How to Pre Sell SaaS Using No-Code | With Stan Rymkiewicz

So it's only been just over 2 months now. And I know you mentioned you're a big fan of, and so am I, building and launching presales or preselling your SaaS company. Using no-code, I'm assuming you're, it looks like you're using something like Webflow and then to validate your demand. How did that look like? What was the process for you in launching Arapa? Can you share what was like the total cost to build it? How long, what was the timeframe to build it and what were the results? So if other founders are considering doing something similar, they have an idea of what actual, what it looked like. Yeah.

So basically my framework that I don't, I don't feel that it was successful in the past, but actually worked in this project, for this project, is I always try to sell before I build it. And so basically I send out a couple of, I mean, I think I have over 100 cold emails, pitched the product, booked a lot of calls. for a span of the week and try to sell it on the first call. And after the first week or so, I had a couple of sales. Then I decided to keep going for another week or so. And after that, I gathered, I think, about 10 sales. It was a yearly subscription, $300 up to $500. And with 90-day money-back guarantee saying that, okay, if this won't work, I will refund you the money, but I really want that upfront payment from you.

Hmm.

And then I, once I had customers, I tried to tackle on how the hell I'm going to build it. So I glued Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier and built a marketplace on it. Right. It was pretty simple. I think I built it in, from the design to the sort of semi-final version, it took me about 12 hours or so. You know, the cost of this was basically a Webflow subscription, Zapier subscription, and Airtable is free. So I think it's less, it was about $40 to get started.

Nice. So 12 hours, about $40, and you made a bunch of phone calls pre-selling it. What were some of the clients that, what were they saying when you were calling them and how were you pitching and saying, hey, I've got this service. Did you already have the website before or was this even before you even launched that 12 hours?

No, so I was extremely upfront with it saying, okay, I don't have anything basically. It's, it's, I'm working on it. It's in the process. We will launch it in a couple of weeks and I just wanted to give you a heavily discounted price for a yearly subscription.

So you got them to sign up for a yearly subscription. What were you doing to validate? Were they actually giving you the credit card and subscribing at that point?

Yeah. Oh, sorry. I forgot about Memberstack. I used Memberstack to manage all the user management and the payment system for Stripe and stuff like this.

Yeah, yeah.

So it was also a service that I tried.

And were they, when they were signing up for you, were they anticipating that they would have to wait? Because I'm assuming you didn't have a qualified sales rep at that time, trained, ready to go. And then you said, okay, it's gonna take a few weeks, but I'll give you a discount. I'm assuming that was the conversation.

Yeah, so I said that it will take probably a month to ramp up. Right. That's why I'm asking for a yearly subscription. So you won't cancel after the first month because it will take time. And that's why it's heavily discounted. I think I offered like 60% discount or so. So it was very, you know, half the discount.

That's awesome. And what are some ideal companies? I know it's only been 2 months and then you also had a few on the presales that you've seen have better success with Orapa and your approach to the sales process? And how do you know if it's a viable solution for them? Who should be looking at this platform? And then a question on top of that is, do they provide the leads? Like, are typically the companies providing the leads to these sales reps and then they're setting up the meetings, or does the rep also source their own leads?

So the best success we've seen with our platform So the companies need to know who they are selling to, right? Who is their dream customer? And they need to know, they need to be sure sort of the value proposition that they are going to lead with in that conversation with the prospect. So it's quite not the best solution for a startup that is just starting out hoping to get first sale. But if you know for a fact that if you meet with CEOs of tech startups and you are able to sell one deal out of, I don't know, 10 or maybe 5 meetings, it's a perfect fit for you.

Okay.

And in terms of how leads are generated, you don't need to provide any leads to the reps. We take care of that as a platform and to help get started sales reps booking more meetings and help them earn additional cash. take care of lead generation for them. I've been in business, lead generation business for a couple of, for 2 years now. So I know sort of how to get the leads and we are using many different data providers to streamline the process and just to help out sales reps so they can only focus on executing their campaigns and the outreach itself.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, leads is everything, right? It's the life and blood of any company. And you know, so a company in order to succeed, especially, you know, who have that sales engine and are trying to build a sales team is, you know, they always want to grow and exceed their sales goals. But, you know, starts with sourcing, you know, high quality qualified leads, right? Otherwise you can have all the best lists or the longest list, but if it's not qualified, you know, you're wasting your time. How do you suggest the sales rep or startups to find those targeted clients and make those calls at scale? And be efficient as well?

So I think that you can easily get started without any data providers, just you going out and looking for companies and contact details. It's doable. Of course it will take time, but it's the best solution if you're on a tight budget and you want to just get started. So few ways that you can, you need to find sort of a lead pool, right? Where the companies that you want to reach out to, they hang out. So for example, if you want to get in touch with SaaS companies, the best way is sort of to get on, I don't know, G2 Crowd or Capterra and just get all the companies that are there. Then find the right person from LinkedIn and then find the email. I don't know, many different tools like Hunter or .io. And that's the process to sort of get started. Once you hit certain scale, you can of course invest in data so it gets more streamlined to really hit scale with it, right? But if you don't have scale, it's really important to do things manually so you can find that maybe leaks in the whole process.

Is there any tools that you recommend that you really like? So you mentioned Hunter, LinkedIn, you look at G2 Crowd and Capterra, you could probably scrape some of that and pull their data. Anything else that you like to use?

Yeah, so the perfect tool for me that basically does all of the things that we want in outbound sales is Apollo.io. I have tested many different email email sending tools for cold email and this is one of the best ones out there and they already have the data in the platform. And for me as a European, it's extremely important to have reliable data because not every big data providers, they have data in Europe. So this is one of the best tools to have the global reach that you are after.

Agree. Yeah, we actually used it in the past as well. I love using it as well. So