I still remember the sudden flood of texts and emails. It was November 2013 and Google had just announced “Helpouts”. My friends, advisors, and investors all thought it was the death knell to my company, Clarity.fm…  and thought it to be their duty to let me know. Fresh off TWO successful exits, I was no stranger to competition and had become resilient in focusing on “me” while tuning out the noise. But when a 100 billion dollar giant comes thumping

“How’s your company doing?” It’s a simple question. Yet one that freezes so many SaaS founders in their tracks. Why? They have no freakin’ clue how to answer it. Do you mean churn? Do you mean new leads? Do you mean expansion revenue?

Nothing makes me facepalm harder than getting an email from a SaaS company with a subject line that says… “Dan, your free trial is about to expire” *grabs an ice pack for my aching forehead* If you’re using email marketing as a notification tool (and not as a 24/7 salesperson who doesn’t take holidays or call in sick after a Black Mirror binge fest)...

If you’re feeling like you’re in a rut and spinning your wheels around your next “big move” inside your SaaS company… I’m gonna make you a little promise, k? If you watch this week’s video and follow through on the 3 questions… your company will look drastically different by this time next quarter. Why am I so confident making that prediction? Simple…

Did you know that there’s a multibillion dollar industry dedicated to doomsday prepping? Even crazier… Reid Hoffman was quoted in the New Yorker, estimating that about 50% of Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance”. Now whether you buy into that idea or not, there is a type of doomsday in the software world you absolutely NEED to be prepared for. It’s this:

Nightmare scenario: You just spent 30 mins delivering an amazing product demo. The guy on the other end of the Zoom call is all hot and bothered. Loves your solution. Sees the value. Wants it yesterday. So you go in for the close…

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…

I was recently working with a SaaS Academy client who had a serious churn problem. So serious that he was letting 18% of his accounts disappear without a fight. Couple that with skyhigh acquisition costs and flatlining expansion revenue… and let’s just say that this company was playing with some serious fire. “Scale” wasn’t a word you could use with a straight face. Make no mistake…

Have you ever tried to collect a case study only to find yourself stumbling over the “ask” before mercifully aborting mission? Yep. Happens to just about every SaaS founder. Even when we get epic results for our customers… … asking for a case study turns otherwise confident SaaS founders into the chess club captain trying to ask the head cheerleader out to prom. *awkwaaard* But it doesn’t have to be.