I posted a SaaS I made in Maker Zero recently. What do you think of it, and how would you get it in front of agencies or companies if you didn't have an audience or extra cash to spend?
If you don't have an audience for your SaaS, I would not spend a bunch of time building an audience. By the time you build the audience, I don't think SaaS as an industry will really make much sense anymore, just given that AI can virtually rebuild anything and everything today for tokens on the dollar, so to speak. What I would do instead is build a two-step process. Rather than building your SaaS, building an audience, and then selling it, I would just build a SaaS and then sell it. You do this by going outbound, not inbound. You don't need to build an audience in order to go outbound — you literally just find people that would get a lot of value out of the product you're selling and go talk to them. There are a variety of different ways to do that; obviously Maker School is a big chunk of the outbound approach. You just reach out to people that have some sort of buying signal and then put your product in front of them in a highly curated way.
The feeling you describe is akrasia — knowing what to do but not doing it because the required activation energy feels too high. To overcome this, consider the two business models you mentioned. A SaaS model is highly scalable but requires product‑market fit and can take years to generate revenue, during which you burn runway with no income. An agency model, by contrast, lets you earn money quickly (e.g., $20k in the first month) but is hard to scale and lacks predictable recurring revenue. I recommend a blended approach: start with an agency to generate early cash flow and runway, use that revenue to fund your SaaS development, and then gradually shift from manual implementations to a SaaS product. This path takes longer to reach the same scalability as a pure SaaS, but it yields far more money in the early years and gives you proven business‑owner credibility, which makes raising funds or reinvesting easier.
My recommendation is to first grow the SaaS a bit before you start a YouTube channel. Instead of advertising $2 K in MRR, frame it as a $100 K‑a‑year business. That kind of headline is more interesting to viewers. If you’re still early and don’t have impressive results, people won’t be inclined to spend time on your content. The key is to focus on what you’ve achieved that’s better than 99.9 % of the world. When you have a tangible outcome—say you’re consistently making $8‑10 K a month—you can use that as the hook for your videos. Spend time improving the SaaS, develop strong skills, and once you have a modest success metric, start talking about it. Use that achievement as the basis for your content and you’ll be able to attract an audience.
First things first, you can't be camera shy in a world where your success depends on you being confident enough to show you in conjunction with your brand. People won't see that as shyness — they'll see that as a lack of conviction or a lack of belief. If you really believe in your brand, you will stand behind it 100%, and that includes putting your face on it. So it's not really a question of being shy or comfortable or whatever; it's a question of 'do I really fucking believe in what it is that I'm doing?' And if so, of course I'm going to put my face behind it — that's how you show the rest of the world your belief. So reframe that. The second thing is reach. There are many different ways to do it, but you don't actually need social reach in order to build a startup for your cleaning business. It depends on what your startup is, obviously, and the ticket value, but you can actually just reach out to people one-on-one, like I usually talk about on my channel. A lot of big high-ticket SaaS companies do this sort of thing, and that's how they actually grow. So if your SaaS or startup or whatever it is makes somewhere more than, I don't know, like $3,000 lifetime value, it actually makes sense for you to do this sort of outreach. And then your apps on the App Store are going to be 50/50 — probably not going to be that high-ticket, but just worth considering. And then if you did want to build social reach, the best way to do so right now is just to pre-commit 90 days to a platform and a format. A platform might be YouTube, a format might be talking-head AI automation tutorials such as I do. And then just rip and do one video or one piece of content a day every day for 90 days. If you feel like you can do more than one — because maybe it's a text thing or some sort of audio thing — then do two a day for 90 days. Don't assess yourself before that period; only assess yourself after that period. If after the 90-day period you think you made a positive return on investment for all the time, energy, and money that you've spent, then ramp it up and go all in. Otherwise, just move to another approach, take what you learned from the previous one, and rinse and repeat.
It's straightforward. Just look for companies that book demos. The reason you have to look for companies that require a demo for their product or service is because if you go for any SaaS company, you'll get a bunch of really low-ticket ones that charge like $5 a month. Instead, you want businesses that charge $500 to maybe $1,000 a month, get people on a six to 12-month plan, and end up making an LTV of six to maybe $10,000. The value there is if you get that SaaS company one more customer, you've now generated six to $10,000 for them. Which means if you're charging three to $5,000, it's really easy to get them one or two customers a month and maximally justify the money they spend on you. So literally just compile a big list of SaaS companies, command-F and have whatever tool you're using look for the word 'demo' on their landing page — as long as they have a demo, you're good to go. You can send mass emails to them through any sort of enrichment campaign like AirSkape, Vain, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, AnyMail Finder, and so on. Then just sell them more customers. The simplest and easiest problem most businesses have is they don't have enough customers. A B2B SaaS company in particular never has enough customers because their fulfillment and back ends are almost completely automated — that's why they're in B2B SaaS. The only real thing they need is to pour fuel on the fire.