Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
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Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. In this episode, I talk with Andy Kim. He's the co-founder, co-owner of a SaaS app called Trotto. That's at Trot.2. Andy acquired the majority of the business from the original developer that built it. And Trotto is in an interesting position in the sense of once they acquire customers, their retention is extremely high. But most people who need the tool are either unaware they have a problem or they're not aware they have a problem. or problem aware, but they're not even solution or product or most aware. And we talk about that dynamic in the show of how difficult that can be and how it can be a bit of a headwind to get over. But to Andy's credit, he's making progress and growing the business month to month and has figured out some interesting approaches for getting around that. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Selling Your Business Without Regret
Sherry and I have taken our combined many, many years of experience going through exits, counseling founders through exits, and it's not just focused on SaaS. It's all types of businesses, but obviously there's a light emphasis on SaaS because, of course, we do have more of a network in the space. But if you'd consider backing the Kickstarter, you can head to exitstrategybook.com and click the back the Kickstarter button and we will be in touch the moment it goes live. Could really use your support. First 24 hours is a great signal to everyone that if there's a lot of backers, then we tend to get more. So exitstrategybook.com if you're interested in that. Before we dive into our conversation, MicroConf mastermind matching happens three times a year, and it's happening right now. Applications close on December 4th, so just a week or two after this episode goes live. Masterminds have been critical to my development and frankly my longevity so
as an entrepreneur, and I've been a proponent of them for probably 12 or 13 years, you can go to startups, the rest of us.com and search for startup mastermind and find the first time that I ever mentioned it on the show. And it's it's a long time ago, because I became a believer in meeting with like minded founders over time, a small group of founders who really followed my journey, almost like honorary co founders. So if you've been feeling alone or isolated or lost, or like you're just not sure what to do next and you need some accountability and someone else to be in the trenches alongside you, head to microconf.com slash masterminds. You pay a one-time fee and we will match you up with other like-minded founders. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Andy. Andy Kim, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. what the hell is a Go link?
That's a good question. So most people probably have not heard of a Go link, but the way to think of it is a URL shortener. The consumer version of this is bit.ly or tiny URL, but Go links specifically only work for people within the same organization. So whereas you would use bit.ly to shorten our URL for like marketing purposes to the general public, where anyone can click on that link. GoLinks only work if you and I work at the same company and the purpose is really to share resources between each other.
Got it. So folks understand, you're a SaaS, you charge per seat, per user. And when I think of Bitly and what was the other one, TinyURL, I think of these big kind of freemium consumer cheap plays, right? But you're much more on the enterprise side. Isn't that right? Okay, so talk us through how that, it's like two sides of a different coin.
Yeah. And if you remember, Rob, when we were actually interviewing for TinySeed, you were questioning why do companies even pay for this, right? It's an interesting phenomenon. But the reality is this is a what I call like enterprise software tool that works independently. The larger the company is, the larger the problem becomes. So there's really three use cases. I'd say company-wide, team-wide, and then individual use. But the way that we break it down between those three, sometimes there's good overlap. But really the fundamental problem is, hey, Rob sent me a resource three months ago, and I don't remember where he sent it. Email, Slack, he might have told me over... a video conference.
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