Want to know the quickest way to kill your company and team morale? It’s super easy. Invest tens of thousands of dollars and man hours in building your software, only to find out after the fact that your market couldn’t care less. Done. Now you can happily go back to whatever world you just left behind. On the flipside, if you want to launch your startup the smart way by pre-selling your product BEFORE you build it…

I first met Matt Goldman - serial entrepreneur & CEO of Churn Buster - 3 years ago in San Diego just after selling Clarity.fm. I was invited to speak at the local co-working space and Matt saw that I was in town, so he asked me to come on his Rocketship.fm podcast. It was a super fun conversation and I realized this guy was talented. Fast forward a few years and Matt sold his previous company, bought Churn Buster and

I’ve nerded out to over 1,000 business books. Of course, there’s the *obvious* classics like Traction, Scaling Up, and Good to Great. But there’s also this little-known, underground classic that I REFUSE to let any of my private coaching clients do without. It’s so *under the radar* that at last count, it had a whopping total of 9 Amazon reviews (all of them 5 stars by the way...)

“Facebook ads don’t work for B2B SaaS” Raise your hand if you’ve heard that one before (or have been the one to say it). I hear some spin on that one multiple times per week. Usually from a jaded SaaS founder who went “all in” with Facebook only to burn through their Amex card with nothing but a stack of air miles to show for it. There’s a reason that Facebook is such a polarizing channel in the SaaS world.

If nobody’s pushing back on your pricing… That’s a problem. You might be thinking: “But Dan.. isn’t it a good thing that everyone’s saying YES to my price without resistance? Why would I want to rock that boat?” Simply put:  

Ever hear of a guy named David Sacks? He has a crazy gift. Essentially, he doesn’t know how to get involved in a startup and NOT have it turn into a billion dollar success story. We’re talking about… … Paypal (sold to ebay for 1.5B) … Yammer (sold to Microsoft for 1.2B) … dozens of companies he was an angel investor in (Airbnb, Facebook, Uber) He’s as close to a “tech oracle” as there is…

A SaaS Academy client recently asked me what SINGLE metric I would look at if I had to bet on the future success of a software company. It all comes down to this…

“You’re not suppose to succeed!” “The numbers are against you from day one.” Those were the words hurled at me across the board room from one of my mentors. Encouraging, right? Up until that point I had so much confidence that failure wasn’t an option. But the truth is - and you hear it all the time - most startups fail.

When I started my SaaS (that stands for Software-as-a-Service) startup Flowtown my co-founder Ethan and I had a tough decision to make... How do we fund the company? Even though I had the capital to self fund the whole thing, as I had just sold my previous company Spheric, he was 23 and didn’t have a penny to his name. So this is what I did... It was Friday, and I said, if you can find a way to raise

How much does it cost you to acquire a customer? Understanding that will help you understand your model. Most founders think it’s just the cost of your advertising spend. Nope. It’s everything you spend on marketing (people + ad spend + contractors, etc) AND sales (everyone involved in the process + tools, etc)... And that still doesn’t include anyone you might have to qualify, or the cost of running webinars, etc.