MicroConf Tactics: SaaS is Hard Until You Learn These 4 Skills

**Rob Walling** (0:07)
It's the MicroConf Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and in this Tactics episode, we look at audio from one of our most popular YouTube videos. This one's titled, SASS is Hard Until You Learn These Four Skills. And this is where I talk through the core four SASS skills.
Before we dive into the episode, I have started writing again. I used to be a blogger before podcasting and MicroConf and all that. And aside from writing books, I really haven't done much writing in the past 15 years, but I've rebooted that, and it's all happening in my email list. If you head to robwalling.com/emails, you're going to hear me talk about my mental frameworks for how to build an incredible company, how to hire task level, owner level, and project level thinkers, thoughts on pricing, positioning, founder mindset, all the stuff that I talk about on Startups for the Rest of Us and in these YouTube videos.
But with more meat and it's all written out and it drops in your inbox once a week. That's robwalling.com/emails.
I'd love to have you be part of that.
And with that, let's dive in to why SaaS is hard until you learn these four skills.
If your SaaS is stuck, say you're doing five or $10,000 a month, or maybe you can't even get to a thousand MRR and you can't figure out why it won't grow, odds are good that you're missing one of the core four SaaS skills. After working with thousands of founders and investing in more than 230 SaaS companies, I can tell you, miss even one of these and it becomes a ceiling on your entire business, no matter how good your market is or how smart your idea is. When most founders hear that, they think you can hire an agency for marketing, that you can find a freelancer for development, or you can get a co-founder to do whatever it is you don't know how to do. And almost every time, this doesn't work. So in this video, I'm gonna break down what the core four actually are, what to do if you don't have all of them right now, and when you can realistically start handing them off. Because you can, it's just a lot later than most founders want to. So let's start with what the core four SaaS skills actually are. The first one, and these are in no particular order as I go through them, but the first one is product. It's the knowledge of what you should be building and how it should be built to a certain extent. And I don't mean the underlying software architecture that's born development, but I mean how it's going to integrate into your existing application. And frankly, this skill, product, is the one that most people don't think about, or they underestimate how hard it actually is. This is not project management, where you are just moving things along. This is deciding what gets built, in what order, why, and how. It's about taking customer feedback, understanding your space, your industry, your niche, and iterating towards something that people want and are willing to pay for month after month. You can't build something people want by accident. This is the job of the founder, and that's why skill number one is product. Skill number two is development, and again, these are in no particular order for now. Development's not just writing code, it's the ability to ship fast and maintain a code base that doesn't collapse so that you don't build a ton of technical debt that screws you 12 months down the line. Feature velocity in the early days is one of your only real advantages over bigger entrenched competitor. And the idea is that you ship features fast, but you don't introduce a bunch of tech debt, and you have no bureaucracy because you are so small. You can ship in days what takes big companies months. Skill number three is marketing. Now, this is not posting on Twitter. It's not audience building. I've ranted about this before. Audience building is not a core SaaS skill. There are really three layers to marketing. It's execution, like the individual contributor pushing buttons in an ad console, or writing the actual content that you're going to use for SEO. The second layer is project management. This is keeping everything moving, reviewing things, keeping everyone accountable. And then there's marketing strategy. This is deciding which approaches to test and where to double down. Now, there are 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. I've talked about them on this channel, on my podcast, and in my book, The SaaS Playbook. And as I've said, just going and posting on social media is not what I'm talking about. With marketing, strategy is the one that matters most and is hardest to replace, because that is deciding what to test and where to double down. And that's not something you can just outsource to an agency or ask ChatGPT to do for you. And the fourth skill is sales. This is having real conversations with prospects, understanding objections, closing deals, dealing with procurement, all the things it takes to sell your product. Now, not every SaaS needs this. If you are purely self-serve, you can skip it, but the fastest growing companies in my portfolio are almost inevitably doing some sales. So I mentioned earlier that missing any one of the core four SaaS skills can put a ceiling on your business. Here's what I mean by that. The way I think about the success of a company is a multiplier. It's the founder or founders times the product times the market. And you might say each one is on a 1 to 10 scale. And realize that they multiply, they don't add. That's very important here. So if my founder's score is a 3 because I'm missing sales and marketing, even a 9 market and an 8 product gives me 216