Aaron Krall: How To Add Revenue Fast To Your SaaS Company #196

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how to add revenue fast to your SaaS company. Today we have our guest Aaron Kral joining us. Aaron is a SaaS onboarding and lead conversion specialist and the founder of SaaS Accelerator, a coaching program that helps SaaS founders implement systems and processes to scale revenue faster and more predictably. He helps SaaS companies with an ARPU of at least $100 or more achieve scalable predictive growth and are looking for proven systems and frameworks they can implement to increase revenue and build a scalable SaaS. So Aaron also runs a SaaS Growth Hacks community on Facebook, which currently has over 30,000 members and founders, which is massive. Welcome, Aaron. Super excited to have you on the show, man.

Excited to be here. Thanks, man. Thanks for the intro. Wow, makes me sound a lot more important than I am.

Uh, you're, you're important to me, so that's what matters, and I'm sure the rest of the people appreciate it.

So sweet. You're already off to a great start, Akil. I'm already digging this.

So we start all the podcasts. So, you know, let's, let's, uh, talk about growth, revenue. Um, you know, SaaS companies are looking to grow these days. You know, a lot of instability in the market. They're trying to figure out how creative ways to maybe work with less than what they have. So one way they can do that is maybe addressing their churn, right? But there's other things as well. So aside from churn, we can talk about that in a bit. What are some maybe big issues you see for SaaS companies these days? What are some big reasons why some of the revenues are decreasing and what can they do about it?

You know, that is such a— I've been asked that question so many times in my— ever since I was a baby. People have been asking me that question. I'm just kidding. I've only done this for like 6 years, but it feels like a lifetime. And it's a hard question to answer because it really depends on what kind of company, SaaS company you have. It's kind of like SaaS is kind of like the equivalent of brick and mortar, right? So how do you grow a brick and mortar store, brick and mortar business? Well, what are you like? Are you doing physical therapy or are you selling You know, knickknacks, you know, like, you know, there's so many different answers to that question. So the first thing that, the first thing that I do when— so it's a hard question to answer, and I know that's not the question, the answer that you were looking for.

Mm-hmm.

But the first thing is when, when I look at what's the biggest growth opportunity, I look at the universal rules, like no matter what kind of SaaS you are, No matter where you're at, what you're selling, there's some universal rules that I kind of like, I advise people to look at. And the first one is, do you have case studies? Number one, of specific results that you've been able to deliver? Because that is going to make your job so much easier to sell and to grow when you can show that you've delivered a result. The second thing is you have to figure out what is the result that you deliver. And it's not always an increase, you know, it's not always an increase in revenue or a decrease in costs or more clients. A lot of businesses think, SaaS companies, that that's really all people care about is more revenue. And what I found is there's a lot of SaaS companies out there who who don't want more revenue because it equals more stress and they're not ready to scale. Like some, you know, if I were to promise you 1,000 new leads tomorrow, some companies wouldn't be ready for those, especially if you're like, if your customer value is $100,000 a year, right? I can't take 100 clients on right now.

Yeah.

So like, that's not what they want. So the first thing is, what is the result that you really deliver for a client. And if it's increasing revenue, great. If it's save 4 hours a week, great. If it's whatever it is, figure out somebody that you currently work with or get a case study and say, hey, we've helped this company accomplish this meaningful result.

Okay.

That's the first thing. You gotta have something like that. If you don't, it's gonna be really hard because you're just gonna be selling a commodity. You're gonna be selling based on how many more products, how many more features you have compared to the next guy. The other thing that I looked at and I would ask is, and if you're a founder listening to this, I would ask yourself, what has worked in the past really well to generate leads and growth? What is already working? As entrepreneurs, we get really bored quickly with things and we try something, it works, and we think, great, that worked. Let's move on to the next thing. I don't know what it is. about our mindset, but it's like we always have to be trying something new. Growth is boring. And if you're trying to make it exciting, you might be making it harder for yourself. Just look at what's worked already and say, let's do more of that. Let's really dial that in. Let's get really good at that. I mean, I know SaaS companies that have gotten to millions in revenue by just running webinars. They just run ads to webinars. That's all they do. That's how ConvertKit got started. And LeadPages is another one too. If you like running webinars and you're good at it and it works, do more of those, man.

Right.

If you got a really good SEO team and you know how to drive traffic, then the question should be, how do we drive more relevant traffic and qualified traffic to the site? Because we already have that in place. Figure out what is the result you deliver, because no one's really buying your SaaS, right? People don't buy a product, they're buying a result. And second is figure out what's working and continue to do that. And then once you've dialed that in, there's a point at which the strategies that you've used to get to where you're at just won't work anymore, but not until you're I had $1 million, $2 million. That's where things start to like economies of scale start to don't work anymore. Facebook ads maybe don't work as well as they did, or referrals just don't work as well as they did. You got to come up with a new plan. But until you get there, that's what I would suggest as universal rules as to grow revenue. So if revenue is decreasing right now or not growing, It's usually because you don't know what the specific result is that you provide and who you provide it for. So if you're doing like a— again, an example for this would be I worked with, I don't know what it is, but so many different calendar scheduling apps and they all have just like tiny little differences in features.

Absolutely.

Just like, just one little tweak, one little tweak. Some of them have customers and they don't even know why their customers have picked their product. They don't know. And so the last thing I would do is just get your customers on the phone and ask them a few questions. One, why did you pick me? Like, there's a million different tools out there. Why did you pick me? And their answer might be, I don't know. In fact, I want to cancel. Right. And I think that's the biggest fear founders have is like, I don't want to talk to my customers because I don't want them to cancel. They paid me for 3 years, and if I talk to them, they might cancel. But trust me, the benefits far outweigh the downsides. Talk to the customers, ask them why did they buy, what triggered the purchase, why did they decide to start looking for a solution like yours, and what is the specific result that you've achieved or gotten from there? And then You'll start to see different personas in your customer base. You might have like 100 different customers. You might have like a plumber and then you have like NASA, right? And they're both using your tool and you're like, well, I don't know what target to pick because everyone's my customer. And that's a big mistake to make. So you probably will find out that the pain you're solving for NASA is a much greater pain than you're solving for the plumber, maybe, right? And that's why I would focus more on NASA and I would really dig into NASA. Why did you pick my tool? What do you like about this feature? And just start asking and being inquisitive and not feel like we have the answers. A lot of the answers will come out from our conversations with customers, and that will guide what the next step is.

Just one add-on question on the point of where you said focus on one channel that's working really well, double down on it, stay with it regardless if it gets boring, as long as you're getting results. At what point do you make that decision and say, okay, let's move on to the next channel and focus there?

There's a few points. There's a point at which you'll probably— it's continuing to work, but you're bored out of your mind and you hate your life because you're doing the same thing over and over and over again, in which case you figure out how to automate it or hire someone to take that over for you. That doesn't mean you stop doing it when you get bored or frustrated. Or you just don't like getting on webinars anymore. I've met with a lot of founders who are like, I'm just tired of doing webinars. I just do them and I make $10,000 in MRR every webinar, but I just hate doing it. So the question really is not what next thing can I try? It's how do I remove myself from this process so that I can have somebody else do it and scale it? Because that's really what's going to make your company sellable. If you wanna sell your company, they're not gonna buy it or they're gonna buy it at a much lower multiple if you are the one responsible for running those webinars. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is at some point you're just gonna know that your payback period is too high, right? Like if you have a 2, 3-month payback period, CAC payback period, you know that you have 2 to 3 months of your customer's value to spend getting a new customer. Once it goes over that, you either have to increase your customer value or stop doing that marketing channel and start figuring out something else, right? You just, at some point, you're not going to see an ROI, but you have to determine what that number is in advance. So for some companies, they know that their customer value is $10K because they stay with them for 6 years.

Right.

So they know they can, it's acceptable for them to spend up to a year of the customer value in order to get a customer worth 6 years, but that's a year payback period. And unless you have a massive amount of funding, that may not make sense for you. So think about how much do you want to spend to get a customer? Once that goes over that, then you start looking at different mediums and different ways to grow. But that's like That's where I would ignore your feelings for a second. Forget how frustrated you are. Is this working? If it's working, figure out a way to keep doing it by either scaling it, having somebody else do it, or automating it in some way. Don't stop doing it because it doesn't feel good. That's a big mistake I see.

I hate for you to do that. Don't listen to your feelings. Yeah. So you talked about that one scenario where you said, okay, if I come tomorrow and I give you $10,000, leads or new clients and you're just not ready, or some people are mentally not just prepared, or they just don't want to scale their kind of whole onboarding and their business. We had a good example of that, you know, Peldi from Balsamiq. I don't know if you know him. He was on our podcast a few years ago. You know, he's a guy who's just happy with, you know, 1%, 2% year-over-year growth, doesn't track anything, doesn't have Google Analytics set up, and doesn't want to. And he's like, I'm okay not knowing it. I just want to focus on product and we just want to give good service. And that's all he focuses on. He's like, we don't need to know anything about marketing as long as we're cash— I can look at my bank account, we're profitable, and everybody's happy. Like, that's his metric, um, which is, which is a different breed, and I really admire that.

Absolutely different. Like, I would not suggest that, but if it's working for him, that's great.

Exactly. Different breed for sure. Uh, but for most founders you probably work with, you know, they're probably, I want to scale, I'm ready to do this. But you come in, you say, hold on, what's the kind of checklist or requirements that you go through to say, okay, yes, this company's are ready to scale kind of their onboarding process?

Yeah. So I use Dan Martell's model and I teach it with permission from Dan. And he uses the model ACES, which is attract, convert, expand, and scale. So the first thing that we do is look, we want to audit the entire business to find out first, are you attracting the right people? Okay. Because I've met with so many founders who have millions of visits a month to their site and they're not converting. And so it appears like it's the conversion that's not working, right? From, from like, you know, if you don't know, if you're new to SaaS and you're new to marketing, you're a tech founder, you think, well, it's obviously my product is great because I've invested all my time and energy and heart into it. So it's not the product. It's gotta be the conversion process because I'm not a copywriter or whatever. So they focus on conversions when in actuality it's the quality and type of leads coming through. So first is attract. Are you attracting the right people? Are you putting out the right messaging? Are you positioned as the leader in your marketplace or at least positioned in a way that's different from everyone else? Because if you're just like everyone else, again, you're like a commodity. So attract first is first. Second is, is convergence. What is your conversion mechanism in place? If you have a demo process or totally hands-off free trial, looking at that and making sure that you have like— and there's lots of things that we look at in the conversion process, but what happens when someone signs up? Do they get value from the product? Are they converting? And Dan uses this concept called the Precision Scorecard, which is like just 3 numbers you're looking at. It's like, Traffic, depending on what your business is, it could be a number of 3 different metrics, but are you getting traffic? Are you converting it? And is it sticking around?

Hmm.

Right? And if you have those things figured out, if you're attracting the right people, you're converting leads in a way that's profitable for you and you're growing and you're keeping them, that's like 90% of the issues. Now it's just a matter of Bringing more leads into the funnel, right? So it's just attract, attract, attract, attract, attract until you get to the point where you get so many that the next problem becomes, you know, how do we scale to the next level, which is usually building the team, right? But up until that point, it's how do we— it's attracting the right people, converting them, and then keeping them around. If you have those 3, and there's within each one of those, there's lots of checklists and stuff to look at, but— That would be like a really, really simplistic way of looking at it.

Is there any other, you know, any downsides you see of kind of going down to deciding, okay, I'm ready to scale this before being ready? So, I mean, what do you see is like, okay, you don't have one of these, your traffic is too low or your conversions are right, but it's still driving more traffic and you're like, yeah, I've seen a lot of—

I've seen all different types of things. But one of the biggest mistakes I've seen is founders Think we need more revenue and the way to get more revenue is more customers. So we have to attract more people. And, and so it's just attract, attract, attract. And what happens is they bounce from Facebook to LinkedIn to cold email to this to that, and nothing's working, but they're still getting clients.

Mm-hmm.

Because either people are finding them or They have a few articles that are driving traffic, but they don't know where the clients are coming from. So they're just trying different things and it's not working because those mediums don't work. It's because they usually don't understand who their ideal customer is. Right. So if I know that I want to fish for salmon, right, and I'm not a fisherman in any sense of the word, but you know, you're not going to go to like the, your local marsh.

Right, right, right.

Like salmon are freshwater fish. You have to go to where freshwater is. Okay, that's the first thing. All right, well, the next thing is, all right, where's there a ton of freshwater? Like, my brother-in-law goes to Alaska. They're literally jumping out of the water and you can catch them, right? If you need to be a good fisherman, My sister is not like the most, like, you know, coordinated person in the world. All she does is hold out a net and the fish jump into the net.

Right.

They just jump into the net.

Zero effort. Yeah.

Right. So if you're saying, I'm not a good fisherman, I don't know how to catch fish, is that really the problem? Or are you just not the place where the fish are at and they're desperate for what you're giving them? Right. So if you fix that, if you go where the fish are at and you know who you're fishing for and you put the right bait in front of them, and the right bait could be anything. It could be a product they don't have access to yet. It could be a problem that's not being solved. You can solve for them. It could be, here's a better way out of the current solution that you're using, right? It's much easier. It's so much easier to convert. But if you're just focused on attraction, because attract is the sexiest part, conversions is hard, expansion revenue is really hard, scale is not sexy. None of those are sexy. Attract is usually like the most sexy of those, and it's usually where people start. But if you don't have that strategy first, what's going to happen is you're going to feel like nothing's working, and you're going to feel like your growth has plateaued and you have no idea why. And then you're going to start questioning, Is my product any good? Am I any good as a person? Right? You start to look at yourself and none of that is true. It's just that you're not putting the right offer in front of the right person. And usually somebody coming in who has a fresh perspective and who can come with a customer-first perspective can usually solve a lot of those problems because they're not involved in the product as much. Like a really easy way to fix that is just have someone else come in and tell you like what your customers, why they're buying, who they are. And then, you know, once you figure that out, it's so much easier.

So I like that analogy of, you know, trying to find out where the fish is. And then once you go there, you kind of gather them in an easier place. But then there's the other part of, you know, we talked about tracking and keeping them, right? So, you know, you don't want them slipping out of the net, right? Once you do all the hard work of getting them in. So from the onboarding side, there's also the part of maybe building a community around the product or service, whether that's after you catch them or before. How do you best suggest maybe building a community as a SaaS founder, you know, to keep the fish happy, I guess, in there?

That's a really good— that's a really good question. And, you know, the community— well, all right, so there's basic human needs that we have, and one of them is to feel connected. Connection. People will do incredible things just to be— they'll join gangs just to feel like they're connected to a community, right? So there's definitely a very powerful human need. I've seen a lot of SaaS companies grow who don't have like big communities.

Right.

Like big Facebook groups or like Slack groups. But if you're talking about community as in, like, I was talking to one founder and he said one of the best ways to really stand out is to have something you stand for and communicate that as your message and you'll attract the right people. And that is kind of like a community, right? When you join, I'm trying to think of a good example. Really, maybe like a really niche specific product. Maybe this is not the best example, but Superhuman, right? Who's going to pay $30 a month to check their email? There's literally a million different ways to check your email for free, right?

Yeah.

But the community, the message around Superhuman is Making email easy, right? And so when you pay for Superhuman and you get messages from Superhuman, you do feel like you're part of a special community, right, that values their time more than free stuff, right? And there's a lot of hot buttons that that presses. When I jump into Superhuman, I fly through all my emails, man. I feel like I do feel like I'm a superhero, and that is part of the community that is built by understanding who your customer is. I don't think it's necessary for every SaaS company to build out a whole community and focus on community building, especially if it's not your strong suit. I mean, it took me a long time to build up my group. I really love it and I'm really good at it, but there's other things I'm not really good at. So if I were to start a SaaS company, I would build a group. around it. I build a community around the pain that I'm trying to solve, right? And then my solution would be part of that, solve part of that pain, right? Is that what you're asking?

Yeah, I guess it makes perfect sense. Okay, so if you were to start that, I'm a SaaS founder and maybe that's my— I have an email marketing widget and I want to start bringing people in and understanding them because this is a problem I really care about. I think Lemlist did a good with this as well. Would you go and build this on Facebook? Would you do it on a Slack channel? Where would you start inviting people in and would you charge them for it? Just little details there maybe.

I have a whole program on how to start a community and because I did it with SaaS Growth Hacks and I'll tell you the steps that I went through is one, you build a community around a pain or a future desired outcome. that they want, right? So don't build a— do not build a group around your product because no one cares about your product. Eventually it'll become like a punching bag for your product. People come in and say, hey, I haven't gotten, you know, where's support? I submitted this ticket weeks ago and it's really damaging for your brand if you're bringing customers in and prospects. So keep that separate. Build a group that will attract ideal customer, right?

Mm-hmm.

And it can be, you know, HR representatives unite, right? Or HR representative hacks, you know, if you want to attract HR representatives. And once you build a community, you realize that your software problem, your software is solving just one problem for them. And so if you go into that realizing that you're building an audience that you're going to solve problems for, you realize that your SaaS, your product only will solve one particular problem, but they'll have other problems that they can solve that you can either bring partners in or you can upsell them and cross-sell them into things that they need. So don't build it around a product, build it around a pain, and then be specific as you can. You can buy lists of HR people, you can buy lists of pretty much anybody, your ideal customer, right? When I started SaaS Growth X, I bought a list of 40,000 SaaS company founders. It's like, I don't know, 5K or maybe it wasn't that much. And I emailed them all and I said, hey, I started a group for software founders where we discuss what's working now in the software world to build and grow your SaaS. Would you like to join? And I manually replied to everyone when they responded and I got people to join. When they joined, I made a big deal about it. I messaged them on Facebook and said, hey, welcome to the group. So glad to have you here. Would you post in the group of what your SaaS is and who you help? And so the— I don't know what number we're at, 3rd or 4th— is make them feel special when they join.

Mm-hmm.

And then you don't need to have a huge group, by the way. Like, you can have 400 people in the group depending on how much your software product is, but that's a good size to start. Promoting your product, building trust. But I would say that's it. And then within groups, people really like actionable stuff. So if you're posting stuff, don't post long videos, don't post huge articles with copywriting. Say, I increased my conversions by 6% using partners. Here are the 6 steps that I used to do it.

Right.

Because when you're on the type of people that you're attracting, Usually are probably people with more— ideally they're people with more money than time. Yeah, right.

Exactly.

So they're not going to read a 700-page ebook on how to do partnerships. They just want to know what are the basics and then get a high-level idea. And then if they want to pursue it, they'll find somebody to do it for them. So just give them the high level. And then if you do that, you have a really good, really good community.

Nice. That's actually a good idea. I never thought of, you know, sending an email because people think, how do I build it? You know, they think you have to create content, publish everywhere, and slowly attract, but also doing the outbound way. Curious, from that list you, you know, you purchased, you know, 20,000 or so, you know, how many of those, you know, do you say ended up joining your group at the initial stages?

I would say a few thousand.

Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, they were my seed. That was my seed group. Yeah. And then after that, That was it. That was it, dude. I didn't promote it anymore after that. I mean, I had people start coming to me and say, hey, I posted your group in my article for promoting SaaS growth groups. What are the best SaaS growth groups? And I started showing up in searches because of my keywords, SaaS growth, and it just grew organically from there. I don't think I ran any paid ads. the group. But that's what happens when you pick a really specific niche and you know the problem that you solve and the group is valuable. You put value in the group, the group will just continue to grow. People will just—

Wow. I'm going to have to— for some reason I thought I was in that group, but I'm going to join today for sure. Aaron, what— okay, I guess kind of final question here because I think we're talking about growth. We want people to kind of plan for 2023. Kind of coming into the end of the year here. I know this is kind of a broad question, but people are formulating their marketing budget. You know, they said, this is working, we want to try some new things out here. There's all these cool things that we've heard that people saying this is working this year, and all these things are dead. So that's what generally happens, right? In their minds, they're thinking of the new shiny things that they're ready to tackle. What do you suggest? What's the revenue streams you'd focus on, SaaS founder marketers looking to budget for next year?

All right, another great question. It's kind of like asking, I have back pain. What medicine should I take? Right. Well, are you allergic to any medicines? Like, how old are you? What medicines are you currently taking?

Right.

So I don't want to prescribe anything. It's really dangerous for me to prescribe things when I don't know your situation. But I will say the majority of SaaS companies can benefit from what I call an expansion partner program.

Mm-hmm.

Which is making a list of the companies that could integrate your tool into their product. So they don't need to spend the next year developing that feature. And they pay you a monthly fee. It's like a licensing fee to be able to access your feature into their product. You run the backend. You do continue doing all the coding backend and support and all that kind of stuff. And their tool next month they can say, hey, we just released a new keyword monitoring feature to our tool, right? Like in a month they can say that because they just integrate your tool and they just pay you monthly. You can say you have a scalable, like a variable pricing, say every 1,000 users, it's X amount of dollars. When it goes up, you pay this much and it's usually way less expensive than it would be to hire a developer to go through it and develop it all themselves. That's like a really easy way to increase revenue. And then the other one would be just regular partnerships. There's so many people out there that are teaching courses, teaching things, coaches. And if you have a really good keyword monitoring tool, right? And there's somebody who's taught a class on SEO marketing, you can just go to them and say, hey, we'd like to give every one of your course members a free 60-day trial to our platform, which is going to help them have more success with your program. And then we're going to give you a commission if they convert, right? So Brilliant. I call that leveraging existing audiences instead of having to go out and create your own streams. Where are your customers flowing already? And then put your product or service in there in that flow. somewhere. And there's just so many flows out there that currently exist that I would start there way before going out doing paid ads, because that's pretty risky unless you have a good process in place. It's low risk, it doesn't cost you anything unless you get a customer, but it is, you have to really focus on relationships.

Makes sense. So would you, for that specifically, would you hire a full-time affiliate manager? Is that something you'd budget for? Or what would you, you know, how would you—

You know, it depends. If you already have a really good affiliate or a good partnership, somebody that's a good partner and you know it works, spending some time to go get more is probably a really good idea. If you don't have any and you're testing this, I would do it yourself first, get a really good partner and validate whether or not it's a good avenue for you to take, and then hire a partnership person whose only job is to go out and build relationships with these individuals, find new flows, and get your product integrated into that flow at some point. And if you do that, I think that's a— having somebody do that full time would be a huge— there's a massive ROI there.

Makes sense. Yeah. Plug it into their funnel, right? Maybe it's their email campaign or somewhere in their upsell. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man. This has been great, Aaron. Ready to— so we're done this part of the episode. We're gonna get to the fun part, which is rapid fire time. This is rapid fire. You ready?

Oh, man. All right. I'm ready.

You ready? Ready? All right. Let's do this. All right, Aaron. What's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into flow state?

It changes. It's constantly changing. I think right now I really love this app on my iPad called Lake, and it's like a coloring app, and it's just very relaxing. It gives me a chance to just focus and let go of stuff, and it's like really easy. It's like a kid's—

L-A-K-E? Lake?

L-A-K-E. Yeah, there's a setting where you can't draw outside the lines. You just color it in. You don't really, you don't really like need to focus too much. Um, that's been really cool for me right now.

That's cool. That's cool. I mean, I know they have the app. I actually have one of those books, physical ones that like help you with that.

Yeah, I have one of those too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That actually helps surprisingly. Yeah, cool.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, Aaron, I'm not sure how old you are, but you know, what's one piece of advice if you could go back in time and you would tell your maybe 20-year-old self?

How old do you think I am?

35.

You got really close. 38.

38. Okay, cool.

Yeah. Yeah.

So 20, 25. Yeah, maybe 25.

You know, I would say, I would say, dude, stop worrying about stuff so much. Stop worrying. That's the first thing that I would say. And then the second thing I would say is stop specifically stop worrying about money. Stop worrying about money and focus on how you can provide as much value and help as many people as possible. And what are you really, really good at that will have a really huge impact on people? I was so focused on money and revenue and income, and I was focused on all the wrong things. And so I would say those— and then I would worry too much, and things just worked out for me. So I worried way too much when I was growing up and I focused on the wrong things.

Do you think the money just sorts itself out in the end? Because, I mean, okay, you know, you want to grow a team, you want to scale. So just kind of add on here. I understand what you're saying, but then you're like, oh, I've got to hire all these employees. I want to help more people. And then there's like, you know, you know, maybe my charging for my service and time, you still have to start worrying about the money part, you know, and then that kind of equation gets— then you get back into that track of like, okay, I got to charge more. Make more money and then bring on more people to help more. Or do you look at it that way?

Yeah, I would push back on that. I would say there's a lot of people that are really successful and happy who just don't have a team and they're making a huge impact. They have a really small team. They're not going to be Elon Musk, but they're bringing in Consistent revenue. They're helping people, and then they're using that money to go do other things that have a much— things that they really enjoy and having an impact on the world. I don't want to have a company where I have 60 employees. I wish I could just have just me and a VA and just push out great content and have a funnel that just pushes people through. That's what's so great about SaaS is once you have the delivery mechanism in place, you can really step back and like, not have a team of 100 people if you don't want to, you know? So, um, so yeah, like, I mean, there is going to be worry, um, especially if you want to grow a company like that. But if you're focused on the customer and you're focused on, on how, on how you can really help them, I think a lot of that will sort itself out.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, cool. Aaron, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue Continue to grow into yourself. Meaning, is there anything that keeps you up at night these days other than money?

Yeah, I found out a few years ago I have ADHD, and I've always really struggled in my life, like completing things, getting distracted, procrastination, having really hot, huge bouts of energy and then really low amounts of energy. And that's been a constant struggle. There are times when I wake up and I'm like, I have 2 hours of extreme focus and the rest of the day I'm like totally unfocused. And it's like there's things I need to do and I don't know how to do them. Like, I don't have the energy, like, or like focus or motivation. And that's been a really huge challenge. So, so in order to fix that, I really I've been focusing a lot more on exercise and my health and my diet. I've had to cut out all these things I really love eating, and it's been a sacrifice a lot. I know that's probably like a sacrifice with a small— with a really small S, but that's probably been one of the biggest things for me.

Nice. And you're feeling better now? Do you feel that change in your energy?

Yeah, dude, I do feel a lot better. It's a work in progress, but I've absolutely noticed changes.

Nice, man. Glad to hear that. It's important. I mean, people always think about growth, about your business, but yeah, it starts with inside, right? You focus on yourself, invest in yourself. I mean, everything gets better from there, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah. Who are the best maybe 3 resources? They can be— these can be books, mentors, maybe people you follow in the space who you'd say have been maybe most instrumental to your success over these last few years.

You know, one of my, one of my Best mentors. His name is Travis Sago, S-A-G-O, and he teaches what I call introverted, low-pressure selling. And he also teaches— he's a really big proponent of shortcuts to growth and success and wealth by leveraging other people's audiences.

Mm-hmm.

And he's, he's just got some really incredible stuff. And I just love listening to him. I love his groups. It's been amazing. As far as like books, you know, I've read so many, so many books and I've learned so much, so much stuff. I'm just so grateful for every author. That's taken the time to put stuff down. You know, I would, I would say, man, that's a really good question. I, you know, I really look up to Dan Martell.

Dan Martell.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. I would say Dan Martell is someone with values and integrity that's just extremely high, which is really hard to find. Yeah. And I've read— I mean, I probably can name off like 10 books right now that have had like a big impact on my life.

Okay. Any recent ones you remember that come to mind? Or if not, sorry.

You know what I've been reading now that's been really, really interesting is it's a book called How to Live by— I think it's Derek Sivers.

Derek Sivers. Yeah, he's great. I'd love to have him on the podcast. Yeah, he's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And it's how to— the book is How to Live, and each one of the chapters is a different way to live. And it's like, it's, it's, it's like convincingly like, here's what you need to do to be happy. And then the next chapter, it's like, here's what you need to do to be happy, but it's totally different. And he makes a case for all of them.

It's all conflicting, right?

It's very conflicting and it's very— yeah, it causes you to think like, whoa, What? You know, like, anyways, it's really— I'm not through it yet all the way, but it's really good. He's really— I really like his stuff.

Yeah, I heard him a few times on Tim Ferriss' podcast. I always liked him. And then I remember his first book, I think it's called Anything You Want. That's a fantastic one. I don't know if you read that one, but—

Yeah, I got all those books on my list right now.

You do? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, Derek Sivers is great. If anybody knows Derek, I'd love to have him on the podcast. Even actually Dan. I've been chatting with Dan. Actually, I chatted with Dan and Derek in the past, but we just couldn't schedule a time. But I'd love to chat with them too. So, you know, 2 great—

Well, I'll get you Dan on.

Yeah. Okay.

Appreciate that.

Yep. Cool. Last, I guess, final question before we ask, you know, for tips and any resources. What does success mean to you today, man? Whether it's personally, business, financial, life, there's no right answer.

Yeah, that is such a great question. And I've, I've thought about that so many, so many different times. And, you know, I think what success looks like for me is being able to spend my time in my zone of genius. So the things that really— I know that I'm really, really good at, that come effortlessly to me, spend my time, most of my time doing those things while at the same time using that zone of genius to make an impact on people's lives.

Hmm.

And I get so much value out of that. And I haven't really cracked the code yet on that. I'm not anywhere near where my zone of genius levels should be. Probably like maybe 30% zone of genius right now. I'd like to get to like 60% or higher. But man, if I can spend the time doing what I love doing and really enjoy it, And make an impact on people's lives, I feel like everything else will work out, number one. And then number two, everything else in my life kind of settles into place. I don't feel nervous. I'm not stressed out all the time. I have energy because I'm not wasting all my energy doing things I don't like. I'm a better dad. I think Finances work out more when you're doing things that are effortless, that bring a big value.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's what I tell people. Everybody's like, just follow your path. Like, what do you want to do that you know you're in your zone?

Yeah.

And everything just starts to align around it and just like, oh, this feels right. It feels so light and easy.

Yeah. I'll mention one thing. I grew up in a worldview that there was a right way to do everything. Very black and white. Yeah, very black and white. Good, bad, evil, right, wrong. And I spent so much of my life looking for the right path and trying to have other people tell me. There was a period in my life where I, where I said, I remember saying, I wish someone would just tell me what to do. I would just do it. I'm so tired of of not knowing what the right path is. And within the past few years, I realized that there is no right path. There's a, there's a path that's right for me.

Exactly.

At a specific time in my life. And, and I can't follow what everyone else wants to do or be or look at someone else and, and, and have them say, this is the business you need to be in, right? This is what— this is how you need to grow. This is how you need to do self-development or personal development. I've realized there isn't— it's not as black and white. And so I spent a lot of energy trying to find the right way, but it's different for everyone and there's no right or wrong. It's what's best for you at the right time. Exactly.

Yeah, just listen to it and follow it. That's awesome. Great advice. Thank you, Aaron. This is great. I think there's a lot of good wisdom here. People, I think, can take away a lot of good things here. Where can founders listening in get in touch with you? I know you mentioned you have some, maybe some free resources you can offer, maybe the website to check out.

Yeah, I got a bunch of really great stuff. You know, probably the best way to find me is go to SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook group, join the group. Answer the questions and put your email in, and we will be connected. And and you let me know like, hey Aaron, I I need this. I need help with that. I want to be connected with this. I I can help you out with whatever you need. That's probably the best way. If you're not on Facebook, just go to AaronCrowd.io and and reach out to me there. You know, I'll. Well, we'll figure out what you need and we'll get you into the right place.

Okay, awesome. I appreciate that. We'll, uh, yeah, add the Facebook group to the, the show notes for you guys to check out as well as the website. So thanks, thanks again, Aaron. Really, really appreciate it.

Absolutely, man. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, Subscribe and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.