Stop Trying To Be The Next Zuck (Do This Instead)

Eight of the ten highest-earning founders I know aren’t building the next Uber or Facebook, they’re in markets already crowded with 50+ competitors.

What made them millions in cash wasn’t ground-breaking innovation that leaves a 100-year legacy. In most cases it was a unique insight applied to an already existing workflow where dozens of competitors already operate.

This fairy tale of category creation and “building the next big thing” can do more harm than good. Especially to first-time founders.

Here’s the thing: I’ve met many founders who are going after the billion-dollar exit and have raised millions of dollars to do so, but are overworked, underpaid and on the venture capital hamster wheel.

I’ve not met a single founder who’s earning 7-figures a year in cash from their lean, bootstrapped startup and is unhappy. When you’re operating a business like this, the world is your oyster and you can sell it for a healthy multiple at any time.

I’m not saying the Unicorn Route is wrong. To each their own.

But to reach unicorn status you have to fundamentally play a different game which likely involves raising venture capital, losing some ownership in your company and playing a game with huge risk (and upside potential, too).

This obsession with being the next Zuck has led to a huge misconception in the SaaS industry: that to win you need to create something brand new.

This is objectively false. Markets are huge and to build a million-dollar business you only need to capture a small slice.

Let’s look at my client Instantly as an example ($0 to $20m ARR in 3 years). They entered the cold email space which was already hyper-competitive, with incumbents that had been around for years.

These guys didn’t invent cold email. Their unique insight was that with inbox rotation you could send thousands of cold emails per day while everyone else was sending 50.

And while competitors were charging $100s and in many cases $1,000s per month, Instantly offered unlimited sending for $97/mo.

Their competitors did all of the hard work in prior years by educating the market on how effective cold email is and how to do it. Instantly appeared and gave the market a better and cheaper way.

These opportunities are all around you:

• Competitor products that are greedy and charge too much

• Repetitive, manual workflows that can easily be automated

• Product features that could be 10x better but competitors don’t prioritise them

When you’re not raising venture capital you don’t have the time or money to educate the market and try to convince them to do something new. You need to find a workflow that your prospects are already doing with or without you, and offer a more effective way.

If you’re in the early stages and feeling unsure, send me a Loom video of your situation and I’ll try my best to help.

The SaaS industry isn’t as scary as everyone makes it out to be. Plenty of opportunities await.

Cheers,

Liam

P.S.

If you’re an early-stage B2B SaaS founder, we will guarantee your first 5 customers. Read more about this process here.

$0 to $20m ARR in 3 years
$1m added in 6 months
$3k to (now) $97k per month in 12 months