How to SAAS : PART II

How To Rob

Spoilers: if you did not follow the first part of the series, I would advise you to take a look here first.

By now, you should be able to have the investor mindset:

• You can differentiate between the B2B and B2C.

• You know how to farm ideas not hunt them.

• You know what “churn”, “MRR”, “ARR”, “conversion rate” means.

• You understand the low touch and high touch funnels.

• You know the basics of business and how a product could be marketed.

• You understand the validation part and how crucial it is.

If one of the previous bullet points is ambiguous or fuzzy for you, just re-watch the corresponding video before jumping to the next part.

Episode 2 : The Bootcamp

This is the most crucial and important part of the series, this is the longest one too. The Bootcamp was created and designed by Justin Vincent for the indie Hackers and as he says in his Bootcamp introduction:

Why you need to do The Bootcamp?

The Bootcamp will answer any question that popped up on your mind in the first part of the series. It’s like the ultimate tutorial for indie hackers. It will challenge every business concept that you learned and will breakdown bootstrapping into 7 notions.

• Context : In which level are you ?

• Customers : Do you know your customer ?

• Market: Do you know how to reach your customer ?

• Product: Are you able to create the product with the resources you have ?

• Price: Can you make a pay check with the price ?

• Competition: Can you still get a piece of the market ?

• Longevity: Are you willing to push this to the end or do you have the shiny objects syndrome ?

Justin sees the indie hacker life as a leveling game. The first part of the Bootcamp “Context” will be your reality check. You will definitely know in which level you are and learn that leveling up too fast is the most common founder error.

How much time will it take?

Justin’s Content is pretty straightforward. You will need one and a half day to digest the content. Although Justin prefers that the Bootcamp users take two readings: one fast reading that dissects the different parts of the program and a second thorough reading that looks into details. I would suggest that you do everything in just one take. We will provide you with notes we took from the Bootcamp but I strongly suggest that you take your own notes too.

Shouldn’t the Bootcamp be the first part of the series ?

We struggled a lot into defining which one should come first. In my opinion, Rob’s content is a big introduction into the vocabulary and the concepts behind SaaS. Plus, the format of the section is videos which makes it easy for a noob to get motivated and jump in. After that, comes the Bootcamp where you will know exactly in which step you are, what you did before and what you need to do next.

Conclusion

The Bootcamp episode is my favorite part of the series and the most important one. This one will let you conduct a self-criticism of your actual status, even if you think you are not a noob, you might be fooling yourself. This special episode, humbled me but gave me motivation in the same time and I hope it will do the same for you.

Please don’t forget to join our Micro-SaaSers linkedin group, facebook group and keep us updated with your progress.