What I learned from serial SaaS entrepreneur last weekend…

Over the weekend I drove an hour south and caught up with Founder of Deadline Funnel, Jack Born.

Deadline Funnel seamlessly integrates with your tech stack, adding real-time deadlines to your marketing campaigns to boost urgency and conversion.

For nearly seven years, I’ve relied on this software for virtually all the summits I’ve produced, experiencing firsthand its capabilities.

We use it to automate our one-time-offers and daily pages..

We also use it to automate evergreen webinar funnels (instead of paying high prices for webinar software).

Overall, it automates a number of important processes in our business and the best part is that it’s a really simple solution compared to some other similar tools I’ve used!

Jack is a curious and humble guy. We talked about many different topics over lunch.

And I thought it’d be valuable to share a few great insights!

Here are my top 3 takeaways from the meet-up:

Every business faces its unique challenges.

I have to admit, from the outside looking in, I thought Deadline Funnel would have been a fairly simple software to build.

How hard could it be?! You just need to add the onboarding workflow, a few webhooks, add a deadline timer and voila!

Nope, it’s never that simple.

He told me about the redundancies needed for a tool like Deadline Funnel. You need to have the capabilities in the hosting to scale up and down with the traffic getting sent to each funnel.

One customer may have an email list of 1,000 people. And another may have 10,000,000 people.

Each of those customers will have a massive difference in requirements and you never know when a large hit of traffic will begin.

The lesson: Solving hard problems that others can’t even see is what gives you the competitive edge!

It doesn’t need to be perfect to begin.

Entrepreneurs a tinkerers.

We can’t help but get into the trenches and tinker with stuff at times.

However, since we’re generalists, not specialists, it typically means we don’t know all of the best practices.

It was like music to my ears when he also told me that there have been many times in the past where he would code a new feature and get it working.

Then hand it off to his team only to find out that they need to rebuild the whole feature again and fix the code to ensure it followed best practices and could scale up with the rest of the code.

I do this all the time. I have an idea and just find any way possible to turn that idea into reality.

And I typically do.

But then I find out that my way was the slow way, or the impractical way.

Or that it wouldn’t be the ideal way at scale.

I talked about this on my YouTube video on Friday, “Get Started Before You’re Ready”.

As entrepreneurs you don’t need to know everything.

You just need to get started, prove that your products works and that people want it…

And then figure out the best practices later as you begin scaling.

The Lesson: Don’t wait to see how every piece fits together, just start putting together the pieces right in front of you and figure out the rest later.

AI Tools are over-promising and under-delivering.

We talked about the different use cases for implementing AI in our businesses.

He also mentioned something that I continue to rant on about…

AI tools are just not living up to their promises.

We spoke about customer service bots to help streamline customer service enquiries and reduce the amount of hours support teams need to be manually answering emails.

If you’ve built any type of business at scale, you’ll know that about 80% of the support tickets are the same.

And no matter how many articles you add to the knowledge base, people just don’t read them.

That’s where customer support bots could come in handy.

However, many of the out of the box tools that promise the world are not delivering on that promise.

So, in true entrepreneur fashion, Jack set out to code his own customer service bot.

And is seeing much more positive responses than anything else on the market today.

The Lesson: Custom workflows and internal tools are the future. Those adopting them now will benefit the most in years to come.

This supports my theory that I continue to talk about…

Building your own custom workflows and internal tools is the future.

They are easy to create. (even if you have no technical background)

You can build them exactly how you want them.

They integrate seamlessly in your current tools and workflows.

You have less logins and dashboards required in your workflows.

Which creates a better working environment, less mistakes and increases productivity.

These are the exact reasons I built the “Content Operating System”.

So remember these lessons and begin leaning into how you can automate more of your business.

Those at the top of their game, like Jack, are continuously seeking ways to optimize and innovate.

They understand the opportunity we have right now with AI automations.

I recommend dedicating an hour each week to explore automation opportunities.

Start applying what you learn and watch your efficiency soar!
– Mitch

P.S. Want to leverage real scarcity in your marketing funnels and boost sales? Try Deadline Funnel free for 14 days by clicking here.