🌱 How To Start When You Have Little Or No Money...
Let’s face it, most who want to start a business in SA simply don’t have the capital or – worse yet – are not connected enough to do so.
Now, there are many business types and approaches you could take to overcome this, but here’s one that has worked for many where your end goal is to create a Software as a Service (SaaS) product.
4 Steps to Start Up, Low Cost
1. Sell a service first
With no product (yet), the most pressing thing is to get some money flowing in. And the easiest way to do this is to sell your time and expertise to a company – as a contractor (not employee), providing the service that your SaaS product will eventually perform (accounting, job management etc.).
This will bring in some income but also help you get deep knowledge about the problems your SaaS product wants to solve and the customers you’ll one day sell it to.
Not to mention it’s a paying client with whom you can build a relationship and a playground where you can start implementing some tech to see how it works.
2. Automate parts of that service
Now that you’re solving some of the problems yourself, start identifying where tech can automate some of the pains experienced by the various stakeholders in the company.
You can even experiment using low-code and no-code solutions such as Airtable, Notion, Zapier, the Google Suite and comms tools such as Slack, WhatsApp and email – to get a feel for how this could work and give you a solid idea of what to build.
3. Package it as a product and license
Take all your learnings from this, develop it into a product concept and engage your client as the first customer. Your objective here should be to get buy-in from them, and a commitment to use the product.
While the client keeps paying you for your time, consider offering the tech to them for free for a period (say 12 months). Just make sure you keep the IP (rights) to the product you build: just get that down on paper or email as proof.
If you can pull that off, you’ve got a deep understanding of what’s needed, a first iteration (albeit hacked together using no-code) and buy-in from your first trial customer, you’ve overcome a large part of the risk in launching.
Now get to work to either build it (learn to code) or find a developer that wants to partner on it.
4. Engage clients with similar profiles and/or problems
Now that you have a first version, use the case study of your first client to engage people with similar problems. The case study and demo will go a long way to develop trust and give you a shot at landing that first SaaS customer.
Be patient, though, SaaS models take a very long time to be profitable, and you will likely have to raise funds at this point or keep going with the consulting work until your customer base has scaled enough.
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