9 Tactics CEO’s Used to Hit $10m Revenue

hello software leaders over a thousand software Founders registered for the webinar that you are about to see a recording of and over 250 showed up live in fact you can move forward here to minute 10 in the video and see them all live with the little Zoom counter at the bottom it was incredible energy we focused on 33 growth tactics the top SAS Founders are using to grow right now that was in May and June and going here into July in 2024 you're going to get all the cas studies here in about three seconds now if you want the full slide deck just click the like button Below on

this YouTube video leave a quick comment and I'll get back to you with the full Google deck the full Google slide deck but now let's jump into the live recording in studio here we go I want to First just talk about a framework for growth right we're all focused obviously on growth and so there's a bunch of different growth strategies some of them are fast and some of them are slow now let me ask you guys a quick question just put it in the chat if we're looking to grow a company and we don't want to spend a lot of money and we obviously want to grow and you know create sustainability and grow Revenue do we

want to generally test fast growth tax itics or slow growth tactics type fast or slow in the chat fast growth tactics James beanie or slow Morgan cats fast or slow those of you that are poker players or or parents with seven kids that need patience you're going to maybe say slow everyone else is going to say fast right we want fast tactics that's the left side here John Healey right now the second question is do we want to spend a lot of money or a little right do we want cheap growth tactics that can we

can run like no money or expensive right Chris SN says little in the chat David says cheap of course right we ideally want growth tactics that are on the upper left quadrant so if you've minimize my screen you're going to want to maximize it so you can see this we want those things in the upper left quadrant right fast things that are generally not expensive to run especially for a startup with under 5 million bucks of Revenue right we want fast and cheap now part of the benefit of having all us live today is we can have a bit of a group brainstorm so out

of curiosity guys what growth tactics are you testing today just put it down in the chat Rachel Khan can I pick on you what are you testing at product B in terms of growth go ahead and unmute yourself sure uh LinkedIn marketing interesting does that mean paid spend or only organic content organic content and so what does that mean are you posting directly on your account sort of uh multi-page you know threaded download buttons or what are you what are you posting it's actually really simple we tested a lot of different things and we found that just uh quick blurbs of

content move uh potential customers the easiest so mostly just original content I love that and guys Rachel's got a beautiful company called productable you see the logo behind her she's doing an incredible job selling uh into usually I would say Rachel what's the right way to describe the industry you sell into I don't want to say slow and archaic but it's a tough Market to sell into right yeah National Security a lot of military so yep yep a lot of military so you guys can see in the chat content

events uh CEO Outreach uh Lauren says monthly use case Focus virtual roundtables and guys I appreciate the comment ments I can see them live and as I read your comments I will customize the content we learned today so Rachel just gave some good examples uh let me now what you're going to see on this next screen I'm going to go forward here in a second I've basically taken all of the 3,300 software interviews that I've Done Right with Founders now if you're going what is Nathan talking about just guys raise your hand if you listen to at least one podcast or you've been on the podcast raise your hand hi I'm looking

David Lanie said yes you can see Martin look a bunch of people bunch of people raising their hand right the podcast is what I launched back in you guys the Backyard Barbecue goes crazy you guys have to manage your own audio that's the risk of having over 100 I don't know what do we have 110 Founders live that's the risk having everyone live but my point being here uh is uh we've taken the best content from these 3,300 interviews I've done with SAS Founders and I've said let me plot the tactics that work the best so I'm going to go silent here you guys look at these 33

tactics and you tell me if I'm missing any that you guys are using that are working well

see if you can find like Doug just put in the chat podcasts right see if you guys can find the growth tactic working best for you see if you can find it here in the quadrant and then feel free to light me up if you're doing Sylvie dism at frame us and you're like whoa that's not on the thing put it in the chat or anal sound same to you Tina M James me if you guys see something put it in the chat as well right so what we've done here is we've basically said okay here are 30 Fe growth tactics that the fastest growing

companies use there's fast and cheap in the upper left right then they're slow and cheap in the upper right and then expensive down below so guys the way we're going to work through our content today over the next 43 minutes or 53 minutes is you want to think about not just which growth tactics you're doing you want to think about the order you're doing them sequencing is what it's called right you can't just go listen to a $50 million AR CEO and go copy their growth strategies today no you want to go see what they were doing when they were at your stage at 2 million of

Revenue right and do that right you to have the context and so I think a lot of us make this mistake so Tina M I'm going to ask you to unmute yourself really quick if I asked you how should most software companies move through this graph like bottom left to upper left or upper left to bottom right how would you say they should move through this chart oh I would definitely say top left to bottom right you want to get you know your as much learning as possible as quickly as possible and then move into

the slower more expensive stuff you you nailed it I would argue if you're watching right now and you're under 3 million bucks of AR you should not be doing anything below the line you should not be doing anything but below the fast Slow line because those things are expensive if you're doing those things with under three million bucks of Mario it's hysterical I can't tell if you're rocking out to music or if you're just agreeing with me and bopping your head up and down just tell me you're agreeing with me and you're loving the content n I'm loving it I'm agreeing with you that's all he's just jamming out over

here I'm going on he's listening to a good Bop or he loves the content but the reason you don't want to do the stuff below the line if you're under 3 million bucks a Revenue guys is because then you're going to have to go raise VC and then you lose control right or you lose your optionality because those things are expens expensive tactics if you want to keep control and grow you want to do exactly what Tina just said you want to start in the upper left then move to the upper right so cheap things that are fast and then slow and only after you're above four or five million bucks of Revenue do you start considering placing some bets that are below the line right that are below the line so this is sort

of good guidance uh in terms of uh in terms of the next slide we're now going to bucket this by Fun fun right by function purple is influence yellow is paid right purple is BD orange is content and red is engineering many of you guys if you have some scale ready you might actually have HED individual people for each of these colors this is sort of How It's bucketed Michelle Lawrence I'm curious at form Piper have you guys hired someone specifically just

to manage and do your paid or do you guys use an agency we are not doing paid at the time okay no paid no paid what about what about your outbound strategy do you have some AES and sdrs those kinds of folks we do yep yep yep so guys that's how you want to think about sort of this in context right or these these color schemes now what I want to do uh as we're we're going I'm I'm going to tease you with the next slide right we're about to jump into these nine growth tactics and nine case studies before I do that though I would like to

customize how we work through these with your feedback so two question survey I just put up first is this your first webinar with us yes or no and then second say we are trying insert your tactics you might say Affiliates but we can't get Affiliates to promote right so insert the tactic you're currently trying and then the challenge and guys what you're doing is you're helping me figure out what you care about and it's going to aable me to create better webinars in the future and deliver

better content on this webinar so first yes or no is this your first webinar and then second just type a quick sentence we are trying X tactic but we have y Challenge and remember here's a list of all the tactics again if you need a quick refresher now I'm going to pick on Jay rraam while everyone else is typing Jay what company are you with what are you building go un mute

yourself uh we're we're building a small business Communications app uh similar to Podium and bird eye we're just building a much better Mouse trrap Hot Space what's your mouse trp uh it just does more I mean we automate organic SEO for our subscri rers um our payments platform is better we have a fully loaded CRM in there um we have a dashboard where you can quickly navigate through the whole app you know like a 5-year-old it's it's very very very

intuitive all right Bird eye for a 5-year-old I think that could fly we'll see if it works but Jay thanks for being here guys it looks like about 50 I'm GNA stop the pull here in five seconds four three two one and I'm going to share it because I want you guys to see who you're here with right there it is so looks like 54% of you are new welcome it's so good to have have you I appreciate you guys being here and then it looks like about 47% of you guys are veterans which we love I'll study those uh answers after the webinar and F with you one-on-one with some tactics that are relevant specifically for the tactic

that you're currently testing let me stop sharing and let's move into the content for today here's our blueprint for the next 48 minutes I've broken it up into three sections the first 10 minutes we're going to focus on tactics regarding building your influence the second 10 minutes are going to be about your content strategy with some surprising things here you're going to think I know content strategy I'm going to try and shock your ecosystem a little bit with some real case studies and lastly we'll talk about some outbound tactics why Cold email is not dead if you do it the right way why door knocking is something you might consider

it's work for viip and lastly you don't always have to put your call centers in Argentina I'll show you how we're view wave did this 20 million bucks bootstrapped ARR lot of great content today so let me jump in out of curiosity section one is influence section two that's two fingers is content section three is outbound guys just hold your fingers up one two or three which which section are you most interested in one two or three Adrian said two Brian's two ragna's two Tina said one Jay's two annais is one okay good we've got a nice mix we've got a nice mix let's jump in first section here is all about

influence now influence what I mean by that I call this soft power it's one of the biggest advantages you have as a startup if you figure out a way to build what I call soft power it becomes easier for you to convince Affiliates to Market your product right or how to have partner send emails on your behalf or how to get your product lunch to number one or how to get on the first page of Hacker News this is all soft power right and so how do you create that soft power well it starts with attention take a look here at sem Rush's Revenue

graph and what if I sort of took us back in history here for a second this was their 2010 most popular page in terms of how they were getting new traffic can you see what they were doing here marioa what does this look like to you can can you tell everyone what you see here actually my screen isn't [Laughter] hopefully that's just they driving driving it all through affiliate Partners Patrick Shaw with rapid final jumps in and saves the day that's

exactly right Patrick can you read is it big enough can you see what they're paying out terms 2040 40% yeah we're trying to figure out our affiliate plan right now and that's I mean it's it seems like a lot yep how many of you guys agree with Patrick you're testing Affiliates right now just type affiliate in the chat is anyone who's testing Affiliates right now they could also some people call it value added resellers or channel strategy I mean is are you paying some group of people some variable commission to bring you traffic right so 40% on the first year Nathan or

what is that 40% of what the setup fee or yeah so Patrick I mean they had obviously they they didn't know scr was going to be as big as it was in 2010 they were pre-revenue back then so they're going I just need people to promote 40% in perpetuity now wow Patrick you're smart right you already have a couple million in Revenue everyone else you're smart what happens if you're paying 40% in perpetuity over time let's say you grow to 5 million bucks Revenue what happens eat your lunch yeah it's exactly right and let's say all your Revenue comes from Affiliates and you're paying out 40% what's the maximum gross margin you can

have what's the maximum gross margin who's got it in the chat there you go got it exactly right Tina's got it 60% right that's before ads cost in hosting so maybe you're actually 50% that's a terrible gross margin for a software company when you go try and sell you're going to sell for like peanuts because the buyer is going to say you have 50% gross margin that's terrible so what happened when that c Patrick to your point they had to shift their strategy look it by 2018 they passed 60 million bucks of Revenue 40% of that Revenue had

had come from Affiliates so it's 40% of about 60 million right it's about 25 million bucks but do you think they knew that going in and they used it as an accelerator to just create the growth well my my point is this is where I come back to that sequencing comment to man at the top of the call right none of us know I mean we all hope we're going to build $100 million a our company right but in the early days we're just scrapping we have no idea if this is the one right is this going to be the one well it turns out for SCM March this was the one so Patrick they had to go crap how do we buy back our margin how do we

get our margin back you don't want to piss off the Affiliates what do you do well so they have a clause and what a lot of folks do and it's my recommendation to you guys today make sure if you're paying out this kind of heavy commission that you've got a clause in your affiliate contract that says something like the following listen really carefully at any point in time us the company right has the option but is not required right but has the option to buy out your affiliate monthly

commission for forward looking six months so let's say you're paying some affiliate two grand a month because theyve brought you 10 grand of Mr right you're basically saying you can buy that affiliate out for their commission 2K per month times 6 months 12 Grand I paid Tina 12 Grand today boom I now own all the customers she gave she gave us free and clear right we're buying out that forward-looking commission stream this is a really really important thing to build into your affiliate contract because in the future you know if it works and none of us know if it's going to work but if it does work you need to be able to buy back that Revenue stream how many you

guys just sort of had an aha moment you thumbs up does that sort of like make sense was that good value right you want that in your affiliate contract thanks Patrick so guys today I don't want to spoil the beans you guys can actually go to it right but if you go to SCM Rush affiliate program they pay out actually they just pay out a one time cost per acquisition now if you bring them a trial they pay 100 bucks one time if you bring them a customer they pay you 250 bucks one time Affiliates don't make any recurring anymore at at a CM rush so this is again I mean by sequencing right you can't just copy's affiliate strategy today because you can't get affiliate

spr your business if you're only going to pay them one time for a customer because you're new we're all new we're new s we're SAS startups you've got to start with a 30 or 40% perpetuity and then step two is usually like okay 30% in year 1 and then 20% in year two and then nothing in year three right and then step three is sort of okay now it's just a one one check at the beginning right and then it's done so you're buying back margin over time all right we're still in section one let's go to case study 2 as Adrian enjoys his lunch Adrian what are you having man lenberg what are you

eating looks good man I'm eating in very good vegetarian Indian Cuisine ah wrist rub it in I appreciate that nice vegetarian Indian Cuisine with 262 SAS Founders Adrian thanks for being here man what are you working on what are you building uh we building an ESC platform I have no idea what that is what's EC ESG oh ESG employment social and governance okay okay very good are you post- revenue or pre-revenue um post Revenue we are

running moment uh roughly 400k and we started rough a year ago congratulations guys Round of Applause for Adan for be transparent 500k almost of AR in his first year that's amazing man all right back to your salad back to your salad and taking notes let's jump into zensi it used to be called LMS 365 look at the revenue growth here look at the revenue growth here now what was wild and what is wild about zensi is they use what I like to call

opt now ragna and I see Thomas obvious on with sassiest anyone I met on on the on the sassiest European tour is not allowed to answer this but opt G where's G Gill unmute yourself is J Patel here J mute yourself yeah what's up Nathan did we meet in person on the tour or no uh no but we met at saser okay did I tell you what opt was or you just guessed right in the chat and you nailed it first try I'm a big fan of your podcast so I heard of them

how many episodes Have you listened to uh I say at least 20 or 30 of them and then I attend each of these webinars for last like few months now oh amazing man I'm thrilled you hear it you nailed it though guys he nailed it it's called other people's traffic the reason I'm bringing this up is a lot of us man it's getting hot in here too take my jacket off here calm down calm down calm down don't get crazy just just relax everybody okay all right OPM used to be the popular thing right used to be other people's money right how to use OPM OPM the problem is you read about the

stories like quibby if you guys search qibi bankrupt qibi bankrupt just search it qibi bankrupt this was a company that Jeff kenberg and Meg Whitman ex CMO or CEO of eBay launched a platform called quibby this was a couple years ago they put billions behind it in pre-launch everyone's going it's going to be a hit they're billionaires well it failed they tried to use money to buy attention and it failed I want you guys to remember this you cannot buy attention today you

have to earn it you you cannot buy attention right you have to earn it billionaires tried it fail you really have to earn it with creativity and so the reason opt is more valuable than OPM is for that reason here's how zensi gets most of their traffic look at the screenshot now what this is is this is a picture of their listing in the Microsoft app exchange right a lot of their Trials come directly from this they are using Microsoft's traffic to grow their

business now this is not a revolutionary tactic or right idea right it's oh you put it in an app store of course duh Nathan that's easy stuff well it's easy to think about but it's harder to do how many of you guys are in at least one of these app exchanges right these are 14 of the most popular ones they drive the most Revenue to SAS companies how many of you guys aren't at least one just put one up in the air anybody stepen Benson's one Stephen which one are you in uh we are in uh Salesforce HubSpot

Microsoft Dynamics Zoho um and uh and and recently uh AWS guys Steve has built an incredible business called Badger mapping Badger m is it Badger map Stephen or Badger mapping. comom you know we'll take your traffic either way opt baby but stick your link in the chat though guys Steve is an incredible founder he's he's really Capital efficiently built his business he should have died during Co because his software allows people to plan their in-person physical sales Roots their field sales

reps which no one was doing during Co he figured out a way to survive he he I lived with him at the Disney house for what was it stepen Steve maybe three four months three months yeah but it was the summer of uh fall of 2020 we had these beautiful founder events and one time this uh very Charming lady came over with a cheese plate they are now married with one kid Steve or two kids living in Lisbon right uh one kid living in southern Spain you're unbelievable

wait so yeah it's it's it's a it's a fun story it's a great it's a great story but guys Steve which app exchange drives Badger map the most trials per month or per year would you say Salesforce Salesforce yeah now guys look if you're just now getting into one of these you're thinking right now well Nathan I can't compete in the HubSpot app exchange there's already a thousand apps in my category how do I win why I would tell you you're right I don't have a Magic Bullet for that so let's think about this for a second why are the apps today at the top of the HubSpot app

exchange why are they at the top usually it's because they were there first right so let's look at the screen right now which of these companies have the newest app exchanges so that you can go be there first well open a eyes is pretty new stripe stripe's A1 billion company they've only got 150 apps in their app exchange go dominate your keyword there right what else is new any other really new ones on here I would say those are the zoom is fairly new under a thousand apps there right go play there so that's the idea here right

if you're touching don't try to be in all these because it's they're not relevant for all of you but you should be in at least one or two of them right one or two of them that's op all right we're still in section one I'm now into into into this third section now this is going to be really freaking weird this is going to be very very very meta um I didn't want to do this section but people kept saying Nathan the webinars are incredible I come to everyone I come all the time I come you know great how many of you guys just had curiosity you heard earlier someone Gil said he's been to a couple maybe eight nine 10 the past couple months guys how many of you guys that

are back again how many would you guys uh say that you've been to one two 5 10 I just think most of these things okay see some tens in the chat some fives some Ben Murr in the house that's great Ben good to see a man SAS CFO but the webinars are typically really boring and so you can see here again I don't have to tell you this what's on the screen because you're actually seeing it live we're actually doing this right now but you might be wondering how does Nathan and founder path how do we get consistently hundreds of Founders live and thousands registered which are also

leads well I follow a very simple framework this is it this is it the bottom left is minute zero the bottom right is minute 60 you have to tell your story on a webinar better than a Disney animator there has to be a hero there's got to be a villain there has to be a crescendo to a climax with the resolution you want to give your audience Goosebumps right how do you tell the story if you're not

great at copier storytelling well Tina let me just pick on you for a second what's your company name and what are you building I'm going to try and use you as a real example here um my company's name is drift golf we're um two-sided Marketplace for golf courses think Uber Eats but for golf okay I love this so guys we're giving Tina is giving webinar right now to golf course managers now look she's not trying to get a million people live she only needs a 100 golf course managers because her ACV is what Tina a th000

bucks 10,000 bucks a year yeah something like that right so she's gonna say welcome to the webinar one little thing that drives me crazy about the golf industry is whenever we try and manage bookings in the traditional software it always glitches out it doesn't work we solve this with this one little feature okay now INE 10 the next worst thing about the golf industry is why you leave revenue on the table because it's hard to check the upsell for the Coke Zero products and the protein bars when I'm trying to sell golf balls if you want to increase your average cart value at check out at your golf course here's how

we help you solve that problem minute 40 the worst thing about the golf space is block Tina what's the worst thing about the Golf software space the Golf software space is that everybody has one little solution for one little problem so Golf Course managers are stuck spending up the woo for lots and lots of different programs and none of them work together and the reason you should come check out Tina softare is cu we are an all-in-one solution for everything you need ranging from the golf course the

snacks at the snack bar the pre-registration for the course timing the te- spot kickoff times we do it all in one for one flat price of $7,000 per year right and that's the best thing about Tina SAS company at minute 45 then that's the crescendo right the villain are the other software companies that are Point Solutions she's the hero the resolution is here's a link to try demo book with the AE or if you're bossy sell right away click here to put in your credit card and buy for a th000 bucks a year right and then that's that second part that step function and then Tina what you want to do there the reason

it's a step function is you unmute so here watch I'll do it right now guys how many of you guys are live right now and you're a Founder path customer already just put in the chat who's a Founder path customer anybody anybody Rachel can I pick on you just because I know you're a Founder path customer all right absolutely so okay so Rachel you're found why are you using founder path oh because government deals are really slow and the money is Lumpy and so money always comes but never when you expect it I love that Mark rankovic why are you using founder

path yeah pretty much the same reason we sell into school districts and the uh revenue is very seasonal we get 20 uh prepaid annual contracts and we get 60% of our cash flow in calendar Q3 and only 40% across the other three quarters and can I ask how much Capital you got from founder path or you don't have to share it if you don't want to just about 800k at the moment 800k and one last one Steve why do you use founder path um it's it's less of the the revenues lumpy and it's just that you

know we it's I I've I've used SAS debt for I don't know seven years or so not not all with founder path uh I used some other ones earlier I switched to founder path a couple years ago but um we've always just been able to have five more Engineers than I would have otherwise been able to have and we've been able to build more software create more value um it's are you comfortable sharing Steve how much you took oh I mean over the years I bet I've done eight million bucks in in saset but

I mean the last round I mean I think I've got 2.8 with you right now yeah so guys what I just did that's the step function at the end of this from minute 45 to 15 you want to unmute your current customers because they will sell the rest of the people live right notice I'm sort of asking Rachel and Steve leading questions but not really like if they said something negative I would also want to call that out like Rachel could have said Nathan you guys took forever to close and I'd say man Rachel you're right we're working on that but you still worked with us so why' you do right Rachel you could have said

something negative it was my fault I took way longer than you guys did oh no no I'm totally joking that's an example but my point is guys the reason a lot of people are nervous to unmute current customers is because you're nervous they going to say something negative but it makes you real it makes you super real right and and and what happens is you let those people talk and keep them unmuted and they sell everybody else and then you move on the next one that's the step function so it's almost like your own what's that TV show where they like sell necklaces and it's like oh Suzanne's calling in she just bought the

two for one deal the schamy schwap thing where you can clean it in two minutes oh you know Sammy just bought it s okay we only have four left it's sort of like you're doing that okay it's QVC you're sort of doing that but on a webinar right for B2B SAS now the last thing I want to talk about webinars is you've got to do these little bubbles you've got to do the lwi right this is very all of you should be screenshotting this and sending it to whoever does webinars at your company right just tell them whatever this is go watch Nathan's recording you got to get the stic you

got to do lwi here's what lwi

is many of you guys if I just talk for 50 minutes straight you will tune me out because my voice becomes the norm right so it's easy to ignore if I break up my voice I've already done it I've unmuted people I've paused you're going to see me with embedded videos later on those are ways to break up your voice you've got to break up your voice on on webinars otherwise people mute you right so keep people listening how do you keep people watching your slides some of you are guilty right now you've minimized my slides which pissed me off

because I spent a lot of money on these slides but you've minimized the slides how it's my responsibility to make sure you're viewing the slides how do I do that well you guys have seen me do this I've said I'm going to the next slide now or see my mouse or here zenze Revenue look at the curve that's how you get people keeping your screen maximized right and leaning in and then lastly you want people to kinesthetically interact that literally means hands body movement hands I've done this a couple times I've said 1 two three you guys are physically moving your bodies right or you're answering poll questions typing right or

you're putting your thumbs up that's kinesthetic engagement when you combine all three of these things and you use one of nine of these tactics at least every five minutes when you download your webinar performance results at the end you're going to see the majority of your people stay live for over 90% of the whole webinar if you don't do these things people drop off a minute 10 and you never see them again they're gone all that work you did to promote it they're gone after 10 minutes all right so we spent a lot of time on section one because it's the thing I'm the most passionate about but here's the summary on section one and then we're going to go into section two and three which are

each 10 minutes each section one summary we talked about Affiliates step function like Patrick Shaw said step function your affiliate program aggressive at the start out clause cost per trial cost per sign up towards the end as do scale like SCM Rush number two opt nothing else to be said there op other people's traffic and lastly what does the perfect webinar look like how do you keep people in game engaged all right give me a big old heck gu in the comments if you learned at least one thing from section one W said W unmute yourself what was your favorite thing what was your biggest

takeaway um the marketplaces marketplaces yeah that's a good one that's a good one I thrive off your guys' energy I see your customers live here on the right ragna says let your customers talk David said opt Brent said everything everything I'm loving it all right guys let's keep the let's keep momentum going here the last six tactics I want to cater a little bit to where you guys are at today if that's okay with you no pressure to answer this but again do enable me to give you better content if you do answer this so I'm going to launch a poll really quick I'm going to launch a poll really quick and

all I'm asking you is to take last month's Revenue recurring only recurring only okay last month's Revenue time 12 so what's your AR today right what what range are you this is a sort of a nice way to also say hello say hello to everybody else on the webinar because I'll share these in a second it your name won't be attached right but I'll share the the percentages of the Bands right with everybody else here in a second so four three I'll give you five more seconds to answer this are you pre Revenue are you 1 million to 3 million 3 to 7 7 million plus where are you guys

at where are you at all right 3 two one let's end the poll all right and I'll share with you guys guys here's who's here's who you're hanging out with today right 25% of you are pre- Revenue 34% of you are 1 to 500k uh 13 + 9 plus 4 so 26% of you are doing more than a million per year and 5% of you are doing more than 7 million per year I can't see how many people we have live but you guys can look at the attendance counter down at the bottom I think and put it in the chat so you can take 5% times whatever

that is and you can see who's doing or how many people are doing what amount of Revenue so I love that I'll cater the rest of the content towards some of these categories um and the the chat is guys can you guys can you guys see the results in the chat or or sorry is the chat it's still moving right okay great great all right so that's the results let me stop sharing here let me stop sharing um and I'll go to the next section of content we're going to focus

on content content marketing now guys content marketing this is I think a massive black box you know we try it we get frustrated we put our blog post nobody views it we go content marketing is stupid it doesn't work right it doesn't work um we're going to focus on three very specific tactics here over the next seven minutes we're going to talk about Zen business clickup and then retention. comom now before we dive deep deep into each of those three categories the one thing I'll tell you guys is when you run these first three growth tactics it helps you keep your options open like Tina taught us in the beginning if you

start on the upper left of that graph and move around the bottom right you don't have to give up Equity to raise cash to test expensive stuff early because you're doing the fast and cheap stuff early right and you want to keep your options open so so out of curiosity look there's nothing wrong by the way there's nothing wrong with raising a bunch of capital it's just a different Playbook so how many of you guys in the chat right I want you to say um Capital efficient if you've raised less than 1X your ARR say Capital efficient in the chat if

you've raised less than 1X your ARR okay so Jonathan Rachel Martin Douglas Morgan Wy Paul Jim Benson David Liv okay a lot of you guys right a lot of capital efficient companies right now there's nothing wrong again with being the cback it's just a different model but when you are capital efficient this is what happens specific you're going to be like that guy in the bottom right or the bottom right center of my screen right now I want you to meet Eric I want you to meet Eric dixa mads in the upper left

he's the opposite of capital efficient they've raised a crap ton of money well the founder in the center bottom on the right made a lot of money from the founder that's chasing growth at all cost and raised a bunch of money to buy his company right right why did Eric in the center bottom get acquired by dixa well dixa went out and rais let me see if I can actually do this on the Fly dixa raised 43 million so you can see here right actually it's right on their site right Dixon went out in March of 2022 and raised 43 million bucks and they bought two companies one of them

was called solemate right which is Eric the CEO this is what Eric said about how much money he made on the exit I'll let you read

this the point here is Eric started with the cheap and fasta in the upper left self-plug here he used founder path money right doubled his Revenue then exited and kept basically all of it right because there were no VCS there was no 1X liquidation preference there was no dragged out uh diligence process because the VCS wanted a 100x return right let me give Ben the opportunity to chime in here really quick Ben Murray you launched one of the most popular if not the most popular SAS metrics course in the world you've got a new one launching here shortly uh talk me through a little bit how you sort of

advise companies that you know are thinking about you know they are currently Capital efficient they're thinking about raising a lot more and you're going huh think about these three things first I mean what are you seeing in the market today hey Nathan can you hear me okay I hear you great Ben oh perfect perfect yeah I mean I work with a lot of Founders and you know either coaching or fractional work and you know you have to understand what's working not working in your business you know so if you're going to raise you know what's that plan because I just interviewed a series B founder raised 26 million and he knew exactly how he's going to deploy

that you know he said there's the science to the SAS metrics that you then have to prove out at series a at Beyond you know so you really have to speak the language of SAS now I mean you nailed it and we you know we've worked together with a bunch of Founders to help I mean I know this is selfish and sounds really gimmicky like internet marketer but founder path and I exist to help you guys get rich I know that's terrible but I know Tina if you're really wealthy you're going to create you're going to invest in other companies you're going to have a great family Great Vacations you do whatever you want you're going to have a beautiful lovely life and we actually

did this recently as Scott uh Scott at contact monkey so he he had raised about a million from founder path and Ben you worked I don't know this is if this is true or not so correct me if this is wrong but I'm fairly certain you worked with him through the updated deal correct uh for Scott yeah yeah yeah I've he's been yeah long-term client and still a client and uh yeah they're they're doing great so guys Scott gave me permission uh in the video um uh he gave me permission here because he's I've already put on the website to say

what I'm about to say we never share stuff unless we have permission to say it from the founders but he effectively bootstrapped to well over 5 million bucks of Revenue using other people's money in this case it was founder pass and then and only then went out and did this deal right now he didn't say how much of this was secondary or not but if I'm a betting man a big chunk of this was secondary because he held all the cards he held all the cards as the founder he had full control right growing capitally efficient so that's the name of the game here we're now operating at founder path out of $150 million fund you've heard from Rachel

Steve and some others uh that are currently you you know heard from Mark as well that are currently using us Steve I'm not going to replay your embedded video here it was great to have you live you already gave these tactics and these this sort of summary but guys to Steve's point he used our RPA product which is our factoring product seven times totaling 3 million bucks right which he gave me permission to share in this in this recording this testimonial we did he grew it from Steve you said 1 million to 6 million ARR right over the course of the time that you were using SAS debt and then you allowed you to

grow your valuation from 3 million to 36 million and Steve how much of those Equity gains did you get to keep I mean all of them so I we did a small round early on like a friends and family round but uh but you know the the the we we haven't had to sell any anything and and we're at 7 million now in in ARR so incredible we did the we did another deal with you guys uh when was that like February so we kind of

plused up yeah and we did like Rachel we uh I don't have your permission to share our deal so I'm not going to share it but Mark and everybody else that we work with you know we're we're now basically working with folks like Steve you know Steve only Drew 2.8 million but his Term Loan is for 4.2 so he knows he could pull another million and a half 2 million in the future if he wants at at terms he already knows what the terms are so it's sort of like a Ben you probably know better than I there's a formal name for this in the finance world it's like maybe a delay draw Term Loan or something like that but it's basically what svb used to love to

do all right so Steve we appreciate we appreciate that man it's good working with you guys what I want to say uh we've got a bunch of our team on right now if you guys are considering debt right now this doesn't mean you're going to take it maybe you're just curious right but if you're doing you have to be doing at least a million of Revenue right but if you're doing at least a million of Revenue and you want to be like Steve and Rachel and Mark who you just learned from go ahead on the screen go ahead on the screen and just hit the little yes uh hit the little yes button and what that will do is our team will

reach out to you after this and answer any questions you have and we'll get you an Excel file template of how our term loans work so you can type in well what if I did a three-year payback at X perent rate and I took a million or what if I took 3 million on a four-year term with a 12-month IOP period you can sort of play around with the Excel model with yourself and with your CFO and uh and then come back to us if you have questions I give you guys 10 more seconds to answer that if you want that Excel file just type yes and then let us know about how much Capital you might be

looking for right just put that in the little text field afterwards so three two and actually had a curiosity if you guys have this isn't just about founder path a lot of companies use debt or non-dilutive Capital how many of you guys have used non-dilutive Capital just put in the chat type debt who's used some form of debt let's not include convertible notes because those are meant to convert to equity but if you've truly used debt right guys look at the chat it's sort of like when you read the Forbes top 100,000 list right all wealthy people know how to use debt you get in trouble if you don't know how to

use debt right if you don't know how to use debt and you take it you don't know manage it it can be bad but most software companies with Founders that are scaling they do use debt it's just we don't talk about it a lot because it's not sexy so you don't read it on Tech crunch all right let's end the poll here let's end the poll and we're going to jump into section two tactic one here it is Zen business Revenue growth there it is he wants to beat Legal Zoom right Legal Zoom is a big company big company right so how was he doing it

well take a look at the screenshot this is a this is the backside of his ah refs account now if that text is clear enough can you guys type in the chat do you see any words that are repeated in those URLs what words do you see repeated in that URL in those URLs yep LLC you see LLC Mark saids said business yep you see names LLC Aaron Carr yep names Max Aaron good to see you by the way man love seeing familiar

faces in the chat he good to see you brother all right business yeah catchy is it Janine Janine Jonas yep catch's a good one guys what he's done here is what's called programmatic SEO you see the first row here you see the first row the word there that one's got 1,64 backlinks just LLC what's what uh what Ross realized is if that one landing page is doing so well the next phase of his SEO strategy should be taking the word LLC and multiplying it times some

other variable that would generate 50,000 landing pages so what's the other variable he's multiplying by LLC to create 50,000 landing pages geography right so it's LLC Florida LLC California LLC Texas LLC Austin Texas right boom that's program that is the Genesis of programmatic SEO so so don't get lost in Long articles and you're like what the hell is programmatic SEO all it is is using your creativity to

multiply two words together and generate 50,000 landing pages that's it right uh yeah W these are these are the URLs of the landing pages right which are all SEO optimized now look I am no expert on SEO I just know a couple things I've done that really worked anyone on here just crushing with SEO raise your hand anybody is anybody crushing with SEO no one no hands I'm looking behind me Edgar what are you doing Edgar raise his hand Edgar unmute yourself what are you doing on

SEO uh well uh we do a ton of content marketing so um we have quite a few copywriters writing a a lot of Niche content related to what we are doing so we are in email marketing space so we create all kinds of you know articles and the what's your website net you can go to the blog what's it

called you can go to the blog s.net and click on the blog Edgar you're saying it too fast type it in the chat I'll click on it type it in the chat yeah okay hold guys while Edgar's doing an SEO though Erin maybe eron I'll pop to you here in a second in terms of SEO um SEO is how we sold two million bucks worth of git Latka right so like the podcast did well a lot of you guys said Nathan how do I know what episode to start with so we took all the audio data and built a massive database at get Latka 30,000

software companies right and if you go into any of these let's click on unium for example with 6 million of Revenue you'll see my interview and all the data including the revenue graph these are all verbal points that they shared audio-wise in the interview right in the public podcast interview so we used voice data to build a database and then I said how do we get traffic to this thing well what you see here in our search console by go to get Latka see if you guys can see see if you guys can see let me just do last 16

months so you can see more of a pattern I want to see if you guys can see the trend uh in our in our keyword or if it takes forever to load I'll just tell you what it is right but you can see here 1.17 million clicks guys this is free clicks from Google this isn't paid Google this free clicks from Google so if I was going to pay five bucks per click or 10 bucks per click I just saved five million bucks or 11 million bucks respectively what's our keyword it's very simple you'll notice it it's it's always the company name plus the word Revenue if you search almost any

software company plus the word Revenue in Google get lack will almost always be the number one result right that's our programmatic SEO right and you're going well Nathan you know did that actually generate revenue for you well let me show you let me log into if I can figure out how to do this on the fly my founder path account right for git Latka so G Latka is now obviously a side project I'm mainly focused on Founder path but this is reading directly from our stripe data so you can see when I was only doing G laa we scaled it from basically

nothing to about $60,000 per month in Revenue this was back in February 2022 obviously we had churn and growth slots now we're sort of flatlined at 30 grand a month in Revenue but this is still powerful right we spent almost no time on this 30 grand a month in Revenue all programmatic SEO so try to eat and teach sort of what I preach here now if you're curious about you know other metrics annual cring revenue quick ratio LTV to CAC Runway you know churn we look at a lot of founder path when we're underwriting companies like Badger Maps

like Rachel like Mark uh all that data is in here as well we've sort of built this for free so if you guys are looking for for free tool to track this kind of stuff encourage you to check it out additionally this deck and recording if you guys look in my founder path account you see this button right here where my mouse is if you click this uh this is where you can get the recording you just type the word Nathan and you'll see all our webinar recordings right here along with the slide decks the key templates with every webinar there's hundreds of free courses

for SAS Founders here so uh all you want to do if you want that deck recording just create a Founder path account real quick I'll drop the link in the chat so you guys have it just so you can bookmark it or even do it now it's very quick let me let me send it to everybody there it is right there it is right so if you want this full slide deck just create a quick course now that way you can take the slide deck throw it over to your marketing team and say hey check this out or or maybe you already have a Founder paath account who's already I

just launched a poll who's already got a Founder paath account Mark Rachel Steve we're still trying to figure out how to improve our reporting product for Founders that have already taken money from us Steve I know you you just signed a big contract with another company we're going to keep trying to learn from you and build a much more robust reporting product for free uh and hope that over time more and more folks use it but it's a tough space right yeah I mean well the my my story was I was using uh a free one um you can say the Nam it's okay yeah you can say I

was using profit well and and uh they there's something wrong with their their the way they're integrating with stripe and so it was every month our our numbers were more and more off and we kind of knew directionally but the the great news is about 4 days ago I figured out that it's been a good year but I figured out that it was like twice as good as I I thought like I thought I'd grew grown like 350 a year in ARR but it was actually like 700 so this is a good problem yeah it was a good problem but but I mean I knew it was Dire I knew

directionally I was I was light but I didn't know how light it was but we we we we bought chart Mogul but you know that's expensive we got it I forget exactly what we're paying them but it's it's material and five figures right I mean I imagine most of it most of those contracts are five figures yeah absolutely and so it's better if you can build it for free way better but and and we actually I do use your stuff for a lot of you've got some metrics in there that that uh are other people don't really do and are useful um I'm still

wrapping my head around uh chart Mogul like the the people the team that put it together they they haven't trained me yet so but that's but the it is uh it this does right now my my take is this is something you got to pay for if you want it to be done right but I'm my fingers are crossed that I mean and I I I don't know what's going on with with profit well exactly but they got bought by paddle and maybe you know maybe they are not uh maybe paddle would like you to pay because they have a paid product

that does something along these lines so I I maybe they're not put as much love under the we'll keep learning I mean we love everybody else in the space too but we also have you know our main business isn't selling charts right it's it's helping Founders get non-dilutive Capital with our funds so appreciate all that guys I'll click end pull really quick uh and then move into the next section here of content which is clickup click up how many of you guys raise your hand use clickup anybody anyone use the Gant charts anybody Jay rotham yeah Edgar we've saw them on buses and in every airport a couple years ago during Co their branding and marketing was everywhere here's zeb's Revenue growth

and I want you guys to look at this landing page really carefully do you see the gray oval at the top above the big bold headline if you can't read it what it says is click up clips and it says replaces can you guys see what it says it replaces what happened to that company replaces about 4 months ago anybody what happened to loom about four months ago exactly chip nailed it got acquired for about 945 million bucks well what

did lassan do right when they acquired it obviously you just paid a bunch of money for a company you want to look good you want to make money from it so what do you do you increase the price right because you want to make money well what happens if you love loom the price just increased and you don't want to pay it what do you start searching for zom replacement clickup launches this landing page right if you what's hysterical I love Zeb to death if you go look at click Up's landing page like their AHF backend site structure site

index they launch a landing page like this almost systematically for the past 5 years three months after every major acquisition right that's how predictable it is for them right so every acquisition in the productivity tool space they launch landing page like this replaces boom right about 3 months afterwards because they know that search volume is there that's been one of his top growth tactics lastly here in section to retention. comom love him or hate him we've seen ad him a bunch obviously on LinkedIn he pivoted hard to B2B SAS in 2023 you can see his Revenue

growth here it s actually flatlined a little bit he's trying to turn it around but you can't deny his ability to get attention on LinkedIn so let's look at his January p&l here it is for about 5 Seconds 3 2 one right if you had me minimize you probably missed it but what you saw here is this little link right that he put at the bottom of his LinkedIn post I just want you to see here how unsexy this is a lot of us go well we can't just link to a Google form we have to have a special landing page

and has to go through design and Engineering has to integrate with HubSpot and eight months later you still haven't launched the freaking landing page right it's just a Google form that he's linking to in LinkedIn and it got about 1,600 people on our b2bs weit list and that's what he launched with right and now it's doing meaningful Revenue right Martin it sounds like that form got you to sign up is that right unmute yourself did you use this link I did indeed interesting so quick yeah how long did it take it to fill

out like two minutes yeah quick right and then what what did he do afterwards how do he Market it to you and then I just got a link and with a simple signup process all the steps installed the script got it running boom done y within like y y Qui this drove this drove 300 demos now guys one of the things I'll tell you here you might go well I'm not Adam Robinson I don't have a massive LinkedIn following one of the keys to building a big LinkedIn following is to follow the same story arc I told you earlier about in the webinar right good

bad good bad hero villain Crescendo climax resolution you're following the same thing when you're writing copy in your LinkedIn post right you want to write that same kind of structure so this is section two summary we talked about programmatic SEO free tools for SEO uh right for click like click up and then don't over complicate LinkedIn now we've got 6 minutes left in the webinar so I'm going to just go through these tactics very quickly you can get the slide deck afterwards by siging up to founder path for free whippy ai's Revenue growth looks like this four

million bootstrapped he uses cold emails but not like us raise your if you've sent at least one cold email the past seven days be honest come on Brent young come on who's done it yeah we've all done it we're not proud of these emails just generally speaking we're not proud of these emails right but we have to do them right we're going ah this I got to do this it doesn't feel great I would encourage you to think like Dave thinks he was the ex World Series of Poker champion in 2018 when he was 26 years old won three million bucks he likes

thinking about risk now he's building that into a SAS company and he drisk his company whippy AI because he knew he was competing with a group called zip whip zip whip requires that its customers embed JavaScript that means he can use a tool called built with which built with scrapes the whole internet and says hey Dave here are all the websites that embedded your JavaScript of your competitor go win them over right that generated 470 leads before he put it in Apollo and sent a cold email blast we all hate this term but before he sent a cold email

blast he created it down to not 470 but just 50 he said show me florists that that use zip whip that need text message Marketing in New York and Texas and he wrote these emails one-on-one to start and only after his fingers got so tired from copying and pting did he say let me automate this with a blast right to 50 the one takeway I would tell for you guys and passes on to your marketing team when you're thinking about doing cold email marketing or cold email

Outreach it should be done one to one first right and test different formats different stories different structures and then automate right A lot of people skip that step and that's why I have so much spam today right so that's why zip whip one of the ways zip whip is losing traction to whippy next let's look at viip pay let's look at viip pay you bet Gina glad you enjoyed that guys VI pay is a tool right that helps you check out small businesses do check out like restaurants and then they sell software on the back side of it here's

his Revenue growth now this slide I'm just going to ask you to read it yourself left side is fixed expenses right side is variable many of you would argue that you could never do what's on the right side here and I would challenge you I would challenge you I think a lot of you would say Nathan I need the fixed head count expense for AES I need the left side it's not going to work right well look Austin and others are using the right side totally variable 100% commission no onboarding you don't have to buy my computer they don't need a wework license right it's

100% commission and it's driving a lot of busy uh busy uh pays growth it looks like Jim's doing a lot of this James you're testing this as well that's good to hear the last tactic of section three here a lot of us think call centers don't work guys how many of you guys just yes or no in the chat have some form of a call center could be one person anybody Jay where's your call center located what country unmute yourself Stephen said yes Jason yes we're actually on boarding three right now Mexico Nicaragua and Columbia

what what do you pay a call center rep per month uh 2400 bucks 24 okay so not cheap actually that's that's that's that's getting up there okay that's but that's all in for the call center we're not hiring individual reps we're hiring 50 at a time ah I see I see I see okay that makes sense Stevens and ukaine Philippines Guys review W is bootstrap to this much revenue he said let me test a call center in San Diego no foreign country San Diego you want to talk about expensive expensive that that's what he did two people what Matt did that most of us don't do is he put a

stake in the ground for his numbers he knew he had to get his call center folks making this these kinds of numbers right now that you might go I can see Tina she's going Nathan you're full of Tina this is the $18,000 sale right so this isn't like a low arpo like oh you know this is $18,000 sale from these call folks in San Diego here's his call center in San Diego today all right cold calling still works and the economics do work if you know what the funnel is supposed to look like and you write smart scripts that don't sound or feel

like spam right but it works great for emy's bootstrap to over 18 million bucks of ARR today James is giving me a big old heck yes in the chat guys here's section three summary as we wrap up here with about two minutes left and I respect your time so we will be on time right outbound can still work door to-door can also work and call centers do work if you know your economics now look guys here's the model we started with Tina said start in the upper left work your way around we only covered nine of these today we only covered nine of them there's

33 here's my ask to you it is the pleasure of my life that you guys give me an hour and a half of your time once a month I love it yeah hope you can feel my energy I think there's probably what 150 Founders live today we're going to cover nine new ones of these next time so a lot of you guys might have seen this content if you saw me tour Europe some of you guys hadn't seen it yet so that's why I want to give it but next month it's all new brand new content nine new of these circles and what I want to do is respect your guys'

thoughts so control me here you pick one bubble and put it in the chat what's I basically have playbooks 15 page playbooks for each of these bubbles which bubble you can only pick one what bubble do you want me to go deep on next month put it in the chat okay virality newsletters Google ads Joel said retargeting ABM Affiliates newsletter founder brand that's my favorite by the way right is the found under brand because it leads to so much soft power

right so much soft power okay I'm seeing a lot of ideas here's what I'm going to do I'm going to prioritize those of you that register right now in terms of building the deck around your ideas so there's the link to zoom for next month's webinar right I want you guys to go ahead and register now and tonight what I'm going to do is I'm going to download this full chat history from Zoom I'm going to download all the registrations for next month's webinar and I'll prioritize those of you that typed in the chat what you want me to cover and that registered on Zoom go ahead and do that right now give you a second to do that type done in the chat

once you registered for next month's webinar again there it is in the chat done done done okay a lot of DS coming in there chip said done this is great as you guys are doing that again we're going to create amazing content next month as well it will be July 2nd at 12:00 p.m. CST again I respect your time so we are going to end right on time hopefully guys I delivered over the past 59 minutes we talked about nine tactics of how to add Revenue to your software company quickly we talked about influence content outbound you got

webinar ideas you got call center ideas you got it all hopefully you enjoyed it if you want Capital we'll reach out shortly I'm loving obviously managing the founder path fund with our team 150 million bucks supporting folks like Rachel Steve Mark and some of other you guys I see on today being a little quiet but that is okay thank you for letting me do what I love every day I will see you guys next month if you enjoyed this webinar you can go ahead and put one to 10 in the chat 10 being you loved it you learn something guys thanks for let me pick on you thanks for hanging out thanks for turning your video on I'm Nathan lacket founder path I'll see you guys next month

take care see you Tina see you guys see you Aaron bye see you John bye Brett bye Jeremy