Most Common Mistake Founders Make on their SaaS Startups | With Spencer Fry

What are some, uh, you know, you've done this so many times, you, you said you mentor and you coach a lot of entrepreneurs as well, um, and you also see entrepreneurs, you know, thousands of them through your platform.

Yeah.

What would you say are some of the most common mistakes you see founders making? You know, with their startups or maybe areas that they underutilize or maybe don't pay enough attention, focus to, and maybe more for SaaS founders or creators either way.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll speak to SaaS founders. I think one of the things that I see is that, well, actually a couple of things. One, I really believe in persistence and by persistence, I mean like constantly every single day trying to like do that 1% thing that's going to add up over time. And I see a lot of founders that like get very discouraged when, you know, they do something and And they don't get a ton of benefit from it. They were expecting 1,000 new customers and they got 5 or 10. And my motto and what I always try to tell entrepreneurs is just like, it'll pay off over time and you just have to continue to do little things all the time. That kind of goes to my second point, whereas I see a lot of new founders that take way too long to ship. They try to polish everything, they try to make everything perfect. And the market doesn't really care. The market just wants you to continue to improve and eventually you'll hopefully catch fire. But no one cares when you have a brand new website. The customer doesn't care. It's just constant improving and just staying in it for the long term. So persistence, super, super important. And don't give up. Things take a while. The first year and a half, 2 years of our business, we were doing almost zero revenue. Um, and now, you know, we're fully profitable team growing really fast.

Yeah, it makes sense. Patience and persistence. I love it.

Yeah.

Um, in terms of growth levers, you know, which helped you kind of grow your business, do you have any recommendation for other SaaS entrepreneurs, uh, maybe for who have similar markets as you, similar kind of target audience in the B2B kind of B2C space? Uh, what have you seen, you know, work really well for you guys?

So the really interesting thing about our business, and I think this is true for all businesses, is that the marketing channels change over time. You know, in those early days, you can do a webinar with, you know, 50 people and make enough sales where it actually like moves the needle. So early, early days, we were doing lots of webinars. We, we had an affiliate program that worked pretty well, you know, getting our customers to refer their friends, that sort of thing. You know, getting people to blog about us, create YouTube videos about us, etc. But in the backbone of all of that was our content marketing machine. So we now have 5 people whose full-time job is to create articles, videos, guides, tutorials, tools, etc. for us. So content marketing has been a big source of customers and leads for us. And that was really important for me when we started that about 3, 4 years ago was SEO and content takes a lot of time and this is a business that I want to build over the next 100 years. Obviously I won't be here, but over the next 100 years. So I needed to establish that really early and I wanted to be the sort of leading voice for the creator community. So I think for any SaaS business, content is just killer, but you got to start it early and it can take a year or 2 years to really build up. That's kind of been mostly where we focus most of our time. But in the last few years, we've actually been spending a lot more money on paid marketing. So paid marketing wasn't working for us in the first few years, but now it's a huge source of new leads for us.

Makes sense. Have you, uh, have you, what would you say have been, you know, maybe the biggest failures in your growth strategies? I know you mentioned like you've done some product launches, you know, maybe not a failure, but have you done any kind of other experiments that you said, you know, you thought would work and maybe isn't worth it for your business?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. But I would say that one of the important things to do is, you know, the thing that didn't work last year could definitely work this year and could definitely work the following year. So we're constantly like retesting things that haven't worked for us. As example, paid marketing didn't work 2 years ago for us. So similar things like we launched a podcast, we spent almost $50,000 producing it, did a whole season. That really was a bust.

Really?

Yeah, I think like we didn't have enough distribution probably, and I think we got under 1,000 listens per episode, which is fine, but I think we were hoping to at least maybe break even on it or something like that. So that was something that sort of failed for us a couple years ago, but I don't necessarily think— I think we could revisit it in a year or something and maybe it will work. What else? We've had things that we— like, for example, we ran an online conference last year, which more than broke even. But we're really excited about running it again this year and using all the things that we learned from that original conference and making it better and hopefully making it even more profitable for us. But yeah, we're constantly revisiting every growth strategy.

No, no, it makes complete sense. And what would you say are some of the biggest challenges right now, you'd say, in terms of growing or scaling your Podia?

So I think there's a bunch of different ones across every department. In the product, And the development department, the biggest things for us is that, you know, we have a very technically complicated product. We've got a lot of things going on behind the scenes. So to continue to make it really simple for our customers to use, but also to continue to add additional like features and functionality to it, there's this very big balance that we're having to sort of weigh. Like, you know, we add this new feature that makes the product more complicated, but also makes has higher impact. So there's this big product development balance that we're facing right now, but it's been going great. And I think we've sort of— we're treading the line very carefully. In terms of sort of more of the business as a whole, we're hiring a bunch of different positions, mostly lots of developers right now, but it's hard to find great talent in tech. Is this difficult?

Sure.

And, you know, especially for us, we were a fully remote company since day one. And it was very easy for us to differentiate ourselves in the hiring market because like, if you wanna work remote, come work for us. But now like every company is remote and a lot of companies are going full remote. So there's way more competition for job postings, but we have a really great place to work. So we do get a lot of like good applicants. And then on the marketing side, it's really just about, you know, continuing to scale all of our channels and, you know, seeing better numbers this quarter than last quarter. Of course.

Yeah. Cool. So if anyone is listening and looking for a job, you know, reach out to Spencer. They're hiring.

Rails developers.

Rails developers. Awesome. Spencer, kind of shifting gears here, you know, kind of rapid-fire questions, you know, but answer as you like. Who or what are, would you say, 3 of the best resources That could be books and/or people like mentors or people you follow, would you say have been instrumental to your success over the last few years?

So they're mostly going to be people that I just know in person. So unfortunately, like I can't share the resources.

Any books?

Well, yeah, I mean, both, both of Ben Horowitz's books I've loved, you know, they, they are more for larger companies, but I think you can learn a lot of tactical information. And I think one of the things I think about all the time from his books are this wartime versus peacetime CEO stuff. So I would definitely check those out. They're both great as audiobooks. But yeah, in terms of like—

The Hard Thing About the Hard Things, right? That's one of them. What was the other one?

Yeah, that's one. And then there's one around culture that's really important for, I think, That's one of the big things that we care a lot about is culture. And I think getting culture right early on is super, super important.

Sure.

But mostly like my resources tend— so I have a CEO coach who I talk to about once a month and she's great. She sort of helps me through a lot of like, you know, talk through a lot of different challenges. And then I have entrepreneurs that I've known for, you know, 10, 15 years in New York City, which is where I mostly live, who, you know, I talk to and text with every single day. share questions, comments, thoughts. And then every once in a while, or not every once in a while, but every quarter we have a board meeting. And so like I meet with my investors and share thoughts and questions there as well, but mostly just years and years of experience.

Sure. Sure. Okay. Anybody else you follow, like, I don't know, on Twitter or anybody you really like and maybe you look up to right now, or?

I mean, I don't really, I'm not like a big, tech celebrity follower type. You know, I have lots of respect for like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, like those sorts of big iconic figures. And I do really like all the things that they've done for, you know, the world. But I don't really necessarily follow like single founders or things like that. I kind of care more about like products in the market, like, oh, I love this product. So, you know, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

Unless it's kind of the person behind the scenes.

Fair enough. Um, so a couple of exits, you know, doing really well right now, profitable, good team, building something for the long term. What does success mean to you today, Spencer, whether it's personally, financially, business? There's no right answer.

So I think for me, it's honestly, it's just being happy with what I do. That's, that is success. Um, you know, we spend so much time, uh, at work and working on various things and I, there's nothing I'd rather be doing. Like, I think you could offer me lots of money today to sell and I wouldn't be interested because I just love working with our customers. I love working with my team. I've never worked with a better team in my entire life. I've never worked on a better problem in my entire life. I love the idea of helping people make money online. I think that's awesome. That's kind of where I started when I was 11 years old. So I'm loving life right now. I'm loving the product. I'm loving how we get better every day. Um, so yeah, happiness is kind of the thing that drives me these days as an older man. Nice. So you are 37 soon.