Episode 852 | Getting Big Name Customer Case Studies and More Listener Questions (with Ruben Gamez)

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'm joined by Ruben Gamez as we talk through a few listener questions. Topics range from getting case studies from much larger customers, and how to sell during the day when you're at a full-time job. Before we dive into the episode, I'm running a premium small group retreat called Tiny Summit. It's for founders doing a million or more in ARR, and it's for December 5th through the 7th. This isn't so much a conference as it is a working retreat, where you're going to put dedicated time into solving your hardest problems while being surrounded by other founders at your level. And folks like me. To apply to attend, head to tinyc.com/tinysummit.

Prices are going up next week, so if you're thinking about applying, now is the time. And you heard that right. We take applications, and we are not letting everyone into this event because the quality of the attendees is imperative to making this an incredible event. We will sell this event out, so tinysc.com/tinysummit, if you're interested in joining me and a handful of other seven and eight figure SaaS founders. And with that, let's dive in to listener questions with Ruben.

Ruben Gamez, welcome back to the show.

Ruben Gamez (1:27)

Good to be here.

Rob Walling (1:28)

Yeah, we're going to answer some listener questions today.

Our first one, all four of them are audio or video. And so the first one comes from Xavier. It's about speaking to folks in your space that potentially work at companies that are selling to your same ICP, but are not competitors, and about speaking to them in the early days as you're trying to find customers and learn how to market. So we'll roll that here.

Xavier (1:59)

Hi Rob, this is Xavier. I was watching your video, how to find your 10 first SaaS customers. And the second advice you give is to reach out to other SaaS founders that are more advanced than I am, and in the same space as I am. Let's say I do that, if my first features are clearly differentiating, but not technically hard to implement, and I'm still in the early phase without a finished product, just validating the idea, if the idea turns out to be good, isn't there a real risk that they move faster than me and outpace me, especially if it's a small, agile team rather than a huge company? I know this is an early question and that you don't reply that much anymore to this kind of question. Still, I try my luck.

Thanks again for your great and helping content.

Rob Walling (2:52)

And in order to help you as a listener know what he's talking about, I'm going to pull the audio from that YouTube video, just the one minute snippet and put it right here. So the first is, talk to other founders who have sold into the same space, who have sold to the same ideal customer profiles, people who both succeeded and failed and get their perspectives. You can talk to sales and marketing specialists from slightly larger companies, not huge companies, but let's say you're just starting out and you know there's a SaaS company doing 50 grand a month in the same space or selling to the same customer type. Look someone up on LinkedIn, reach out to them, say, hey, trying to do this, need some advice, see who you can talk to to learn more about the space.

So Ruben, what do you think about this concern he has about talking to people and maybe what they, maybe they steal the idea and they execute on it faster because he said he was like still in the validation phase, right? And if they have the resources that they can outbuild him and he's basically going to lose the race, lose his idea.

Ruben Gamez (3:50)

Yeah, no one's going to do that. I think we've talked about this multiple times in the past. It's so much work. It's just so much work to, you know, even if somebody thinks like, oh, this is a good idea. I'm going to do it.

Nobody actually does that. But if they were to do that, then they might have a burst of energy for what? For a day, for a few days, for a week, but to actually build it out and do all that work. Yeah, people don't do that. The other thought that I had was that he was talking about in terms of validation, and I think of it more in terms of you're not validating the product, you're trying to find out how people buy, what the best channels are, things like that. So I did that with SignWall. I talked to several people that had done e-signature startups either as founders or growth people, part of the team for certain products, and I was trying to learn a few things. I was trying to learn, in those cases, they didn't work, so I was trying to learn why it didn't work, and their opinions of it, what they thought went well, what they found was working well for them, channels, all this stuff. And less about like, will people pay, like, people are already paying for it. If they're, right, in their cases, they failed, so I also wanted to learn a little bit about that.