If you really want to build a successful SaaS business, do this first….

It’s 10 AM, and I'm arriving at jiu-jitsu. The parking lot is full of very nice cars. 

I’m wondering, what the hell do these people do for a living? Not only are they driving nice cars, but they also have the flexibility to go to jiu-jitsu at 10 AM on a weekday.

So I started asking everyone —What do you do? 

And that’s when I start to realize that almost everyone owns a boring business. One of them owns three cookie shops. Another has a construction company. And so on.

It turns out that I go to jiu-jitsu with many people who have boring businesses and lots of flexibility. Most rich people I know made their money in a boring business.

Step 1 to building a successful SaaS: Get rich in something else.

People who don’t have money but want to get rich will sometimes decide to go straight into starting a SaaS business. But in my experience, the people who start successful SaaS companies are usually already rich. They’ve gotten wealthy somewhere else before jumping into SaaS.

If we want to get more technical and define what I mean by wealthy, they are high-net-worth individuals (1-5 million net worth) or even very-high net worth (5-30 million net worth).

Something like 90% of our customers have money to invest in their SaaS product. Then, there’s about 10% who can actually raise the money it takes to get the product off the ground. 

And if you really think about who those people are—the ones who can raise funds—they usually come from money, went to a great school, and worked in big tech companies before.

If not software, then what?

Pick a boring business. Don't innovate.

If you want to get rich, step 1 is to pick a boring business.

I personally started with a service business, but I prefer to call it a consulting firm, which is just a more sophisticated term for service businesses.

Service isn’t sexy. No one is saying, “Ooooh, look at this service company! How exciting!” It’s not the cool thing to do. 

As if service wasn't uncool enough, I chose to work with boring technologies like PHP. PHP is not cool. It hasn’t been cool for years. It’s boring and simple. People often say it’s gonna die.

Yet, most of the internet still use it, and I'm not talking about just simple Wordpress websites, Lemon Squeezy a complex fintech startup just got acquired by Stripe and is built on PHP/Laravel, and even Apple has many complex applications built in Laravel.

Popular entrepreneur and programmer Pieter Levels went on the Lex Fridman Podcast and talked about how PHP is the best (and caught a lot of flack for it).

…Which brings me to Step 2—don’t innovate.

Don’t try to make it different from everyone else. You’ve just got to operate a little bit better than the competition. Do that for 10 years, and you will become wealthy!

That’s what we’ve done with DevSquad.

Yes, there are cooler technologies we could be using. But we’ve been doing this for 10+ years, and we’re probably one of the biggest PHP/Laravel specialized development shops in the country. 

It’s boring and profitable.

Once you’ve got a solid, money-making business up and running, you’ll have some money to invest in your SaaS product. When that time comes, just hit up DevSquad —we’re here to help you make even more money!

TL;DR: Don’t build a SaaS to get rich. Build a boring, profitable business. Do that for 10 years. Then, contact Devsquad to build a SaaS product. And get even richer!

To your rebel journey,