Launching a Profitable SaaS Business in 48 Hours

In 48 hours, a SaaS startup, "Outer View," was ideated, validated, and launched, securing two paying customers for podcast research.

### Launching a Profitable SaaS Business in 48 Hours: The Journey of Building "Outer View"
* 🧠 The challenge: **Build and launch a profitable SaaS business** in 48 hours, from idea to **first paying customers**.
* 🎙 The idea: Create an AI research assistant for podcasters, called "**Outer View**," to **automate guest research and question generation**.
* 🔍 Validation: Validated the idea through **quick interviews with podcasters** and **online research** to confirm market demand.
* 🎨 Branding and website: Created branding, including the name "**Outer View**" and a logo generated using Fiverr's AI tool, and built a **one-page landing page** using Sotter.
* 🛠 Tools used: Leveraged no-code and AI tools, including **Make** (for automation), **Airtable** (as a database), and **Sotter** (for user interface).
* 🚀 Product development: Built the AI engine using Make to **fetch guest information**, **generate questions**, and **find social media accounts**.
* 📈 Sales: Acquired **two paying customers within the 48-hour timeframe**, one on a **monthly plan** and one on an **annual plan**.
* 💰 Profitability: While the project fell $30.82 short of profitability based on tool costs, considering only additional tool expenses, it resulted in a **$29 profit**.
* 🏆 Conclusion: While the challenge was not fully successful in terms of profitability, the project demonstrated the **feasibility of quickly launching a SaaS product** using **no-code and AI tools**.

I've been talking about how to launch a profitable SaaS business on this channel for a few years, so I thought maybe it's time to show you how to do it instead. So, in the next 48 hours, my friends, I'm going to come up with an idea, validate it, build it with no code in AI, and launch it in the market. And the catch is that I need to be profitable before the end of this video in 48 hours. It's time to put my money where my mouth is. Let's go. Now, for this startup, because I'm planning on actually running it after we launch it, I decided to take on a co-founder. This is Cole, my buddy, and we're going to be working together on this. Let's talk about step one. As you know, every great business that makes millions of dollars today started with one thing: a great idea. So, for this step, I'm simply going to be using pen and paper, but also the help of my good old friend, ChatGPT. Okay, so first, I want to see if I can find some technology trends.

that I could build a startup on. So now I'm going to take some of these Trends and I'm going to write down businesses that could be built around them. The second thing I'm going to do is the problem-based approach, which is basically figuring out problems that I currently have and seeing if there's a solution for them. Okay, so this brainstorm took about half an hour, and now I realize that I will not be able to solve the problem of my newborn crying all night. So I basically pick this other idea, which is a problem I currently have. So basically when I plan out some of these videos, I do so much research around the topics, around the people that I introduce, and it's also not the kind of work that I like to do. So I came up with the idea of creating an AI research assistant for podcasters so they can prepare for their next guests, because frankly doing all the research is so boring, and I would just love to have a handful of questions I could ask guests.

and a full profile about this person so that I could quickly prepare before jumping on air, and know everything I needed to know. I also think that if it works in the podcast world, it could also potentially work in the YouTube world. Now, before jumping into it, you don't have a full idea until you've answered these three questions. The first one is, who is your customer? Right. In this case, our customer would be a podcaster who has already started their podcast, has a small following, maybe doesn't have a huge team, right? Number two, what's the actual problem? Well, the problem is that you have to do research, and that usually takes either hours, or you have to pay someone hundreds of dollars to do the research for you. And the third question is, what is your business model, right? You're really only a business once you have a business model. In our case, we're actually going to give people access to this for free, and then if they want more, then they're going to have to pay a subscription. It's going to be a monthly subscription.

now that we have a complete idea, we're ready to move forward. Awesome! So, that part only took us about 1 hour. Now, the good news is that we have an idea in the bag. The bad news is that if this doesn't have legs in the market, we're going to have to start from scratch. And that's why it's important for us to get to step two. Here's the hard reality, my friends. It doesn't matter if I think this is a great idea. It doesn't matter if you think it's a great idea. The only thing that matters is if the market thinks it's a good idea and are actually willing to pay for it. So, the next step is validation. Now, for this step, I would usually line up a bunch of customer discovery interviews so I could understand what the market needs. But because I only have 48 hours, I'm going to have to skip this and find quicker ways to validate this idea. So, to speed this up, I'm actually going to text a couple of people I know who run podcasts.

to understand if they even have a problem in this area. Okay, so what would you say is like the most difficult part for you to like run a podcast? One is the clipping process, so getting the right clips. Second is, I think, research. As the time SC, so like what kind of research is it about the guest? Is it about the topic the guest like kind of leads the topic? So like just finding finding information about the guests, you know, if they've done other podcasts, would you pay um to solve that? I mean, I would if my podcast would make more right now. I would get a researcher like on the team, but it's not really feasible right now. Okay, so I think that feedback was kind of promising. We might actually be on something, but before I jump into the next step, I want to do a second method of validation, and that is research. So I'm going to do now is go to the interwebs and see if people are talking about this openly, maybe on forums, maybe on blog posts, 'cause I want to

make sure there are actually more people with this problem. Research interesting prepping show notes. Research again. Okay, so with that insight, I feel pretty confident that we can build the first version and actually go out there and test it. But just to be clear, if I didn't have a 48-hour time limit, I would definitely invest more time in validating this idea. Now it's time for step three. We now want to build out the website and the first version of the platform. But to do that, we need to actually have a brand behind it. So in this step, we're going to be creating the branding. First up, we need to come up with a name, and then we need to find if it's available as a domain. Now for this, Cole came up with a really cool idea. Joe Rogan has this guy on his podcast called Jamie, and every time he just calls up on Jamie, he gets him the research instantly. Oh, pull it up, Jamie. And that's kind of what we're trying to do with this startup. So we thought that My Jamie

could be an interesting one. However, after checking out the domain availability for Jamie or my Jamie or things like that, I didn't find anything good. So we're actually going to take a different direction. So let's get some inspiration. The first thing I'll do is go to this tool that I find pretty cool called Namel. And we're going to go and try to find a brand. Okay, as usual, all my best ideas come when I'm just taking a little walk, having a break. And I thought of this concept that basically, you know how we're trying to get people their research before the interview, we could maybe call it an outerview. So I'm going to roll with that. I'm about to head back to the studio. We're going to jump into it and take the next step. Let's go. I checked it out and there's not that many people using this name. And also, I bought outerview.io on Namecheap. But what is a brand in a name without a logo? To create this logo, I could go to

something as simple as a logo. There's another one called luca.com, but a couple days ago I saw that Fiverr created an AI generator, and I'm going to try to use that one. So I'm on Fiverr now, and if you go to the top bar here, you can type in logo, and you come here. What's the name of your brand? Outer View. And you see it's just generating some, and this is it, my friends, the logo. Excellent. So now that I have my logo, I need to create a color palette around this specific key color that I'm going to be using throughout the entire project. Now for this, I'm going to be going to a platform called colors or coolers. So after playing around for about 15 minutes, here's my color palette. Basically, I'm mainly going to be using this key green. There's going to be a lighter version of that. There's also going to be a kind of background version of that. I have a color palette. Now I need some images, so I'm going to go to a

platform called Unsplash. Here you can get royalty-free images as you wish. I'm going to put a podcast. I'm going to find some images that work well for what I'm trying to do. Okay, so I'm actually pretty happy with this basic brand we've just created. And just to be clear, avoid over-perfectionism in this first step of building a brand 'cause people don't care about your logo, they care about the value of your product. Next step is to build a website, more specifically a one-page landing page that describes your offer very specifically and makes it very enticing for people to buy. Let's jump in and use the elements we've just created to go out and build that. Okay, so to build this landing page, I'm going to be using Sotter. We'll be talking a little bit more about Sotter in a second, but let's jump in and start building out the structure, which is really going to be our offer. So once I'm logged in, I created a new project. It's Untitled application. I'm just going to delete

everything, and I'm going to start from complete scratch. That took a long time, but I'm done now. Let's check it out. Your podcast research done in seconds with AI. So basically, here is the promise. Then it's everything that you need to crush your next guest appearance. Now, here we have pricing. I'm going to make it for free for a couple of uh searches, and then I'm going to have the pro version that people have to pay $25 a month to upgrade to. I'm going to finish it off with a call to action. Take the work out of your podcast. Try free trial. But as you can see here throughout, I have start free trial. So you want to have your call to action in different areas of your website landing page. Check. So unfortunately, that took way too long, about 7 and 1/2 hours, just to build out the landing page page. 'Cause yes, I got a little stuck in perfectionism. I wanted it to look really, really nice, and that's kind of putting me in a pickle because I

only have 34 hours to actually build out the whole product launch. It get first customers. It's scary. Okay, so now that we know the three key features that we want to build out in this MVP, let's talk about the no-code and AI tools that we're going to actually use to build it out. Okay, so the first tool we're going to be using is pretty much the engine behind this entire startup, and it's actually the way that we're going to tap into AI to bring complicated features to this app. The name of this tool is Make, and it is a no-code automations platform. It basically allows you to automate actions inside of like a bunch of tools that you already had, and the drag-and-drop interface allows you to build very simple but also very complex scenarios that could just connect two different apps or could connect a whole series of apps. So a simple example of this could be something like when someone fills out your contact form on your website, it could shoot the information of that potential client inside of your CRM.

could also send it inside of your email marketing tool. That could start a drip campaign so sure we're going to use this tool for all sorts of simple operational efficiencies to automate things. More importantly, we're going to use it with more complex scenarios to be able to go out there and fetch all the information from across the web. Tap into Ai and pretty much run the entire back end of this startup. Now just to be transparent with you when I got the idea for this video, I actually reached out to them to see if they would sponsor their video and guess what they accepted. Yay so thank you so much make just to be clear I'm not saying nice things because they are sponsoring this video but because this is legitimately my favorite no code automation tool anyway now that we have the engine for this startup we need to have a place to store the data and that's exactly what we're going to turn to the second tool. The name of this tool is air table. Air table is pretty much a spreadsheet on crack that lives on the

internet. You can build internal tools for your company with this. You can also use it as the database for any SAS product. Now that we have the engine and we have the structure, we now need to build the beautiful finish on top, the user experience. And for this, we're going to be using a tool called softer. Now, like the other tools I talked about today, this is a very intuitive platform. And the reason why I chose these tools is because even if you're non-technical, you can use them. So they can be incredibly powerful. And now that we have the right tool stack, it's time to jump into building. Now, because nothing matters in your startup until you've built out the engine, let's jump into make. And we're going to start building awesome. So I just talked to Cole. He's going to jump in and start building out the make scenarios. I'm going to jump into softer and build there. How about some epic music for this time lapse? Cole, what's up, man? Hey, man, we got a bit of a problem here. What's

up so I've been trying to troubleshoot some of these API calls, and we're nearly there, but the perplexity API seems to be consistently giving us some bad responses. Think we can hop on a quick call? Yeah, let's do it. I'll shoot you a little Zoom link right now, and we'll try to figure this out right now, okay? So I have some good news. After 45 minutes chatting with Cole right now, we were able to figure out what the problem was. We adapted the prompt, uh, and perplexity now is responding correctly. There's actually a funny story behind this. When we were prompting it to get past appearances, the guests had already been on, like, podcasts, previous podcasts. It was basically sending us back, uh, that song, and even though the song was promising us that it was never going to let us down, uh, you know, perplexity was definitely doing that. But anyway, we fixed the problem, and we're back on track, guys. We did it. We cracked the engine. We finally built out the scenarios. All of them work, and they're

providing us with the data we need inside this app to run the engine. So now let me show you how we built it. I'm going to be breaking down each in plain English. Okay, so this first scenario is find guest info, right? And this is what allows us to create the profile. So as soon as someone inputs the name of the person they want to search for, it's automatically going to go ahead and it's going to get that information inside an air table. So what's the name of that person? It's going to go and tap into perplexity. It's going to do all the main research. Then it's going to go ahead and mark it down, meaning that it's going to create a prompt. Then we're going to send it to chat GPT. And we're going to be doing two different things around formatting and summarizing. And then we're finally going to be sending it back to air table. And once it's inside of air table, we're going to be able to represent it on the front end and all.

this in seconds. Now let's talk about the second one. So, this scenario is going to generate personalized questions for that guest. The first thing that happens is that there is a webhook that waits a little bit because we need to get the information about the profile before we know and create the question. Then, here an Airtable, it's going to go ahead and grab those records, and we're going to send them to Perplexity to find specific questions based on that profile. And finally, we're going to send back those personalized questions to Airtable. And this third scenario seems very simple, but it's about finding the right social media accounts for this specific individual. The first thing that we do is that we have a webhook again. It sends that information. We make a first search on Perplexity so we find that specific YouTube channel, we find that specific LinkedIn based on that person's website, and we're going to send it to another tool that's going to allow us to then send it back to Perplexity so that we can double-check that that's actually

the right person, and then we're going to create that and send the link to that inside of Airtable. Again, where we're going to be able to show it on the front end inside of the app. Now, another cool thing that we were able to do with Make is actually go out there and find all the past videos that person appeared on, so that we can bring in all of those appearances and put them in a Content Library. So, really, it provides people with everything that they need in one place to research their next guest appearance. And that, my friends, is how we built the engine, attached it to the structure, and also we're able to create a very beautiful user experience. And now that we've done all the heavy lifting, we're going to go inside of Software, and we're going to start to fine-tune the user experience to make it really user-friendly. This is it, the Moment of Truth. Let me introduce you to Outer View, your podcast research done in seconds with AI. So, when you reach the landing page, you

can pretty much use any one of these buttons here to sign up for free. And then once you do that, it's going to ask you to log in or to create an account. Once you've logged in, you're going to find this account, which is guest research. So, we're going to go ahead and add a record here, and we're going to select, for this example, Alex Fosi, because a lot of you probably already know him. So now it's going out there and researching everything about this guest. Boom, and just like that, in seconds, we have a full profile. So here we have a recap of the profile. We have some of his social accounts. We have some popular quotes from him. So these could be quotes that people could explain on air and clarify, and you can ask specific questions. It also provides the context and significance of these quotes. And then underneath here, we have personalized questions. Then we jump into all the details about his background, his career, his contributions, his achievements, a full timeline of the entrepreneurial journey, his current role.

and finally, we jump into past appearances so you can easily get access to content where you see him speaking being interviewed by someone else. So you can really see what you can expect. And so, within just a couple seconds, and then just reviewing this maybe in 20 minutes, you're completely ready for your next interview. So you can click underneath in the description and test out outou ofview for free. If you want to subscribe, it'll cost you less than $3 per appearance. And so, instead of spending 3 hours of your time or hiring someone to do it for you for just $3 per guest, you can use this [Music] tool. What's up, guys? How's it going? I won't lie. I'm feeling a little bit defeated this morning. Last night, my newborn was crying all night, and I was also up late fixing some bugs in the product. But we have so much more to go. So I'm super excited that we finished the product. With that being said, now we have the hard task of going out there.

and getting first paying customers. And time is running out. So going drink a little bit coffee. Let's go. Last night, I realized hey, I actually also have to go and get customers. And time is running really, really short. Last night, what I did is that I hopped on LinkedIn and just added as many podcasters as possible. There were about 20 of those podcasters that accepted my friend request. So now today, I'm going to try to get in touch with them and try to get them to buy. And if you want to provide support right now, either get me a coffee or subscribe to this channel. I just received a message back from one of the people that I messaged on LinkedIn. I asked him, do you have an assistant who does your guest research? And he said no, I need one. I do the research. So I started the conversation just like, hey, I'm like building out this AI assistant, you know, like that can do it all for you. And so hey, who knows, potentially this person could be our first paying

customer guys, you won't believe it. We actually did it. We got our first Pay customer. Let's go. It's a guy named Matt, and he bought the annual plan from us, which is absolutely amazing. Matt, you are a legend. You are our first customer for out of view. We will treat you like a prince. There's nothing like the feeling of that first sale for your startup, and in this case, it is for a podcast called Not Done Yet, the podcast for clues to success and how high performers never give up. It's a podcast where he interviews successful founders, and he's going to use out of view to get the full profile to save him a bunch of time. Congrats, Matt. This is awesome. Now let's keep pushing so we can get as many sales possible before the end. We have 2 hours left. Let's go. Oops, I did it again. Got another sale, guys. Another guy. This time it's for the $29 monthly plan. Leroy Hempen. Excellent. I'll go and check out his profile. We have

only 20 minutes left, so I'm hoping I can get one last sale squeezed in before the end, but we're going to see. Oh man, this is so exciting. Okay, my friend, time is up. It's time to look at the results and to see whether we've succeeded or failed. Now, unfortunately, I'm sorry to say that I failed this challenge. Let me explain. We got two paying customers, one for the $29 plan and the other one for the $300 annual plan. So, that's a total of $329. Now, for the cost, let's break it down. I first want to mention that I already have access to a lot of these tools, so I didn't actually spend extra apart from the actual logo, and most of these tools have free access at the beginning. But if I had already exceeded all my free credits, this is what it would have cost. So, software would have cost me $167 on the monthly plan. For Airtable, if I went month-to-month, it would cost me $54. Then for Make, it would cost me

$18.82 plus about $10 for access to the API. For perplexity $20 for chat GPT. And then I spent $90 on the logo itself. That is a grand total of $359.99. Meaning that I am $30.82 cents short. Therefore, I am not profitable and I fail this challenge. However, because all of these platforms have free plans to begin with, you could also consider that I've only spent $120 for the additional tools that I use. And that means a $29 profit. Which means that I would have won this challenge. Potato, potato. Okay, that's it for me. Thanks for watching till the end. Let's go for an app.

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Christian Peverelli - WeAreNoCode

The speaker plans to come up with, validate, and launch a SaaS business with a co-founder in 48 hours, using AI to build it with no code.

They decide on creating an AI research assistant for podcasters to help them prepare for guests, with a potential expansion to the YouTube world.

The business model involves offering free access and then transitioning to a monthly subscription for additional features.

Validating a Podcast Research Startup in 48 Hours

Skipping the usual customer discovery interviews, the entrepreneur quickly validates the idea by texting podcasters and doing online research.

The feedback received is promising, leading to the decision to build the first version and test it.

The next step is to create the branding, including coming up with a name and checking for domain availability.

The concept of "outerview" is developed as a brand name with a unique logo and color palette.

The focus is on simplicity and value in the initial stages of brand building.

The next step involves creating a one-page landing page using Sotter to effectively communicate the brand's offer.

Simplifying Podcast Research with AI Tools

AI-powered tool offers quick podcast research, with a free trial and a $25/month pro version.

5 hours perfecting the landing page, feeling the pressure of a 34-hour deadline.

The startup will use Make for no-code automation and Airtable for data storage, with Make already agreeing to sponsor the video.

Building User Experience with Softer for Company Internal Tools

The Softer tool is being used to create a user-friendly interface on top of the existing engine and structure.

The team encountered issues with the perplexity API but was able to resolve them after a discussion, allowing them to successfully build out the scenarios.

The first scenario involves finding guest information, which includes research, formatting, summarizing, and storing the data in Airtable for representation on the front end.

Streamlining Guest Research for Podcasts with AI

A webhook collects guest profile information before generating personalized questions.

Airtable is used to gather records and Perplexity to create specific questions based on the profile.

Another scenario involves using a webhook to find the guest's social media accounts, double-checking the information, and creating a content library of the guest's past appearances.

The "Outer View" platform offers a user-friendly experience for researching and accessing guest profiles, social accounts, quotes, and personalized questions, streamlining the podcast research process.

Overcoming Challenges to Secure First Paying Customers

The speaker shares the challenges of securing the first paying customers for their AI assistant product.

By reaching out to podcasters on LinkedIn, they successfully land their first customer, Matt, who purchased the annual plan.

The product is aimed to help podcasters with guest research, as demonstrated by the sale to the host of the "Not Done Yet" podcast.

The sales attempt resulted in a total of $329 from two paying customers.

However, after calculating the costs of the tools used, the total expenditure came out to be $359.

The seller argues that considering the free plans of the platforms, the actual expenditure was $120, resulting in a $29 profit, and considers it a potential win.