Being a founder is f**king difficult.

The sheer force of will needed to bring a new product into the world is something that only people who have tried it can truly comprehend. We’re spending every waking moment building a product that will make people’s lives easier — but getting them to listen is always the hardest part.

So many startups fail because of how difficult it is to get people to listen. Without listening, they can’t see the value. Without seeing the value, they wont buy. This chain of events makes the holy grail of a startup, achieving predictable revenue, impossible. And without predictable revenue, startup life is 10x harder.

Without predictable revenue SaaS founders are forced to frequently shift our focus from strategic growth to short-term financial survival. This uncertainty hampers our ability to plan and strategically invest in key areas like product development, marketing, and hiring, leading to stalled progress and missed opportunities. Ultimately, the constant battle against financial instability diverts precious time and energy away from innovation and long-term vision, jeopardizing chances of success.

So how do we get people to listen?

A path to predictable revenue

We’ve spent years testing the hypothesis that there’s a simple solution.

A way to add predictability to prospecting for SaaS founders.

A way to achieve rapid growth whilst holding onto more equity.

A way to enable more strategic focus and, ultimately, a higher likelihood of success.

Through experience and experimentation, we have established a methodology that takes our prospects on a journey, systematically building trust by introducing the right content at the right time. Imagine if every prospect we ever spoke to knew exactly how our product solved their problem, and exactly how much value they see from using it. By sticking to 3 key principles, and leveraging these 5 essential pieces of content we can build that steady stream of engaged prospects to convert into our ultimate goal of predictable revenue.

Principle 1: Keep it lean

Lean is all about improving throughput by identifying and systematically removing waste and improving business processes. There are many forms of waste, but for simplicity, the best place to start is to look for bottlenecks — a point of congestion that slows down a process. The most successful lean businesses have cracked the ability to control their own bottlenecks, thus, controlling their revenue.

The first bottleneck is eyeballs, not customers.

As a SaaS founder, focusing on the right things at the right time is crucial. Focusing efforts on customer conversion when the top of the funnel is not converting is waste. Only when we can send out a piece of content and have a predictably good click-through rate, are we able to control our bottleneck and move our focus onto the next stage of our customer journey. Once we’ve created repeatable success in getting eyeballs, then we have earned the right to tackle the next step in the flow.

Maximize sales throughput with passive prospecting

When it comes to wealth, the more assets you have, the more passive income you’ll receive. As a SaaS founder, you need to approach prospecting in the same way. If you think of sales as a job then it has to fit into your daily to-do list. However, if you focus on investing time in the creation and iteration of digital assets, you’ll be able to sell while you sleep.

You’ll be passively prospecting.

The 5 essential pieces of content every SaaS founder needs to create are digital assets. Put simply, a digital asset is a piece of content that moves a potential customer through your sales journey without you having to do anything. Digital assets can be incredibly powerful, every element of them can be tracked and analyzed, enabling incredibly targeted, data-driven iteration at a level that is just not possible using other sales methods.

Principle 2: Meet people where they are

Earning people’s attention has never been harder, their standards for the content they’re willing to consume have hugely increased. The rise of so short, sharp, ‘snackable’ content has meant that people are only ever one swipe away from moving onto something they find more engaging. BUT, if they like it, they’ll finish it. Hook someone in the first 30 seconds of a good TV show, they’ll binge the whole series. Building content for your business is no different so, as a SaaS founder, we need to nail how we capture attention, and then back that up with quality.

Start ‘snackable’ and don’t let them down

“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” This is how Steve Jobs started the legendary Apple event in 2007 when he launched the first-ever iPhone. In 3 seconds, he captured the attention of everyone in the room and held it for 1 hour 19 minutes. If the product was crap, no one would have remembered how the event started. Steve started snackable and didn’t let the audience down.

SaaS founders need to do the same thing when approaching their content journey. When we create our 5 essential pieces of content (very nearly there) we need to grab our prospects' attention by using stackable forms of content before seamlessly moving them through a journey that continues to deliver them value. Whether someone is viewing our content on a screen as small as that very first iPhone or as big as an ultra-wide desktop monitor, it is essential that our content is optimized. We need to think mobile first.

Lean into the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

Also known as the frequency illusion. It occurs when something you recently learned about suddenly seems to appear everywhere, creating the impression that it is more common than it actually is. As a SaaS founder, this can be an incredibly powerful tool. Potential customers are very busy, so will rarely go looking for solutions, and even if they did — would they find yours over your competitors? Either way, this isn’t a risk we want to take. We need to find them, but not with an email, by creating our own frequency illusion.

Imagine getting yet another sales email in your inbox. First name, surname, deleted. Now, imagine seeing that same surname and first name but also their photo as they’ve viewed your profile on Linkedin, then a few days later you see they’ve liked one of your posts, then you see them on your profile again before finally seeing they’ve sent you a connection request. You’ve seen them everywhere recently, you’re intrigued, you accept, and you read the sales message.

Principle 3: No one cares about your product

No one cares about your product, they care about their problems… and they probably don’t care about them enough to try to fix them. Our job as SaaS founders is to relish that battle, to show how much we care about their problems, to show them how they can be solved, and to inspire them to make that change. Who knows, if we do it well enough then they may end up caring about our products after all.

Align on the problem before showing the solution

The human brain is an amazing thing, and everyone’s is different. However, a phenomenon called neural coupling occurs when we wrap concepts around a well-told narrative. The research suggests that listeners are not just passively receiving information but are actively experiencing the story in a way that mirrors the storyteller’s brain activity. This helps in establishing a shared mental framework and emotional connection between the storyteller and the audience.

Where possible we SaaS founders need to weave stories into our content to ensure our prospects see problems in the same way that we do. This, in turn, ensures that they’ll see the potential solution (our product) in the same way we do, therefore, seeing its true value. If we can’t align with our customers on the problem we solve, then we’ll never be able to align on the correct solution.

You get what you measure

We fear the unknown, are resistant to change and we’re a lazy bunch too. Therefore, just by aligning on a problem and solution in no way means that we’re going to do anything about it. The solution is to identify the unmet need and quantify the cost of inactivity.

In this situation, the unmet need refers to the gap between a prospect's current situation and their desired outcome. Where possible we want to quantify the dollars and cents value of this gap in order to create urgency by highlighting the cost of inactivity. Doing this well will make the status quo uncomfortable, inspiring positive change within our prospects.

The flow of five essential pieces of content

Finally! We’re on to the main event — the 5 pieces of content essential for every SaaS founder and how they need to flow into the minds of your customers. We really hope you see how each piece of content that follows draws from our principles. We also really hope you see how the right flow of content takes prospects on a journey, by the end of which they’ll know exactly how your product solved their problem, and exactly how much value they’ll see from using it. Paving the way for the SaaS startup holy grail that is predictable revenue.

Predictable revenue stems from our ability to build trust with our potential customers. These steps are designed to systematically build the levels of trust needed to convert someone from never having heard of you into a paying customer. These levels are as follows:

1. Trust level 1: ‘I trust that engaging with your content wont be a waste of my time’
2. Trust level 2: ‘I trust that you understand my problem’
3. Trust level 3: ‘Other people in my industry trust you’
4. Trust level 4: ‘I trust there is potential value in working with you’
5. Trust level 5: ‘I trust your product will solve my problem and I’ll realise that value’

So without further ado, here’s the flow:

1. A piece of content to: Earn their attention

This first piece of content is all about standing out, its only job is to grab attention and use that to sell the prospect on the benefit of giving you some more of their time. It needs to be highly visual and light on words, using short-form video where possible.

Content timing: 15–30 seconds
Content type: Think Instagram story, TikTok video or YouTube short
Content goal: This is your ‘movie trailer,’ its only job is to sell a ticket to the full movie — the next piece of content.

2. A piece of content to: Align on the problem

If you’ve made it this far then we already know what this piece of content needs to look like. It needs to be an engaging and well-crafted piece of long-form content, clearly articulating the problem our product solves using stories to achieve neural coupling to align with your prospect on a point of view.

Content length: 3–4 minutes
Content type: Long-form either written or video
Content goal: Align with your prospect on the fact a problem exists and you have a way to solve it.

3. A piece of content to: Prove it works

Now you have aligned on the fact a problem exists, now we need to show credibility so that they trust you understand the industry and have solved problems of similar businesses to theirs.

Content length: 1–3 minutes
Content type: This can be told in many formats, it can be through longer-form video, told through the lens of your product, or even by using something highly visual and shorter form. This depends on your product.
Content goal: Show evidence that your way of solving the prospect’s problem has worked well in the past for a similar company to theirs.

4. A piece of content to: Evaluate the value they’ll see

This is where we help prospects identify their unmet need and cost of inactivity by completing a short series of structured questions. The hidden benefit of this is now we know exactly which parts of our product are going to resonate most with our prospect, directing how we can best follow up with them and guide them through their purchase and onboarding

Content timing: 3–4 minutes
Content type: Interactive quiz with an instant results page giving clear quantitative feedback on their answers.
Content goal: Quantify your prospect’s problem and show the value you can provide by solving it.

5. A piece of content to: Show how the product works

You have now earned the right to show the prospect your product. In this step, you need to tell the story of how your product will solve their problem in the product. Use product visual and user flows to cement in the minds of your prospect exactly how the product works, making the quantified benefits calculated in the previous step tangible.

Content timing: 4–5 minutes
Content type: Interactive product tour
Content goal: Convert the prospect into becoming a paying customer.

Welcome to Flowify

We’re building a toolkit to make the creation of these content flows incredibly easy!

We’re building a way to rapidly make and iterate all of these digital assets, baking the methodology throughout to help as many SaaS founders as possible achieve that holy grail that is predictable revenue.

We’re currently running a closed program with some early access partners, but we will be running a beta program later in the year.