I Interviewed A SaaS Millionaire... Here's What I Learned

What does it take, Michael, for an average person to start a business from zero dollars and take that within 60 days to $2 million? What it takes is a customer base who's looking to buy what you have. Within a period of 60 days, we increased the revenue of of a business by $2 million. 15 years I've been doing this. The businesses have generated I can't say specifically, but in the tens of millions over that time. Our first customers, we didn't even have a dashboard for them to log into. The very first customers, we just said, "We're going to work with you in Slack." One growth strategy that worked really well is uh I would say creating a sense of FOMO. In their minds, they have an idea of what an MVP is, and their idea has a way more in it than what a real MVP is. They're probably more than 50% of their ideas should be cut on the initial launch. You see, I've been building this product called Mochi in private for quite some time. And on May 2nd, 1:00 p.m. EDT, I'm going live to show you exactly what I did to build the product to production only using AI by myself. Mochi has 1,274 features that were built in less than 4 months. To put that in perspective, even if you built two features a day to production using AI, that would take you about 2 years. And so, my promises are pretty much this. By the end of that event, you'll know exactly how to find an idea that AI fundamentally cannot kill. You'll know exactly how to build your idea using AI to production. And you'll learn a new way that I'm introducing, which I believe is the only way to build SAS in 2026 without getting cloned by AI. And I'll also show you the two proven paths as to how you can monetize your code, some of which I use myself to make five figures from Mochi before even launching. And if you're looking to take advantage of this AI era, then you must attend May 2nd. Because on May 2nd, everybody who makes it to the event is going to get an awesome mystery gift, okay? I can't tell you what it is, obviously. I mean, it's a mystery, but uh you'll have to find out. So, if you're ready to join, I'm going to leave the school community link down below. We're going live there on May 2nd, 1:00 p.m. EDT. Don't miss out, and I'll see you there. Hey, Michael, how's it going? Great. How's it going? Awesome, man. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with us today. Everyone wants to know, they're curious to know what you do. And so, our first question to you is, could you quickly just tell us what does your business do? My business is called Rapid Cloud, and we are a high-performance hosting company. For those who don't know, hosting is basically the infrastructure of the internet. It's what allows a website to exist online. And we focus specifically on WordPress. So, WordPress is the most popular content management system for building a website. Almost half the internet runs on WordPress. And Rapid Cloud allows WordPress sites to run on the internet with very high performance. So, there are some types of WordPress sites, like blogs, that are very simple to host, but there are other sites, like communities, e-learning sites, membership platforms, that have a lot of users logged in and are very difficult to host, and we provide really scalable, powerful hosting for those types of websites. So, what inspired you to start this business given that there's so much competition in this space? The reason we started Rapid Cloud is because we were solving a problem that our own customers were having in my previous business. So, for almost 15 years, I ran a company called BodyBoss, which was actually acquired uh just a year ago. And BodyBoss is the most dominant, most well-known community building platform for WordPress. Uh we had over 100 employees, about 30,000 active customers using the product. And imagine uh just just to understand that business, the idea is that it allows you to build your own community that you're hosting and that you control. So, the features are kind of like Facebook, but the people using it are not trying to compete with Facebook. They just want those types of features. So, let's say, for example, I go to my gym. If my gym wanted a membership portal, they might use BodyBoss, and it would allow their users to have uh members who can interact with each other in all the kind of ways you'd expect in a social network. Our customers, one of the biggest complaints they had, or really the biggest complaint, is with performance. Even though there's lots of hosts in the WordPress space, most of them focus on sites that are easier to host, which are basically like publishing sites where the content does not change very often. And to get slightly technical, they they rely on very aggressive page caching to make it work. And for our customers, even though there's lots of competitors, they really could not find any host that would allow their sites to run uh without performance constraints. And they would have big constraints. I mean, if these people have potentially hundreds or thousands of users logged in at the same time, their sites would stall or crash, have 20-30 second page load times, and it was destroying their ability to run their community. We realized there was a gap in the market, and we had known this for probably a decade. And eventually, we decided, "Let's build a solution to it." And communities are not the only use case where people have this problem. I mentioned before, it's membership sites, e-learning sites, e-commerce. WordPress powers roughly a third of all on-online commerce. Really, any sort of scenario where customers where the users on the website are logged in and where each user is seeing different content from the other user, in those scenarios, it becomes very difficult to host, and the existing hosts aren't really targeting that type of use case. Got it. Awesome. That's really nice. So, you got your you essentially got your idea from past business idea. Yeah, we built this as a solution to a problem that our own customers were having. So, when we launched the product, we launched it to our own customer. We had our own customers complaining every day about this problem. Uh and so, we knew the problem really deeply. I mean, I've been typical customer that we use in my product is the kind of customer I've been working with, you know, for over a decade. So, Michael, where were you in life before you started uh your entrepreneurship journey? Did you have some entrepreneurship experience in the past, or, you know, did you come from a family or a background of entrepreneurship? Yeah, so I did not come from a background of entrepreneurship, but uh I came from a background or you could say a family of creators. So, I've always been someone who liked to building and creating things. In my my younger life, I would draw, I would paint. I used to teach woodworking. I would work on houses and do construction. I just always I was that kid who was obsessed with Legos. You can see in the background all all of my models. I have one This is the latest one I just finished uh it's like a rover going on the moon rover. One on Mars. Nice. Yeah, Mars rover. Um I still in my free time like to build stuff because I need to get my creative outlet. So, that's kind of my background. And my whole family is like that. Like my both my parents can draw and paint, and my aunt teaches painting at a university. They grew up with that in my in my background. And so, when I was younger, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I just knew that I wanted to build stuff to create things. I was also very technical. I loved working on a computer. I went to grad school for architecture, actually. And as I was in school, I realized that my passion for it wasn't strong enough. I didn't really like it that much. And for me, it's not really a great career. Architecture is a tough career. It's like becoming a doctor. I mean, you have to go through grad school, and you have to go through 3 years of apprenticeship and take all these tests. And then, the salaries are not that good. But like the other part that's different than being a doctor is the salaries are not comparable to being a doctor unless you're like in the 1%. So, I dropped out of grad school and tried to figure out what to do next, and I started learning how to code. And so, I was doing front-end coding, of course, cuz I'm like a design person. So, I was learning how to do CSS and JavaScript and layouts and things like that. And I had a a a friend who was a back-end coder, and we just started doing little custom projects together. And that's how I got into it. And then later, I I another friend of mine, someone a good friend from high school, and I decided to start a company together. And so, that was my first freelancing part of that, I guess you could say. And we started our first company together, which was called Easy Outsource, back in 2010, I guess. And the reason we started this, back then, you didn't have Well, you had Upwork, back then it was called oDesk, and you had some other job platforms, but none There was no dominant one. And before it became cool to do this, we were working virtually and hiring people overseas and all that stuff online. Early on, we had some uh virtual assistants and developers we were hiring in Philippines and India and stuff. It was hard to find them. So, we built this company called Easy Outsource, and the idea was that you could have job seekers who were overseas, and you'd have employers who were like in the West, and they could connect with each other. And in the process of building this, something happened. We We In order to build this product, we had to build a lot of the features that you see in a community. You had members who would have a profile, and they could send messages to each other and all that, and they'd register an account and stuff. And so, what ended up happening uh kind of organically is that Easy Outsource grew for a few years, and then I sold it. My partner and I it was acquired. There's a company called onlinejobs.ph. It's like a Philippines-focused job network. The whole user base now has been merged into there. Eventually, it made its way into their hands. And we ended up kind of taking that software and repurposing it and extending it as a community platform. That was kind of the birth of of the BodyBoss brand was Easy Outsource. Cuz we had already started getting into this kind of stuff of they can register, they have a profile, they can send messages, they have notifications and stuff like that. So, we started extending that that feature set and advertising that we built communities. And And by the way, Easy Outsource was built on WordPress. Back then, if you wanted to build a website, like the easiest way to do it was on WordPress, even if it was all custom. And that's still the case today, although it's changing with AI and everything. Um but so, we we built it on WordPress, and then we were building BodyBoss, basically our our community platform on WordPress. And that grew, and then, you know, and then people couldn't find ways to host it, and then we started a hosting company. So, that's kind of That's the journey. Got it. So, this is what we call a linear business model, which is instead of creating multiple businesses that have different customers, Mhm. customer, and we create multiple businesses around them, right? [clears throat] So, guys, if you have multiple ideas, try to see if there's a way where you can piece all of that together just to have one customer. And if you have I'm sure even Michael can, you know, support me on this. If you have too many ideas that deviate from what you're currently doing, you're going to go off track, you're going to get distracted, and at the end of the day, you're going to have a product that is completely different, and not just in terms of the marketing, not just in terms of managing the team, but everything else that comes in place with that. So, unless you have the system, which is how to run that business separately, right? Unless you have that down, it's probably better for you to start a linear business model. And so, some ways that we would do this in SAS is if you have, let's say, a hosting platform, just like Michael, right? You would find out what other problems are these customers going to face? Well, they might need web development support. They might need custom development support, which could be a service. They might need more hosting credits, all that kind of stuff. And just figure out other ways to monetize using the same customer because every problem you solve always creates another problem, right? And so, what Michael did here is exactly that. He just found all the problems that could potentially arise from just just solving one problem and then created multiple businesses around the same customer. So, one problem that most developers face is they try to build their SaaS or build their business first before they start marketing. And so, my question to you is how did you manage to have customers before you started and build something that you can offer as an MVP or just some way to prove that your product can deliver on the value that you promised. So, you want to learn first along the way as much as possible. You want to have cash flow and cover your expenses. So, that's one thing cuz to build a really, really solid product can take years. So, you don't want to wait that long putting in money before you launch. And you [snorts] don't want to find out after you launch it that nobody wants your product. So, you want to learn your learn your customers and cover your cash flow as you go. In the early days or the early years, the majority of our revenue came from the agency, actually. So, we would work with customers and sweet we had a MVP of the product. We had a community platform, but it was missing so many features that people wanted. And what we would do is we would get clients. So, I would get clients and and charge a retainer by the hour and I had a team of developers and we had an agency and they would say, "I wish that this feature. I wish that this feature." Instead of just building everything under the sun for a year, we would say, "Okay, I'll charge you X amount of dollars and build it for you." And cuz people had all these things they wanted. In the early years, personally, me and my business partner back then, we would actually do sales calls and I would manage projects. So, I I knew my customers really well cuz I was managing projects for them. And that allowed me to have a a cash flow and not have to have a job on the side while we in the background worked on the product itself. The dream was always to have a SaaS business that to be product driven. But, you know, that's what we did and in the background, what we would do is we would build features in the product. But when a customer came to me and said, "Hey, I I want this feature. I want that feature." Not everything go belongs in the product. You don't want feature creeping and that's something cuz everything you build you have to maintain. So, we would be very careful about only building the stuff that had mainstream appeal and anything else we would just bill people by the hour on retainer and and build it for them. So, that's how we grew the product organically. With Rapid Cloud, we needed an MVP of the product and it is a competitive space. So, there is a kind of high bar for what a minimum is that people will accept. But I will say our first customers, we didn't even have a going to work with you in Slack." And if they would need a backup, they would tell us in Slack and we'd go generate a backup in a zip file and give it to them in Slack. Because they were having these performance issues and we're like, "We're going to put you on the infrastructure that we built and it's going to be super fast." But to build an actual user dashboard is very time-consuming. Nowadays, we have a really robust dashboard. You can you know, manage the whole site and do everything. But we didn't even have that at the beginning. Um so, that allowed us to have at least some customers. The people who really needed it, we were able to get, you know, test that things are working, get feedback, and bring in some revenue, you know, probably a year prior to we when we would have normally launched. One of the problems that uh most new entrepreneurs probably have is that in their minds they have an idea of what an MVP is and their idea has a way more in it than what a real MVP is. There's probably more than 50% of their launch. Like an MVP really means minimum viable product, minimum. Like really, really, really think about that. What what is the absolute minimum that you could uh have in here to sell? And early on, you know, there's going to be a lot of stuff missing. There's going to be bugs. You're going to be very hands-on. But that's one of the also one of the advantages of being brand new. You know, you can talk directly to your customers and be really hands-on in a way that a bigger company just can't. So, Michael, how did you get that first customer? And not just that, how did you convince them to work with you on an MVP product that you were offering through Slack? Uh-huh. For for Rapid Cloud? Yes. So, there we had an advantage that we had again with BodyBoss we had tens of thousands of of existing customers. So, and some of them were through in BodyBoss we had an agency also and we had customers who we were doing custom development for even if if when we launched this. So, we had customers that we knew on a personal basis who had performance issues, who we knew could benefit from the product. So, we reached out to those customers and told them about it and said, "Hey, we're going to put you on our product and you're going to see it's going to be much faster. It's going to solve your problems. If not, you can go back." And we did and those early customers loved the product. They were shocked at how much faster their sites were and that they weren't having all these performance bottlenecks. And that's how we started and then once we were ready to go live in a bigger way, we started doing email campaigns to the rest of our customers. So, we had a bit of an advantage that we had an existing customer base. But I remember being an entrepreneur a long time ago and having no customers what that's like and you know, no one to market to. I would say in in the very, very early days, I mean, I would go to networking events. I would give talks at networking events to get customers, agency customers like that. You know, like the the pure hustle. That's how I started. Um and then we started market doing a lot of SEO and marketing. We hired a a person in Philippines, a virtual assistant. We would do research and find content related to our product that no one had written about, write articles, and then we would do all the we would do link building to get it to rank in Google and get people to read the article and come contact us and then we'd get on the phone and try to sell them. That's but the world has changed dramatically since then. So, now you have AI. You know, you can do automated AI outreach and you can do AI can write your articles for you. You can do AI can go into your LinkedIn and find people related to you and automatically request them to connect. Like it's a whole different world from how I started. Yeah, I think people just have the upper hand right now. It's so much easier to start a business now. And Michael, everyone's waiting to know how much did you make in your entire entrepreneurship career? Throughout the 15 years I've been doing this, the businesses have generated in I I can't say specifically, but in the tens of millions over that time. So, in the fastest we ever grew a business was within a period of 60 days we increased the revenue of of a business by $2 million. And what does it take, Michael, for an average person to start a business from $0 and take that within 60 Well, what it takes is a customer base who's looking to buy what you have. So, we launched a product to one of my customer bases that people were craving. We spent a long time building it and we did a whole campaign of pre-sales and we also had a time limit. We said, "You have to buy within within these 60 days or else you're going to be on a waitlist to wait to buy it." And we did pre-sales and all the people who wanted it put in their deposits within the 60 days and and we brought in $2 million. Awesome. And were these sales calls? Did you get people on a call where you can sell to them or was this a payment link on your website? They were it's payment link on the website. They were paying. They had a window of time where they can get a full refund also, which helps to get the sale. So, they were paying on the website and then they would be scheduled for an onboarding call. You know, what what it was basically a pre-sale and then the product was available a few months later for them. And then we would schedule people for their onboarding and we'd do that through email and and through some phone calls and get them set up on the product. What SaaS ideas do you think entrepreneurs should start in 2025 or probably some evergreen ideas that they can start today? You probably already know, but if if you're not into it, get into AI. SaaS products that are not using AI behind the scenes to power them are probably not going to work going forward. And SaaS products that are not built using AI are going to have problems also cuz other people can build faster than you. So, it's a pro and a con. I mean, the pro is that you can build much faster than before. The con is that anything you build can be replicated much faster than before. So, you have to come up with ideas that are hard to replicate. One area is personal brands. So, if you have influencers or you have a personal brand, no one can replicate your personal brand. Hosting, one of the reasons I like is cuz there's an infrastructure component to it. It's not pure SaaS. So, it is extremely and expensive to try to replicate what we're doing in Rapid Cloud. So, I would focus on those types of areas where you're leaning heavily on AI, but finding some kind of vertical that's difficult to replicate. And of course, you need a marketing channel. Uh so, that's part of it, too. I mean, a big part of this is finding it could be an influencer, it could be something else. You need to find a way to market your product. If someone were to start from scratch today, what should they do first? The first thing I would do is do some research to find out whatever your idea is, validate the idea a little bit before you just start building. So, you have ChatGPT and things on your side to to research. Try to figure out if there's competitors who are who are doing what you're doing and if [clears throat] there's actually space for you to get involved in. Talk to the potential customers. Find other business owners who are doing sort of tangential things and talk to them and learn. I would say before just diving in I think the mistake of just building. It's better to take a couple weeks and like really do the research and figure it out and make sure that whatever you're getting into that there's a space for you to to fill. That's that's the first step I would take. What is one valuable lesson that you learned in your entrepreneurship career? But the most important lesson I learned over time is to focus on the profit margin and the churn and to make sure that the actual economics of the business are healthy and to not just focus on building a great product or marketing and things like that, but to be very, very clear to really just know your numbers. My early companies, we didn't really know our numbers that well and the software we were using didn't present it to us. So, it was like very hard to figure out things like our churn and our customer acquisition costs and stuff. Later on in in in my career, I started learning more about that stuff. And really focusing on that cuz that's going to guide decision-making. People with a finance background, they're going to be it's going to be that's going to be very easy for them. People with a development background, that's something they have to learn and it's important to focus on that and up your game and learn all that early on. Awesome. What is one growth strategy that worked really well in your business? So, one growth strategy that worked really well is I would say creating a sense of FOMO. What you can do, if you if you launch something and you just market it in such a way that like it's so awesome, here it is, people will just not buy it. They'll just sit around and be like, "Ah, maybe maybe I'll be in a few months from now I'll buy it." So, what you have to do is create a kind of sense of urgency for the customer. So, maybe you have a discount that's only going for a certain period of time and then it's going to end. Things like that, you just have to to give people a reason to buy now. And if you do that, then you can get a lot of people to convert. If you don't, then people will just sit around and wait and not buy. Awesome. That's some great advice. How do you keep yourself motivated when your SaaS or your business does not bring you the revenue you expected? Uh the way you keep yourself motivated is by taking care of your mental health. That's That's my answer. As As an entrepreneur, it's very easy to reach burnout, and that used to happen to me a lot. I work differently than I used to. I mean, I'm 41 now. When I was in my 20s, my 30s, or early 30s, I would have I would work really long hours. I would work I would really have product launch, I'd stay up till 10:00 in the morning. I thought that was the thing to do. But then, the next day I would crash. So, what's the point of doing that when you could just take care of yourself? And what ends up happening is when when you get the burnout, it affects your emotions and your your mind. And so, these days I take really good care of my health. And your physical health and your mental health are tied together. If your body is performing properly, you will have positive mentality. If your body is in pain, you will have negative thoughts in your mind. Every morning I go outside and I get sun exposure. I go for a long walk. I do yoga almost every day. I spend time with my family. I do things to just keep myself in a positive state of mind generally. And that gives me the clarity of mind to think about stuff, cuz business can be so all-consuming that you just get sucked in to the There's so many fires you put out all day, every day, and you can just get like obsessed with it. And you have to be able to step back and look at the bigger picture of it and have a clear mind. Um, I think that's the most important thing. And maybe for some people you already do this stuff. For me, those were hard lessons learned. I destroyed my body uh just sitting at a keyboard like all day, all night. I destroyed my body in the early years. And it took me a long time to figure this out, how important it is to take care of myself. And that has made a huge impact in my ability to perform. Uh, and it's easier now. I I I'm I'm able to do my job with way less stress, but with the same output. I think that's the most important thing. Especially these days, you know, a post-COVID world where a lot of people are just working in their home office all day. You can go drive yourself stir crazy. What is the most important skill someone needs to learn today if they want to start a business? Um, I would say I'm going to break it down to a couple things. One, AI. Obvious, but that's the way of the future. AI's eating up everything, and you could hire 10 people, or you could hire three people, and it depends on how much you lean into this. That's probably one of the most important things. And the other skill I would say would be a combination of like time management and learning how to delegate. So, I I think it's very tempting for an early entrepreneur to have the attitude of I'm going to do everything myself and be a workaholic. It's important that you learn how to focus on what actually matters. And when you build a team, learn how to actually delegate and give other responsibilities so that you can be efficient. Cuz when you're very small, it's easy to be extremely inefficient, and it sort of doesn't matter. But as you get bigger, I mean, BodyBoss, we had a team of almost 150 people. So, I I can speak from experience. When when you When the team starts to get bigger, those inefficiencies creep and compound. So, learn how to manage your time and how to manage other people, and use AI to assist as much as possible to build an efficient business that can scale. How does RapidCloud stand out compared to all the other competitors in the WordPress space? Yeah, so our our value proposition, there are a few things that make up the value proposition of RapidCloud. Number one, performance. So, if you only have one visitor on your site, it's going to be fast anywhere. But when you have hundreds or thousands, especially if they're logged in, it's a dynamic website, uh RapidCloud will maintain the performance even with massive amounts of visitors, whereas our competitors won't. Your site will really slow down, which has a big impact on the customer satisfaction of your user base. That's number one. After that, we have an incredible dashboard, so it's very easy to administer and manage your site and have insight into what's going on. We have best-in-class security. We are scanning your server 24/7 looking for malware and auto patching it um and help and removing it if there's a problem. And then the last one is customer support. Our Trustpilot is 4.7, 4.8. We have extremely satisfied customers, and we have 24/7 live chat support, and uh we really put a lot of effort into taking care of the customer. How can someone speed up the process of learning all these skills so that they can start their business faster? I would say the best way is to find a mentor who can help you speed up your knowledge. Cuz there are people who've been doing Whatever you're trying to do, yeah, your your specific idea might be unique, but the core fundamentals of how to run the business are not. Every business, especially SaaS business, has the same core fundamentals. And you can spend years making mistakes, or you can get a mentor who can work with you and give you advice that will allow you to avoid those mistakes. Have you had a mentor in the past? I have. I've had multiple people I've turned to. I've had mentors and advisors who have looked at the business and given me help, both people I've paid and also just people I know in my network. I have a lot of friends who are entrepreneurs. I have friends who are lawyers. I have friends who are VCs. And I have, you know, I have those people in my contact list to Whatever the challenges I'm going after, one of the first things I do is just get on a call with them and get their advice before I do anything. All right, Michael, my final question to you is, what is your best advice to someone who wants to start their SaaS business but hasn't taken action yet? Uh, my advice is to learn your customer. So, it's very easy to get excited about your product and to spend months or years building this amazing product, and you're not actually solving a problem that the customer has, or maybe the solution just isn't of enough value that they'd be willing to pay for it. So, you need to understand your customer, and the best way to do this is to actually talk to the customer. Um, and the other advice I would give you is to know what type of business model you have. So, every business I've run has been a kind of cash flow business, where we have a high price per month or per year, and that's able to sustain the cash flow, and we've been bootstrapped and run it that way. That is one type of business. Another type of business is one where you make a very small money per customer, maybe maybe it's even free for 90% of the customers, and the business can only survive at massive scale, in which case you probably need to be VC-funded, and you're going to spend a lot of time fundraising. So, these are two very different types of businesses. So, I would say early on you should know what makes sense based on your skill set and the audience you're going after and your risk tolerance to what you're trying to do. Awesome. If people want to find you, where could they look up your business or find you on social media? Yeah, so the business is Rapid with a Y. It's r a p y d dot cloud. So, you can go to rapid.cloud, and you can also look this up on the YouTube channel, LinkedIn channel. If you just search r a p y d cloud, you'll find us. Um, and feel free to connect. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Michael Iznos. I'm sure you'll see my name written down. All right, thank you so much for hopping on this call and helping the Prodigy community answer some very important questions that are a mystery. And so, I appreciate your time, and we hope to have you once more on this channel. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.