Thread by @iamwillcannon

How you can build a $10,000 a month business...

... By copying an existing business and changing ONE thing about it:

I own two businesses:

1. UpLead (worth ~$75 million)

And we copied ZoomInfo.

2. Signaturely (with over 30,000 signups now)

And we copied DocuSign.

But why?

Take DocuSign ($~1.5 billion a year) for example.

DocuSign is #1... but there are hundreds of other players

There's room for many winners to build their businesses to 2M, 10M per year...

But to DocuSign? Everyone else is ants.

Numerically, a $10M/year biz makes sense.

So here's what you change (choose 1 at a time):

1. Make it easier to use

You don't have to develop an entirely new & unique algorithm...

Just make your product very easy to use.

A lot of software is very complicated.

(you get inside it and you're like "How do i do XYZ?")

Make it simple and get your clients.

By the way,

That's what we did for Signaturely.

Getting online signatures was hard...

So we just made it not hard.

Simple.

2. Combine 2 steps into 1

For UpLead, all we did was add email verification to get accurate, clean and verified leads.

At that time, no one was doing that inside their app - we were completely transparent.

It was a small twist but had a big impact.

People love transparency.

Analyze your product to identify little tweaks that make a huge difference.

UpLead has leads AND the email verification - it does both in one.

That's the evolution of a product:

Being able to do a lot more things all inside one platform.

Ask yourself:

What 2 tedious steps can you combine to make your product, service, or software easier to use?

For example, @blackhatwizardd's SaaS combined email scraping with domain warmup.

And it works.

3. Pricing

Pricing misconception:

People believe charging less is the way to get a business off the ground.

This may work in the beginning...

But if customers are coming to you based on price alone, those (usually) aren't high-quality customers.

But yes, you can innovate in price.

If everyone's charging on a certain model?

You can charge a different model and make more $$.

Maybe you do a free trial.

Maybe a free trial but with credit card.

Maybe you pay-as-you-go.

Maybe you only do a yearly plan.

Maybe you make it cheaper as you go.

Be creative.

4. Multiple acquisition channels

I like to have diversified customer acquisition channels.

For example,

If your competition is killing it in Facebook ads...

But you have multiple acquisition channels?

You're able to get more customers than them.

(For every pond your competitors are fishing there are 10 other ponds they're missing)

5. Niching down and expanding over time

Niching down works well when you're getting started.

For example, my company Signaturely:

I could have done E-signature for Realtors (there's like 3M realtors) and it might have been a big enough niche for us to build a big business

But, if you're trying to build a billion dollar company?

Niching down initially can be great... and then you need to expand over time.

The thing is,

Not everyone wants a billion dollar company.

A friend of mine has an email sending service exclusively for marketing agencies.

It has a lot of functionalities that marketing agencies love inside their app...

But it doesn't work for, say, personal brands.

And that's ok - that's not the target market.

You can either niche down OR niche down in the beginning & expand over time...

All up to you.

To summarize:

1. Make it easier
2. Combine 2 steps into 1
3. Pricing
4. Multiple acquisition channels
5. Niche down & expand

Thanks for reading!

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