Digital Commerce Summit – Interent Marketing Voices

5 Lessons Learned from a SaaS Home Run

Laura Roeder is known for putting together agile companies that put the customer first — including her current hit, Edgar, a SaaS (software as a service) product that hit a million dollars in revenue in its first year in business.
She excels at “keeping it simple” — maybe because she ran ultra-successful online education companies for five years. She turned around and put those lessons into a software business — and she’s crushing it.
Laura leapt out on her own as a freelancer at 22, without giving it a lot of thought. As she laughingly put it in her Unemployable interview with Brian Clark, it was:
“… probably the worst way to do it.”
You can find that interview here: From Freelance Designer to SaaS Superstar
She hadn’t done any prep, she hadn’t lined up any clients … she didn’t even know what a proposal was.
Lesson #1: You learn by doing
While I don’t particularly recommend that approach for most of us, it underlies a key principle of starting a business:
You learn the real lessons by doing.
(If you’re looking for a lower-risk way to learn those lessons, the “side hustle” — a part-time business you can run in your spare time — is a fantastic middle road.)
Educating yourself is important — and you can find lots of techniques and strategies here on Copyblogger and our sister site, Digital Commerce Institute.
But education is the initial, back-of-the-envelope sketch. It’s when you actually start building a project, product, and business that you

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What It’s Really Like to Start an Ultra-Successful Company: Meet Moz’s Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is known for founding an incredibly successful company — while keeping an unwavering commitment to his core values.
You may have noticed, if you look around at the general business landscape, that a lot of successful founders are a bit cocky. They tend to overestimate the role of their own genius in their success — and underestimate the hard work of their teams and the luck that went into that success.
(And no, for the curious, I’m not counting Rainmaker Digital founder Brian Clark in that group.)
Rand Fishkin isn’t like most founders.
For example, founders of successful businesses typically play certain cards close to the chest. They’re highly selective about what they reveal about their businesses. And there are some strong business reasons for doing that.
Rand, on the other hand, is radically transparent about the good stuff and the bad in his business.
“Transparency is synonymous with Rand Fishkin, in a fantastic way.” – Brian Clark
Sometimes that transparency has come at a price. But it’s one of Rand’s deepest core values, as well as a foundational value for his business. And while his commitment to extreme transparency has closed some doors … it’s also opened some amazing ones.
Moz’s long, winding path to “overnight success”
Like so many stories of explosive growth, the company now known as Moz started out on a rather winding path.
The company started life as SEOMoz, a side project for Rand while he taught himself SEO. Eventually it became a full-time consulting

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The Secret to Powerful Products that Sell: Meet Tara Gentile, Creator of ‘Quiet Power’

Tara Gentile is known for helping people grow terrific businesses — without sacrificing ethics or heart.
Tara works with “idea people” — people who have an idea that they want to turn into a product, program, or service, but who may not always see themselves as business owners or marketers. She helps her audience and clients find the right business models, craft marketing that resonates, and structure their businesses for profit.
She calls her approach the Quiet Power Strategy — and it’s a complete reversal of a lot of the “cookie cutter” advice you sometimes see around digital business.
Listen and observe
A while back, Tara spoke with Rainmaker Digital CEO Brian Clark about how to thoughtfully observe your audience in order to strengthen your business.
Listen to Win: How Actionable Observation Provides Profitable Answers
Brian and Tara share a deep focus on listening in order to uncover audience interests, fears, and desires. When you master this, everything about your business starts to work better.
It’s also the key to marketing that doesn’t feel pushy or creepy — because you’re speaking directly to the problems and concerns of your audience, using their own language. Marketing becomes a direct expression of audience empathy.
Listening is the key to building a business based on service rather than selfishness.
“I see [listening] as probably the biggest thing that’s keeping people from creating marketing that works and products that sell easily … and sales processes that don’t feel slimy.” – Tara Gentile
What do they care deeply

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Multiple Streams of Income from Your Digital Business: Meet Joanna Penn, Creative Entrepreneur

Joanna Penn is known for being an unusually multifaceted author.
Not only does she write thriller novels under the name J.F. Penn, she’s also a nonfiction writer, copywriter, teacher, and content creator … and she’s the “chief marketing officer” for her own career.
And her marketing superpower? Being able to see the myriad business possibilities that a single book can unlock … even for fiction (which most people mistakenly believe is the least profitable form of writing).
Joanna has sold books in 74 countries, as well as created courses, audiobooks, and other profitable models for writers.
“As a creative, you’re creating intellectual property assets that can earn you money for the rest of your life and 70 years after you die.” – Joanna Penn

Business skill … or creativity?
In a recent interview with Rainmaker Digital CEO Brian Clark, Joanna revealed that she has no patience with the myth that creativity and profitability are mutually exclusive:
“I got really annoyed by the fact that I’d wasted 13 years not being creative because people said to me, ‘You can’t make a living out of this.’”
(You can pick up the full interview here: Inside the Lucrative World of Self-Published Ebooks)
Joanna knows that business itself is creative — and that business skills can help creative folks like writers earn a good living from their work:
“If you learn the business as a separate skill — as you also have to learn the craft — you can actually do both … Business is creative.”
Joanna isn’t just

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