There’s SO much content out there about how hard you must struggle and that you might have to give up EVERYTHING to succeed in building a B2B SaaS. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, building your B2B SaaS business during nights and weekends can actually be a huge advantage for many reasons.
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Episode Transcription
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I’m gonna talk to you about is when and how to build your B2B SaaS business. Now, having said that, I’ve built multiple different types of businesses and in different ways, but my preferred option, having that experience now and having worked with a lot of people to help them build theirs, is to do so part-time when you’re first starting up.
There’s a lot of content out there and strategies about lean startup. They call it struggle porn, which I think is a great name for it because people seem to kind of glorify this, I need to barely scrape by before I become a millionaire overnight. None of which usually happens for almost anyone. So if you ever hear a story like that, that typically comes, those are the exceptions, obviously.
But there’s so many advantages to building this business, essentially on your own terms. Right? And if you do that, and if you have a source of income, A primary job or consulting or contracting that you do also part-time. You can make sure that you have the cash flow that you need and take the time that you would like to building your B2B SaaS business, this isn’t something you have to do full-time.
In fact, most of the B2B SaaS businesses I’ve built, and most of the ones that I’ve built that have been successful to the extent that I would like them to be, were built by me part-time. As in it wasn’t the only thing that I was working. Now these businesses le lend themselves to this strategy relatively well because you can increase, you can create such great leverage in that B2B SaaS.
Businesses when done right, don’t require a lot of human capital or the type of services you might need if you were building a traditional kind of service-based business. So that’s one of the advantages. The other element here that I think is important to mention, What I recommend a lot of folks to do that come to me that want to build a B2B SaaS business, and especially if they don’t have a ton of industry experience in the industry that they want to build a product for, is to go get a job in that industry.
I love the strategy for a whole bunch of reasons. Number one, you can make. Decent cash flow to cover your cost of living or take care of your family or whatever. Ultimately, you need, you’ve, you can use the cash flow from that job to cover those elements. Then you can carve out a piece of that to invest in building your B2B SaaS business when you’re ready.
And one of the other advantages is if you get a job in. You’re learning a lot of subject matter expertise and you’re getting great understanding for the problems and challenges in that industry. The B2B SaaS product that I’m building at the moment, Is in podcasting. I just so happen to also own a podcasting service business or productized service business that makes the problems and challenges in that industry crystal clear for me to be able to figure out where is there opportunity to invest in building a SaaS business that’s gonna create value for other people that have these problems.
Because I built that business, I know those problems intimately well. Essentially, I am my own target market, which is a huge advantage as opposed to. Seeing what you think might be a problem from afar, but never having actually worked directly in that industry, or at least as much as someone else who spent years in it may actually know in terms of the context around the problems and challenges to be solved.
So, points of takeaway from this episode are you don’t need to dive head first and sacrifice everything in order to build a B2B SaaS business or be successful in B2B SaaS And. Doing it via nights and weekends and getting a job in industry can provide great cash flow and take a lot of the pressure off in terms of if and when your B2B SaaS ultimately takes off.
Plus give you a ton of expert insider information and knowledge in terms of the context around the problems and challenges in the industry for which you may wanna build that product.