Dan Martell - Building a Saas Prototype With No Money

00:00:00.000 After five conversations, I realized they didn't even understand what a bookmarklet was.

00:00:05.440 I was just way too close to the problem.

00:00:20.280 Hey there, everybody. I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS

00:00:24.340 Academy. In this specific episode, I'm going to share with you how to create a prototype

00:00:29.260 that quickly allows you to design product,

00:00:32.020 even if you have a product in the market,

00:00:33.880 and really teach you how to save five times

00:00:36.860 less money on development.

00:00:38.820 I've seen so many people build products

00:00:40.980 and have to spend more money on software engineers, et cetera.

00:00:45.540 And be sure to stay at the end

00:00:46.720 because I'm gonna tell you how to get access

00:00:48.100 to my customer, my top customer development questions,

00:00:51.140 and the eight different sections of types of questions

00:00:54.920 from validation to problem discovery, et cetera,

00:00:57.980 that you'll be able to use

00:00:59.300 in your next customer conversations, but let's get into it.

00:01:02.600 So I've been building software products

00:01:04.320 for almost 25 years and clickable prototypes,

00:01:07.860 prototyping is just part of the journey.

00:01:11.060 If you've ever had engineers build something for you

00:01:13.500 and when you finally got it back, you're like, what is that?

00:01:16.080 This is the most jankiest, wrong, confusing interface ever.

00:01:21.980 I mean, I see this happen when a lot of my coaching clients

00:01:24.540 go and hire external dev teams or like a developer

00:01:28.080 and they just kind of like write an email

00:01:29.820 and say, here's what I wanted to do.

00:01:31.640 That is not the way to build products.

00:01:33.220 I've literally built probably hundreds

00:01:36.220 of different wireframes personally.

00:01:38.300 I've been involved in designing 12 plus products

00:01:41.080 where like complete solutions.

00:01:43.340 And the way I do it even today is using clickable prototypes

00:01:48.500 because I want to simulate, right?

00:01:50.680 And I remember one time I was building

00:01:52.840 one of my companies, Clarity.fm.

00:01:54.520 So we were a marketplace to get advice over the phone.

00:01:57.020 So I'm not gonna get into the product,

00:01:58.340 but we were designing a new feature, okay?

00:02:01.200 It was this bookmarklet.

00:02:02.700 So a bookmarklet is an extension you add to the browser

00:02:07.180 that lets you change the webpage that you're looking at.

00:02:10.040 And the crazy idea we had was,

00:02:12.060 well, we had all these experts in our marketplace, right?

00:02:14.520 So it was kind of like if LinkedIn had a call button,

00:02:16.680 that's what Clarity.fm was.

00:02:18.780 We had all these experts in our marketplace,

00:02:20.260 but we wanted to make them discoverable on other sites.

00:02:24.940 So on Twitter, when you search for expertise on Google,

00:02:28.980 on LinkedIn, we wanted to add a little call button

00:02:32.200 if the person they were chatting with

00:02:34.240 or looking at had a clarity profile.

00:02:36.860 So we built this bookmarklet.

00:02:38.600 And before we got building it,

00:02:41.200 we, you know, our product team,

00:02:43.080 and I actually designed this one,

00:02:44.560 I wireframed it in Keynote.

00:02:46.540 I'm gonna tell you all the different tools later on

00:02:48.640 and tell you where to get those,

00:02:49.860 but we wire-framed it,

00:02:52.800 and when I started showing it to customers, okay,

00:02:55.900 because Clicko Prototypes, if you've never done this,

00:02:57.600 you can literally simulate the workflow.

00:03:00.200 So somebody signs up, and they click this,

00:03:02.380 and they go through that,

00:03:03.220 and then when you're showing it to a customer,

00:03:04.580 a potential customer, they can give you feedback on it.

00:03:08.620 And I showed it to five different customers,

00:03:10.180 and after the first one, my head was like, oh no.

00:03:13.060 Second one, same problem.

00:03:14.640 Third, exact same problem.

00:03:16.580 I was just like, but I went through it

00:03:17.960 because I really think don't fix it, just go through it.

00:03:20.780 After five conversations, I realized,

00:03:23.680 simple thing, that the way I was describing it,

00:03:27.500 everybody said the same thing.

00:03:28.960 They didn't even understand what a bookmarklet was,

00:03:31.940 and they didn't understand why they would use it.

00:03:34.100 The interface didn't communicate it.

00:03:36.840 I was just way too close to the problem.

00:03:39.000 And I know some of you guys do the same thing,

00:03:40.660 where you're designing something, you're in the forest,

00:03:42.860 you have all this context,

00:03:43.960 and you just think it should be obvious to your customers,

00:03:45.880 And then you show it to them and they're like, what is this?

00:03:48.760 Most of my customers at the time had no clue

00:03:50.940 what the word bookmarklet was.

00:03:52.760 And even if they did, I didn't even

00:03:54.280 have an image showing how it would add value to their life.

00:03:59.240 So without some microcopy or an image showing how this would

00:04:02.920 be better for them, there was no desire to install it.

00:04:06.080 And if nobody installs it, then they're not going to use it.

00:04:08.560 And the biggest waste in software

00:04:10.700 is building a feature or a product that nobody wants.

00:04:14.700 And the saddest part is sometimes is they would want it

00:04:17.280 if you could communicate it clear but you're confusing them

00:04:20.660 and you paid all this money to get it built

00:04:24.020 and then you find out after the fact it doesn't work.

00:04:25.820 So I wanna highly recommend you use clickable prototypes

00:04:28.200 to learn like I did in that situation

00:04:29.920 and save you a ton of money.

00:04:31.500 So there's four key strategies that you need to understand

00:04:34.960 for when you build a clickable prototype.

00:04:37.800 Number one is you gotta understand the tools, okay?

00:04:41.000 So there's different tools as I mentioned

00:04:42.900 And they kind of go from like just wireframing

00:04:47.380 to more advanced prototyping to simulation

00:04:50.620 and really like playing the app for a customer.

00:04:53.700 So on the low end, I like to use a tool called Balsamiq,

00:04:57.580 Balsamiq with a Q. 1.00

00:04:59.300 I've been using it forever.

00:05:00.420 Peldi, the founder is a friend of mine.

00:05:02.740 I think it's the coolest product.

00:05:04.220 It's the simplest, but I also use Keynote as I mentioned.

00:05:07.820 So I mean, on the low end, if you want something simple

00:05:11.020 and easy and focused on the wireframes.

00:05:13.520 Balsamiq is you can't go wrong and Keynote's another one 1.00

00:05:16.300 you can download different themes and templates

00:05:18.820 to let you design wire or mobile flows, et cetera.

00:05:21.660 And then you go up to the mid tier.

00:05:23.500 This is when you get into like a Figma or a UX pin.

00:05:27.060 So you guys can Google those.

00:05:28.140 I'll link them up in the description below.

00:05:30.580 But these are products that are kind of mid range

00:05:33.200 between like super high end pixel perfect prototypes

00:05:35.780 and like almost like wireframes,

00:05:37.760 almost like a paper kind of mocked up stuff.

00:05:40.900 That's the middle ground where you can get

00:05:43.200 some of the advanced simulation stuff,

00:05:45.680 but it's, again, it's not 100% design.

00:05:48.240 Because the problem is if you make it too pixel perfect,

00:05:51.060 then people start giving you critical feedback

00:05:52.640 on colors and gradients and buttons and button colors

00:05:58.400 or copy, you wanna get feedback on the flow

00:06:01.080 and the problem you're trying to solve,

00:06:02.140 not necessarily on the color of the background.

00:06:04.840 And then on the high end,

00:06:05.960 you've got tools like Flinto and Envision app.

00:06:09.180 And these are like the very powerful simulation.

00:06:14.180 It's almost like if you're building a building,

00:06:16.300 there's kind of like sketching it out.

00:06:17.780 You know, if I was building the house,

00:06:18.620 I could sketch it out on a piece of printer paper.

00:06:20.420 That's kind of balsamic.

00:06:21.700 And then a more middle ground would be like a blueprint.

00:06:26.900 Right, that would be the middle ground.

00:06:27.980 But then the highest end would be like a virtual tour

00:06:31.020 of the completed thing in VR in the metaverse.

00:06:33.880 That's kind of the same way to think

00:06:35.080 about these three categories of tools.

00:06:36.440 But for most people watching this,

00:06:38.080 If you're interested on how to do this properly,

00:06:40.140 just start with Balsamiq.

00:06:41.400 It's the one that's gonna get you going.

00:06:42.980 Number two, outline outcomes.

00:06:45.640 So a lot of us that have never built product before

00:06:49.200 don't understand that there's a whole methodology

00:06:51.160 behind product design, okay?

00:06:53.020 So if you wanna go down the path of design thinking

00:06:58.700 and Don't Make Me Think is one of my favorite books on this,

00:07:03.340 but there's Sprint, I forget the guy's name from Google,

00:07:06.960 but if you wanna search that one.

00:07:08.140 There's all these different design principles

00:07:10.820 of how to solve problems,

00:07:11.840 but the one I like the best is goal-driven design.

00:07:14.520 And the reason why it's important

00:07:15.520 if you're gonna prototype is every flow

00:07:18.300 should be designed for one specific outcome.

00:07:20.920 What happens often is when you're building a product

00:07:24.580 and you're new to this,

00:07:25.500 you just wanna dump everything on the same interface.

00:07:27.980 You create almost like a dashboard and it's got all the,

00:07:30.580 it can do this, it can do this, it can do this.

00:07:33.320 And you don't really design it, you know,

00:07:36.000 from a completed specific outcome point of view.

00:07:39.940 You don't say like, okay, this person wants to add a user.

00:07:42.380 Well, what does that look like?

00:07:43.540 Somebody wants to send money to somebody else.

00:07:45.220 What would that look like?

00:07:46.860 And if you wanna like really get good at prototyping,

00:07:50.540 yes, you need to understand the tool,

00:07:51.740 but you also gotta learn how to design

00:07:54.320 using a goal-driven methodology, okay?

00:07:57.420 So that processes of understanding

00:07:59.880 what's the one need the customer has at that point,

00:08:02.700 the user and helping them get to an end point and a result,

00:08:05.940 that is the thing you're gonna have to learn

00:08:08.380 if you wanna be good at this.

00:08:09.440 Anybody can draw squares, circles, triangles, forms,

00:08:11.740 whatever, but if you actually wanna get good

00:08:13.760 at prototyping product, you need to study goal-driven design.

00:08:18.020 Number three, sketch inputs, okay?

00:08:20.500 So what sketch inputs means is that you,

00:08:23.520 like a lot of people, like I mentioned,

00:08:25.080 you just design the dashboard and you don't design

00:08:28.660 the forms for the inputs of the data, right?

00:08:31.280 It's really easy to fund to like show a report

00:08:33.340 and here's, oh, look at this.

00:08:34.380 Like this is what the product could do.

00:08:36.260 But none of the output and the reports happen

00:08:39.460 without the input, without showing the screen

00:08:43.020 that connects their data systems,

00:08:45.520 their financial systems, their email marketing tools.

00:08:47.660 Like if you're building an email marketing tool,

00:08:50.120 like what's the flow for somebody to create a campaign, right?

00:08:54.800 Like that matters a lot more than

00:08:56.720 here's your campaign dashboard.

00:08:58.820 And most people create dashboards without,

00:09:01.920 in a format it's called, it's a blank slate.

00:09:04.920 There's no initiation.

00:09:06.840 Like if somebody comes into your product for the first time

00:09:09.700 and they have nothing created, what does it say?

00:09:12.980 What does it show?

00:09:13.820 How does it guide the person through a process

00:09:15.820 of being successful using your solution?

00:09:18.320 So like to me, the blank slates design,

00:09:20.640 the data entry design, those are the inputs

00:09:23.460 that you need to wireframe and sketch those out.

00:09:26.340 And really ask yourself like,

00:09:27.500 Do I need to ask the customer this information at this step

00:09:29.980 or can I put it later?

00:09:31.000 Can I grab it from somewhere else?

00:09:32.840 Can I have them just connect to another tool

00:09:35.980 that probably has this data and can I suck the data in?

00:09:38.640 Anything that you can do to remove the friction

00:09:41.900 of completing a task for your customer,

00:09:44.620 that's where you wanna actually spend your time

00:09:46.560 and energy designing, not just creating the output

00:09:50.460 and saying, oh, look how cool this is.

00:09:52.040 We're gonna make it do this.

00:09:53.520 That'll get you sales, but it won't get your retention.

00:09:56.240 And you can pre-sell a lot of people with a prototype,

00:10:00.060 but you won't get the retention

00:10:01.520 if you don't think through how it works.

00:10:03.620 The implementation details matter.

00:10:06.040 Number four, check reality.

00:10:08.180 This is, as I mentioned, I love talking to customers.

00:10:11.120 I love showing them cool new stuff.

00:10:13.000 It's like, I get myself in trouble all the time

00:10:15.400 with my teams because I'll get on a call

00:10:17.640 and I'll be like, oh, check this new thing out.

00:10:19.600 It literally just happened.

00:10:21.000 Like I had one of my product teams,

00:10:23.520 I got them all to buy Oculus VR headsets.

00:10:27.440 And then, you know, everybody else,

00:10:29.860 why are we buying Oculus headsets for the team?

00:10:31.800 Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:10:33.160 Look, it's, you know, like you wanna innovate,

00:10:36.880 you wanna push things forward,

00:10:38.540 and you wanna show your customers.

00:10:40.220 I don't know about you, but I'm excited.

00:10:41.660 So like my product team,

00:10:42.640 I wanted to show them what's possible.

00:10:43.880 I even got a few from my real customers and I showed them.

00:10:47.400 But the problem is, is that if you, again,

00:10:49.180 you guys can do your release cycles the way you want to.

00:10:51.140 I just get excited that I want to show them early,

00:10:54.180 but this is where getting a customer advisory board

00:10:56.900 really works.

00:10:57.740 So customer advisory board is essentially

00:10:59.960 at least a dozen people that you feel best represents

00:11:03.100 your ideal customer profile, right?

00:11:04.740 These are not your first customers.

00:11:06.000 These are not people that are the loudest.

00:11:07.860 These are the people that you feel represent your ICP,

00:11:11.600 your ideal customer profile,

00:11:13.520 and you invite them to join this board.

00:11:15.060 And what you commit to them is,

00:11:16.360 hey, we're gonna show you early stuff,

00:11:18.120 we're gonna get your feedback,

00:11:18.960 We're gonna co-create the product together, right?

00:11:21.600 So as long as you have that group

00:11:23.100 and you set the intentions,

00:11:23.980 you won't run into the problem I have

00:11:25.420 where one customer tells one of my customer success managers,

00:11:28.840 like, I heard you guys are building this.

00:11:30.420 And they're like, what are you talking about?

00:11:31.660 Because nobody told them because it's not ready yet

00:11:33.280 because I'm still iterating.

00:11:34.660 So you need to set this super exclusive

00:11:39.200 and don't disclose anything to anybody else

00:11:42.000 that I show you in these meetings

00:11:43.340 because I don't know if I'm gonna build it, right?

00:11:46.220 But that, to me, is how we check reality.

00:11:48.900 We bring the prototypes to those meetings.

00:11:52.200 And in those meetings, you unpack what you're building

00:11:54.600 and you listen.

00:11:55.660 And this is one of the entrepreneurial traits

00:11:57.720 that I think is lacking right now is,

00:11:59.460 I'm looking for what assumption is that I got wrong.

00:12:02.540 I'm not looking to sell the idea.

00:12:04.740 I'm looking to say, here's an assumption I have.

00:12:07.260 Is that true?

00:12:08.660 Here's another assumption I have.

00:12:09.880 Is that true?

00:12:11.000 My assumption is that you understand

00:12:12.820 what to write for the headline of this landing page.

00:12:15.460 Because if you don't, then you're not

00:12:17.040 going to complete the landing page builder.

00:12:18.740 And it's all these little things

00:12:20.200 that we just take for granted that you,

00:12:21.920 a great product manager can kind of rewrite

00:12:24.980 those questions to learn.

00:12:27.240 And they check the reality with real customers,

00:12:30.620 especially the ideal ones

00:12:32.020 that you actually wanna build your business off of.

00:12:33.860 The one that will pay quickly and pay the most.

00:12:36.280 Find those people, put them into a group

00:12:38.300 and check your product prototypes with them.

00:12:40.800 So quick recap, the four key strategies

00:12:43.300 for building great clickable prototypes.

00:12:45.660 Number one, choose the right tool.

00:12:47.220 I recommend Balsamiq to start. 0.95

00:12:48.960 Number two, outline outcomes using goal-driven design.

00:12:53.240 Number three, sketch the inputs.

00:12:55.260 Make sure you don't drop them on a blank slate dashboard.

00:12:58.380 And number four, check reality.

00:13:00.940 Build your customer advisory board.

00:13:02.760 So as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

00:13:04.460 I wanna share with you an exclusive resource

00:13:06.260 called the Top Customer Development Questions.

00:13:08.900 There are eight different sections for product validation,

00:13:12.960 problem discovery, product reviews, et cetera.

00:13:17.320 These are the exact questions that I use

00:13:19.360 when I have these meetings.

00:13:21.180 So if you wanna copy,

00:13:22.020 click the link below to download your copy.

00:13:24.840 It goes through the exact words you want to use

00:13:27.320 to ask the questions and the follow-up questions.

00:13:29.760 A lot of you guys don't understand

00:13:30.760 how to actually extract and pull the learnings

00:13:33.580 that you need to from your customers

00:13:35.640 to build the right product.

00:13:36.680 Click the link below to download your copy.

00:13:38.760 And if you like this, please click the like button,

00:13:41.580 subscribe to this channel and let me know in the comments

00:13:44.920 what you like best.

00:13:45.900 What was the most meaningful for you?

00:13:47.860 And as per usual, I wanna challenge you

00:13:49.480 to live a bigger life and a bigger business

00:13:51.540 and I'll see you next Monday.

Dan Martell - July 04, 2022

Building a Saas Prototype With No Money

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