Hey - Marc here.

Happy Saturday morning, motivated B2B SaaS Founders!

Here's at least one tip to keep in mind as you grow your B2B SaaS company:

Today's issue takes about 5 minutes to read.

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In today's issue, I share some key takeaways from a recent interview between Nathan Latka, the host of Daily Interviews with SaaS Founders, and Hamed Silatani, the co-founder of Uptime Labs. They discussed how to get your first 3 customers to pay $72k.

Hamed Silatani is a performance and reliability engineering manager and enthusiast with 20 years of systems engineering experience. A father and husband — he uses his remaining time to build Uptime Labs, which helps train teams to fix outages quicker at uptimelabs.io.

About Uptime Labs

Uptime Labs trains people to recover from genuine IT incidents, not just those caused by malicious intent. For example, when the network goes down without any particular reason, and different applications start failing, that's the kind of experience we get people through.

Silatani's decision to sell 15-20% of the company at a $4-5 million cap is a good benchmark for other SaaS founders to consider. It's important to strike a balance between securing enough funding to build the product and retaining enough equity to maintain control of the company.

PS Now, seven of them are full-time, five are in product engineering, and then two are co-founders.

Challenges

Meeting customer demands.

They had to meet the demands of their first customer who needed to scale up their engineering team in a short span of time to prepare for the peak period during Christmas time. This could have been a challenging task for Uptime Labs to fulfill within the given timeframe.

Advice to Other Founders

Focus on customer needs first.

He’s not saying he doesn't care about money. He does; he needs it. But what you should care most about is building an awesome product that people need because then, money and success will follow.

Adjust equity splits based on risk and contribution.

Equity splits may need to be adjusted as the company evolves and co-founders take on different levels of risk and contribution. Be prepared to have difficult conversations about equity splits and determine a fair and transparent process for making these adjustments.

Prioritize financial planning and runway.

Silatani notes the importance of having enough runway to weather economic downturns and unforeseen challenges. As a SaaS founder, it's important to prioritize financial planning, budgeting, and cash flow management to ensure your company has the resources it needs to succeed.

Bonus

Hamed’s favorite book is "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy."
He follows Dan Demetriou, the CEO, and founder of Autonomics. After his success with Aftermath, he started advising other companies.
His favorite online tool is Miro.
Something he wishes he knew in his 20s is to help as many people as possible without any reason because when starting a journey like entrepreneurship, all of that comes back and helps you receive those help.

TL;DR

Uptime Labs was launched last year. It's a SaaS platform today with three customers paying six grand a month or $18k a month in revenue. They did a million-dollar pre-seed round last year at a $4m cap. Today, there are seven folks on the team, and two co-founders are still around. They're looking to scale again. They help you get better at incident response. For example, if two servers go down or something like that, they help you get your teams up to date so they can respond quicker in a real-life situation. We'll see what they do next in terms of growth.

PS Here is a link to the full interview if you are interested in listening to the full episode: How to get your first 3 customers paying $72k, from incident response SaaS Founder

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See you again next week.

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