business performance of, are we getting the traffic or leads that we need? Are those converting into trials/demos or whatever the model is? Then is that converting into paying customers? Then are we ultimately retaining those customers? 

If you’ve ever heard of pirate metrics, acquisition, activation, retention, then revenue, and referral, that’s kind of what we’re going to look at first. Are we performing? If we are performing, then it really becomes a question of okay, if the business is performing, then why are we not seeing the ultimate outcome of growth. 

My guess is, if growth has stalled, then there’s probably something that’s missing. We’re probably not adding enough net new customers on top of the funnel or we’re turning as much as we’re gaining, which means that nothing is ultimately moving. The trickiest part is really identifying where to focus next. 

In any strategic process, we now have to dig deep. If we’re not getting enough net new, why is that? If we’re not retaining enough, why is that? If we were returning a lot, where’s that coming from? 

The next step is usually whenever we see slow growth or like just a very marginal 1% month over month, or even less than that, usually, it’s because there’s some disconnect with the product and the market. 

I know it might scare you a little bit to be thinking oh, my gosh, do I have product-market fit? Usually, there’s some disconnect. It’s either that we’re not attracting the right kinds of customers for our product or there’s something missing from our product that our ideal customer really needs and wants. Now, we need to address that. 

At the end of the day, people turn because they’re not getting value but it could also be that we’re just attracting the wrong kinds of people. This is as we start to identify where that’s coming from. Usually some kind of customer research, some kind of structured customer investigation is necessary, in addition to some kind of market investigation. 

It could very well be that another competitor is eating your lunch and you just have no idea about them. You have to go find out what’s going on. It could also be that there’s things, product-wise, that’s missing. 

Then of course, there’s also other flags as well. Maybe we’re attracting the right customer but we’re not converting them as efficiently. This is kind of where we have to do some pretty intense deep diving. 

A lot of times we find that a lot of businesses aren’t really tracking the right things from the get-go or aren’t reliably measuring anything to start with. I would say if you’ve got a pretty good handle on analytics, attribution, et cetera, amazing dive into that data. If not, then that might actually be the first place to start.

Rob: All right. I was jotting down notes before this call and you pretty much touched on most of the things that I was going to say. I think the one thing I’ll add and you touched on it a bit, but I want to call it out is if you’re plateauing early, if you’re at $2000 MRR, $4000 MRR, it’s what you said, you probably just don’t have product-market fit. You haven’t built something people really want and are willing to pay for. That’s usually the case under about, I would say, almost $10,000 MRR. 

If you’re plateauing at $50,000 MRR or $100,000 MRR, there’s a couple questions to ask. Is the market so small that we have literally tapped the whole thing out? Usually no, but if you’re catering to a very, very small niche, that’s a possibility. Then you have to think, do we add additional product lines to this to be able to charge more? Or do we expand into other verticals or something. 

The other plateaus that I see in that later stage are folks that churn can be an issue. If it’s a 80% churn business, you just can’t outrun that. You need a massive funnel to grow beyond a few million because you just constantly churn them out or have a price that’s too low is often what I see. You’ll never get to a $5 million business, not never right, but almost never. If it’s like my average revenue per county is $10, it’s too many people, and the churn is going to be too high. 

Then lastly, I think I’m surprised at how many folks don’t understand how much traffic you need to drive in order to test an idea or in order to get that escape velocity. I will have folks say hey, I’m at $1000, $2000 MRR and I plateaued. I’ll say, how many uniques do you get to your site in a month? They’re a low touch funnel so it’s all about traffic. It’s like, oh, about 800 uniques a month. It’s so cool, but you’re not going to grow. It’s just too small. 

Get to 10,000 and then look at the rest of your funnel and see are you converting? It goes back to what you said, you just have to look up and down the funnel. Look at the rules of thumb, trial to paid conversion rate with a credit card upfront should be between 40% and 60%. It’s all this stuff that we talk about at MicroConf and on the podcast. 

If you’re outside of those bounds, usually I can look at like six numbers and I’m sure you can do it’s like the traffic, conversion to trial, the trial to paid, the churn, this, and that. You just look at these numbers and be like, yeah, that’s your worst one. You just feel it because you’ve been around it long enough. 

That’s why I like that question because I feel like, (a) a lot of people run into it and, (b) the answer is it depends on the stage but it is just kind of a framework. We know the SaaS metrics. I recorded a YouTube video a couple weeks ago, it’s like the six SaaS KPIs you should pay attention to and it’s everything we just said—the LTV, the churn, and this and that. 

Thanks for that question, David. Hope that was helpful. 

Next question is from Marcel Albrecht about stealth launches. He says, “Hey, Rob. I’ve heard you mentioned the concept of a stealth launch a few times. I’m curious, under what circumstances would you recommend a stealth launch?” 

I have a note here before I toss it to you. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned stealth launches on the podcast so I think he’s confusing me with someone else, but I figured, hey, it’s a question. It’s here, let’s dig in. What are your thoughts on stealth launches, Asia?

Asia: Stealth launches are so interesting because I’ve only ever encountered a few of them in my work at DemandMaven. There’s only been twice where I’ve ever worked with a founder. This is out of dozens and dozens and dozens of projects at this point, in addition to just meeting hundreds of founders. 

There’s only been two companies I’ve ever worked with before where they were in stealth mode. The reasons why they decided stealth mode was they were banking on a very big idea. They were on the path to raise […], which totally could be your vibe, not knocking that vibe at all. I think it’s a great vibe, if that’s for you. 

The third thing was, it’s not that they were worried about competitors copying their idea as much as they knew that they were on the brink of something. It’s a very innovative thing and they knew that they were going to have to dot their I’s, cross their T’s, get all their ducks in a row before they really went out and asked for the big […] dollar. It was really like, we want to make sure we are very, very, very clear that this is going to work or it is not, at least to the best of our ability. I did not work with this company, by the way.

Superhuman actually comes to mind as a company that spent a long time in stealth mode. People did not really know about Superhuman until they had already been building the product for 2-3 years. On top of that, had hundreds if not thousands of users, beta testers, come through the product, try it out, give feedback, and make it really clear where they needed to best innovate while also providing a ton of value. 

Some of the companies that I’ve worked with, those were the three main triggers. The tough part is I would say nine times out of ten, most companies don’t need to be in stealth mode. That’s my opinion. Every now and again, there is an idea that just feels so wild and out there. I wish I could actually talk about these two companies, but they are still technically in stealth mode so I can’t. They are just so wild and out there and on top of that, the opportunity is so big that they would do their due diligence to be in stealth for a while. 

I want to be clear when I say stealth mode, they are not publicly going to market. They probably don’t even have a website to be honest. They are likely taking on design partners or companies that can help them co-build the product.

They need customers, so to speak. They almost want these design partners to help give them enough feedback to help them build an even better product. Also, to just kind of prove that this is going to be something that’s going to be worth something. The long tail vision though is 10 years out. It’s not two years. It’s 10, that’s how big the vision is. Anyway, I digress. I’m curious Rob, what are your thoughts?

Rob: I mean, my thoughts probably kind of summarized yours, which is if you’re going to raise […] then maybe consider stealth mode. If you’re Superhuman and you have tons of funding and can go build in a basement for 2 ½ or 3 years, and you know what you’re doing because a founder had already reported and exited for a great exit to LinkedIn. If you’re in that case, maybe think about it. 

Otherwise, I would say that you have way bigger problems than stealth mode or someone stealing your idea. The problem is no one’s going to give a crap when you launch. That is 99 out of 100. I don’t know a B2B SaaS aside from Superhuman, but I don’t know anybody else where stealth mode would make sense. 

I started clamoring that we were going to launch because we’re not doing things that are that innovative. If you’re launching something that needs stealth mode, this is probably the wrong podcast for you because this is about more boring businesses. This is about, I’m going to build an ESP that’s better than the other ones on the market. It’s not like it was some huge innovative thing. 

Guess what I did the moment we decided to do it? I went out telling everybody we’re going to build this ESP. Here’s my landing page and our email. We can build the launch. I would go the exact opposite of stealth mode in almost every case unless you have some very unique circumstances, you’re very experienced, and you have a lot of funding. There’s some exceptions. 

Asia: You can work full-time on it and also maybe afford other people working full time on it, which is actually true for all of the companies that I worked with that were in stealth mode. Yeah, I completely agree.

Rob: Almost never, I think is the phrase I would use. With that, let’s dive into our last question of the day. I don’t remember who asked this question, but it’s in the Trello Board so we are going to answer it. 

“Is it possible for a SaaS product to penetrate the enterprise without a dedicated sales force? I will go so far as to say maybe not a full sales force, but what if the sales force is in the early days as the founder or founders?”

Asia: I love that question because it is spicy. Okay, do you have to have a fully scaled out sales team in the early days? Probably not. I will say you are going to have to have some killer sales skills. You’re going to have to have some really powerful sales and negotiation skills. On top of that, you’re going to have to be able to actually deliver against what you promised. 

The diligence process of bringing on enterprise is a giant pain in the early days, but you get to a place where you grow enough where it’s less painful, but still annoying for certain types of industries and verticals. 

Again, early days, probably not. At some point, you will look far more credible. Also, at the same exact time, you will see better performance and results if you build out an experienced sales team course within reason and also within budget. 

I honestly would argue that if you can’t afford relatively great talent here, then it might make sense to just wait until you can. If it’s only enterprise in theory, maybe a couple of deals, and now you’ve got a team. Early days, not necessarily, but you are going to have to be the best salesperson you can be.

Rob: I want to be clear here too. There are some SaaS apps where they have their $50 price point and then their enterprise plan is $500 a month. That’s not an enterprise actually. Enterprise, I think it was $30,000 grand a year up, $100,000 a year up. I mean that’s true for enterprise. You’re talking $5000–$30,000 of annual contract value. To me, that’s more mid-market. You can sometimes get through that without the enormously painful procurement. 

I’m in agreement with you as well. It’s not that you need a sales force from day one, but you need a person who is a great salesperson, if you’re going to sell into this space and you need to charge enough. That’s the big mistake I see. 

If my product is $50 a month and CVS comes in and wants to use it in their […], BestBuy, or Target, Fortune 5000 company, they shouldn’t be paying $300 a month. They should be paying $3,000 a month. 

They’re going to put you through the wringer procurement, negotiations, the security audit, the custom redline terms of service, and the invoices with POS with net 30. All this stuff is such a headache, you have to get compensated for it.

I usually say the moment I’m doing enterprise sales, the minimum ACV I want is at least—and this is bottom and scrapey—is about $25,000. Einar, who is my TinySeed co-founder, he’s like yeah, that’s too low. I think it should be $30,000 or $35,000. 

We have absolutely seen TinySeed companies closing deals with these big companies that are $60,000–$100,000 a year and these are SaaS companies that have $50 a month plans. The bottom line is the enterprise gets more value out of it and just selling to them is so cumbersome that you do need to price it appropriately.

Asia: Yeah, completely agree. In my mind, I was like a minimum of $10,000 a month. I think it kind of sounds like it could actually even be a little bit less than that and still be considered like an enterprise sale, which I think is great.

Rob: I don’t know. 

Asia: Who knows. 

Rob: That’s my interpretation, but for you and in your world, enterprise maybe $120,000 a year. That’s a perfectly reasonable amount because maybe mid-market is $10,000, or it’s $20,000 up $120,000, then enterprise is $120,000. It’s just how we define it. I don’t know if there’s any system. 

Asia: No hard rule. 

Rob: Bottom line is, if you’re going to deal with larger customers like this whether it’s $20,000 a year or whether it’s $120,000 a year, you are going to have to do high touch sales and you are going to have to be good at it. 

In fact, that is why all the SaaS companies I launched, none of them required high touch sales. Because that’s not my gift. My zone of genius is not in sales, it’s in product, it’s in marketing, it’s in whatever a little bit of branding. It’s whatever else got Drip, HitTail, and frankly, MicroConf, TinySeed.

Those things don’t require enterprise sales although TinySeed does because we have investors. Guess what I did? I have a business partner. Einar is the sales guy. I talk to investors, I hang out with them, but I don’t close the deals because it just isn’t where I am the best fit.

Whoever asked this question or if you’re thinking about this yourself, especially in the early days if you’re bootstrapping and maybe you don’t have other founders, you do need to think about, I should build a business that at least leans into my giftings and there are many ways to do it. You can build super low touch businesses, if you’re more in the marketing, left brain thinking through funnels. If you are better at sales than go after a business that requires that.

Asia: Yes, 100% Totally agree.

Rob: Awesome. Well, Asia, this is super fun today. If folks want to keep up with what you’re doing so demandmaven.io, which is your growth marketing consultancy for SaaS. Actually, your h1 is it’s time to stop throwing growth tactics at the wall. I like that. 

You are @AsiaOrangio on Twitter. Asia, you have a podcast called In Demand that has been on hiatus for six or eight months and you’re bringing it back. Tell us about it.

Asia: Yes, I am bringing it back. Actually, it was because of attending MicroConf and also a few other conferences. People mentioned it and they were like, hey, when is that coming back? I was like oh, I didn’t realize that was the thing people liked. 

Yes, I am bringing it back this season. We are on season three. We will be focusing on how to be a better CEO. Also, how to work with marketing leadership and how to think about building your marketing team. We’ve got a bunch of very big topics that we’re going to break down. These are just solo hosted by me. I’m kind of bringing together all of the research and insights and sharing them with all of you. I’m super pumped to bring it back. It’s a good time.

Rob: I’m excited to listen. I have listened to the first season, 18 episodes in your prior couple seasons, and the h1 on that is how to grow your SaaS to 100,000 MRR. I like that value prop. You can search In Demand podcast, obviously, in any pod catcher you use, but the canonical URL is in-demand.castoos.com Thanks again for joining me, Asia. 

Asia: Awesome. Thanks again for having me. 

Rob: Thanks for joining me again this week. If you haven’t checked out youtube.com/microconf. In addition to conference talks that we’ve been putting out, I’ve been putting out some 5–10 minute videos covering SaaS specific topics and its content that I’m not releasing on this podcast feed. It’s things like Bootstrapping VS Venture capital, what’s the right call, how I made $30,000 a month with SaaS, top five activities of a great SaaS Customer Success Manager, SAS metrics: the best guide to software as a service, KPIs.

That kind of stuff is pretty topical and tactical. There’s also some strategic thinking but it’s all around bootstrapping and mostly bootstrapping SaaS companies. So youtube.com/microconf if you haven’t already checked it out and you can subscribe. It’ll show up in your YouTube feed as these videos are released.

I’m trying to do one a week at this point so if you’re looking for kind of what feels like a little more Startups for the Rest of Us, even though it’s me solo, but you get to hear more of my thoughts on this topic and further your education and SaaS all the while having an actual video. We have editors that are making these things pop and making them interesting. I’d encourage you to check out youtube.com/microconf and I’ll be back in your ears again next Tuesday morning.