Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 730 | The SaaS Launchpad: The Ultimate Course for Launching Your Product
Tue, 10 Sep 2024
In episode 730, Craig Hewitt turns the table and interviews Rob Walling about releasing The SaaS Launchpad course. Craig, founder of Castos, asks Rob about the course's purpose and structure, which founders that it’s designed for, and why he made a course as opposed to a new book, or a YouTube series. They also discuss the pricing strategy, hosting platforms, accountability, community, and more. If you’re trying to take your SaaS from zero to one, purchase The SaaS Launchpad before September 30th to get access to a live Q&A with Rob. Topics we cover: 2:00 – Why a course? 4:35 – Who is it for? 9:37 – Breaking down the pricing behind the course 14:32 – Choosing a platform to host the course 17:47 – Enabling action from those who enroll 27:33 – Course topics that help founders get early traction 30:26 – The biggest problems early-stage founders face Links from the Show: The SaaS Launchpad Craig Hewitt (@TheCraigHewitt) | X Castos The Rouge Startups podcast Craig’s YouTube Channel Episode 606 | The Podcasting Landscape, Keeping Your Saw Sharpened, and Scaling Your Team with Craig Hewitt The SaaS Playbook MicroConf Connect MicroConf Mastermind Matching The MicroConf YouTube channel TinySeed Episode 726 | Selling 29,000 Copies, Information vs. Motivation, and Making Your First Level Last (A Rob Solo Adventure) Circle.so Ruben Gamez (@earthlingworks) | X Lianna Patch (@punchlinecopy) | X Derrick Reimer (@derrickreimer) | X Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) | X Episode 628 | The 5 PM Pre-Validation Framework If you have questions about starting or scaling a software busines...
It's another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and today on the show, Craig Hewitt is actually the host. Craig graciously accepted my invitation to come on the show and interview me about the new course that I'm putting out through MicroConf. It's called the SAS Launchpad, and it's at saslaunchpad.co.
And it's an early stage course that focuses on finding ideas, pre-validating, doing some validation, building an MVP, building a launch list, and Finally launching and knowing when to quit as well. And this course is something that me and my team have been working on. It's almost a year now. And it's hundreds and hundreds of person hours dedicated to this. I would love to tally it up.
And just because you put a bunch of hours into something doesn't mean it's good. But I'll just say I don't put that much time into something if it's... if it's not good. And the course has launched as of today. So that's launched by .co if you want to check it out. But we don't just talk about the course. Obviously, we do talk about what's in it. But Craig asked me, why do a course versus a book?
Why do a course now? Why cover this topic? You know, it's a lot of the thought process. We even get into some kind of business stuff of like behind the scenes, thinking through the role that free content plays into the ecosystem, the startup ecosystem as education versus courses. Why not just give it away for free? You know, there's all this thought process that I hope you hear.
It's two experienced founders who've been in the game a long time. kind of talking about the thought process of why launch the course at this price point instead of making it a book or instead of putting it up for free, you know, just all of that stuff. So if you are an early stage SaaS founder or an aspiring SaaS founder, obviously the course is designed for you.
Even if you are not, I think this episode is still a good conversation to walk you through the thought process of two veteran SaaS founders and entrepreneurs. And with that, let's dive right into our conversation.
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.
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?
It's a good question because what I've said since I launched my first course in 2009 called the Micropreneur Academy, I said, no more courses for me. I'm all done. They are so much work. Like people think books are a lot of work. Courses are kind of write the book and then... turn it into a lot of videos and audio and edits and visuals and, you know, so it is a tremendous amount of work.
The short story or the short reason to do a course is that I think there is more likelihood that folks will actually take action on a course than they will on a book. I mean, I can see, you know, the SAS playbook's about to sell its 30,000th copy. It may have already done that, actually. I need to run the numbers for the last few weeks.
But I know the majority of people who read it won't do anything. And I think this new course, SAS Launchpad, it's actually outlined from a book that I had mostly finished. But a course allows you, there's like a little bit of accountability. You can see, have I finished this module? You have worksheets, you have checklists, there's, you know, other assets.
There are other people going through it at the same time, like in MicroConf Connect. And so to me, it's more about, I hate it when people buy stuff and don't use it. Like that's a person, you know what I mean? Like I don't want to sell snake oil.
As a creator, you mean?
Yep.
Yeah.
And I, it's like when I had my SaaS apps, it was like, I hated people that, I didn't hate people. I hated it when people would pay me month after month. It's like, they're not using your account. This is not cool, you know? And similar with books and courses.
And I feel like the way we've architected this course and we're using, we're going to launch it in Circle, which has a bunch of, you know, has an LMS built in, right? So it's like- There's gamification and there's quizzes and there's all types of stuff, which look, if you think that's fluffy, just skip the gamification.
But it's definitely more high fidelity and it's a lot more density than I could put in a book. Like if we just transcribed the course, it's too long to be just a book. Like that's the density of information in it.
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.
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.
Totally. So it works for both non-technical and technical SaaS founders. It's all about SaaS, as you would expect. And really, the goal is to help aspiring founders. It's an early stage course. And it's how to find SaaS ideas that work, how to validate them, how to build an MVP, again, whether you're technical or non-technical, and then how to build a launch list, an interest list, and launch.
It takes you through there. And I think there's, well, I know there's a huge need. I mean, coming back to your first question of why now, because we get requests at MicroConf or me personally pretty constantly of like, how do I validate this idea? And it's like, well, I have a YouTube video that's like 10 or 12 minutes on that topic.
Well, the course is almost 10 hours of very dense Rob Walling talking, right? I talk at 1.5x naturally. And so it is just, it's like, everything that I could think of. If I were going to do this today, what information would I want to know? And so that's, yeah, that's the ICP.
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?
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?
Yeah, that's good. I think the supposition that it is all out there is incorrect in the case of this course. Like they're probably 70% of what I say in this course is it's new or expanded or deeper or better examples. So a lot of time with a YouTube video, and I'm putting out 52 YouTube videos a year, it's like, here's the title.
And I have some bullets and I riff, and that means I'm thinking off the top of my head. So I'll make up an example. With this course, it was like, we're going to talk about pricing. And so instead of just talking about, hypothetically, here's my basic things, which I would do in YouTube, we're like, all right, let's come up with two fake companies.
And we actually have three, I think, throughout the course. We register domains. We have landing pages for them. You can go like usepostcard.com.
Oh, cool. Yeah. Okay.
And so we have like a horizontal CRM, but it's like a lightweight CRM. And then we have... If you say you have a podcast hosting platform, I'm going to... We don't. You're going to rage quit. Cut his mic. Cut his mic. And then we have a vertical ESP for realtors. And I think that's usepostcard.com. And you can go there and see the thing.
And then we have kind of an indie hacker, like fileflip.io that converts files and blah, blah, blah. So all that said, we put in work to make these things more consumable, more palatable, and to go a level or two deeper than I have ever done in a YouTube video. The other thing, to get back to your point of why compile it all, it's the same reason I write books.
Like, a good chunk of the SaaS playbook, at one point or another, I've said on a YouTube video, in a podcast, in an indie hacker comment, responding on hacker news, inside tiny seed Slack. Like, every time I answer a question that I think someone else has, I throw it into a Google Doc. Those become the books. And that became this course, because this course started as a book.
So as I was writing the SaaS playbook, I started from the beginning of, like, here's how to find an idea, validate, you know, do all this stuff. And then... I realized at a certain point, like A, this book's going to be 400, 450 pages. And B, at that point, I was really, really excited to talk about loose product market fit onward, like tiny seed onward, right?
Tiny seed funds, 5K, 10K, 20K a month. Like that's what I wanted the SaaS playbook to be laser focused on. So I had almost 30,000 words. It's like 150 page book. on all early stage stuff. And I was like, maybe I'll publish this as an e-book, maybe I'll never publish it. And then people started asking these questions of like, oh, you should publish it. So I added another 10,000 words.
So now it's about as big as Seth's playbook. Still only about 80% done. It's just not quite refined enough. And we started talking in MicroConf and several people on my team were like, we really need to help early stage folks because they just seem kind of lost. And no matter what we do, here's a playlist on YouTube. Hey, here's a resource for someone else put together.
They just seem to not, you know, kind of wander and not get it. We even have early stage SaaS masterminds that we match people in. And that one has the biggest failure rate of all of our masterminds because people don't, it's like, what's the playbook? You know, what's a roadmap? What's something to get me there?
And so that's really why we were like, let's do an early stage thing and let's make it super approachable and let's go deep on it.
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?
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?
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?
Yeah, that's a good way to frame it. Basically, we started doing the course and I thought to myself, what is this, what's the value here? What have other folks charged? Is there any anchoring to a price for a course? Obviously there are, there's a lot of internet marketing folks, there are some startup folks who charge for courses.
And I also wanted to look at what's our opportunity cost to produce this course? Because the opportunity cost is not just my, I'm trying to think of how many hours I've spent personally. It's got to be 100, 150 hours of my time. It's about like a solid month, which to me is like I don't spend much time on things. You know what I mean? Like I delegate a lot.
So to spend that much time is like that's a big opportunity cost. And you're the only one that can do most of this. The recording, the outlining. Now, Producer Run helped me a lot to turn the book into outlines, and then I would spend another hour or two per video trying to flesh them out.
The total person hours, though, and the cost of this is, it's tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of person hours. I mean, I would not be surprised if we're 500, 700 person hours in. So there's a big cost. So I had to think to myself, if I charge $99 for this, this is a complete, no, it doesn't work. And if we spend that much time, and I build something worth $99, I've failed.
I want to build something worth four figures. I want a $1,000, $2,000 course. That's the level of production and the level of detail and the level of, I think, expertise and value that I think I bring in this course. So we batted that around the whole time. We were like, I think this is a $1,200 course, probably $1,500. At a certain point we evaluated $2,000. Then we had to say...
What's the purchasing power? What's the buying power of an early stage founder? Do they want to spend $1,500 on a course? And this is where you have a customer you have to think of, your ICP, and you have your time investment, and you have your time and money investment, but also you have the value. Those are three related but different things, right?
We eventually arrived at, and we were on a call one time, and I said, I want to sell I think this is a $1,500, maybe $2,000 course, and I want to sell this $1,500 course for $499. That's what I want to do. And my team, well, other people had said that. I don't want to claim like I came up with the price. But we agreed. It was like, this just feels right.
That price point feels right based on what we're doing and the support we're giving and all that stuff. So... Yeah, it feels good. And to your point, this will not sell 30,000 copies like SAS Playbook or my next book. The economics are so different because SAS Playbook can get, you know, wet for 10 bucks on Kindle or 25 paperback. A lot fewer people will buy this.
But my hope is that the people who buy it get a lot more value out of it than they would if it were the SAS Launchpad book, you know, that I had written.
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.
One is we have spent north of half a million dollars producing free content. And that's YouTube, that's this podcast. Oh, I mean, actually, if I include this podcast, literally, it's got to be 700, 750 grand, you know, over the course of the years. And so there's a lot of free stuff that I put out. And I almost consider like a Kindle book at $10 is close to free.
It's not free, but you know, so how many of those, I'm just finishing my fifth book right now, right? So there's a lot of those. So there's that element of like, I don't want to make everything free. This is the backend for us. We do have to pay for the other stuff.
But the other thing is when people have skin in the game, when they pay for something, they tend to value it and they tend to want to follow through. We, at one point, were going to try to comp people to go to like microconf local events or microconf remote events.
And I was staunchly against comping tickets because I was like, they're either not going to show up or they're going to just blow it off. Well, it's free, so it's not worth anything. But when something is truly being charged, whatever the number is, 500 or 1,000 or 1,500, whatever we had decided to charge, I just think people will do it. We'll take action a lot more.
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.
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?
Yeah, so to be honest, general manager Fraser, who runs MicroConf, went and did a lot of research on all the platforms. Because obviously we are in Slack for MicroConf Connect. But as you said, you're not going to run a course from there. You need a learning management system or an LMS, unless you're just dumping files. Hey, here's some MP4s in a folder.
That's not really what we're going for here. And so as we researched that and honestly started putting our heads together of like, how long is MicroConf Connect, which that's the online community, how long is that going to be in Slack? Are we going to be on it next year? All they do is keep raising rates and screwing us around and wanting to do phone calls.
It's the biggest pain in our ass, probably in the business right now, is dealing with Slack. And so we were kind of thinking two ways of like, we want an LMS and it would be really nice if it had community features built into it. So that if and when it comes time to migrate off of Slack, that now MicroConf is just all in one place.
You can buy the course, you can consume whatever other things, the member directory and all this stuff. And so what I don't remember is GM Fraser looked at four or five platforms and we kind of evaluated them and Circle just seems to be... I don't know. As we looked at it, it's like, well, that doesn't, it's disqualifiers. Oh, well, that's a red flag on that one. And that one hasn't been around.
And I know that other people like yourself have used Circle and the features seem to be there for what we need.
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...
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.
Right. But the real benefit is what you pointed to, the network effect, is I want whatever community we run, I want people to have it on their phone. That's really what I want. And way more people have Slack than Circle, so it is 100% a step down in that respect.
But for all the other things it does, it's just a, gosh dang it, it's so cheap compared to, I'm used to paying Slack six figures a year to run my, you know what I mean? And it's massive. I think it's more than 50% of our profit on Connect goes to Slack. It's insane. And so when I look at Circle and I'm like, oh, we're going to need the premium super enterprise plan.
That's crazy. Yeah.
$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
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
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a couple things. Anytime I put out content, I'm always like, this is going to be pretty hard, so don't do this unless you're willing to put in the work, right? So it's like an upfront expectation.
You called out several things there that we've mentioned of the gamification, even of accountability, of, hey, come join Connect, and there'll be channels to be talking about the course. We are talking about... I would like to see masterminds. If you've taken a course, you get matched into a mastermind with other course takers, so there's a common vocabulary, so that adds accountability.
And then I can't force anyone to do anything, but I feel like the way that I've presented it, tried to present it as super approachable and very tactical, like this is the next step, this is how I think about it. So it's like even just structuring the way that the videos come together and all the checklist quizzes and like everything we have is like, do the next thing.
It's like, Oh, you're done with this. We'll now do the worksheet. Oh, now you're done with that. Take the quiz. Cause it's fun. And you get a little check box and you know, it's, I don't know, doing the best I can, which is kind of what I do with all my stuff. Right.
It's like, I realized that I've put out 730 podcast episodes and there are some people who listen to all of them and just haven't done something. And that's, that's okay. Yeah. I guess that's their choice. I hope people don't buy the course and not do things, but ultimately I think it's up to the person buying it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's right. We have 27 videos. 27 videos in this. And on YouTube, you go over 15 minutes and we just see massive drop-off of time of people watching. And that's a penalty. I like what you're talking about. Absolutely, when we put a YouTube video out, it has many goals. And one of the goals is to communicate information, but some of the other goals are counter to going deep on information.
So in the course, I talked to Ruben Gomez for 46 minutes about... not just SEO, but like how he would think about SEO early stage and evaluating a market. And Leanna Patch does, I forget how long hers is, 45 to 50 minutes of how she would write a SaaS landing page, whether it's to validate or whether it's to pre-launch and all that stuff. She just walks it through. It is so dense.
And I couldn't put that out on this podcast because people wouldn't listen to it. And I couldn't put that out on YouTube because it would completely flop and it would kill the momentum of our channel. But I'm glad you brought this point up. Who else did I talk with?
45 minutes with Derek Reimer, the entire video, he and I talking how to build an MVP and like what to leave out and what not to leave out. And an MVP he built that was amazing and worked, which was Drip. And an MVP he built, which was not amazing and didn't work, took too long, took him nine months, which was level. So like, where else can we do that type of dense information?
And, you know, and really provide. That's where I'm talking about like the people you see in the course and some of the things I say, it's like, oh, I've heard this before. You have not heard it like this. Like it is one or two layers deeper on every topic than what I'm able to put out on a podcast on YouTube or even maybe a conference talk could be an equivalent.
You know, when I do a conference talk, like, there's a lot in there, right? If you watch the, it's like everything I know, like one, actually, like one microconf talk became the entire SaaS playbook pricing chapter, basically. So that's the density of it, right? That is more of how I think about a course. Is a course and a book are very information dense?
A podcast and a YouTube video are, by nature, can't be nearly as much.
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.
Folks who come into the course are going to graduate and then still like have questions and stuff.
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.
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.
And then you should think about in six months, this is where you want to be and be doing.
Yeah. And I'll say here, like if folks buy the course before September 30th, I'm going to be doing a live Q&A, probably like an hour for everybody who takes the course or who is in the middle of the course or whatever, for them to ask these questions of me. It's going to be private and it's going to be only for folks who buy it.
So that's kind of a bonus we wanted to throw in, but that is part of it, right? Is if you're starting to do it and you have questions, that's kind of going to be I don't really plan on doing a bunch of live Q&As around this, but we did want to do it early on. The other thing I think people need, you pointed to it, is like it's motivation, it's accountability.
Where do those things normally come from? Well, for me, they come from my mastermind and they come from communities I'm part of. That's kind of the next thing to keep you going is mastermind matching with other folks who have taken the course. And then being part of MicroConf Connect where people will inevitably be talking about, much like SAS Playbook gets mentioned a lot, right?
In the channels and on social media or whatever, like the SAS Launchpad course will get mentioned and you'll be able to be like, oh yeah, when Rob said this about Postcard, I'm applying that, right? There's examples. So I think there's that. But to really answer your question, you said in six months, what should you be thinking? Well, there's a couple of paths.
In six months, if you still don't have any traction, then you should be thinking about, I need people around me to help me. I talk about this in the course of like figuring out, do I pull the ripcord and stop? What are the signals? There's like an entire video I recorded. All it is, is how do you know when to quit? And it's every decision criteria that I have in my head when I quit something.
I've quit a bunch of stuff. I've quit MicroConf Locals. We were running 10 events per year. We stopped them. Why did we do that? There's a bunch of reasons. And we quit. I pulled the ripcord. Why did we stop doing... MicroConf on air, which is a live stream we were doing during COVID. And then it became a weekly live stream. And eventually we pulled the plug on it. And there were reasons.
But what were those reasons? And what's the framing criteria for doing that? Why did we go from 52 YouTube videos a year to 26? That's not quitting. But it was a big decision of like, we ship every week to we ship every other week now. And there were reasons, right? So I kind of, I don't necessarily use those as examples, but we had to make those hard decisions and complete information.
It always is. And that's where in that, that video, it's like, this is how you decide when to quit. And those are the things like in the video, I think that if someone's at six months and they don't have traction, it's probably time to start really evaluating. Do you need to quit?
I think if you're at six months and you have a thousand MRR, 3000 MRR, 5000 MRR, well, it's like, you know, what's next? 10 bucks. on Kindle, SaaS Playbook. That's where the SaaS Playbook starts. This truly is a prequel to the SaaS Playbook. The idea is it takes you from 5K a month up to seven figures in ARR.
It's kind of everything I know advising tiny seed companies and everything I've learned from... from this podcast and from advising them. So there's definitely, I think there's a lot of scaffolding in a good way. And hopefully there'll be that social accountability and community that people can feel if they do embrace a mastermind. This stuff's separate than the course, right?
The course is information and it's quizzes. You know, we've talked about worksheets, but our other offerings, MicroConf Connect and mastermind matching, I think are probably going to be a key component to folks who succeed. Yeah.
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.
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?
Yeah, so I think I mentioned it's like 27 modules, which are videos. And the shortest ones are like, there's a few that are like eight to 10 minutes. Longest ones are like 45 minutes. And so it's about nine and a half hours, almost 10 hours of content. And it's broken up into three phases.
So there's the idea phase, which talks about the ingredients that make a great SaaS idea, how to find a real problem that people are willing to pay for. I dive really deep into the 220-200 framework for idea validation. I've mentioned that briefly on this show before, but this is my definitive.
I'm probably going to take this and turn it into a written piece at some point in the future, like a year or two down the line, because it's every thought I have about that framework. So that's the first phase, the idea phase. The second one is the build phase. This is where I look at creating and launching a successful MVP project.
creating a landing page that converts, thinking about early stage marketing. And then the third phase is the launch phase. And that's where I cover building and launching to an early access list, trying to iterate, early approach to iteration, defining product market fit, and of course, early pricing. And it's not just all me, like the majority of the content is me.
It's very thought out, like a conference talk would be or like a book. But I also brought in, you know, I've already mentioned like Derek Reimer to talk about MVPs, Leanna Patch talking about copywriting, Ruben talking about SEO, Ross Hudgens, who's the founder of Stitch Media and knows a ton about SEO, is also talking about evaluating an idea.
You yourself, sir, came on and you give a masterclass on... sales for early stage founders. So this was the thing is the course started out. It was like, this would be like 12, 15 videos. This would be great. It'll be a couple hours. And as we got in, we're like, well, this is a good course. It's not great. And it's like, well, don't people need to know sales? Yeah. Okay. Let's add another one.
Don't people need, what about building the MVP? Cause that's often something I skip over. Cause I'm always like, ah, everybody knows how to build a product. And people are like, no, They don't. So it just, it kept expanding. It was scope creep. That's good for anyone who buys the course because it's way more extensive and bigger than I thought it would be.
But for us, it just became, I don't ship half-assed stuff. I cannot, I cannot put my name on something that isn't the best that it can be. And so I agonize over this, why shipping books and courses and everything. I'm always like, it has to answer every question that I can think of. Otherwise, I'm not doing the material or the customer, the consumer justice.
And so that's why this thing ballooned, you know, but again, it's like that's to the benefit of, it didn't balloon in terms of, oh, it's just a bunch of filler, like nothing in this is filler. Again, I don't do filler. You know, I try to make it as dense as possible.
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.
As things I've said, it's like, I can't find an idea. I have a bunch of ideas I don't know which to go with. How do I validate? How do I get a sense of which of these I should lean into? How do I not spend six months in a basement building something? How do I not launch 12 products to see what sticks and actually have a little more of a repeatable, skillful process to it?
That's the early stage stuff. And then once you narrow it down and you're like, oh, I can evaluate an idea and like pre-validate and say two hours, then the 2200 framework is around this. It's like, now you can spend 20 hours on one idea or maybe two to do some validation. And then the 200 is like, I'm going to build an MVP. So that's... That's really the three stages of it.
And it's like, look, if you've already launched something and you don't have a ton of traction, this can be helpful. If you've launched a bunch of things and don't have any traction and you're kind of back to the drawing board, this is also quite helpful. I think it just gives you, again, a helpful framework for how to do it. It's not a blueprint. It's not step-by-step.
None of this is step-by-step. We know this. You can't pay by numbers. The idea phase is so hard. If I were to go back to this again, this is the process I would use, but it doesn't mean that it works the first time. It doesn't mean that it works for everyone.
It's just a matter of here's a framework and here are the best practices and the knowledge that I've gleaned from doing this for almost 20 years now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the problem. And that's why it is hard to write a book or create a course around this because the SaaS playbook, which starts at, let's say you're at 5 or 10K, lose product market fit. Like from there forward, as you're saying, a lot of things are decided. You have pricing, may need adjustment, but...
you're in the market, you're doing things, you build something people kind of, you know, there's just a lot more things that are certain. Nothing is certain at this early stage. And so that is why it's hard. Now, I can hear someone thinking, well, if it's not a blueprint, or, you know, there's no process for it. So why would, how do you even know anyone's good at it?
Is anyone better at this than anyone else? And it's like, I'm going to point to Jason Cohen. I'm going to point to Heaton Shaw. I'm going to point to David Cancel. I'm going to point to myself. I'm going to point to Ruben Gomez. How many two, three, four times successful founders? There are more. That was off the top of my head, but it's like, they obviously are pretty good at this.
And then we see folks who do it three, five, 10 times with no success. So there's something. It's not just the person. They're not smarter. It may be a little smarter, but it's That's not it, right? It's like there are steps to take that will get you closer. There are frameworks around optimizing or increasing your chance of this being a successful venture.
As we wrap up, I already mentioned that, you know, if folks buy before September 30th, they get an early bird bonus, which includes a live Q&A with me about the course or really about anything that we have time for. The URL is saslaunchpad.co. And obviously, I'd encourage people to check it out. This is the best course I've ever produced.
It is one of the only courses I'm probably going to produce. This is so, so much work, dude. You know, I don't want to pour it on, but it's just way more work than you think it's going to be. And that's a good thing. The reason it's way more work is because I didn't want it to be good. I wanted it to be great. And so that's launchpad.co if you want to check it out.
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,
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.
Thank you, man. That means a lot. And if folks want to keep up with you, you are the Craig Hewitt on Twitter and obviously castos.com for the best podcast hosting on the internet. I also would like you to plug your YouTube channel if folks want to see what you're up to there. What's the URL for that?
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.
And if folks are interested in a founder coach one-on-one when they come to me these days, if they're looking for someone who's been there in the trenches, specifically with SAS, getting to seven figures, I send them your way. So thanks for that. And thanks for taking the time today to come on the show and have a chat with me.
Awesome. My pleasure.
Thanks again to Craig for spending an hour with me putting this show together. And thanks to you for listening today, this week, every week. It's great having you here. I hope that SaaS Launchpad is a wildly successful course, not just in sales or in revenue generation, but that its success is measured by the people who take it and change their lives through entrepreneurship.
If I can increase the number of people who take action and the number of folks who ship something and the number of folks who get to 1K, 5K, 10K, or 100K MRR, my job here is worth doing. I hope this episode inspired you to take action, to do something to push your business forward. This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 730.