Episode 779 | 10 Myths Most SaaS Founders Believe
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You're listening to Startup for the Rest of Us. I am Rob Walling, and in this week's episode, I talk with Mark Thomas about 10 myths that most seven-figure SaaS founders believe. And this is based on a LinkedIn post

He pushed live a couple weeks ago. If you don't know of Mark Thomas, he has spoken at MicroConf Europe, and he'll be speaking again this year in Istanbul, Turkey in just a few months. Mark served as head of growth for both Powered by Search and Podia, and he's now doing growth consulting. And he is one of our founding coaches of SaaS Inc.

You can head to sasinstitute.com if you are interested in learning more about that. Before we dive in to this episode, I want to tell you a little more about MicroConf Europe in Istanbul in just a few months. I'm really excited for it. It's going to be in late September. You can head to microconfieurope.com.

to buy a ticket. As of the time I'm recording this, which is about two weeks before this episode goes live, we are already 65% sold out. All the early bird tickets have sold out. We have sold out all of our events for the past few years. So if you want to come to this event, you really do want to get a ticket now. We have speakers like Mark Thomas, who you're about to hear from, Michelle Hansen, founder of Geocodeo and author of Deploy Empathy, and James

founder of Astalti, who was on the show, I don't know, in the past six months. It's a great crew that's forming. We're going to have another couple speakers as well. And I'd love to see you there, September 28th through the 30th in Istanbul. You can head to microconfieurope.com if you are interested. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Mark. ♪

Mark Thomas, welcome to Startups with the Rest of Us. Finally here. Finally here. It's been a long time. It feels like you've already been on the show. And I'm kind of surprised you haven't. So glad you took the time. Finally, after all my phone calls, my emails, my DMs. It's been incredible. Into the abyss. I can't even believe it. I finally had to go through Tracy at SAS Institute to get you on here. Yeah, the weight of correspondence has just been too much. It's a big deal. Yeah.

So you have these, what I'm calling 10 myths that seven figure SaaS founders believe. These could also be 10 traps, the pitfalls that seven and eight figure SaaS founders fall into. And you did a really good post on LinkedIn about it. And we'll of course link that up in the show notes.

Give us some background before we start walking through these of where you came up with them. Anything else you want to add before we dive in? Yeah, so I've done a lot of consultancy work, but also worked in a number of different contexts in SaaS in general. I've been a founder. I actually was not great at marketing as a founder. We could talk about that in a bit. And then I kind of learned marketing and now I do it as my job. Yeah.

And I've been in-house, I've been in an agency context, working with big SaaS companies. But pretty much every time I work with a company, I hear one of these things that we're going to talk about. And every time I think, I don't know if that's true, I disagree, or I think there's a different way. And I've always tried to gently guide people to the other path.

Because ultimately, I do this full time, but founders are thinking about a million different things. So yeah, I put these down so that I've got something to point people to next time they say one. I love lists like this too, because listicles have a bad rap because of all the buzzfeeds and whatever, really diving into them 10, 15 years ago. I actually like listicles or just lists of things, as long as they're accurate and they deliver on the promise.

And they're not bull. They're not just made up like fluffy, like we're really, this could have been an email. You know, it's like this whole thing of like, no, it, these 10, I think are actually a really interesting. Now, I don't think you and I are in a hundred percent alignment on, on all of them, but that's going to make for interesting radio right now.

What a rubbish world it would be if we were. Yes, Mark. Everything you've said in here is 100% my experience. And that's the other beauty, right? As you and I are coming onto the show, it's like, what is my experience, right? Also, as a founder, I'm invested in 200-something startups, right? And you've done probably more, certainly more in-depth marketing work with more startups than I have. I flit on the outskirts and I have high-level conversations. I'm like, this is how I would approach it.

And then I step away and, you know, for whatever my founders, they think I'm like sipping margaritas on a beach somewhere. But I'm actually recording fun podcasts like this. But you, you know, you have been in the trenches certainly in knee deep in more startups than I have. So that's where different perspectives come in. Yeah, hopefully.

All right, so let's dive in. So Mark Thomas on LinkedIn, if you are not following him, you should look in the show notes for that link. And your post says, stuff I've heard from working with founders at SaaS companies between 1 and 10 million ARR and why they're wrong. Number one is, quote,

I'm not good at marketing.

or maybe higher. How did that happen? Did it just magic? It didn't just magic. I've worked with dozens of teams at this stage and the founders, they're the best marketers. They know the company, they know the client, they know the customer, they know how everything works, they know what messages land broadly. Maybe it's not totally dialed in, but they're like,

They're incredible marketers who maybe don't have the technical skill set of a marketer. And I think it's just such a limited belief and it makes founders often make poor choices about team structure and waste a lot of money. Yeah, I think it's one thing to be

with yourself, like to assess yourself in certain areas of like, how good am I at operations versus product versus development, marketing, sales, whatever, and have a realistic, not overly narcissistic view of I'm a 10 out of 10 on all those things. But this is one that I've heard probably more

more than I should, specifically for companies that are doing seven figures, right? There are certainly, you know, Weback founders that are doing 2,000, 5,000 a month. And some of them say, I'm not good at marketing. And we're like, because you've never done it. Like you really just don't know how, like you've scratched and clawed and that's legit. But if you made it to seven figures, odds are something's working. Something's working.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. You might not know how to run a paid ads account. Like Newsflash, a lot of marketers don't know how to do that either. I had a co-founder at my company who was a salesperson. He'd made his whole career in sales and recruitment and kind of selling that. That's a hard world to be in. And so I told myself, hey, next to that guy,

I'm like, I don't know how to do sales. Same thing with marketing, really. They're pretty adjacent. And then I left the company and I went into agency world where suddenly, months later, I was selling effectively $100,000 deals. It's just a switch that you can flick and say, hey, I'm maybe not technically gifted at this, but I could be really good at it. And I'm going to do it because I'm a founder and I'm going to work it out. And that's the founder mindset.

Yeah, that's what I like about that is as a founder, even if you think, hey, I'm not good at this, it's usually, but I can be, but I'll figure it out. That's the thing. It's like, what do you need to figure out to grow this business? Sometimes it's sales, sometimes it's marketing, sometimes it's hiring. There's all these different things.

you'll figure it out. Even if it's true that maybe today you aren't technically as good at marketing as the person next to you, you're probably doing just a fine job. I remember this. After we sold Drip, we sold it to Leadpages and they had a 40-person marketing team. And there were marketers on that team. I mean, there were...

managers reporting to managers, big team. And they were really good because Clay, the CEO was, was a marketer by training. And so he knew how to hire folks. And I remember being intimidated and being like, I don't know. And they're like, bro, you grew this to mil, you bootstrapped this thing to millions in ARR. You know something about something. And I was always a little bit intimidated. It's not the right word, but it was a little bit like, ah,

I'm genuinely not as good as you guys. But it wasn't that I wasn't good. It's just that wasn't my sole focus. It was only something I did 20% of my time, right? Right. With that, let's dive into number two. Quote, this is a founder saying this, we really need to get top of funnel working if we're going to scale.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. This really, really might be true sometimes. But here's the thing. If you get to 1 million, 10 million ARR, there is a huge amount, I would say 90% of the time of waste in your life cycle. Basically unmonetized usage. Let's say you've got a thousand users and you get to 10, you know, 1 million ARR. Like firstly, good for you.

Secondly, you've probably got a small portion who are paying you the amount that they should be paying you. And within the rest of that, there is like a captive audience who've already said somehow they have the problem that your product solves, but you haven't yet found a way to get them to pay you. Now,

They should be paying you for something if they're using your product. If they are taking up expense, basically, on your company, you should find a way to make them profitable or at least pushing towards profitability. And it's a huge opportunity. If you've got those thousand people and those 10% are paying you to actually make that

that real big amount of revenue, what would happen if instead of thinking about how much you're going to have to spend to get, you know, three, four times that you simply said, I'm going to spend a third of what I might have spent to get to that four times number.

And I am going to work out how to extract as much value as I can without being like an evil capitalist from these people. As much as makes sense for your business and their business, it would be significant. Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why in the Tiny Seed Accelerator podcast,

We have playbooks. We have seven or eight different playbooks we walk through. And our first one is funnels. And the reason we do that is we want to set some rules of thumb about what are the ranges of web visitor to trial or trial to pay

or activation percentages, what are good decent churn numbers, what are good outbound conversion rates and calls to close and all this stuff. And it's not that there is a one size fits all, but there are ranges. If you ask for credit card upfront versus not, it's going to be different numbers. And the way that I think this one of we really need to get top of funnel working if we're going to scale is that

that's true. That's the lowest hanging fruit if you've already optimized most of the rest of your funnel. And most companies at 1 million have not. Now, by the time you get to 10 million, still a lot haven't. But if you've brought in a knowledgeable marketer or you've learned marketing by that point, someone should have been working on your whole trial to pay or first touch.

to retention and expansion funnel. But it's kind of boring grindy work and it's more sexy and interesting to just drive more. You know what I mean? It's that vanity metric of like, but look, unique visitors to the website went up or whatever.

But realistically, this is why I'm such a believer in kind of rules of thumb around a funnel. Like I can look at a SaaS funnel today and if you tell me credit card or not, free trial or not, freemium or not, or it's high touch or low touch, I'm sure you can do this too, where I just look at all the numbers and I point to one of them and I'm like, that's your bottleneck. That's your bottleneck. Well, how do I do that? It's not magic. It's that I've seen a bunch of these funnels and it's just these rules of thumb in my head, right?

Yeah, they're all different, right? But I worked at a company once and basically they were at the upper end of this bracket up towards 10 million.

I've purely worked on lifecycle stuff with them. Basically sequences like annual upgrade sequences, trial reactivation sequences, things like that. We added almost a million dollars of revenue in a year just through that. Now that's wild and that's possible for most businesses I think. It's basically what I work on these days is lifecycle stuff and just finding these opportunities.

It's frequently low hanging fruit. The 80-20 of those is not, you know, it's not months and months of work. It's like, let's get something in here. Let's get an email or two that does this. And we can optimize it later depending on volume, but let's get something in.

Let's look at number three. Quote, what if we made our affiliate terms X percent for recurring revenue for the lifetime of a customer? So if I have an affiliate program and I'm a SaaS founder, the kind of myth or pitfall here is we're giving away 10, 20, 30 percent, whatever it is, for the lifetime of our customer. What's the problem there?

Well, I've got to say, I was pretty new to affiliate marketing. It's not something I've ever really thought about before. But I have now worked on a number of affiliate programs for SaaS companies in this stage. And when you download that CSV out of the affiliate platform...

And you look at the number of new sales that happen. Over time, what you tend to see, and this isn't always true, obviously, but what you tend to see is that the number of new sales actually drops over time.

But the amount that you're paying out does not. In some cases, it even grows the amount that you're paying out because if you've got expansion revenue working, you're still paying for the same percentage. For somebody who wrote a terrible little blog post in 2018, got you one customer, and now they have been taking 30% of the lifetime of that customer, even after you worked hard to expand them or grow the whole account.

Now, firstly, that feels almost criminal to me. But secondly, stop doing it. It is crushing your profitability. Every month that you continue to pay out on that like,

Frankly, pipe dream of a promise to continue paying them forever is a month where you are like making your business less profitable. I again, recently, I worked on one of these and I found on like day one of looking at the affiliate program, like $20,000 of revenue, just like

sat there that was getting paid out and it blew my mind in the sense that like oh this this person like what would they do with 20,000 extra dollars right now like if they had that today would that make their runway for you know a month maybe yeah maybe it might like for some people or could they invest that in a channel that really works for them well yeah maybe and then they wouldn't have to pay that plus it compounds for the life of the customer it's not just 20,000 today it's

It's maybe $20,000, $30,000 a year or whatever. And that's a huge gain for some people, especially when you're concerned with runway at the bottom end of this revenue bracket more than the top probably. Yeah, the least profitable bootstrap SaaS company that I know at scale...

is heavy, heavy affiliate stuff. And when I think of SaaS companies at scale, their net profit is usually between 30% and 50%. That's what you can get to. And this company does 10% net profit because the affiliates are taking...

30 or 40 or whatever the number is lifetime. So this is one that I wholeheartedly agree. Now, I think if you are going to go heavily into an affiliate program and there is some Keystone affiliate that you want to land, and usually these Keystone affiliates have these big audiences, and you're going to want to go heavily into an affiliate program.

And they want advisory shares as well. That's kind of a dirty little secret no one ever discloses. I've never come across that. Yeah, it's big names. I don't know if it's an FTC violation or not, but whatever. Now maybe they'll negotiate and you're just like, I just have to do this. But once that affiliate falls, then you can get a bunch of others and the other ones you cap it. 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, somewhere in there. Usually 12 to 18 is what I recommend. I've had some tiny seed companies do affiliate projects

and one of them was negotiating really hard and eventually said, well, we can give you two years. That's a long time. Even two years is a long time. And the reason, you know, you talked about how over time the number of new customers they send you goes down, that's because it's audience, right?

audience doesn't grow at the pace. This is the whole reason why I often say don't grow an audience if you want to build a SaaS. Grow an audience if you want to do books and courses and sell events and do all the stuff I do. But if you're going to do a SaaS, there's so many better ways to spend your time, so many better marketing approaches than audience building. One thing finally I'll say on this one is that one worry that people have about cutting these things if they've already done them is that the affiliates will get really angry and try and sue them.

Maybe. I spoke to a person who runs an affiliate platform about this and they said, that's never happened to anyone I've ever heard of. The second thing is, I actually did this. I cut one of these recurring commission things. Just like I said, one month notice, that's it. After this, it's just no more commission on anything older than 12 months.

We actually saw an increase in referrals after that because people were like, flip, I haven't been driving any business. I'm not getting any new commissions. I need that. I'm going to drive some commission. And we actually saw massive growth in the program after that. So it doesn't have to be doomsday for your affiliate program to cut this stuff. Yeah, I would agree. Number four, quote,

We should build a marketing team so we can focus on product, ops, finance, whatever. So what's the issue with this? One million feels like a lot of money because it's a big mental kind of anchor for a lot of people. But even at 10 million, it's not that big a business. It's a nice business for sure. You should be proud of that. But the goal should be to grow out of that bracket as quickly as you can.

In my experience, people, if they stall, it tends to be really between those numbers, one in 10 million revenue. Try and get away from that stall by outpacing it. The reason that I think that you shouldn't think too much about your marketing team at this point is because

It's because you're going to make the wrong hires. You're going to lose touch with your customer. You're going to slow yourself down. You're going to burn a lot of money. Let's say you hire a VP of marketing at 1 million. Firstly, there's no one to manage, so you don't need a VP. But you need someone who's senior enough to build a strategy and then junior enough to actually get it done to a high quality.

those people are hard to find and you'll probably hire the wrong person and they're going to take a long time to ramp up. You're going to pay them, they're going to not work out and then you're going to have to let them go and start all over again anyway. So my advice is,

Do the marketing yourself for as long as you can. Hire consultants to fill in the gaps and help you scale channels that you already know are going to work and like basically find the opportunities that maybe you haven't. You don't have to hire them.

All right, so this one I mostly agree with you on. And the thing that I see with TinySeed and beyond TinySeed founders is oftentimes it's a couple developers and they want to hire marketing by the time they're doing 20K a month. And I'm like, no, no, no, we can't do this. And I have this list of, like, we have dozens of TinySeed companies that are doing seven or eight figures in ARR. And almost everyone, and I think maybe everyone, the founders did the marketing sales and product into seven figures. Yeah.

That's it. And I believe it's everyone, but maybe there's one or two that didn't. But whatever it is, it's 90 something percent, right? And this can be challenging for a developer to hear of like, but I don't want to do the mark. Can I just hire someone for that, right? There's a whole section of my book that says, can't I just hire someone for that? It's in the marketing channel because I hear this so

I hear this so much. But I do think that when you get to about a million or two, it depends on a bunch of stuff, the type of business and all this stuff. I think this is when a founder can think about handing off one of those three, marketing, sales, or product. Now, it's not delegating, abdicating, handing the complete thing, but it's bringing someone in who is more senior and can do strategy rather than just piecemealing things out and I'm still the bottleneck.

Yeah, I think it can. I've seen that work. I guess I'll put it that way. I've seen that work enough that I'm like, this is a strategy. Now don't hire a whole team. I'm not talking about hiring four or five people, but I'm talking about you now, if you've been doing marketing sales or product for this long, you kind of know what's happening, what's working, what's not. Probably what you're going to try next, probably what's in, not autopilot, but it's in maintenance mode of like, oh, we're just doing more SEO every month. Bringing someone in who's a little bit higher level and not just a task level thinker, but can actually do project or owner level thinking is,

is where I start to think about that, between that one and two million-ish mark. Totally. I love it.

All right. Number five, quote, we've done well with one customer type. We need to find a new market to grow into. Oh, yeah. This is one. Launch it. Let's launch a second product. We've talked a lot on this. It's like, hey, we're capping out. Yeah, let's translate it into Spanish and German to expand it. Yeah, so this is along those lines. I think listeners of this podcast are familiar with that, but why don't you talk about why this is an issue? Did you get my investor notes from my company? No, did you? No.

I've just seen these pitfalls over and over, you know? At one point, we had a platform that basically allowed people to vote, like do live voting. And for some reason, we thought, hey, let's like really focus on societies where there's a lot of democracy. And it turned out that

If we look at a table of that, Iceland has one of the highest kind of most democratic societies. And we were like, well, it's obvious. Let's just translate the app into Icelandic. There's no reason not to do this. Oh my gosh. Fortunately, better sense has prevailed because Iceland's got what, like 3 million people, I think. I think it's 300,000. I think the entire country is like smaller than mine.

Yeah, so there's not that many users for that. So yeah, finding new markets just isn't the biggest opportunity at this point.

what I love about founders and working with founders is is they have this they have this mindset of like the 80 20 what is the most impactful action I'm here to tell you that it's not finding a different market because you've barely you've probably barely scratched the surface of everybody who could buy from you and the other thing is as we said at the top of the episode like

There's probably a lot of people who already tried to buy from you but couldn't find a way or the timing wasn't right. Going back to those people is going to be infinitely easier than trying to develop a new market and find a new kind of go-to market that works for them.

and get all of the features that that market needs maybe differently to your existing market. I think you're going to need to do it at some point, but it's probably not at this stage. And maybe you'll get out of the 10 million bracket without a second customer type or a second market. It's entirely possible.

Yeah, in most cases, and this is again 95% plus of plateaus that I see or have nothing to do with market size or I've tapped out a market. It's really a one in 50, one in 100 where it's like, oh no, we really have tapped out the market and you actually do need to look for an ICP. I did a talk at, well, last couple of microcomps about plateaus. And I think I sent you a video for that. Yeah, and one of them was. Yeah, that was great.

What next? I think one of them was, I've tapped out the market. It was like seven, the seven reasons that SaaS apps plateau. And one of them was, I've tapped out a market. And I pretty much say, almost never. Just this is here for completion, but like, don't you use this as a crutch. You know, I'm calling, I'm looking at you, half the audience who's like, oh, wait a minute. So it's totally in line with number five here. Number six, quote, if I send more email, people will unsubscribe.

But Mark, this isn't a myth. This is true. What do you want to say about this one? Rob, do you know anything about email? I come across this one so frequently because one of the things that I say most to founders and to marketing teams early stage is send more email. I think a lot of marketing science is basically voodoo, but

this is true. If you appear more frequently than your competitors to the person who you're trying to sell to,

And if you keep on doing that, and you keep making offers, eventually, someone will take notice. They might not buy from you, but they'll certainly consider you if they have the problem that you're solving. You think that you're appearing a lot right now, I promise you, you're not. You are not getting opens, you're not getting noticed in the inbox, which gets 1000 emails a day. You're not appearing frequently enough in people's kind of

feeds and things like that. Email is one thing you absolutely can control. Just simply increase the number of emails that you send because a healthy email list is not the goal of building a SaaS company. Like you don't need a healthy email list in the sense that somebody who's trying to sell an info product needs a healthy email list.

you need to find new buyers in that list or you need to sell more stuff to the people who are buying already. So just send more email. Just a specific case study here. I worked on a product once that had basically sending four emails a month, kind of product announcements and things.

I got the opportunity to basically look at that and go, here's what I think we should do. And I just said, let's send 12 emails a month instead of four. There was some friction there. People felt a bit sort of, should we do this? I tell you what, when we saw the data come in after doing this for a while and there was a 9% bump in conversions to paid plans,

After every email that we sent and then a trailing effect in the following days, suddenly people took notice. The goal is not to keep subscribers and build a subscriber base. The goal is to get more customers and sending more email allows you to do that. Number seven, I heard XYZ company grew with programmatic SEO or insert any easy growth lever here.

Why is this a trap? Because I have heard some people grow with programmatic SEO. I think Zapier did it back in the day. Talk to us about this. Sometimes programmatic SEO is going to work for you. But I can't tell you the number of times I've been talking to a company and they've gone, "I think we should try programmatic SEO." And I'm like, "Okay, well, why? Have you tried creating content that speaks to your buyer's pain, first of all?"

Have you tried doing this other thing or this other thing? And the reason that a lot of the time people want to do stuff like programmatic SEO is because it is easy, relatively speaking. They're basically building a feature for their marketing site. Google is not going to value that in the future in the same way that maybe they did in the past. All playbooks diminish in efficacy over time and effectiveness over time.

And so if by the point that you've heard that somebody grew easily with whatever growth lever or growth hack or whatever, it probably has diminished in effectiveness already to a certain extent. And you should do what is more effective, which is trying to convert more people who are already in your life cycle. That's my take. What you said about it being easy really, really makes my founder myth or founder mistakes clear.

tingle because the founders who I see kind of on the internet who kind of get in their own way over and over and never seem to succeed but you're always like but you're smart and you build good pride but you never it's they want to do the easy s***

And they want to stay in their comfort zone. I see them thinking out loud on Twitter and instead of them saying, hey, I built this product for this type of customer. What marketing approach should I do? What would resonate with them? What are my customers? They'll say like, well, I'm good at or comfortable with or in the past I've done dot, dot, dot. Therefore, I'm going to implement this for this SaaS app.

And I'm always like, that has nothing to do with it. Nothing to your experience in comfort zone to have nothing to do with whether this is going to be successful. You should start that the, oh, you're asking the wrong question. You know, it's not the easy, it's not the comfortable. So that really, just that piece of it really resonates with me.

I think one thing I will say is I'm not trying to shame anyone here by saying this. I know you're not either, Rob. No, I am. I'm going to start throwing names at you. No, I'm just kidding. Not trying to shame anybody, but trying to educate and be helpful. I think it's like, yeah, it is. Because the reality is people are scared of failing and scared of looking silly if they get the marketing or the sales wrong.

Look, you're going to fail if you don't get it right. So you may as well give it a good go on your way to the inevitable middle. Yeah, that's right. No, it's never about making someone feel bad for what they're doing, but it is saying, hey, here's a heads up and here's how to do this better. I mean, that's the whole point of this frigging podcast and the YouTube and all the books and all the reasons that I'm yapping my face off for the last 20 years is like,

Like, hopefully, you know, we can help you make fewer mistakes. And I think the times when I get frustrated and when it sounds like I'm trying to shame people is when people keep making the same mistakes over and over. Because I've been saying this for 10 years. Stop doing B2C. Stop doing two-sided marketplaces. And stop staying in your comfort zone when it comes to marketing and sales. Your customers don't care. Your customers don't care what you're comfortable with. They care with how they buy and how they want to be.

spoken to. So yeah, I like this. We got some good energy going here. Yeah. Nice. All right. Number eight, sales doesn't work for us. We want self-serve only.

What's the issue with this? Sales works for everybody. You don't like sales. There we go. This is it. You feel like you don't want to be sold to. But again, it's a limiting belief. At some point, you validated this company that you're building, unless you got incredibly lucky. And let me tell you, it's not going to happen a second time. You had to validate this.

It's the same thing as sales. All you're doing is sort of validating in reverse. Now you're basically saying, hey, you've got this problem. I've got a product now that works. And you're going to the same people that you used to validate this thing, the same customer type. And you're saying,

Look, do you want it? Because here's the thing, self-serve is great. But if you've never done it before, and even if you have, it's an absolute pain to get right. There are so many variables that could go in the wrong direction for you. And it takes time and energy and headspace. I'm not against self-serve models. In fact, like most of the companies I work with are predominantly that.

But you will learn a lot. You'll go faster by adding a sales model and you'll go faster by closing more deals and putting things that you learn back into the marketing, back into that self-serve motion. Definitely, even if you're building an incredible self-serve motion, then still every now and again, get on a sales call with someone, even if you don't predominantly do that.

Just do it. Trust me. Take the hint. You're going to see some revenue from that. You'll close bigger deals. You'll learn that you're underpriced. You'll learn that people want you more. You'll learn the features they actually care about, the things they say about you. It's like a shortcut to greatness by doing hard work.

Yeah, we were, with Drip, we were self-serve only in the early days and at a certain point people wanted to start talking to us. And what I had to do was qualify them up front because I didn't want to talk to everybody who wanted a $50 a month plan. It just wasn't, and now in the early days I did because I was trying to learn but at a certain point I was like, this isn't worth it. So what we did was we learned to qualify with a little JavaScript pop-up

questionnaire. It's like, hey, how many subscribers do you have? Because we just had one value metric. And it was like, well, obviously you're going to pay us two, 300 bucks a month. I'm willing to do a one call close with you. And we found that we had a two to three X improvement of conversion for those instantly. And then that's when I hired, I had customer success. I didn't even have a sales team. I just had one customer success rep who I then had do these warm, they weren't even sales calls. It was more like answering questions because it's like, I'm on Infusionsoft. How are you different?

I'm on ActiveCampaign. How are you different? It was stuff like that, you know, and it really helped. And I think every business, almost every SaaS company I know, there are some very, very rare exceptions, but almost everyone can use some help with this. Not even help, but that it would help their business, as you said, along the learning and along conversion rates, and it gets you there faster. And it also can help you suss out, you know, if you're charging $30 a month for your SaaS and it's all low touch, no touch, you

You start doing a few sales calls here and there when someone's like, well, I want 30 seats of this or I want to buy 10 times more data than anyone, you know, whatever your value metric is. You start to find those companies that do want to pay you $500 a month or $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month. You build that dual funnel of one low touch and one high touch. And that is where I see real kind of bootstrapper hockey stick stuff come out of.

Yeah, totally. All right, I'll tell you what we're going to do. We are going to do number nine and then we're going to leave it to the listeners to go to your LinkedIn post in order to discover what 10 is. How's that for a teaser? Rob, you're a marketer.

I'm not good at marketing, Mark. You just did it. That was it. Ladies and gentlemen, that was mine. All right. Number nine, we don't want to take cheap shots, so we don't do competitor content. So first, you want to kind of define quickly what competitor content is and then go into why this is probably not a healthy view. Yeah, so competitor content would be something like literally an alternative page or a drip versus active camp.

I'll take that one as an example. Yeah, that's it. So people don't want to do these because they think, oh, these never work on me or I don't believe it when people say things about their competitors. And that's fine.

But I tell you this, these pages are one of the best conversion points across all companies that I've ever worked on. They're almost always in the life cycle and the conversion path of a great customer. You can do competitor content that is genuinely helpful to your buyer

without nagging your competitors, without saying like, hey, these guys suck, buy our product instead. They're going to choose someone in the market. So it makes sense for you to put across the genuine take rather than just saying, hey, I'm going to take their most expensive plan and say I'm a thousand percent cheaper. Instead, just make the argument about who your product works best for

And why? Because if you don't do it, someone else, your competitor probably might put across the negging view. They might do the potshot content, right? And they're going to be less generous. Their stuff's going to rank. People are going to read it. You should do it on the basis that you're a helpful person trying to help your customers make a good choice. And by the way...

If you create this content and say to people, hey, if you are not the right fit for us, you are going to be in this group of people. These products are great for you because this is who buys these. But if you are the right fit for us,

you should buy our product because of these reasons. You're going to have better lifetime value because people are going to churn less frequently because you've actually sold people honestly on your product and you can deliver. That's my big take on competitive content.

And we've talked about this on this show quite a bit and we get listener questions about like, how do I do it? Should I do it? And I've talked about kind of three gradients of going really all in and naming names and really being aggressive or naming names, but being a little more light handed with it or not naming it. You know, these different, I don't know, even thresholds are just kind of areas of the spectrum. But in general, yeah, this is something I think probably every SaaS company should do to one degree or another. Yeah.

Mark Thomas, thanks so much for joining me on the show, man. If folks want to keep up with you, of course they can search Mark Thomas on LinkedIn. It's M-A-R-C. And also on my website, which is positivehuman.co. Positivehuman.co. Very nice. And again, as a reminder, if folks want to maybe chat a little more with you, sassinstitute.com, any of your info, and Mark's first group is coming together now, so...

Thanks again for joining me, man. Thank you for having me. It's been great. Thanks again to Mark for coming on the show. And as a reminder, Mark's going to be speaking at MicroConf Europe in Turkey in late September, microconfeurope.com, if you'd like to see us both there. Thanks for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 779. Well, hello, listener. You have found the hidden track of this episode.

Mark Thomas made the mistake of telling me one of his hobbies. I said, what's your hobby? Please tell me it's Dungeons and Dragons because I know a bunch of trivets. No, it's not. It's music. And in fact, being a musician, it's playing guitar and bass and composing and doing all types of stuff. You can actually see him singing to his own compositions on LinkedIn.

But what I did is I went and asked ChatGPT for 10 questions about playing guitar and bass that I could ask a podcast guest. Good if they're funny, an increasing order of difficulty. So I'm going to start with, you know, we're only going to do three. Okay. So first one is easy. It's number one. What's the name of the four-stringed instrument that lets you play root notes, look cool, and take way fewer solos than your guitarist friend?

That's definitely the bass. All right, there we go. I'm going to jump to medium easy. This is four out of ten. Which guitar effect pedal is basically required if you want your intro to sound like the edge from U2? Oh my gosh, I don't own any pedals, but let me say this. My favorite name of a pedal is the Big Muff. Oh yeah, I had a Big Muff back in the 90s, I think. Yeah.

It's great. You know what? If you want a clip for YouTube, sure. It's just you saying I had a big muff in the 90s. Josh, do you need to bleep this? No, it's a distortion pedal, right? I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it's a big, big growly pedal. Back when I played in Grunge, I was kind of a Nirvana cover band with the screamy Grunge songs. I can see it. Do you have long hair? Yeah, kind of with an undercut.

Yeah, it was pretty rough and wore oversized sweaters. Like shoe guys? Yeah, kind of. Except we just weren't that good. All right. That was, oh, so you didn't get it. So the edge from U2 uses, it's a delay pedal. Oh. It's a delay pedal. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, right? There you go. I thought we were asking a specific name though. Ah, no, no, just the effect. All right. Let me see. Some of these are like ridiculously hard. Okay.

I'm not even sure I would have gotten this. I'm a huge Beatles fan. Do you like the Beatles? I do like the Beatles, yeah. All right. I don't think this one is going to go well. This is number nine out of ten. Which Beatles song features Paul McCartney slapping his Hoffner bass like he invented funk, even though slap bass wouldn't be popularized until decades later? Is it definitely a Beatles song? Because I was going to say...

Arrow, what's it called? Arrow Right Through Me? What's that song called? Is that a McCartney song? It's a Wings one, yeah. I don't know that song. But Izzy Slatt, he does... Ooh, baby, couldn't have done a worse thing to me. That's a liver puddling in there. This is amazing, wow. So according to Chad JBT, it's come together. Oh, okay, I can, yeah. Yeah.

Well, ChatGPT has never heard anyone slap a bass. That's the thing. I was kind of like, wait a minute. Yeah. Isn't that slap bass like... That's one of the coolest bass lines I think ever. I think the only other bass lines that I would consider cooler or like a couple of top ones...

Anything by The Jam, massive fan of that. In fact, that's how I, one of the ways that I got into playing electric bass is actually play double bass. And yeah, that's how I got into electric bass. And then the other one I'll say is just listening to like Peter Hook, kind of Blue Monday, Joy Division, just generally like,

New Order, anything by those guys. The way he plays bass is just so incredible and different. I love it. Yeah. I dove into McCartney's bass lines. Well...

Did I dive into it? What I did is I found a YouTube video as I go down these YouTube rabbit holes and it was talking about how if you played root notes to several of these songs versus what McCartney played. And they're like, here's what a competent bassist, me, I am a competent root note bassist. Just enough to sound good. And they were playing it. Do when I call you up, you'll line it to me.

But then the McCartney bass line is... It's like something out of a ska bass line, you know? It's like melodic, isn't it? Yeah. And it's a chorus because he's a songwriter and he writes melodies and all this stuff. So I love exploring outliers. And I can play an instrument...

but they can play an instrument. You know what I mean? It's genius versus like, yes, I've been playing the bass for 20 years and I can do it competently, but it's so different to write amazing songs and bass lines. One more amazing bass line recommendation. If you haven't heard it yet, there is an episode of the podcast One Song where they break down the roots, the stems, sorry, of all the different famous tracks. And there is an episode of that about London Calling by The Clash.

The bass line in that, I had never noticed it before. It is incredible. And I have since listened to it and I'm like, I can't hear anything except this bass now. Yeah. Go listen to that episode after this. I will do that. All right, man. Appreciate it, man. It's great to see you. Bye.