15 Years of Brutal SaaS Business Advice In 52 Minutes

Hi, as the title of this video suggests, I'm going to be giving you 15 years of SAS and software building advice directly from me. I've been doing this for a long time. And while I've made hundreds of millions of dollars building SAS companies, I've also messed up a lot, like a lot. And I've been through the entire journey of this.

I started off building little winging software apps that you would sell in little cesspool forums like the Warrior Forum. I know a lot of you internet marketers remember that. I've gone all the way to building tons of little mini apps to kind of middle ground apps that I had a few exits in all the way to building a pretty large data attribution and outbound SDR AI training company. I realize that's a mouthful. You don't have to understand what my main company Hyros does. That said, it's closing in around $40 million ARR. We're growing at about 40 to 50% a year right now.

And while that's not the most successful SAS company on planet Earth, in fact, people are making so much money in SAS and AI that I'm actually kind of on the poor end of SAS success. Palmer luckily managed to grace my Facebook wall to remind me that I'm poor the other day. And jokes aside, while my company is not worth $32 billion like Palmer's is, I've managed to have some pretty good success. I feel that if you're watching this video, you want to get to. If you're looking to build a SAS company and take it from zero, bootstrapped without raising money to making you tens of millions of dollars per year, I can tell you all about that.

And what I'm going to do in this video is tell you all the things I wish if I could go back in time and tell my 22-year-old self I believe would have actually made me a billionaire by now because I have just messed up and made so many stupid mistakes. So, I'm going to tell you everything that I wish that I knew through my entire journey at multiple levels of building SAS companies, software companies, startups. For the rest of this video, I'm just going to call it SAS. It covers everything. AI as an agent companies, SAS companies, mixed AI SAS companies, software. I'm not going to define that term every time I get to it in this video. And this is going to just be a range of tips from various levels. Whether you're just starting off and beginning all the way to making your first 100K a year, even past the million dollar a month level. I'm going to give you tips across the whole range. It's just going to be a massive brain dump of what I know into what you know to hopefully save you the need to spend a decade learning this stuff. Let's begin. And this is also going to be rapid fire. I want you to leave here with just a bucket of knowledge, a bucket of tips that you can apply right now that will show up in your bottom line.

So the first tip I want to give you is build different types of SAS and different sizes of SAS for different goals. What does this mean? When people think of SAS, they think you're going to go out there and you're going to build the next Zapia or the next Slack and that's it. You're either going and building a billion-dollar company or you're just not. And the truth is this is not this is silly and this stops a lot of people from getting into SAS because they think it's huge and intimidating. You have to hire a bunch of developers and team, all sorts of stuff. Now, as we get through this video, you're going to see it's nothing further than truth. But the first thing I want to tell you is that a lot of people assume you're going to have to raise a lot of money and lose a lot of money building a SAS company. Not necessarily. You need to understand there's different types of SAS out there. There are big giant big giant raising money, go to the moon SAS companies like Slack. There's also multiple $10 million boot cap boo multiple million dollar per month companies like Hyros my company that are bootstrapped. Okay. And then you also have to understand there's very tiny software companies that make 50 to 30k a month. And as you get through this spectrum right here, the cash flow or profit goes up. So for example, Slack its first like five years never made any money. Hyros its first couple years didn't make any money. We're very very profitable right now. And a lot of software companies I built when I was a lot younger that made 30, 50, some 100k a month were almost 80% profit margins day one.

And so when you're building SAS companies, you need to first start off and ask yourself what are your actual goals when building your SAS. If you are like most people, you're probably looking for just financial freedom, which is going to be making an extra 30, 50, 100,000 a month, a million dollars per year. At that point, it's not extra money. That's your main funding money. That's your lifestyle money. That's completely fine and it's totally possible to build apps like that where you don't go and hire big software developer teams. You either use a firm or you use AI coding and your own coding skills to go and buy build tiny apps to just make you money and cash flow. Now, as you get higher up through this, it becomes much harder to do that because as soon as you get into the 200k, 500k, million dollar per month range, that's when competitors start coming in who are very cool not making any money upfront or not making money ever, which I'll get into here in a second. And it's not about you're going to see the best way to make money in SAS isn't actually making money. It's actually building the thing to be big. Just understand when you get into this, think about what you want. Do you want cash flow? You're probably better off building multiple $30 to $50,000 a month SAS apps that cost very, very little or can be built for like $10 to $20,000. If you're trying to just get to maybe a million dollar per month, you're probably better off just bootstrapping the company kind of similar like I did at Hyros. Are bootstrap companies, which bootstrap means you didn't raise any money from investors to build a company. That said, that's not the fastest way to build a really big company. If you're looking to make billions of dollars, you're probably going to want to raise money and try to build something like Slack. Most people are going to want to go right here. So, just get this out of your head that you need to recognize what your actual goal is for your financials and your career and where you need to target. I want to be a billionaire and build something like Slack, okay? And I think I can turn Hyros into something these sizes right here. There's plenty of big companies like Surge or Valve or whatever that are smaller companies that didn't raise any money that have just gone to the super multi-billion dollar valuations. For example, Only Fans, Zapier, Craigslist, examples like that. So, just understand this as we get into it.

Now, I mentioned before number two, this is the next tip right here that the best way to make money in SAS isn't actually trying to make money in cash flow. So, what do I mean cash flow? Let's say your software costs you $20,000 to develop and then $10,000 a month to maintain to have the developers keep working on it and you make $50,000 a month. So you're taking $40,000 a month profit home after advertising whatever. That's great. But the best way to actually make money in SAS is like I talked about with Slack. See the way the big dogs make money is they don't make money ever. What they do is they build something big. So for example, if you look at something like I don't know 11 Labs, relatively new AI company. Cursor, one of the fastest growing AI companies, SAS companies, software companies in the world right now. They've shot from zero to hundred million dollars, lightning fast. They've not made a dollar. They've raised tons of money. Their cost to run is way more than what they make. Why on earth do they do this? It's because it builds the equity valuations to crazy numbers. I believe cursor, I'm just going to throw out a number, is worth like 10 billion right now. Okay. So, if you're the founder of the company, 20%, let's say you have 20% of the company. I, for example, try to bootstrap my company. So, I have the super super vast majority of equity in my companies. I like to own most of the company because that means there's more upside for me and I'm also the person that funds my companies. So, I'm able to pull that off. But let's imagine you're a founder and you have to raise money. Okay, you build a company at $10 billion. You've never made any money. You've raised a ton of money. You're losing more money than you make, but the company is worth 10 billion. Therefore, your 20% is worth $2 billion and you never made any money. And the reason why this is the best way to make money is because going and building something big with other people's money is one of the fastest ways to build something big and make the billions of dollars doing this. So you have to understand that most founders are not trying to make money. They're trying to grow their equity value. Then when you have $2 billion in stock, you can borrow money against this for the rest of your life. Say I want a $100 million house. No problem. I borrowed $100 million to buy my giant mansion filled with exotic tigers. This is how most people make money. Facebook didn't make money forever. Forever. Did it look like Zuckerberg was hurting for bucks? No. This is how most people, the smartest people make money and how you want to make money as you get more advanced in SAS. Because if you have a business that is making 100K a month and you extract 80K a month from it, that 80k a month isn't going towards growth. Whereas, if you go and keep that 80k a month in the business, you can then use it to grow the business. And the business is going to grow to, let's say, 300,000 a month. Let's say at 100,000 a month, your equity is worth $1 million just at a normal SAS multiple 10x. Now your equity is worth $3 million. And so if you do this in a year, you actually made $2 million a year instead of just a million dollars a year. And also if you get your growth and everything going, it could also be much higher. You get into the 20x max voltage and whatever.

Another thing I want to point out is one of the benefits of SAS, it's the multiples and the consistency of the income that comes in. One of the reasons why SAS is in my opinion the best business model is because it's one of the best business models for reoccurring income. So when you're building a SAS company, you're billing people every single month. You know this, look at your Netflix account. That's an example of SAS type of billing. And so your goal in SAS purely is to get a customer and keep a customer. And this makes the business in my opinion really really simple because in e-commerce you have to do all sorts of crazy marketing because everybody else is selling what you're selling. And in info marketing, you have to do all sorts of stuff because people don't stay when they buy your products. But when you have a SAS company, it's almost like you're selling a phone bill. And when you're selling a phone bill to somebody, they keep it on forever. So if you can get one customer and you can keep them for years, this is going to lead to low churn, which churn is essentially the rate of what people leave at. So if you have a 5% churn, that means every single month 5% of your customers leave. That's really bad because the end of the year 50% of your customers have left. However, if you get your churn to zero or 1% or even negative percent, which is let's say a person signs up for $100 per month and on average they upgrade to $300 per month and they don't leave, that's going to give you negative churn. So, one customer actually grows the account. Regardless, if you do this right here, your multiples go through the roof. You can easily get a 20x multiple on your SAS. So, if you're making 100K a month from your SAS, it can be valued at $2 million quite easily if you have low churn or even crazier numbers. I've had friends that have been built SAS that got to like a million dollars a year and they're valued at a billion dollars or something like that. It's crazy. On top of that, this makes the business model very simple because all you have to do is focus on the customer making them happy and keeping them. There's a lot of SAS companies like school, for example, that have ran zero marketing and are valued. I think school's at like $800 million valuation right now. And the reason they were able to do is because they bring customers on and they have negative churn. That's it. All they focused on was just keeping their customers. And you can count on that money coming in every single month. So again, your priority as a SAS owner just becomes taking care of the customer. I love that because that's very simple. All you have to do is think about the customer and make them happy instead of all the other crazy stuff. For example, if you look at like Logan Paul's Prime Energy drink, okay, we can talk about how the quality of the product or whatever the hype, all the angry stuff you want to say about Logan Paul. But regardless, they're selling flavored water and everybody on planet Earth is selling flavored water. They have to do like crazy stuff to get people to prefer their flavored water. And there's no way to really like take care of the customer that much more than Gatorade does. It's just fucked flavored water. That's hard. That you have to really do some crazy stuff to get people to prefer your flavored water. Whereas, for example, at Slack, all you have to do is just build the best communication app. I like that more.

Next, do you need to raise money? This is kind of a goofy question when you really break it down because what people think is you need to raise money just as like a thing you have to do. And you don't. But there's not always reasons why you shouldn't either. A lot of people either look at raising money as good or bad and that's not how you should look at it. The way you should look at raising money is what are your goals? Okay. So, if you're looking for cash flow purely, no, you shouldn't raise money because you want as much equity in you as in your company as possible so you can extract the cash and pay for Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and exotic tigers. This makes it also harder to grow the company, but but if you're making these little 30k a month micro SASS, which I've talked about in other videos, by the way, on this channel, there's full blueprints on starting SAS companies. There's blueprints on getting the product market fit. I'll link to them at the end of this video. There's also links below this video of them titled labeled. You can check those all out. But anyways, if you're going and going for cash flow, no, you don't want to raise money.

Now, Hyru, for example, my company was bootstrapped. And the reason I did that is because I could fund my own company. So, technically, we did raise money. We just raised money from myself. This is why having a business experience or having a supplemental business or tying this to an existing business. For example, if you look at Block Works, they started off as like a news site for crypto. They actually started off with way other stuff than that, but what they do now is they have a crypto news site where they get information for hedge funds, institutions, whatever. And then they added a SAS on top of that. And so basically, the company that originally started the company funded the SAS. Now, they've also raised money. But I'm giving an example of having an existing company like an agency or an info business and then using that to fund the company. This is what I I had info businesses in these mini sasses and I use this to start hyros. It's really good if they work together. So for example, if you have an info company like Alex Heroszi does where he's sharing information and whatnot gets all the attention and then he goes and pushes something like school which he is a 20% owner of that works really well as well. Now school raised money but Alex could have easily bootstrapped school if he had joined early on in that that function and they would have had way more equity in their company.

Now, one of the cons of raising money is the second you do, you're also answering the people. You kind of have a boss. I didn't want to have a boss at Hyro. So, that's what I did. If you look at Craigslist or Zapier or Search for example, it's a company of only a 100 employees. They recently did a billion dollars in revenue. They were bootstrapped. They didn't raise any money. It's totally possible to do this. It's just slower. Okay? And so, a lot of people think raising money is bad. It's not. If you raise from good people that really understand your company and what you're trying to do, that are going to be good adviserss to your company, understand you're the boss, it's just fine. The thing is, you're going to have lower equity and you're going to have to answer to people. But if you have a really big idea and you're going for something, then raising money is good. I don't think raising money as your first company is great because then you're playing with other people's money and you have to answer other people's money and if you mess up, it's like you have to deal with them. I rather mess up and just deal with the consequences myself. So raising money is faster and sometimes being fast is more important. If you're trying to build a billion-dollar company, you need to strike when the opportunity is hot and you need to build as fast as possible. Therefore, raising money is is important. If you're trying to keep a lot of your own control of the company and make cash flow and profit and not be focused on growth and more on the customer, sometimes being private is better. It just depends. If you're starting off in SAS, raising money is probably a bad idea. If you're on your second or third SAS and you have a really big idea, you want to scale the moon or your SAS starts working really, really well and you have lots of product market fitting, competitors are starting to pop up, then raising money to build fast and outpace your competitors is also a smart idea. It just depends on the situation. And like I said before when I talked about building for equity, this is why companies go and build and lose money as they're building. You're probably thinking you have to lose a lot of money by default in SAS. No, that just has to deal with the best way to actually make money in SAS because the best way to make money in SAS is to build a big company, not actually make income and cash flow from your company. You can actually do both. For example, only fans is massively profitable. If you look at pump fun, massively stupidly profitable. If you look at crypto apps like unis swap or whatever, massively profitable. You can do both. It's just kind of rare and it's a little bit more difficult and you really have to get into a niche and run hard early on. So just understand those different situations and that's why people are raising money and that's why they grow if they do.

So when you start a SAS company just general advice the best way to start is to build onetoone and do things that don't scale. You're going to see do things that do not scale all over the place. You saw like for example Airbnb when they started they were like manually signing up and like going doing all sorts of winging stuff to get people to sign up and like use the Airbnb system. They it started off as like a weird thing for events in San Francisco that would help people actually find rooms. So, it started off completely manually. A really good other example of this is Stripe. When they first started off, the Coulson brothers would actually just go and install Stripe and like go to events and like our payment processor is better than PayPal. Let us set up for you. People said, "No, I don't want to set up." They said, "That's fine. I'll do it for you." The point of this right here is when you build onetoone, it's a lot easier to sell. So I can go to like a dentist and say hey like I'll make an AI app just for your business or you will go and actually accept your software at first for customers for example when we started Hyros how we got our first 50 customers is I explained to them why tracking would improve their ads by 10 15%. And they of course believed meish but they didn't want to do it themselves and they weren't going to spend money on it. So I said look we'll set you up for free we'll plug you in your ads will grow this amount and then after that we'll talk about you paying us. So, we just did that manually for customers in the info business and we really designed our software for tracking their unique situations because the software was unique to them and we set up for them and we did almost manually like a service at first. We were like an agency plus a software. This allowed us to charge a lot upfront because we're also offering the VIP white club service. So, the cool thing about building onetoone one, you're able to sell much more efficiently. You're able to directly sell to customers literally through DMs. You find your target customer and you offer to build it for them and customize it for them. Much powerful pitch than just like sending people to a website where they don't see people. This allows you to build your company much better and more efficiently early on. This also allows you to charge more upfront. If I said I have a tracking app for you, I want you to sign up for it. You're not going to pay me anything more than monthtomonth in the best case. You'll probably want a free trial. If I say I'm going to assign a team of tracking analysts to actually set up and build your tracking for you, you will easily pay me a year upfront if I have a good refund guarantee. Like for example, at Hyros, if you don't see your ads grow and scale 10 to 15%, you don't have to pay for it. We've been around for almost half a decade now. And the reason why we have thousands and thousands of customers, pretty much every big famous brand, huge companies, huge SAS companies, massive e-commerce stores using Hyros is because if you sign up for it and you put the tracking and attribution on there, the ads make 10 to 15% more guaranteed every single time. Or you don't pay for it. But obviously since our company's grown a lot, the ads do actually scale and make companies money. So, I'm not going to talk my books too much more. As you can see, that was a subtle sales pitch. But the same thing applies right there. That's how we got people in the door because we could guarantee those results because we built onetoone for them and set up the software for them and then customized the software for them. This guarantees success for the customer. It gives you a much more powerful selling opportunity. You can charge a lot more upfront to get cash flow coming in. This is incredible with ads. Bonus tip right here. Because then instead of getting a customer for, let's say, $300 per month, which is kind of hard to get a sign up, it's very hard to get a a person to sign up for something for $300 per month profitably from ads. We can charge $3,500 upfront, and the ad is now profitable. Let's say it cost us $900 to get that customer. Well, it's very unprofitable right here. This is hard if you're just starting up the company, but if we're doing this, printing money because they're paying a year up front. Now, the flip side of that is your software has to work. So remember that.

Now to piggyback on this last thing, another tip right here is you have to find a problem big enough that people will pay for it and that people will stay forever once they start paying for it. This is a really big thing called product market fit and I made an entire video on it that is linked below this video right here. I'm just saying right now, you need to get to the point where if you have or your initial goal is get 50 customers, get them onto your software, get them whatever you're building, and if you can turn your software off and they don't freak out and start threating you with knives, then your software, I'm being hyperbolic, of course, but then your software is not good enough. You need to get to the point, for example, if I turn off Hyros or if someone turns off your Slack account, someone turns off Stripe, someone turns off your chat GPT connection. I'm not saying you have to build companies on that scale, but think of all the software. Is it your business or you rely on every single day that you'd freak out if they turn off? Someone turn off my Uber account. I don't drive that car back there. Okay. So, I'm like fucked I will be texting Uber and and saying I'm going to leave a burning bag of gorilla dog poop on their on their doorstep, but they don't activate that thing. You want to get to that point right there. Okay? And so, focus on a problem where you have that situation and achieve product market fit before you ever do marketing. There's an entire video below this on that. You should really watch it after this video because it's the most important thing because that's a whole video in itself. I can't make it a micro tip.

The next one, San Francisco. So, this is going to be a multi-level tip right here that also comes with hiring and how to find your first employees. So, when people get into tech and software, maybe you're not doing this, but a lot of people do. They think they need to move to San Francisco and hire from Silicon Valley. This is just like the raising money example. There are instances where you do want to do this. So first off, the benefits of San Francisco is all the people trying to build all the cool stuff, especially in AI and the cutting edge, they are in San Francisco. The end. All the best developers, the people that are really super duper duper serious, most of them are in San Francisco are there. All the networking, all the CEOs, all that is in San Francisco. But what is also in San Francisco is what I I like to call Silicon Valley performance arts, which is also just code for Silicon Valley bureaucracy and bullshit. There is a lot of bureaucracy and bullshit in the VC and Silicon Valley world. There is a lot of nonsense there. There is a lot of excessive cost. There's a lot of wasteful money. And when you get to the point where VCs are giving tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, you run into all sorts of weird stuff. And so, if you ever seen that show Silicon Valley on HBO, it's kind of also just like that. There is also a lot of politics in Silicon Valley. And it's super duper expensive to live there. And everybody that lives there wants outrageous amounts of money for performing even low-level jobs, making it actually very hard to build a startup there. Are the best developers and best people in the world there? Yes, a lot of them are. Okay. But the vast majority of people in San Francisco are very mid-level are average employees, but they live in San Francisco. And because everybody there hires in San Francisco, the wages for it are just insane. I've hired Silicon Valley people before and the the the lack of work they actually get done is shocking. The amount of time they sit in they spend so much time sitting in calls and doing business performance art which is where like they're basically just talking and using buzzwords like aligned and in sync and road map and and all sorts of like these buzzwords and and using all the things they seen in the latest Airbnb founder video. None of them actually do any work and they're doing such little work and hiring so many people that the cost exploded. So, one of the reasons why a lot of companies have to spend so much money is because they are in San Francisco and they hire one person who does no work and hires 15 other people to do a little bit of work and then suddenly you're paying someone $400,000 a year to change the colors of buttons on your website. This is what happens in San Francisco all the time. And so, you just have to understand that if you were a founder, I really think moving to San Francisco could be good for you because you're working with some of the you're around the smartest people on earth when it comes to building this stuff. But when it comes to hiring, I'm just going to give you two simple things. Look, if you're trying to build the next Serge or Chat GBT or Claude or something really crazy like that requires like the top PhD levels minds, you already probably don't need this video. You're probably already raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, maybe San Francisco is where you want to be at. Or if you needed tons of people in office and you need the best techy people in the world, it you need to be out hiring fast, maybe San Francisco is where you want to be in your office. But in my opinion, if you're bootstrapping company or want to start an efficient company, for example, if you look at a company like Remote, they were able to bootstrap and they're a $3 billion company. Why? Because they're not in fucking San Francisco. If you look at another billion-dollar company like Clickfunnels, I believe they bootstrapped it. Why? How could they do it? How could Russell Brunson do this? Because they weren't in fucking San Francisco. They weren't in California. If you look at Zapio, they were able to bootstrap without raising tons of money. And how were they able to do this? Because they're not in fucking San Francisco. There's a long list of why you shouldn't be in Silicon Valley.

Now the other thing to tag team into this is what are the benefits of not being in Silicon Valley and building a remote company. Okay, so you have to understand that a lot of the smartest people on earth are also not in San Francisco and they don't want to move to fucking San Francisco. I personally do not want to live in California and I don't want to live I if I had been building a SAS company in San Francisco during the super woke years of 2020, I'd probably be homeless right now because I would not be able to exist in that type of culture. I just would not. I'd make one tampons in the bathroom joke and people would throw me off a roof. Okay, so um wouldn't work very well there. The benefit of though of building remote is there are so many good people in Europe. There are so many good people in India. There are so many good people in South America. There are so many good people in Eastern Europe. And there's a lot of good people in Japan and some Asian countries. But a lot of them are going to end up working not so much Japan, but if you get into like Asia around China, they're going to work in Asian uh Chinese tech companies. That's just how they work. So a lot of these companies right here, there's also really good people in the middle and every other place in America other than New York City and San Francisco. And the thing is, for example, if you have a developer living in Portugal or you have a developer living in Mexico, they don't need $500,000 a month to afford a one-bedroom studio apartment in San from San Francisco. Okay? Them getting a house for their family isn't going to cost $10 million per year. So, you're not going to have to pay a junior developer $300,000 a year to change the budding codes on your website. That's the benefit. You can also pay people huge incomes compared to where they're living at. And they're not like third world crappy employees. These are really, really good developers. For example, in Hyros, a lot of our developers, most of our developers are in Argentina. They are amazing developers. We do all sorts of crazy shit at Hyros. We have the best tracking in the industry. And all of our competitors are doing the Silicon Valley huge techy thing. And I guarantee that's why their costs are so damn high and we can move so much faster. If you look at a company like remote, this is a really good example. They built it in the Netherlands, but all their employees are all over Europe and all over the world. They were able to build super efficiently, super fast with a small team and they didn't have to raise any money. So understand, same thing with Zapier, same thing kind of with ClickFunnels, same thing with a lot of companies. I think building like this is such a huge advantage and if you make your your goal to find the best talent outside of New York City and San Francisco, you are going to really be able to build so much more efficiently and without losing your mind. And frankly, if you're starting a new startup, paying someone $300 fucking $1,000 a year to change the colors of buttons isn't going to be feasible. If you have a billion dollars in funding like all these people in San Francisco, one of the reasons why this happens because a company starts up, they get some good money, someone's like, "You're worth a billion dollars. Here's a hund00 million." and they don't have to be disciplined with their money. And so you have all these people that move there and getting paid 10 times more than their value. It's just it's very hard to start a company in San Francisco because of that. So like don't okay I you will see endless examples of what I just talked about right here. Try building remote. I love building remote company. I think your employees are happier if they can wake up and just go to their desk and work from their desk. I think a lot of people are happier not living in fucking San Francisco. So as you can tell I have a little bit of bias. I don't really like San Francisco. I don't like California. That being said, it's a it's a same thing with the raising money situation. There's benefits to being in San Francisco. There's benefits to not be. I think the best situation would actually be if you're a founder living in San Francisco, building a remote company. So, you have all the edge of the networking, talking to the people that are building all the cool stuff, but you're able to pay oneif of what they're doing, and your employees are actually living a better quality of life, and they're more engaged, and they're happier than your San Francisco employees. Last thing about San Francisco, every single person that's there is a mercenary. You get one person to come and do your sales. The second there's another company with a higher offer, they're just going to bounce. Everybody there is there to max extract money. If you build a remote company, you can have employees, for example, that hires a lot of our employees have been with me for almost a decade now. If you find ways to help people with their own setups and and live their own life and have a life that's not based around moving to a place where your company is at, they're going to stay with you, especially if you talk take care of them and create a fun environment for them to work in. That's good. Okay? So keep all this in mind as you're building your company.

So the next question you're probably on your mind just based on while we're talking about hiring is how do you hire developers? There's a few ways to do it. First off, you're just starting off. You should just learn code. You should just learn the code. If you're young, 18, 20, learn the code. Get really, really good at it. And then learn how to vibe code so you can code with AI and be like five, 10 developers all in one. You might be thinking, well, that seems hard. I don't want to do it. Well, get, you know, that's it's way harder to go and start a YouTube business and get views on YouTube and be selling like anything you do is going to be hard. Coding, worst case scenario, you have a you have a job that you can run into if you get good at coding. You always have a job where you can run off and work for some Silicon Valley company changing their buttons for $300,000 a year. You always have that backup. It's just the best skill set to ever have. It just is. That being said, as CEO, you're not really going to be coding that much. You're going to be more so focused on sales product design and running the company and running the people inside the company. That said, you can always fall back and actually help your team with code and code. And I just think being a technical founder is so much better because and I I regret this. I'm not a technical founder. I'm my basis is in sales, internet marketing, and marketing and product design. Okay, I wish I did code because you can figure out the business side later on in life. It's kind of hard to pick up code at 35. I can code video games. I can code JavaScript but not the level that I need to be able to be at. It just unlocks so much more opportunity and you can build your softwares very easily and fast and free. So, it's worth taking six months when you're younger to learn code at a level where you can actually go and build your initial app and MVPs because then you can do it for free. You don't even have to worry about hiring developers.

Now, once you have the point where you can either code or you have a little bit of money, my best advice is if you're going to hire developers, two two routes you can go. One, get a CTO who is really good at hiring developers. This is such a huge hack. Get a business partner, get a tech technical founder that's good at hiring developers. Specifically, if you can't code at all because you can't evaluate these guys, and there are two types of CTOs. They're ones that are just brilliant tech tech guys, but they don't know how to interview, they don't know how to hire. That's going to be needed. If you're building something crazy like Claude or something like that, you're building something revolutionary, you need a once in generation mind to go build that. If you're not, you need someone who's good at code, who's really good. So, for example, our CTO at Hyros, he's he's amazing developer, amazing coder, but he's also very good at hiring. So, he's able to go and build out the team for you. Also, if you're building these little mini SAS companies, in my opinion, the best way to go is to hire a firm. So there's firms which are essentially a CTO who has his own team and you can basically just recruit him and he manages a team and you basically pay him and then he manages the team and he's working on a few different projects or he has multiple teams that he'll build. So he'll just build you a team and you're basically paying the firm to build the software. This is not great if you're trying to scale to billions of dollars. If you're trying to scale to 50k, 100k, 200k a month, this works fine. And then once you get to 200 300K a month, you can just be like, "Hey, CTO, just come over here and we're all we're actually just going to make this a real company. We're not going to run like this anymore." This is the best way to hire developers because long story short, it's just such a challenge if you're starting a company and you're not a technical technical founder to be hiring your own tech team. It's just and then managing them, it's just it's going to be hard. So, I'd suggest learning code, becoming a technical founder first, being able to build your own app with maybe one or two other developers. That's going to save you so much time. Or just being able to build your own apps by yourself starting off. You can make these little 30 50k a month sasses especially with AI now and the way you can code with AI and I think that's just the best way to start it off because then you can start the you can start the businesses for free. So maybe your first app doesn't work it's fine. You make two or three apps you're going to get better and better and better at it. Your third one gets there or you're at 30 50k a month you can either make another one or another one or you can actually go take big swings at companies like Hyros which I built or similar to Hyros.

Now, next, AI and coding. I'm just going to touch on this very quickly. I don't think we're going to be at the point where you can solo code or replace companies or huge SAS companies with AI anytime soon. On top of just coding a company or building the the app in general, there's huge maintenance that comes with maintaining all these things. And so, where Vibe coding has a very huge flaw is once you get there's there's three flaws that you need to understand. And I'm not telling you not to learn how to vibe code. This is why I'm telling you you need to learn how to just code code. And you're not going to be able to build SAS companies just off vibe coding. It's just not going to work. We're not going to be seeing Claude building companies and replacing SAS companies anytime soon. There's three reasons for this. One is just as the as the database or the infrastructure of the app gets complicated, the AI is not able to take into context everything that's going on. Okay? And so that just there's too much going on. It's tons of files talking to each other. It just can't take that all on at once. And it doesn't have a memory of how your software works. AI doesn't remember things. Every single time you boot up chat GP, it's back to the first version of what it is. Any memory it has is just basically prompts and information loaded into it from your past conversations. And that's very limited of how much it can actually take in. Now, that's of course going to expand and everything, but part of building any software, any game is understanding the overarching infrastructure of your code and having an understanding of how it all works together. It's like a person and you remember how a person works. Say you're working with a person. Do you remember their behaviors, how they the the things they know, the things they don't know, how they work together, the way they view things and that's how you work with them. It's the same thing when working with code. AI just doesn't do that very well. On top of that, as you're building these huge things, the complexity, even if it could understand, the complexity gets very complex and you have to understand the the gen and the strategy behind your code. So, for example, if you have a video game, there's core infrastructure of how all the NPCs work together, how they tie into the damage systems, the health systems, and everything. And each coding, it's not like a a cookie cutter blueprint for each video game. They all have really unique systems that are designed, and it's called the architecture of your code. And you have to understand how they all talk to each other. Okay? And if you don't understand how your code works, there's going to be bugs. And if you don't understand, like, for example, if I'm if I code up a video game from scratch, I've done in the past, you can see like a video of a game I I play right here. If I see like that big giant character right there start moving in a weird way, I know where that code is in the

System and I know how his shield interacts, and I know how the damage, his his damage, and everything interacts, and how he's going to do certain behaviors at certain times. And that's many different files all over the place. And I understand there's the behavior files over here that he talks to. There's the health files over here that he talks to. There's the bullets and the damage and the stuff, the systems over here that it talks to. It's a bunch of files all talking to each other. And so if I don't understand how those all interact, I'm not going to know where to look when the guy starts floating off in the outer space in the game. That's a very simple example right there. But if I violated all that or I didn't understand my code, then uh you're not going to be able to go out and fix that.

And so the way you need to learn how to code is using with AI to speed up your code, but you're still the one controlling the architecture and you understand how it works, or you're going to run into that instance right there. And that's why vibe coding isn't going to be replacing anything anytime soon. You should develop with AI, not have AI develop your systems. You can greatly speed up, for example, that big shield character on screen. I can build, I can speed up building how the bullets interact with the shield, and then the health systems behind that, and then automate the spawning of of systems or create a spawn system in the game with AI very, very quickly because it can look at the code and do that. So I can create individual parts and speed up that. But as far as the architecture and all of it working together, that's where you run into problems, and that's why vibe coding isn't a scalable solution.

Finally, that comes up to the third problem, which is maintaining all of it. As you build a big SAS app, things change, APIs change, integrations change, new stuff releases in the world that the AIs haven't seen before and they can't code or they don't understand and are not able to go into. So again, you're going to have to understand how your app works to maintain your app, which takes tons of developers. So for example, people are like, well, dentist offices are going to start just making and coding their own apps. No, they're not. Look at all the infrastructure goes into your business. You're not going to have a team of developers maintaining every single one of those apps. You're just going to pay for an app. Okay, so understand AI coding is about to speed up. Developers can get way more done, but no one's going to be vibe coding apps.

And then finally, the last big problem with it is if you watch that one interview where the person talks about just how AI is pretty much slop right now. It's not slop. Claude can do like really good coding, excellent coding without errors, especially at a high level. The problem with it is that when you start building anything really advanced, you're going to be creating and working off new ideas. And what LLMs are is basically like echo machines, and they're they're they're prediction machines. They predict what's going to come next by working at what's already been created in the prompt or the input of what you're sending in. And they use things they've seen in the past. And so they have to be using old things and then comparing that to create not a new thing, but they just might copy it over and predict what's going to be there. They're not able to create a new thing. They can't create new ideas. They can't come up with new concepts. They can't creatively put two things together and come up with a new idea. It has to be something existing that creates problems as you're trying to create something completely brand new that's particularly advanced. And as soon as you get into that area, it's not even going to know how to work it all together. So these are the these are the the challenges with AI coding right now.

And you're probably thinking, well, is SAS going to become extinct? I don't think so. And if you look at the LLM right now, what's happening is we're really hitting a plateau where GPT-4 is not that much better than GPT-5. Claude's making huge jumps in coding, but it's even still like a 10, 20% jump right here. They're still super functional. You can do crazy stuff with them, but we're not seeing the 100% leaps that we used to see. And I think that's probably going to lead to the AI bubble here maybe later in 2026 when ChatGPT hits a plateau and they've spent way more money than they can earn. With that being said, finally, LLM right now, the the amount of available benefits they provide to businesses has given us enough tech to build around for the next decade. So, it's the best time to actually be building SAS companies that use AI and LLMs because there's so many creative applications of using stuff like ChatGPT in software. For example, Harvey, it's a ChatGPT wrapper. It just plugs in the ChatGPT, but because of all the systems and stuff they have inside that, they were able to build a $150 million per month business worth billions and billions and billions of dollars. I think it's either 150 million a year or 150 million a month. I don't know. But they were able to build a giant [ __ ] company just wrapping around ChatGPT because of all the intricacies of working with these and applying it to businesses. That's not something someone's just going to be able to go out there and copy.

It's the same thing kind of with Hyros and what we're doing with Hyros AI. You slap it on a website, it's increasing revenue of businesses by 3 to 5% when you put on websites. It's a little code. It detects anonymous and your returning visitors on the website and it uses an AI mind that's trained around your business to reach out to them if they don't buy and then bring them back to the website and get them to buy. You slap on on your site SAS business and Shopify stores especially, it increases the amount of calls or the sales coming in by three to five percent like clockwork. And that is a ChatGPT wrapper, but the advantage of it is the tracking systems in Hyros that are not ChatGPT, and the data that we have that customers are able to store up, and the way we manipulate ChatGPT to do certain things, which is very, very complicated. Very similar to like Finn at Intercom, which is a ChatGPT wrapper, but there's all these intricacies they built in to manage your customer support systems, to read your customer support systems, to train ChatGPT around your business that make it super duper valuable. So yes, people are going to roll their eyes when they say LLM wrapper companies, which are basically ChatGPT. They're built on top of ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. Cursor is built on top of Claude. They're doing okay. And I think we're going to see tons of room to run in that area right there. So that's just my general AI coding speech and where I think the terms on all that is.

So the next thing on top of this, well, we're talking about Harvey. Harvey has like, I I might be pulling this out of my butt, like 500 customers. All right. Or if you look at something there's a there's an AI business called Turig and they have like eight big customers and they make, I I think they did like a billion in revenue or 500 million. A lot of money. Harvey doing either 150 million a year or I think they ran, I think it's 150 million a year. Anyway, they're valued at like $7 billion or something. Good result. Okay. So, what are the points of this right here? You you don't really, those are kind of bad examples because of how much money they make, but you want to sell to high-end customers first. Why? All right, so look, it is going to be way easier for you to call a law firm and create a custom app just for them, one to one, that bills them $30,000 a month, than it is going to be for you to get uh 300 $100 per month customers on your app that stay forever. Why? Because you can look at all the advantages you have. You can make an app one to one for them. You can do it for them. You can manage it all for them. It's like a service. You can build custom things for them. They get better customer support. And you can guarantee results because you're doing it all for them. So, if we get one customer at $30,000 a month and we're doing everything for them, we can basically guarantee that person is going to stay if we get them results. So, if we go to like a law firm or a high-end business that has a lot of money, and let's say we build them something that costs them $30,000 a month, but it makes them an extra $150,000 a month. Easy, easy, easy, easy, easy. This gives you ton of funding for your company, gives you tons of cash flow coming in, and guarantees the customers going there. And so, it'd be way easier just to get 10 $30,000 a month businesses or $30,000 a month clients than it would be to get thousands and thousands of $100 per month clients because those $100 per month clients, you have to come in, it has to work for them every single time, and you can't talk or interact with them and do all these things right here. So the sales process, the keeping of the customer, everything is much harder, and it's harder to run your ads properly, and you have to spend a lot of money on marketing because you have to get lots of them in. Hell, if you're doing high-end, you can just reach out one to one. This works so much better when you're first founding your company, and you can either keep going down the high-end route or you can take everything you built for this customer right here and then start mass marketing it so you can make it for smaller uh law firms and they can sign up self-serve for it.

Okay, so this is the best way to start a company. This is how we did at Hyros. We found info businesses that were already spending $50,000 a month on ads. Probably making $100,000, $500,000, a million a month. And we said, "Hey, we're going to set up a tracking. You're making $200,000 a month on your ads. This tracking will make you an extra $20,000 a month from scaling your ads. We guarantee it. You're not going to have to pay us if it doesn't do that. You pay your upfront because we're going to custom set it all up for you." That year upfront makes us a lot of money, gives us cash flow coming in. Instead of getting hundreds of customers to get to $100,000 a month at Hyros, we only really need to get 30 customers per month to get to $100,000 a month. That wasn't too hard to do. We were able to scale. We had cash flow coming in. And that became reoccurring as those annual contracts renewed every single year. And so that's how we built the company much better and much easier than going and selling a $19 per month little gizmo to thousands of people, which is very hard to do.

Which comes down to the next thing. Before you start doing any marketing, make sure the customers have results. I don't care. This is a little bit challenging sometimes if you're in a place where you need to get cash flow because you can't always make the software perfect before you start selling it. But if you do it one to one and you can get 20 customers that are getting a killer result, then you actually have a product. Like I said before, if they they threaten you with pitchforks, if you turn it off, then you have a product. You have product market fit. Okay? So the reason why you want to do that is because if you don't have this, what's going to happen is when you run marketing, people are going to come into the product and they're going to bounce out of the product.

Now, what do I also mean by result? For example, when Dropbox first started, if they got 100 people in, only about five of the people stayed and used Dropbox, even though Dropbox had the full functionality it did before. Uh when Gamma, a company that's worth billions of dollars right now, they make PowerPoint presentations from AI. When they first started off, the amount of people that joined the software and actually stayed was very low. Now the companies are worth billions of dollars. How they do this? It's because Dropbox, after they got the result for the customers, made sure the customer stayed by improving their onboarding and the ease of use of the software. So the person actually understood and comprehended what was going on and then got to the final result. Gamma. If you go look at their onboarding system, go sign up for them. Just as an example, you'll be making PowerPoints in seconds while like doing a coloring book onboarding. This got the amount of people that actually came in while the result is was there originally, but most people weren't getting to the result. Now it gets them the result. Their churn is super low because people get to the result very fast, and it's a very sticky software. These things altogether is what you need before you start marketing the software.

If you look at School, for example, they they didn't have good, I I'm assuming they didn't have good churn rates when they started off. What Sam Ovenans did over there is he just made sure and worked on the product and made sure the customer got the result and was able to get to the point where they're able to get a result. Not just getting the result is good enough. That that's not good enough. If the software just gets a result, the person has to get to the point where they realize they're getting a result and they see the result. If a lot of softwares that you sign up for, it's like you walk into an IKEA store and there's just a a throwing IKEA pieces everywhere and the sign says good luck in just an empty room. Doesn't matter if that that bed that you build from the IKEA furniture is the most comfortable bed on planet Earth. If people aren't able to build and construct and get to the point where they lay down, you they're not going to keep paying for the product. Same exact situation. So, you need to get all this laid out before you do your marketing, before you start selling it. Because I'm sure you've seen a lot of info marketers and internet marketing gurus, a lot of the most famous dudes outside Alex Hormozi have launched softwares and none of them exist a year later. Why? Even if the softwares work, it's this. They start marketing before they made sure the result was there and the customer can get to the result. Okay? If Uber, for example, when you signed up for it, it took 15 forms and you had to like do a ton of manual stuff and verify your ID, you wouldn't use Uber despite Uber getting the result. Understand this when you're building your companies.

And my final two pieces of advice is this one right here. And there's times to disobey this. Just do one thing when you're trying to go big. If you're just starting off, I think the best way to actually make money is to build micro SAS because you can actually go and niche down. And so this is one tip that I'm going to give you right off the bat. Niche super far down when you're starting off. Don't just go after the uh call booking industry. Go after the call booking industry for dentists, but don't just go after dentists. Go after the call booking industry for organic dentists. The people that remove uh little or the metal fillings that are from the 90s and replace with an organic filling. Do I saying just do organic dentists? No, I'm saying you niche down to like the super subsets of businesses. Don't go after personal trainers. Go after personal trainers for um older women, MILS. Okay. Uh go older uh geriatric people, something like that. Niche down because then you can make an app that's specifically for them and beat everybody else. Do you become the only person selling the product in the entire industry? Does that allow you to scale very far? No. You'll probably only be able to make 20, 30, 50,000 a month tops from the app. That's fine. Then you go and clone the app and you make it for another super duper small subset. Then you go and clone an app and you make it from another super duper small subset. Then you could actually wrap the apps together and turn into one big product. You see how that works? Niche down at first. That's going to allow you to build much better.

But once you actually want to get to the point where you make a million or a couple million or 10 million or whatever a month, what you want to do is you need to just focus on one thing. You shouldn't be building multiple SAS companies all the time. I have friends that have like an info product and a SAS company and they run a YouTube channel and all sort of stuff like that. And unless you're Alex Hormozi, who does all those things, you're not going to be able to pull it off. Okay. Uh when I started getting really results and I got to the huge valuations at Hyros, it's just when I sat down and said, I'm just only going to work on Hyros. I'm only going to work on SAS. That's just all I do. The reason I know so much about SAS and the reason I'm good at it is because that's just all I do. I don't do anything else. Yes, I run this YouTube channel. It's for fun and I it's easy for me because I understand SAS information. Yes, I have my crypto channel, but I do crypto gambling and that stuff on the side. All right, that's not my main thing. That's not my focus. You don't see me building crypto companies or like big serious crypto company swings. Just do one thing. Just do one thing because in order for you to win in SAS, people don't use the third and fourth best product. They use number one and number two, and the number one gets most money. There is Slack and then there is other customer communication apps. There is Stripe and there's other payment processors. There is Gamma and then there's other PowerPoint creation softwares. There is 11 Labs and then there is other AI voice softwares. There is only going to be number one. There is Zapier and there's other tons of connection softwares. There is ClickFunnels and Go High Levels and there's other landing page creators. It's always number one and number two. So, in order for you to be the best and get all the money, 90% of the money in the industry, you have to be number one. And so, the only way you're going to do this is if if it's the only thing you're doing, because if someone else is doing it, and unless you're Elon Musk, which you are not, you're just not going to be able to beat them if they're only doing one thing and you're doing five. It's very simple.

And then finally, my last piece of advice for you on this is if we're talking about number ones and number twos is focus on your customer. If you want to know where your ideas are going to be at, you want to know where you're going to get results at, talk to your customer. If you want to know what to build next, talk to your customer. You want to know why your churn is high, talk to your customer. If you want to know things in your software confusing or why they're not completely onboarding, you talk to your customer. If you want to know how to get more customers, you talk to your customer because if you make them happy, you're going to get tons more people just like your customer. Also, know your customer. Have a target customer. I don't sell to every single person on earth. For example, one of the things that Triple Whale and Klaviyo did really really well when they were building their companies is they saw other companies doing like email marketing for example, Klaviyo saw this and instead of going after every single type of business with email that needed to do email marketing, they just focused on Shopify stores and they only did Shopify stores and they only talked to Shopify customers and so they built the best damn number one product for Shopify customers. You don't have to be number one in an entire industry. You have to be number one for a specific type of customer. Okay? Understand that.

Do not focus on your competitors. Now, look, there is times to look at your competitors and what they're doing well and what you can learn from your competitors, but you're never trying to like you you're not they're not the person that's buying from you. You shouldn't be chasing your competitors ever. You should be chasing your customers. If you're not sure about what to do with your company, don't go and say, "Well, what's so and so doing? We're going to do it because so and so is doing this." Think about your what your customer, who your target customer is, who's really happy with your software, and how you can get them to be even happier and stay even longer. And then how you can help them share your product with other people like them. That's how you're going to win. All right? You're going to win by getting the most of these type of people right here, not by stealing people from your competitors because they're already talking to their target customer if they're smart. If they're idiots, they're going to start chasing you or chasing other companies and they'll hemorrhage all their comp customers anyways. But if they're just focused on their target customer and making them happy, you need to find how to differentiate and you need to find out how to target that target customer better and be number one in space. If they're number one at it, you need to be doing something else. You shouldn't be trying to take their cookie or chasing them or or doing something. You should be building something because it needs to exist for the customer. If you're building something just to copy and get money, it just becomes 10 times harder. So, that's just a general rant on that. There's so many other factors and examples and and reasons I could give for this, but you could just skip all that and just focus on your damn customer and you're going to get such such such such better results.

So, that is an hour. The time is up. I've been talking for an hour here. I'm sure when the editor edits down, it's going to be less. That is everything. Not everything, I know, but that is like an endless list of tips and tricks in SAS lightning rounded at you that are going to show up in your bottom line and are going to make you a lot more successful. If you like this and stuff, um, a lot of the concepts I broke down are below this video. Product market fit, how to start the company from scratch, all laid out, much more specifics, not just endless tips, just one topic at a time. Very well laid out. If you like information on SAS companies and building SAS companies, subscribe to this channel. If you want to improve your SAS ads further and get more customers for your ads and get more customers for your SAS, you should check out Hyros because if you apply our tracking like all the big SAS companies right here, you're going to get more calls coming in because you're going to be able to get calls cheaper and more efficiently. And if you want more calls coming to your website passively, you should put on Hyros AI because then our outbound SER will reach out and bring people back to the site and increase the amount of calls you're getting by 3 to 5%, which is a ton of money. For example, we use at Hyros, we've added over $100,000 a month in MRR just from our AI system plugged into the AI training that we've put into it, which will be done custom for your company as well if you do it. So, you should go check out Hyros because it's going to make you more money. And if you like making more money instead of less money, it's it's the thing for you. Okay, so I'll see you in the next video. Bye.