Craig Hewitt
Appearances
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
From a community and learning perspective, kind of the default choice. If someone's building a community or a course or a thing, it's in Discord, which is worse than Slack, or it's Circle these days, or it's freaking homegrown WordPress stuff.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
That's crazy. Yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
$300 a month and I'm like oh my gosh so that's you know that's another piece cool okay so so we talked about kind of the why is this a course and not a book I think part of the skepticism of of a course is like it's just a course like as much as you do gamification and accountability and community like people aren't going to go do anything with this like maybe especially in the early on
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
group because like it's so hard to go zero to one right what kinds of things have you all thought about and implemented to say people are gonna get results from this and we're gonna ensure that they show up and do the work to get the results that we promised by putting out all this awesome content because because i think that's the thing is like you can go watch all the videos but then like i gotta go do the work to build a business how do you think about connecting those dots
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Yeah. I want to go back to something you said earlier, which I have a fledgling YouTube channel. So I can definitely relate to this, which is in a 15 minute video, there's only so much you can say about pricing or value metrics or whatever KPIs, whatever it is, right? Like, I guess it's more of a statement and like riff on it, if you will.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Hello and welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host this week, Craig Hewitt. You may have heard me on the show before. I'm the founder of Castos. I'm the host of the Rogue Startups podcast. Been on this show as a guest a few times. And I'm sitting down with Rob this week to talk about his new course.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
But maybe it's a cautionary tale for folks who are like, I don't need to pay 500 bucks. I could just go get this on YouTube from Rob's channel or from whoever's channel. because everyone has talked about pricing.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
I think the thing that folks might not realize is as much as we want to create like the best possible piece on this, like we do have to consider like I need to make the best possible piece that will actually get views. So it needs to be kind of gamed or positioned if you want to use a nice term.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Like my video on pricing needs to be interesting and catchy and I need to have it be fast paced and highly produced and stuff like that.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
And I think that the nature of a larger piece of content where you can really take the time and you don't have to worry about drop off rates or click through rates or things like that, like you do in a YouTube video, offers the opportunity to go in depth so much more, even on a single piece. And I think the other part of that is you also can put these things in the right order.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Rob, let's dive in and kind of like set the stage for why I think there's a good place to start, right? You've written a few books, very active in the community, 730 episodes of this podcast have given so much to the kind of SaaS and startup community. Why a course and why now?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
I want to pick up the thread of kind of the progression of like book, course, what after that, right? Because I think that especially early stage folks come in, you mentioned they kind of just seem lost and kind of what do I do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The book isn't enough structure and accountability and community structure. The course, really good fit for that.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Folks who come into the course are going to graduate and then still like have questions and stuff.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
And maybe like you don't have all this solved right now, but just generally, how do you think about if you're listening to this podcast and you are that early stage person and you go and you buy the course and you get through it, what should they think about as like the next step or steps to continue the momentum and accountability and structure of for their journey. Cause it's freaking hard, man.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
I'm a solo founder. It's lonely. It's hard. Even, you know, where we are, which is like relatively successful, like for just getting started, especially if you don't hit it off right off the bat, it's so tough to keep going for folks who are like, okay, I'm going to go do this. I think it'd be helpful to set the expectation of like, cool, you're going to go do this.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
And then you should think about in six months, this is where you want to be and be doing.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Yeah. I just think there's so much support that especially early stage folks need. And so I think that's why I wanted to highlight it. Cool. So I think it'd be helpful just to give folks an idea of like, hey, what's inside? Like what you mentioned, like, hey, this is for kind of zero to one.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Specifically, like what kind of sections and topics are you covering here to help folks get over that hump of like early traction in their business?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
You probably talk to more early stage founders than anyone I know and anyone I can imagine. I want folks to be able to self-identify here if they're early stage. What are the one or two kind of biggest problems that you see early stage folks have that you address in the course where people can say, yeah, that's me. That's really hard. I need some help here.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
You know, I want to interject a little bit of my perspective on this because like I introduced myself and I left out maybe the most important is I'm an advisor in residence at TinySeed. So I have the opportunity to chat with many of the portfolio companies within TinySeed. I also do some coaching on the side.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
And one thing I have seen that is in line with what you're saying is the earlier on, the more questions there are and the less clarity there. And as you progress, things become a lot more clear. Like you have the idea, you have the product, you have the first marketing channel. And it just gets to this point where like you literally just want to hit that red button a hundred times a day.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
And that's your job or that's a person on your team's job. And I think that's the challenge is when you really have a blank slate, there are so many questions and very few right answers. There are frameworks of how to think about answering these questions. But there's no just like, oh, you should do this, because that's kind of like where you are, the next step is pretty obviously this thing.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
But literally starting from zero is maybe the most, most number of really tough questions that you have to answer. And you're inexperienced. So you just don't know.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Awesome. Rob, thanks so much for everything for 730 episodes of this podcast and hundreds of YouTube videos on the Mycroft channel and just for everything you do for the community. I think I know as a podcast host who most of it is just output and you don't get to hear it from folks, but I speak for the community when I say like,
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
many of us would not be where we are today without everything you do for the community. And so I think this is one more just really great asset that you're putting out into the world to help kind of raise us all to new levels. So thank you.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Yeah, so YouTube channel is youtube.com forward slash at the Craig Hewitt. Yeah, I talked a lot about sales because that's kind of my background. I talk a little bit about founder decision making frameworks, a lot of lessons that I take away from coaching a handful of founders one on one to help them level up their game.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Awesome. My pleasure.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
As a creator, you mean?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
So I want to ask about your ICP, right? Like we talk about this a lot. You talk about it on the show. I talk about it a lot with my coaching clients. Who is this most ideal for? And I think that the definition here is a whole bunch of folks could buy this and get value.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
But in your mind, I'm sure there's like a person and you probably give them a name and they have a little cartoon or something on your desk, right? But like who is that perfect person? person to get the most amount of value from the SaaS launchpad.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Cool. You mentioned the YouTube channel, right? So I know the MicroConf YouTube channel is like really active, this podcast, a ton of content. I think a lot of questions in folks' minds would be like, it's all out there already, right? Like, and not just your content, right?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
A bunch of other folks talk about SaaS and, you know, Sastr and Jason Lipkin and Noah Kagan, all these folks are like, why bundle this into a course? As opposed to just saying like, dude, it's all been talked about already. And then I think, why charge money for it? If it's all out there already, why are you charging money for it?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Oh, cool. Yeah. Okay.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Okay, I want to talk about pricing because on a previous episode of this podcast, it will be a few episodes ago. By the time this goes out, you talked about selling 29,000 copies of the SaaS playbook and some of the kind of financials we could all kind of imply from that. I guess one kind of why and what are you charging for the course? And how do you think about this from a business perspective?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Because like... You're a great person and very kind of giving to the community. But but, you know, let's put that aside and put our business hat on and say, like, hey, your time's valuable. You got to get something in return for this. Why charge at all? How did you arrive at the pricing?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
What's the plans and structure like both from your perspective and what other folks could take away from this if they were looking to do something similar?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Why not give it away? Knowing all the, I'll use an internet marketing term, back-end opportunities and offers you have, right? They can go buy the book later on. They can join TinySeed. They can come to MicroConf. Why not make this the biggest, best, free piece of content ever? A couple of reasons.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
I'm curious about your approach to selecting the platform and the technology to deliver this. Is that something that you're interested in talking about? Yeah, sure. You mentioned Circle platform that I've used. You have a few communities in there. I think a lot of folks default to something like Slack, which is just terrible. For a lot of reasons. So this course is going to live inside Circle.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Can you talk about how you arrived at Circle as the platform of choice, not just to deliver the course, because you could do Teachable or whatever, but there's a lot more to Circle, arguably, in terms of community and gamification and stuff like that. Like, how'd you go about making that decision?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Yeah, I think there's a bit of a network effect on the platform level with these. Like the reason so many people use Slack for things that it's really not right for is freaking everyone's in Slack already, right? So like just the uptick in utilization is so high because it's already something that's part of your workflow. I see Circle as...