SFN226: The SaaS Cheat Code - with Dan Schwartz

Starting from Nothing - The Foundation Podcast | Building your business ENTIRELY from scratch.

If you are a non-technical person, you can still start (and grow) a successful software company.

Dan Schwartz is the Founder & CEO of InvestorFuse, a bootstrapped SaaS company that just hit $1M in annual revenue. However, Dan isn’t a developer and he hasn’t written any code.

Dan also wrote one of The Foundation’s most successful guest blog posts, “The SaaS Cheat Code," and today he’s going to share the cheat code with you.

In This Interview I Ask:

• 1:40 - How did Dan get started, and how did he wind up building a software company?
• 5:30 - What was the community you shared your solution with, and how did you reach them?
• 11:20 - It’s expensive to build the software from scratch so, instead of doing that, Dan built it on top of Podio. How much did that save you?
• 12:30 - Did the customer base care at all that it was built on Podio?
• 16:50 - What were Dan’s biggest lessons from all of this?
• 19:40 - Where is Dan going next?

People Don’t Care How Their Problems are Solved

“We could have built InvestorFuse on Microsoft Word, as long as it did what we said it would do.”

When starting InvestorFuse, Dan saved a lot of money by building the product on top of Podio. They were able to go from idea to beta launch in just three months!

Dan wrote in his guest post, “Here’s the big realization: Cloud based software services, APIs, and integrations that connect all these tools together have made it easier than ever for non-techy people to quickly prototype the building blocks of a SaaS … A ton of investors were using Podio at the time because of its flexibility, but with flexibility came some challenges.”

Dan solved those problems by systematizing and automating parts of Podio.

By productizing the automation service, he was able to sell customers a solution. The customers didn’t care that it was built on Podio because they were still able to stay on top of their leads and close more deals.

Resources

• Learn more about InvestorFuse
• Connect with Dan: [e-mail]