Chapter 2 Do the Time 1. Are you prepared to give your company a full two-year commitment to hit initial You’ll fail in SaaS if traction? Not 12 months. Not 18 months. you don’t commit to But 24 months? Two years? Six months isn’t 24 months to initial enough, neither is 12. It’s going to take you traction. 9–12 months just to get the product right. And another 6–12 to get significant revenues. Maybe an Instagram or a WhatsApp or a Pinterest can explode in just 12 months, though again, it took years of development and trial and error before they got to their “overnight” successes. You can’t afford to expect miracles like that in B2B software, services, or whatever business you might be in. Can you afford to commit for 24 months just to get to real initial traction? If not, you should pass. Slack went from $0 to $12 million ARR in one year (2014). Whoa. But it wasn’t founded on January 1, 2014. Giving yourself 12 months to get to initial traction won’t cut it. You’ll quit. Just 12 months in, you won’t have enough revenue to support yourself if you have any at all. The honest truth is that most folks can’t really commit for 24 months for financial reasons, personal reasons, or whatever. That makes sense. Nevertheless, you’ll fail in SaaS if you don’t commit to that amount of time. 2. Are you able to commit to 8,760 hours a year? That’s 24 x 365. I don’t mean committing to being in the office 14 hours a day. That’s not really necessary. But can you really, honestly commit to obsessively thinking, worrying, and stressing about how to do the impossible every single moment? Nothing else but work. Even when you are playing with the kids. Even when you’re having dinner with your husband. That’s what it’s going to take. If you don’t have the mental bandwidth, you should pass. Everything in SaaS is insanely competitive. Because SaaS is so multifaceted, you’re going to have to be the VP of sales, customer success, marketing, and probably product in the early days. There’s endless drama with paying customers. You’ll almost lose your best logo accounts. You have to be intensely, painfully committed to do all this.