Biggest wealth creation opportunity is SaaS

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
I don't know what to tell you. This is the greatest time ever to building SaaS. I mean, no other time in history has it been this cheap to be able to build SaaS, build audiences around it, get it to people who have billions of billions of dollars of spending power who want to buy your product. Now, I have a playbook, 30-step playbook for where the future of SaaS is going. And why are you going to trust me if you're new here? Well, I've been an advisor to some of the biggest software companies in the planet. I was an advisor to TikTok, advisor to Reddit. I built and sold three venture-backed companies. I've been in the arena as Trimoth says. And today I'm going to actually just tell you, here's 30 steps for how you could be thinking about building a software as a service company now.
I'm not going to give you the silver platter. I'm not going to give you the, here's the one idea that you should do so that you can actually build it. But what I am going to do is, here's the framework for it all. I'm going to walk you through, in this episode, I'm going to walk you through each of the frameworks and the steps of the frameworks for how you can go and build with AI a software as a service startup. So let's get right into it. The first thing is, you're going to want to go ahead and start with the sub niche inside a big market. You're going to have to find a big market. A big market could be something like, we're talking huge here, finance. So what's its sub niche? Well, FHIR, Financial Independence, Retire Early, which is a movement within the finance movement for Gen Zs, might be the sub niche in it. You can use AI, you can use tools like ideabrowser.com to find some of these niches. But you want to go into these sub niches. Don't make a mistake of trying to build something for a huge market because that's where the venture boys are playing. This is for the people who want to build a cash-flowing startup. Maybe they could raise venture later, but right now it's about building a cash-flowing startup, $100,000 a month, $1 million a month type thing. That's what you're going to want to do first. Second, you're going to want to map this sub-niche's workflow end-to-end. I'll give you an example of just a local roofing company. The owner's daily workflow end-to-end. By the way, you can use AI to go and help you figure out these workflows. Step one, check new leads, website form, Google Ads, Facebook messages. Step two, respond to homeowner and qualify the job. Step three, schedule a site visit. Step four, drive to the house. Step five, take photos. Step six, estimate materials. Step six, write and send a quote, follow up, negotiate. It doesn't matter what the exact steps are, right? The thing here that matters is you have to map the workflow end-to-end. You can either do this manually, i.e. you're calling up, in this example, you're calling up owners, you're trying to ask them, you know, how do I, you know, what do you do in your day-to-day basis? Or you might be an owner of a local roofing company, or you might work in a local roofing company. So you might be that person yourself, so you know the workflow. So in your head, trapped in your head, you have the insights in order to actually go and do it. So, and then the third option obviously is you can use AI. You can go to, you know, Manus and ask it to figure it out for you. You can go to Clawed Code. You can go to, you know, if you're using OpenClaw, you can use ChatDBT. So figure that out. Those are the three ways of doing it. Super important to have a dialed workflow end to end. Then you're going to want to identify where money changes hands. Because where money changes hands, i.e., you know, in this example, negotiate scope or price, collect deposit, order materials for suppliers. That's where you're going to be able to create some, like, wedge in software and sort of take a piece of that pie. So that's an important piece here. You can highlight that. You could be doing this on, like, a FigJam. You can be doing this on an Excalibraw. You can be doing this on pen and paper where you're writing out these workflows, Google Docs. It doesn't matter, but highlighting where money change hands is really important. Step four is spotting repetitive mechanical steps. Why do you want to do that? Well, you want to do that because that's where there's an opportunity to do some sort of, you know, agent or automation. So you're going to want to spot those and then, you know, again, take note of what that is. So, for example, checking new leads, website form, Google ads, Facebook messages, phone calls, that might take five minutes every day or 10 minutes every day. And if you can save people in this owner 10 minutes every day, what's that worth to him? Well, if that person is making $250,000 a year, $500,000 a year, a million dollars a year, you can literally quantify that and it becomes thousands of dollars. And then, so if you can say, hey, I'm going to save you 50 hours of time this year, 100 hours of time this year, 150 hours of time this year, what's that worth it to you? And if you're, you know, chart, if that person's time is worth $400 an hour, then you can go and just be like, well, I'm going to go ahead and save you all that time and you're going to be able to make more money. So that's step four. Step five is you're going to quantify the cost of those steps. So I kind of just talked a little bit about that. Quick break to invite you to something. Now, this isn't an ad. I just want to invite you to a free event because I think that you're going to get a lot out of it. I want to take one hour of time where we just talk about building businesses in the age of AI. People say SaaS is dying. I actually believe the quite opposite. I think that SaaS is just evolving. I think right now is an incredible time to be building software startups that help you craft your dream life. And for all those reasons, I said, let's just book one hour of time. It's going to be 11 a.m. March 12 That's a Thursday where we can go and lock in and just talk about building businesses in the AJAI. I'll include a link in the description and the show notes to join. And I can't wait to see you there. Step six is create scroll stopping content around that workflow. You're going to not just want to create a product, my friends. No, no, no, no, no. You're going to want to create media. You're going to go on ahead and, you know, create an Instagram, create a TikTok, create an X. Pick one channel that you're going to focus on and build an audience around that. It's easier said than done. Create scroll stopping content. Like, I know what you're thinking, like, easy, you know, that easy for you to say, or that sounds easy, you know, easy, but it really isn't, and you're right. But the truth is, you can use AI to go and research, ask it, you know, in this niche, how are people going viral, right?