Episode 843 | Success Patterns of $1M+ SaaS Founders

**Rob Walling** (0:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I'm your host Rob Walling, and in this episode, I talk with Julien Marzouk. He's a former SaaS founder and now a SaaS coach. He's been coaching for 10 years and has coached hundreds of founders. And in this episode, we dive into the success patterns that he's seen across the seven and eight figure entrepreneurs he's worked with. Before we dive into that conversation, if you are a seven or eight figure ARR SaaS founder, you might be interested in an event we are hosting this December. It's called Tiny Summit. It's a two and a half day high level knowledge sharing event exclusively for seven and eight figure ARR SaaS founders. And while this event will primarily be for TinySeed Institute founders, we are opening a limited number of tickets to qualified founders who are outside of Institute. If you're doing millions in ARR, it is hard for you to find a group at your level. And this event will be just that. It's a very small group retreat focused on founders sharing real behind the scenes knowledge on what's working, building relationships with other successful entrepreneurs, and taking a step away from the day to day to figure out the next big picture moves. It's going to be at one of the top resorts in Cancun, December 5th through the 7th. If you're already part of SaaS Institute, hit us up in Slack. But if you're listening to this and you think, you know, I want to get together in a room, I'm going to be there. There'll be a few folks you have heard on this podcast, and we're going to have a great time masterminding, talking, troubleshooting. If you are not in SaaS Institute, you can email Tracy at tinyseed.com to get on the wait list.
And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Julien about success patterns of 1 million ARR founders.
Julien, welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us.

**Julien Marzouk** (2:01)
Thanks, Rob. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Rob Walling** (2:03)
I want to talk to you today about coaching SaaS founders. We're going to cover a few topics, why a SaaS founder, especially someone doing 7 or 8 figures, might need a coach.
We're going to talk about how to be coached well, what to look for in a coach. But I think the meat of this episode and the part that I'm most interested in hearing and that I think the listeners will be as well is to dig in to your experience having coached dozens and dozens of 7 and 8 figure founders across the decade, the patterns that you see. And I'm assuming there's some success patterns, maybe some anti-patterns here, but I really want to hear that out of your knowledge today. Sound good?

**Julien Marzouk** (2:43)
Absolutely, sounds great. Yeah, I'd be happy to. I think that's also, that's a good opportunity for me, like, order what I've seen.
It's actually hundreds of founders over the year. I'm ashamed to say that. And yeah, happy to get started.

**Rob Walling** (2:58)
Awesome. So I want to dive in, starting with founders doing more than a million. And this is specifically SaaS folks, like, we're not talking about folks with e-comm, and, you know, it is the focus of this podcast and my whole ecosystem.
Why do founders above a million seek coaching? Why should they consider finding someone to help them?

**Julien Marzouk** (3:20)
Absolutely fair question. Usually, they're, like, done going about it alone.
At this stage, they usually feel pretty lonely if they're around one to three million. Isolated. And they want a thinking partner. They need help because usually their lives has become miserable. And overall, they need to change something. They realize that the way they've been doing it is not working anymore. In one sentence, even though they don't say it like that, but what they feel is, what got me here won't get me there.
Plus million.

**Rob Walling** (4:05)
And you know, another thing that I've seen, I'm curious what you think about this, is there's so much content for people starting up.
For people doing 5 or 10K a month, for people doing a little less content, for if you're doing 50K a month, you know, 600K a year, when you get into 7Figures, and I'm guilty of this too, that the audience is just so small for that content. So the stuff that I've created, or we at TinySeed MicroConf have created, for later stage folks, whether Whether it's... on YouTube or whether we create actual products we sell, they just don't get nearly the uptake because there's so few people that want that content, right? So there's not, as a result, there's not a lot of content for folks at that stage. And it seems like customization, it feels to me like everyone in the early stage has very similar problems. How do I find an idea, validate it, do blah, blah. Do you see this? That like the problems themselves get further and further apart such that like a generalized course is potentially a lot less valuable to someone doing a million, five million ARR.