Problem: Boredom is required to win, but I hate it.

One of the biggest issues with building a business is that it is tedious.

And the person who can endure the most boredom will have a successful business at the end of it. After the initial rush of starting a business, it’s all:

  • Hardcore development
  • Marketing / sales
  • More marketing / sales
  • Customer emails
  • A lot more marketing / sales
  • Improving the product
  • …Did I say marketing and sales?

I’m a solopreneur so not only is this a lot work — it’s the same work, over and over again.

But without grinding through many reps, it’s very difficult to build a successful business (bootstrap).

If you hire a pro marketer / salesperson, then you can skip some of the boredom.

Solution: Putting the “game” in game plan.

Inspired by “Solo Leveling”

There’s this Korean webtoon called “solo leveling” where the protagonist is the only person who can level up and get stronger by fighting monsters.

If I think about building a business as a game, I find it less stressful and more “fun.” And if I think about ‘leveling up,’ then it makes the reps a lot more fun.

The Levels Of Building A SaaS

Level 0: Nothing.

  • You haven’t done anything.

Level 1: Slightly better than nothing.

  • You have an idea. But you’ve done nothing about it.

Level 2: Bare Minimum

  • Start a business bank account
  • Start an LLC / set everything up (emails, phones, etc).
  • You’ve done the bare minimum to potentially have a functioning business.
  • Latency: takes a couple weeks for the bank account to go online, but the amount of effort is only a few hours, max.

Level 3: Did Slightly More Than Nothing

  • You MVP a product and build just 1 feature.
  • You don’t care about the UI; ugly AF.
  • You do care about the UI of the landing page though, and make sure that’s clean AF. This is because getting the sale matters.
  • You’re still at $0 — so as far as the market’s concerned, you’ve done only slightly more than nothing.
  • Should take 2-4 weeks max. And you should be embarrassed with your product. If you ‘feel good’ about what you’re selling, you’re too late / have spent too much time on this level.

Level 4: First Dollar

  • You’ve iterated your homepage enough or shilled enough to make your first sale.
  • Should take 2-4 weeks max. If nobody’s paying you, you should lower your price until someone does. If still nobody is paying you despite you having superb copy on your website + obnoxiously cheap pricing + 30-day guarantee, then you should go back to level 1 for another product.
  • Don’t cheat and try to get your first dollar with free trials.

Level 5: Getting To Minimum Wage

  • <= $1000/month. You’re stuck here until you exceed $1K/mo.
  • Customers might complain about your product. And you’ll do some work to improve it to reduce churn.
  • But most complaints are keyboard warriors on forums, who aren’t in your target market to begin with, so just ignore them.
  • Effort should be 80-90% marketing / sales; 10-20% improving product.
    • Because I’m bootstrapping, organic methods ONLY. No paid ads.

Level 6: Going For Broke…By Going Broke.

  • <= $10K/mo. Do not advance to level 7 until you have at least $10K/mo coming in.
  • Paid ads is allowed. In fact, all your money you want to spend on paid ads. This’ll help expedite things. But you’ll keep doing organic methods as well.
  • But effort is still 80-90% marketing / sales; 10-20% improving product.

Level 7: First Hire…Sort Of.

  • Hire a contractor that’ll improve your product for you so you can improve churn.
  • Effort is:
    • Still 80% marketing / sales.
    • 20% improving product.
      • Most of the time ramping up contractor(s) and you doing it yourself.
        • Give them 2 weeks max or fire.
      • But once they’re competent, most of the 10% should be delegation and telling them what to do. First sign of leverage.
      • The other 10% is you doing it yourself in order to expedite.
  • <=$30K/mo.

Level 8: Millionaire

  • Stuck here until you do $100K/mo.
  • Goal: Transition 100% out of development work.
  • Effort:
    • 50% sales / marketing.
    • 50% hiring:
      • sales / marketing
      • devops (contractors, or 1 full time)
      • dev (contractors, or 1 full time)
      • customer service rep (contractors / VAs)

Level 9: Final Level

  • Stuck here til you do $1 million / mo.
  • Goal: You should be CEO and do no level work.
  • Effort:
    • 50% hiring:
      • Full time contractors / devops.
      • Full time sales / marketing.
      • Customer service reps (as many as you need, probably VAs).
    • 40% management:
      • Manage your crew so they can take over your day-to-day.
    • 10% promotions:
      • Spending 40% of your time to manage them is with the intent of giving a select few their own departments: sales, tech, and customer service.
      • Once they can do all your day-to-day (near max leverage), promote them.
        • They will now have their own dedicate teams.
  • Headcount should be <=25.

Level 10: Bonus Level

  • Sell your business at a satisfactory ARR multiplier.

Note each level is significantly harder to advance than the next, just like an RPG game.

As of November 4, 2022, I am stuck at level 5.

Further Notes

The above is just an example. And each person’s leveling up development can be different. In an RPG game, there are many classes: necromancers, druids, assassins, etc.

In real life, there are many different types of progressions available: solopreneurs, team-builders, coders, marketers, etc. Each person with different strengths and weaknesses might prioritize some things before the other. A strong marketer might hire someone as one of the first levels; whereas a developer might MVP something first and then try to sell it.

For me: I know how to code and the final level is the place I want to be. Everything else is reverse-engineered from that.

Reverse Engineering

The higher level I go, the more leverage (amount of output per hour) I want. The highest leverage would be at the CEO level, leading a groups of people, where each individual is leveraged in their own means.