There are a thousand ways to make 1 million dollars in life and one of the best chances I, the nerdy nerd who can code, have to reach this number is by building a successful SaaS and selling it.
But for most people, this goal of growing a SaaS to 1 million dollars in valuation seems impossible.
Of course it's really hard. I've actually never done it.
I just think that with the right mindset and by reframing the thing a little bit, this might actually become... possible?
But for that, I've got to have a solid plan. A plan so simple that even I can turn it from a plan to a reality.
Reframing in numbers
Let me reframe this 1 million dollar valuation into numbers. Something more reachable so my primate brain can better visualize it.
The target: I'll be following what Marc Lou has been doing for the past year with his startup DataFast and his goal to reach 20K MRR. He has done it and the magic number is 20K.
20K because if I multiply it by 12, I get an annual recurring revenue of $240,000 USD and a SaaS can generally be sold for around 4 to 5 times the ARR. So that would be my million dollar.
I'm talking US dollars by the way, sorry to my Canadian and Aussie friends, but otherwise this is cheating.
Easy right? 20,000 definitely sounds less than 1 million to me.
Beginning
I'm starting this journey from 0. I'll share everything. My plan to get there, my successes so I can show what worked for me and my failures so you can laugh at me and not reproduce them. And if you do reproduce them, then, there is I fear, nothing I can do for you.
Before I start with the plan, I need to come clean. I haven't been completely honest. I'm not starting from zero, my product already generates $60 USD per month. But it doesn't matter, I will explain my plan point by point starting from how to find a valid idea and first customers.
Idea
As builders, we tend to let our ego dictate our ideas. We see success stories of big entrepreneurs and think we also have to have big bold ideas for our projects. This is completely false.
What do Marc Lou, Pieter Levels or even Tony Dinh have in common? Yes they make a lot of money, but their ideas aren't new. They didn't create a new segment or even create a new tech. They took something already proven and made their version of it.
This is what I'm doing too.
In the past I fell for the trap of building something I thought people would want and trying to solve a problem very few people have. That's a mistake. I don't have infinite time and money, I don't have this luxury, so it's simpler to just copy an idea and make it mine.
Nothing is unique anymore, even more in the age of AI.
My idea is simple: a customer support platform that comes with an AI agent built-in and I'm focusing on the niche of software engineers and small tech teams. The idea exists, customer support is a big problem every SaaS needs to solve, and I'm solving it for this niche. Not every niche, this one only.
Craft, do not create
Ideas can be copied. This is exactly what I've done.
Now, what makes a huge difference is my taste and the soul, care and energy I put in my product. I could have vibe coded the whole thing. I could have carelessly shipped new features and got the product out maybe two months earlier.
But the truth is good quality development takes time. Even with AI. And you know this as well as I do: you can tell when a product is made with AI. The generic component layouts. The same shadcn defaults everywhere. The lorem ipsum energy of it all.
Minimum viable products aren't a thing anymore, the bar is too high. Developers especially can smell a lazy build from a mile away because we look at products differently. We inspect elements. We notice when the 404 page is the default Next.js one. We judge.
So I took a product in a validated market and I'm making it with a better UX for a specific set of people. I wouldn't subscribe to a SaaS with a crap user experience or interface, and neither would you.
Know who I'm selling to
I skipped this part for most of my projects, but not with Cossistant. Not knowing who my ideal customers are literally means I'm building my product blindly. Making features because they can be nice. But nice for who? Everyone?
Being liked by everyone means being loved by no one.
So I've done the exercise myself, to for once, define who is my ideal customer profile. I created a quick ChatGPT prompt for this (link in comments if you want it). It will help dig and nail this part because it's really important.
ICP should include things like company type, who their customers are, how many employees they have, who will use the product, the tools they already use or want to replace and what they value.
Below is my first honest try at defining Cossistant, something I should have done way before writing any line of code:
Cossistant is for small companies selling successful SaaS products built with the React ecosystem. They want to stay close to their customers, offer a good support experience while staying efficient and preserving their time as much as possible to invest it back in the product they're building.
They think an AI agent can help them save some time on repetitive requests so they can focus on blocking ones. They're B2B or B2C SaaS with an MRR above $1K with 1 to 15 employees. They are product teams: engineers, technical founders, tech-savvy product managers.
They need to add support to their SaaS, ideally support that would work and fit well with their tech stack. Engineers or technical founders as the primary decision makers.
If you're reading this on dev.to, there's a decent chance you match this profile. Small team, building a SaaS, probably using React or Next.js, and probably handling support in a Slack channel or your personal inbox right now. I've been there.
Market the idea
Coding my SaaS is the easy part. Marketing it is where most founders get stuck, including myself.
And I get it. I'm a developer. I'd rather refactor a component for the third time than write a tweet about my product. But I don't want to get stuck this time. I've got a great product in my hands, but people need to hear about it.
How do I do that? How can I create momentum around my product?
First, the obvious: my product must be great. Trying to sell a shitty product is the equivalent of urinating facing the wind. It's a bad idea.
But once the product is good enough, I need to talk about it a lot. Like Taylor, the CEO of Beehiiv said: ship one marketable feature every week. Only work on features that can have a wow effect and would look nice in an X post, a dev.to article, a demo GIF, anything. The more I do that, the more momentum is created around my product and the more people will want to join the train.
Humans love stories. If we see other humans enjoying something, we want to enjoy it too. I saw that with SuperX made by Rob. Nothing for months, then everything. Classic overnight success and I'm aiming for the exact same story.
But I only have 24 hours in a day and I cannot build and market my product on 5 different platforms. So I need to choose and stick to it. I will personally focus on Reddit, X and YouTube. YouTube being long content, X and Reddit more day-to-day updates.
I don't want to sell anything. I want the product to sell itself. Product-led sales is what attracts me most as a software engineer. When the flywheel spins, it's hard to stop it. Making a better product equals having more people talking about it, sharing it and using it. The absolute dream.
But the flywheel is really hard to start spinning. The first efforts seem useless until something happens. Marketing efforts compound into more results. I just gotta stick long enough.
Experiment and have fun
All of this is a lot of effort and I need to do it for long enough to stay in the game and see results. So my best bet is making experimentations along the way. Building cool stuff to promote my main product.
This is what I've done with facehash.dev for instance, an avatar library for React that developers can use in their own SaaS. You npm install it, pass it a string, and it generates a unique avatar. This project is directly tied to Cossistant and my hope is that developers end up using Cossistant because they love what I'm building on the side.
I actually got my first paying customers after this experimentation, which is really cool if you ask me. Open source as a marketing channel. Who knew.
Be present and supportive
The last point and the most important one: communicate with my customers. Ship important features fast and well. Fix bugs like if my life depended on it. Make my product feel premium and made by a human.
In the age of AI, this is exactly what humans will crave. We need AI and will learn to live with it, but at our core, we want to know a human can be there for us. We want to know we're heard. When I open a GitHub issue and the maintainer responds in 20 minutes, I remember that. When I get a canned "we'll look into it" three weeks later, I remember that too.
So I need to be there along the way. Create communities, be proactive and listen carefully. Not take things personally. If somebody gives me feedback it means they care enough to take some of their precious time and write something for me. If my product is bad or not good enough, this is on me, not them. So I fix it, make it better and make more money.
For what it's worth, if you're dealing with support on your own SaaS right now, check out cossistant.com. If you read until this point, it probably means we're aligned and you'd like the product I've crafted.
Patience
This is my plan. Now I need to do it long enough, well enough to start seeing results. I would like to say I'll make it in 2 months, but this is probably wrong. 6 months, 1 year, 2 years? More likely. Time will tell, but I'll share everything along the way.
What are you building? Drop it in the comments and I'll give you my honest feedback on your idea.
Top comments (2)
Rooting for you man. You can do it
Thank Isah!