Why SaaS Is Best for Freelancers to Model

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 349

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Just about every single problem in your business right now that you are currently experiencing has been solved by someone somewhere else already. For example, you don't know how to generate new leads for your business. Someone has solved that somewhere in the world. It is a f**king solved problem. It's not like you have to invent lead generation or some brand new method. It is a solved problem that you can just put into your business, and it will likely work with maybe a few modifications. The issue is when you treat your problems as if you're the first person on earth to have to solve them. And I say this again and again and again and again in freelancers, is every single thing is this brand new thing that's never been solved before, so you have to figure it out yourself. So you end up stumbling through the dark for weeks or months or years, trying to solve the problem and failing, trying something new and failing, dabbling with this, dabbling with that, never actually solve anything. So those problems that you have right now, the instability from month to month, the annoying clients you're trying to deal with and not sure what to say in those specific scenarios where they're mad because of one thing, or they expected something that they didn't get, or you're tired of proposals that are taking too long to make, or you've got an empty project calendar, or stressing out because you have zero clarity on how much money you're going to make next month because this month was bad and you can't afford two bad months in a row. Dealing with scope creep, dealing with late payments, second guessing your pricing because you have no idea how to price projects, especially for you project or quote based freelancers out there. The list goes on and on. These are all problems that you have likely dealt with in your past, if not you're dealing with them right this second. And if you're not, you will likely deal with these in the future. These are all solved problems. And just for sake of example, I want to go outside of the freelance world and just pose a question to you, just to drive this point home. I just plop you in the middle of Maine somewhere in a car. You have a car, you have headlights, you have gas. You don't know where in Maine you are. You're probably not from Maine. And you have to drive all the way to LAX. That's the airport in Los Angeles. You have no GPS, no map. How long does it take you to get there? Could you even get there? I don't know if I could possibly get from the middle of nowhere Maine all the way to LAX. I definitely could not give you a reasonable estimated time of arrival. I don't know how I would get there. I wouldn't know what roads to take. I know that eventually, if I drive west long enough, I'll hit the coast, and from there, I'll figure it out. Maybe if I've hit Canada, I've gone too far north. If I've hit Mexico, I've gone too far south. One day, I'll get there. It could take weeks, months. I don't know. That's the approach many freelancers take with the problems in their business. They stumble through the dark trying to figure it out, hitting the other extremes. They've hit the Canada, they've hit the Mexico. They spent 86 hours driving north, 86 hours driving south. I don't know how long it takes to get from north to south, but they just waste a ton of time trying to do this. Now, if I give you a GPS for the same exact thing, I can tell you it's a 3,500 mile drive. It'll take me about 47 hours. It's almost two days. And with this information and knowing what route I'm taking, I can plot out where I need to stop for food, where I need to stop for hotels, to rest, to sleep, and what that will actually turn into as far as drive time plus sleep time, because I'm not going to drive for 48 hours straight. So I can give you a much more accurate estimate if I have a GPS. That GPS represents the solved problem, the best route, the most efficient route. Google has already had all the data. They have all the numbers. They know the best route from middle of nowhere Maine to LAX. Why would I need to go off and invent some horribly inefficient solution? Because I refuse to use a GPS. That's how you're treating your business right now. So I want to talk through what I think is the best industry to model as freelancers when it comes to finding these solved problems. Because yes, you can go to other freelancers. In many cases, they have solved certain problems in a really efficient and good manner. But when it comes to just modeling an entire industry, freelancers, in my opinion, should be following the SaaS industry. That's software as a service.