What advice do you have for someone new to B2B SaaS and what should they focus on at the start?
I wouldn't recommend starting with B2B SaaS if you're new to business. Instead, begin with something simpler like an agency that offers a straightforward service implementation. If you still want to pursue B2B SaaS, get your first customer as quickly as possible—don't spend time engineering the product. Create a simple landing page, a basic dashboard, and a minimum viable feature that outperforms competitors, then push it in front of as many people as you can. Keep usage costs low and give away slots so people try your service, learning through feedback rather than planning. If you're just starting out, I would definitely avoid B2B SaaS.
I wouldn't recommend starting with B2B SaaS if you're new to business. Instead, begin with something simpler like an agency that offers a straightforward service implementation. If you still want to pursue B2B SaaS, get your first customer as quickly as possible—don't spend time engineering the product. Create a simple landing page, a basic dashboard, and a minimum viable feature that outperforms competitors, then push it in front of as many people as you can. Keep usage costs low and give away slots so people try your service, learning through feedback rather than planning. If you're just starting out, I would definitely avoid B2B SaaS.
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.
The only way is by doing it. You can talk the talk all day and watch YouTube videos from people like me explaining how to build consulting offers, but we only scratch the surface of what there is to know. The only way to know what you don't know is to go do the thing, struggle, and muddle through the mud and the dirt. I wish I could solve all those problems for you, but any online resource is just the first step. If you want to start a business, actually sit with it. Spend two or three hours journaling through your thoughts on the business. Focus less on why it might not work and more on how it could work. Extrapolate things like basic reply rates. Use what's called goal factoring: you have a goal, then you ask how do I achieve the goal, then how do I achieve each of the things that help me achieve the goal, and so on, continuously working your way down until you've arrived at a big list of actions.
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.