Udit Goenka

5 years ago, I lost just over $200,000 when my last SaaS failed due to which I went into a heavy depression. Today, I am sharing the learning lessons so that you do not make the mistakes I made. 1. Do not trust people blindly, especially your team: This was the number mistake my cofounder Oscar Hernandez and I made. We trusted our team blindly. 2. Don't launch an unstable product: My product was in the alpha stage, and I fell for someone's trap who asked me to launch my product early, leading to many angry and upset customers. 3. Do not build an ALL-IN-ONE product: Time and time, even at PitchGround (I'm the founder & CEO of PitchGround), we see founders having a large vision and wanting to BUILD an all-in-one tool. It's a recipe for disaster because managing the repo is very difficult if the scope is too large. Instead, split the large vision into multiple smaller projects if you want. It's easier to manage, maintain, grow and kill if things are not working out. 4. Follow a systematic launch cycle: - Idea: Validate your idea with at least 80 out of 100 people who have paid you $1 for your idea. - Build JUST one MOST REQUESTED FEATURE by your buyers in your idea stage. - Test, TEst, TESt, TEST...and KEEP testing. Many companies need to understand the importance of QA during early-stage. You don't want frustrated users. 5. Focus on building stability and not UI/UX: Your MVP should focus on stability and not UI and UX because your initial set of customers won't care how fancy your product looks, but what they care about is whether their problem is getting solved or not. 6. Sell to at least 1k paying users before building more: We made a huge mistake by building more, leading to more stability issues and unsatisfied users. 7. Build an audience before building a product. I wish someone had told me this 5-6 years ago. Please only build a product if you have an audience. Spend at least six months building enough audience so your initial distribution becomes very easy. I have learned more valuable lessons, which I will share in the future, but I hope these lessons help you build better & smarter. Let me know your thoughts in the comment below.

I often see people struggling to reach this figure, or it takes two years. I have generated around $10m selling SaaS in the last 4 years and bootstrapped everything under my SaaS marketplace PitchGround & my own SaaS FirstSales.io Today, I will share simple strategies for hitting your first $10,000 to $20,000 in MRR in less than six months. This can be applied for most online niches but works best for SaaS. 1) Build in Public on Twitter, LinkedIn & Reddit. Refrain from building your startup in stealth mode; you are wasting so many marketing opportunities. 2) Create 5-type of content frameworks: - Do a weekly giveaway post for your product. - Create content behind the sign-up wall; you can only access the content if you share your email. - Create 1x Reel per day, 2x Tweet per day, 1x Twitter Thread per week, 1x LinkedIn post per day & 1x YouTube Long form video per week. You can repurpose the reel on YouTube. - Create Value content around product categories. For example, if you're selling a growth-hacking product, talk about different growth-hacking strategies, even if your product doesn't offer those features. Awareness is a critical part of reaching more audiences. - Do one collaboration post each week. 3) Create a community You can start building your community at least six months before you launch your product. As a benchmark, wait to launch your product until you hit 2k members in your community. This strategy alone can help you cross $10k in MRR within weeks of launching your product because you have already built the trust factor with your audience. 4) Narrow down your use cases & outreach. For the first 6-12 months, narrow your use case to focusing on just 1-2 ICPs at the most, and ensure all your copy revolves around that niche. Now you can start outreaching out. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to narrow your ICP and scrape that data is easy. Put that data in your favorite email enrichment tool to get the email. Now is the fun part, use FirstSales.io to launch an outreach campaign. Please do not sell them your product; instead, invite them to your community; this will increase your reply rate & future conversion rate without burning leads. 5) Collaborate with a few Micro-Influencers This is a highly underrated strategy because everyone wants that GIANT big launch. Wait to launch big. Launch your product/services MULTIPLE times with multiple micro-influencers, even if it generates as low as 5-10 customers. This adds up in no time. If you do all the above-mentioned strategies, I can guarantee you will build a $10,000 MRR to $20,000 MRR business in no time. Remember, there is no shortcut in life to hard work and producing results if you wish to choose the path of entrepreneurship. If you have any questions, then please let me know in the comments below