Launching a SaaS with Almost No Money

you want to start a business but the problem is you're poor you have close to no money to get started but don't worry times have changed today you can build a fully-fledged SAS business on a budget and in this video I'll show you how I'll cover which tools you need to build and run your SAS and I'll cover which marketing channels you need to grow it and I'll give you entirely free or at least the cheapest versions of all all of them let's go if you're new to this channel welcome here I'm Simon harberg founder

of a SAS portfolio consisting of four profitable and entirely bootstrapped SAS products my products are generating more than a million dollars per year and I can proudly say that I never raised a single Dollar in funding so I know how important it is to balance growth operations and a tight cost control and with that said let's start by talking about product and operations I'll cover this from both a coding and a no code perspective first and foremost you need a website all businesses need a website and there are various great options here some built their

websites from scratch using nextjs and hosted on verell others buil it using no code tools like web flow or framer but the problem is they all get expensive fairly fast some with fixed cost and others with increasing prices as traffic goes up and since cost is our main focus I would go in a completely different direction setion I would host my website on GitHub Pages which is completely free it's been around for a long time but I still often meet people who are not aware that you can actually turn your GitHub repository into a website

totally free of charge no surprise fees no bandwidth limitations and no hidden charges your website will be powered by github's global CDN which is really reliable and really fast now you have two options if you're a programmer and you prefer coding your website from scratch you can use a static site generator like nextjs if you're a no code person and you prefer a no code tool I suggest taking a look at this excellent template generator called Shuffle go to shuffle. deev now you can create your website in a no code editor and then export the

whole thing so it's ready to be hosted on GitHub Pages you can buy access to shuffle on a lifetime deal but you can also upgrade just for a single month export the site and then downgrade in theory you can do the same with webflow framer and so on they also support exporting your code I've done it a few times and the code of exports is a crazy mess web flow is the worst one here it's really really not elegant at all I recommend Shuffle because it's really easy to use and because the code at the

exports is very tidy and very nicely organized you can have a website running in a few hours this way now we need a place to host the SAS Product 2 which is typically some form of dynamic web app again I see a lot of people opting for services like versel super base Heroku and so on but here's the thing I generally wouldn't recommend using these services and since cost is our priority here I most certainly wouldn't recommend them all of these tools run on the cloud provider AWS under the hood and they put a pretty

aggressive margin on top of cost when I acquired tiny Q one of the sest products in my portfolio it was running on superbase and it cost us almost $160 per month to run this simple small tool and superbase would crash all the time making it an unbearable user experience for many of our users we migrated the whole thing to AWS which is what super Bas is already using they just have a more polished UI on top and the cost is now around $12 per month from $160 to $12 per month imagine how this would look

if the tool messed ly scaled hey if you can afford it and you think their UI on top makes your life that much easier buy all means but since cost is our main priority in this video here's what I would do instead if you want to build your Solution on the cloud use either of the three big ones that power mostly all Cloud Solutions today it's AWS Google Cloud platform and asro all other Cloud tools you might find out there simply built on top of their infrastructure and they charge an unre reasonable margin on top

personally I recommend using AWS it's the biggest by far and you can save a whole lot of money by using it directly instead of all those other smaller tools now while that being said there's another movement going on you probably noticed that more and more Tech businesses including bootstrap startups and Indie creators are moving away from the cloud entirely even the big cloud platforms like AWS still have unpredictable prices lack of transpar guant and simplicity in how they charge their customers and down the line for a lot of small companies it's just too expensive for

what you get people want something smaller simpler more efficient and more affordable in a lot of ways like it was before the era of the cloud so I want to share a super cool alternative it's called coolify coolify is a collection of tools that make up most of the things you get in the cloud but it's open source and you can self-host it it's very easy and intuitive to use and you can install it more or less anywhere you want I suggest rening a machine on hetner and install coolify on it now you have your

own little Cloud for $50 a month fixed price everything included it is really awesome my SAS portfolio is currently hosted on AWS but we're actually in the process of leaving the Cloud 2 and we're using a dedicated server on hner for this I can highly recommended now let's take a look at some of the more operational Parts down the line you need to use some Automation and this is one of the areas where no code really shines most likely you've already been using tools like sapure make and air table they are really great tools but

they also run expensive relatively fast so I want to give you some lowcost and free Alternatives instead of using sapure take a look at papley it's very similar you can get access to papley connect on a lifetime purchase instead of paying separ every month paple covers a whole lot of Integrations and it's very likely that they already have exactly what you need instead of air table take a look at Bas row it covers a lot of the same use cases as air table and the best part is it's open source and you can self host

it just like coolify and now you have a free air table effectively you also need to send out emails and for this I recommend using AWS they have a service called SES now someone from AWS do need to approve of your use case before you can send out emails but once you're approved you'll get a higher deliverability than most other services and it is ridiculously much more affordable than tools like syrid and MailChimp and just as a small kicker here notion has an API if you're like me and you also love using notion you can

turn your notion into a small DIY custom management system and newsletter editor because we're using S sces to send out emails we write them all in notion it's super easy to turn a notion document into HTML which we can use to send to our users same with blog posts we write all our blog posts in notion and simply use their API to generate the HTML for our websites and notion is to a large extent free as a startup there are at least four things you need to have covered you need to post on social media

you need scroll stopping visuals you need to handle customer support and you need to track where your traffic is coming from if you want to use the industry leading tools for this it gets very expensive very very fast but I have something amazing to share with you relaunching Founders stack this is the ultimate suffers deck for Founders and it includes access to the full Suite of SAS tools my team and I have worked tirelessly in the past four years to build and here's the best part this is a lifetime deal you will get instant lifetime

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founder stack. proo and log in this deal today now let's shift our focus and talk about marketing we're so fortunate to live in a time where everyone can do marketing completely for free so I want to share some of my favorite marketing channels you can use on a budget but remember the Freer it is the harder it is nothing is cheap and easy at the same time so what you save in cash you have to put down in time and effort instead there is no way around that the first category is content and in my

experience the best place to reach people for free is here on YouTube there are more than 120 million people watching 1 billion hours of content on this platform every single day video content is the future I think most marketers agree on this what some people to disagree on is the matter of long form versus short form content it's probably true that some short form content has the potential to reach more people but data strongly suggests that it doesn't have nearly as big of an impact on the viewer as long form content has it's all about

trust there's a study that suggests that it takes 40 to 60 hours to form a friendship and in the online version this is what's called a parasocial relationship which basically means that the feeling of knowing someone only goes one way for instance I'm here talking to a camera right now and truth is I probably don't know who you are but if you've been watching my content for a while you might almost feel like you know me and you might feel this way with a lot of your favorite creators this is a parasocial relationship and it's

an incredibly strong component in marketing but with short firm content it's difficult to have viewers consume 40 to 60 hours of you on video it's just much easier to achieve with long form content so simply put it builds a connection and it builds trust much more effectively the written equivalent of this is blog post and articles so if you're not comfortable being on camera you can achieve a similar effect by writing long form content medium is a super popular platform and it's available to everyone you can also choose social media platforms like LinkedIn or Reddit

both platforms with massive user bases and people there are used to consume longer posts you can even write articles on LinkedIn of course course you can still post on places like Twitter threats blue sky and so on they're great but don't make these platforms your first priority stick to places where you can write longer posts and where the average user typically has a bit more patience to sit and read the next marketing channel is SEO of course writing blog posts targeting longtail keywords with lower search volume so you can compete as the standard approach to

using SEO it's the way most people do it and I'm not saying it's bad many startups both big and small all use this channel to drive traffic and you probably should too but there's another approach to SEO that I don't hear people mention that often and especially if you're a developer you will probably love this it's an approach marketers Call engineering as marketing or as I like to call it micr products the idea is very simple instead of showing up on Google with an article when people search you show up with a small tool for

instance if I search for LinkedIn video download I'll see free tools from SAS Rel related to social media if I search for profit margin calculator tools like Shopify will show up with a small free tool and these tools are very helpful for SEO they drive traffic they get shared often and they help build up overall domain Authority and of course when people visit these tools there's often some call to action that prompts the visitor to try out the full solution so if you know how to put small tools like this together whether it's code or

no code it's an excellent organic marketing strategy but how do you figure out which keyword to Target you probably know tools like ARs and Sim rush and they certainly makes life easier but since we're on a budget here let me show you an easier way go to Google start writing a few relevant words and see what Google suggests after those words the first five suggestions are probably pretty good longtail keywords to show up on if you can yeah it's that simple I recommend that you get at least content and SEO nailed down but on top

of that there are a few approaches you can use to improve your reach one way is to build a viral Loop into your product there are countless ways this can be done and it can be as simple as a powered by link on your forms embeds or Widgets or in emails that your service sends on behalf of your users on one of my products eight base there's a powered by link on our chat widget which people put on the websites and it has a link at the bottom of the support emails users sent when they

use our product in this way users bring in more users who bring in more users so on another really effective way to have users promote your product is by using affiliate marketing in this way you share some of the revenue each new user brings in but you aren't paying anything upfront so if you're on a budget this can be a really effective way to get your product off ground I've seen some startups offer 30 40 even 50% of the revenue of each new subscriber they bring recur ly and it's really something that motivates affiliate Partners

to go that extra mile to promote your product finally if all you have to get started is your phone start reaching out to people try to be helpful create a network this is something you should do before you start building your product you want to create a relationship with people and give before you ask so if you haven't launched your first product yet start doing that today and in order to create a small recurring Revenue stream to get you started check out these four business ideas that will get you to $1,000 Mr fast thanks for

watching