Dan Martell, SaaS Coach | 5x founder, 3x exits, Investor, Speaker

Welcome to the success story podcast, I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Without further ado, another episode of the success story podcast. All right, I am sitting down with Dan Martell, who is the founder of SAS Academy Now. He's done a ton of things over his career, known in the business community for successes in life, husband, father of two boys, founder of multiple tech startups, sold three of them, five times founder, an investor in 38 plus companies and probably counting million there by age 27, SAS Business Coach, founder of Clarity, founder of Flowtown, which was acquired in 11 Founders, Fear of Technologies acquired in08, and mentor at 500 Startups, Grow Labs, and the C100.org. I saw even on your Twitter, you worked with Proposify, you worked with ClickFunnels, so you're working with the best and brightest startups, you had an incredible career to Dan, thank you for standing down, I appreciate, love to hear your story, and what you're doing. Scott, man, wow, what an intro, yeah, man, I appreciate it, you let me where you want to go, but I'm a giver, so I'm committed to giving you 110% and being open and honest about all stories. So let's see it up with your background, because you highlight your background a lot when you go on your website, you speak about your successes and your failures. So walk me through so people don't who don't know you can tee up how you got to where you are today, you say 5X Founder, 3X Exits, that's some failures. I mean, I've got a unique background, if I just go back how I even became an entrepreneur, I grew up second oldest before, got diagnosed with ADHD when I was 11, grew up in a house where my mom was in alcoholic and my dad was in sales always on the road. And by the time I was 13, I get introduced to drugs, and really my life just spiraled out of control, in and out of group home, crisis centers, rehab centers, all the way to the point that at 16, I found myself high and drunk in a stolen car, trying to get away from the police with hang-gun sitting next to me in the bag, because I told myself I got caught by the police, I was going to pull the gun and let the police do their job. So I ended up trying to get away from, you know, the police inside to be chased, mashing inside of our house, I went for the hang-gun and it got stuck. And before I knew it, you know, the door opened up, the police grabbed me and threw me in the back of the cop car and I woke up over the next day wondering, you know, who is looking out for me because I didn't expect to be alive. And due to the severity of my crimes, I ended up getting sentenced to about nine months, six months of that I spent in an adult jail. I got released to a rehab center called Portage. And I spent 11 months in therapy as a 17-year-old rebuilding my relationships with my family, the building, the trust, rebuilding my confidence, honestly Scott, like I just felt, I had no self-esteem, I had very little confidence and just working out myself and it was at the end of that program, I was helping Rick the maintenance guy clean out one of the camps with an old church camp and in a room there was this old 486 computer with a yellow book on Java programming sitting next to it and I just opened it up and followed chapter one and I got the computer to say hello world and I thought I was a computer genius or at least, that's what I thought at the time. And that one moment, programming and software became my new addiction and when I got out of entrepreneurship, the ultimate personal development program and that's kind of how I ended up, you know, at a young age, starting a company called Maritime Vacation that would completely stale, then I did MBHO which is another failure and it wasn't until I was 24 that I finally found some success on the back end of finally reading business books. I'd read 100 plus technical books, software programming, architecture, database, but not business. And yeah, this first book called Love is a Killer app, I can Sanders really just shifted my whole on light relationships, knowledge and that's why I'm here today, so I'm alive, that's why I am blessed to live the life I live with my wife and my two kids and you know, being involved in all these incredible entrepreneurs company of the coach. That's an incredible story, thank you for sharing that. I, you know, when I usually ask about successes and failures, people speak about career choices they made that were a mistake, perhaps a failed company, but you definitely are about the full spectrum of all time low to where you are today with that's a tough, that's a tough spot to be in at 16, man, that's not a fun place at all. So as you built these out, you know, speak to me about your experience building out companies, why some of them failed, why they started to succeed, and I think that can sort of dovetail into your current success, the lessons you learned. Yeah, I mean, having started from, you know, less than zero, really a whole, right? A lot of the early journey for me was just personal development and like figuring out, you know, how do you communicate, how do you build teams? So a lot of the early failures, you know, maritime vacation and behose was around not, not understanding a thing called marketing, right? Not understanding how sales conversations happened. Again, I wasn't reading any books, I literally thought I'm just going to be a business person. We even call it entrepreneurship back then, which is I'm going to be like self-employed, which was a dirty word back in the day, this is 2000, 1998, 1999. And, you know, I just slowly learned that there's a cap to how much you can physically do in 100 hours a week, and you need to be able to build teams and to build teams you need to create something that's interesting, you know, because if somebody's smart and able to help you out, why would they work with you versus somebody else? And so it was like learning about storytelling, you know, understanding how to present a solution to a customer, but before you even present that, understand how to uncover their real desires or pain, their challenges that they're trying to solve. I mean, I didn't have any formal training and sales, and, you know, today I've sold over $50 million worth of software myself. Like, I don't, I build sales teams now, but personally hand-to-hand sales. And that's on the back end of, you know, buying all the sales books from the zigglers is just, you know, Brian Tracy, like literally just driving around, you know, burning fuel because it was a forcing function for me to listen to these books, you know, back in the day it was on CDs and prior to that tape, to just try to teach myself the skill set to succeed, you know, so I mean, what are the lessons I learned? One, if you're not able to play nice with other people, there's definitely a feeling and a cap on your success. Two, if you don't invest in your knowledge, like if I went back now and I said, you know, like I get kids reaching out to me, some of them get inherent in some of them have a hundred grand, they saved up and they go, which I do it by money, I would take 10% of it and reinvest it in yourself, minimum, like you should really invest in yourself until you get to a point where you're so good that, you know, the, I have an unlimited budget today for my personal education, right, like if I'm trying to start a new business or invest in an industry, I don't know, I will pay to get in front of the world's best people in that topic because speed to me matters more than anything and I'm not shy to admit that I don't know, which when I started off, I 100% had a ton of, you know, lack of confidence to be able to even mint that stuff today, I almost wear it like a badge of honor, like my teams and all my companies are way smarter than I am at any of their skills. And because of that, I don't have to work so hard. So there's, there's just been every lesson lesson out there. I had to learn and continue to iterate to try to become the person who can achieve that level. Next level of success. I think it's a never ending game and it's a beautiful one. And so now that makes a tease up and it makes a lot of sense as to why after you start to learn these lessons and I 100% align with what you're saying about, you know, if you don't want to be the smartest person in the room all the time, you go seek out those mentors and that guidance to help you grow and scale. And that's probably the most powerful recipe for success. Somebody can pick up on just to go seek out that guidance because you don't know what you don't know. Now that makes sense as to why you started to have these successes. So after, you know, you used to, you exited one, exited two, exited three. Now you're starting to invest in companies. You probably can just retire and never work again. Why did you want to start SaaS Academy? What does SaaS Academy do? That for example, even perhaps like a Y-combinator wouldn't do. Yeah. So, you know, on the, why do I work when I don't have to? Because I became a multi-million air when I was 27. You know, I think it was a, what was it? Jim Rohn famously said, you know, people all the time, like if I had a million dollars, I wouldn't work a day in, in my life. And I think he, his reply is, well, I think that's like God sees it fit that you never do because it's not very productive, you know? And I love that reply because essentially it's, you know, people that know how to create value can't see themselves doing anything less, right? What ends up happening if you do it right? Many people don't. If you do it right, is your day is full of things that bring you energy, that light you up, that excite you, that you get to work on, that makes you feel like meaningful and impactful and create a legacy. And honestly, I'd be doing what I do every day, even if it didn't have any financial gain just because I love doing it. So, the byproduct of trying to create as much value as it can for other people is the financial reward, but I don't do it for the financial reward anymore because I've slowly over time figured out how to change the rules of the game so that it's an infinite game. So, a lot of people that don't have the economic wealth to deal that. And that's why like the truth is, if you took all the world's wealth and you distributed to everybody evenly within a few months, it would be back in the same hands of all those people, right? Because there's almost like a wealth knowledge process that needs to be understood. And if you don't have that, even if I gave you $10 million tomorrow, I guarantee in three years and you have enough staff around people with lottery or professional athletes that they just don't understand the process of maintaining or creating wealth. So, all that being said, staff academy is a coaching process. The way I thought about it is, I wanted to create a community for other software entrepreneurs that I knew when I was starting. It's totally different than why I call me or many other sellers. Most of my clients have actually been in our alumni of those programs. And it's, I always say it's got content, community, and coaching because I only focus and coach B2B staff entrepreneurs, software as a service, that's what staff stands for. I have about 350 proven playbooks, like literally swipe and deploy frameworks around what I call the ACEs growth engine, so a track convert expanded scale. So, you know, demand generation, sales velocity, customer success, expansion revenue, and just team and scaling the company OS. A lot of the accelerators, they're more focused on early stage. I only focus post product market fit. So, once you have product market fit and you have the beginnings of some traction, I'm going to help you pour rocket fuel onto that engine. But I always say, you can't come to me too early because if you're driving a Volkswagen, for rocket fuel, the Volkswagen is going to explode, right? So, I'm very selective on who I work with to make sure that they're ready for that level of coaching. I don't make any, I don't miscommunicate that I will drive people way outside their comfort zone. I'll hold them accountable to a level of excellence and execution that they're probably not familiar with, and because of that, we're going to win, and that's all I want in life for my coaching clients. I have a whole non-profit side of my life, a lot softer with, and the people I serve there. But if it comes to people that want to be pushed and be a high performer, I know what that looks like. I'm an example of it honestly, and I feel like a lot of coaches can be sometimes out of integrity with that. For me, I'm not. I teach what I do, and people get results, or they can't stick around because I'm not interested in having people invest in just being part of a group and not doing any of the work. I appreciate that, but I'm curious what does, so you mentioned there's product market fit. There's a certain person that you actually work with. How would somebody know if they're ready to work with you? What does that look like outside of just product market fit? It's normally at least at 10 to 25K monthly reoccurring revenue. And product market fit looks different for SMD mid-market or enterprise as a customer that you serve. So if you're at enterprise, I would say three customers. Your revenue might be a lot more than that monthly because big companies pay more, but at least three enterprise companies mid-market at least 10. I just want to take a moment to pause and thank the sponsor of today's episode, Canva. Very excited when Canva approached me because I've been using Canva for all my graphic design needs for years, and they have never sponsored me before, so I'm very excited to champion a brand that I personally believe in support and I use. Now, if you don't know what Canva is, Canva is the online platform that makes graphic design, designing anything really easy for you and your team. They have pre-loaded templates all professionally made, all very high quality. If you have an idea and you do not know how to bring it to life on your social media, on your website, in your marketing collateral, this is one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to do. Canva Pro makes this so simple. You do not have to be a designer. You do not have to be an artist, anything like that. It is a tool that allows you to create beautiful pieces of content and work with a drag and drop editor. It's simple for anybody to use. You can collaborate with teams, no experience necessary. This is what you use to make stunning social media posts, marketing material. It has video components. Honestly, with Canva Pro, it takes the headache out of creating design. Canva Pro includes 75 million premium ingredients, including premium stock photos that you usually have to pay hundreds of dollars for, illustrations, videos, audio, anything you can need to literally design anything it has in one spot and one app. It truly democratizes design. Now, why I'm so excited about this sponsorship is that they gave me a unique code for everybody who's listening to use. If you want to test out Canva, if you want to test out all of the incredible features for design, remember I said, images, audio, video, they have ability to include team features, brand kits, background removers, resizing different objects with a click of a button. All of it is seamless, super user friendly, extremely intuitive. If you want to start using it today, go to canva.me-slash-scot. They're giving everybody who's listening a special deal, 45 days free. Pro Canva, you cannot get this deal by going on their website. So go to canva.me-slash-scot. You will get a Canva Pro account for 45 days. You can try out as many features as you want. You can make a ton of content. Canva.me-slash-scot. CY design is no longer scary. You will never look at design the same way again after you try it. Trust me on this one. Canva.me-slash-scot. And then on the small side, at least 100, you've got a technical ability to write code. So you've solved the building the thing problem. And you've got some resemblance of a marketing and sales process, or at least it's happening. Those things would have to be true for me to have the conversation. But yeah, that's kind of like the litmus test at the bottom and I'm curious, where does the machine break? Where do you find entrepreneurs making the biggest mistakes when they get to that point and can't scale past that? Typically, it's the reverse of what they think. So I call it chocolate broccoli. People come to me because they think they need more customers than what they really need as a better model. So what does a better model look like? There's only three levers in fast. It's top of funnel retention and monetization. So most of the time, people have a retention problem, but they don't want to admit it or they think it's good enough. So we need to keep more customers than we're losing because that scale, that percent loss per month, gets to the point where you'll hit what's called the growth ceiling. So retention is number one. Number two is monetization, though expansion revenue through upsells, crosssells, add-ons, especially your pricing. Most fast founders don't understand pricing economics in psychology, and that is probably the lowest-hanging fruit. Normally clients build too much stuff and they don't have a clear understanding of value drivers and how people should transition in between different plans and how to structure their plans to create that sales motion to pull people through that expansion. So that's the big thing where it should be. Are they doing it wrong? Yes. Do they even know they're not doing it? No. I mean, these are things that if you haven't been doing this for a long time, your first time building a software company, you've spent most of your time just trying to figure out how to get this thing built that you didn't spend any time on pricing optimization. And then finally, once we have that, Dennis, all that sales velocity. How do you take the right customer, which I call a perfect fit customer, ready to buy customer? So how do you decide who to focus on, who to sell to, how do you get the message in the market appropriately, what channels do you use? And then once you get their interest, what's the conversion process to get them from opportunity to customer and get that done in the shortest amount of time? So you don't have these long sale cycles. That's at a high level. And this is all covered in my ACEs growth engine framework. But most people start at the top, attract, and then they go to convert expand scale. I almost start at the bottom because I need to make sure the model, the unit economics of your process actually makes sense to scale. So if it doesn't, then we can waste a lot of time and money on marketing that's just not going to produce the long term revenue retention that you need. And no, I appreciate it. I think that I think that as if somebody's listening to this, even that awareness of what could be broken can drive them to look to the right resources and, you know, your cell phone or even, you know, a ton of others. To understand all those points that you just mentioned that could potentially break when trying to scale, I think it's very important. And I think that you sort of uncovered that recipe, you know, quote unquote recipe for success. When it comes to scaling startups, a lot of the things that you're mentioning. I hear emulated from a lot of other very successful sales leaders were talking like Mark Robayers from HubSpot. He emulated, especially the churn piece, like mitigating the loss, you know, plugging that leaky bucket. That's another one that I hear a lot. The people don't focus on. I've seen it a lot. And I don't want to, you know, reiterate everything you just mentioned, but I think that as people try and scale their company, it's really smart to understand. Like you said, these things that are going to be huge growth inhibitors. Now I'm curious about, these are very tactical growth inhibitors. In terms of perhaps personality traits, or I don't want to say that there's a perfect kind of startup founder. But what are the personal traits or growth traits that somebody should focus on internally that can allow them to be successful? Or is there just that kind of person that has the grit, determination, drive, perseverance, self-awareness, empathy, whatever that is the most important trait to be successful as an entrepreneur? Because you work with so many. Yeah, no, I think these traits can be developed and taught and learned. I think there's a natural, like, you need to be a certain type of person to build a Mark Zuckerberg or equivalent. So there are, there are these, like, outliers in the data set, but there's this, like, very large medium, the mean of people. And when I look at that, most of my clients are bootstrapped, you know, incredibly successful. They all have a lot of characteristics. One is they're very growth-minded, meaning that they're willing to invest in themselves, hence why they're coaching with me. They're willing to invest in themselves because they have confidence that with that knowledge they can do better than without it. Most people don't trust themselves. When you ask somebody like, why do you not hire a coach? They'll make up a bunch of reasons, but the truth is, is they don't trust themselves to get knowledge to implement, to get a return. That's the only reason why you wouldn't hire somebody who's been there before to help you. Because if I was going to climb Everest, you'd be an idiot to not want to go learn from people that have been to the summit of Everest, or Everest before you attempt it. That would just be, honestly, suicidal, and anybody trying to do it. Yet people do that every day in their business, and I think the reason why is they just don't have a lot of confidence in their abilities to translate that information into execution. That's one thing. So the people that are going to succeed have a level of confidence about their ability to execute that most people don't. They're very much intuned with feedback. What does this look like? It means that they're willing to pick up the phone and call customers and get feedback. They're willing to talk to their team and ask them their team questions like, what do you need more for me as a leader? They're willing to instrument the metrics to know what's really going on in the business. A lot of founders that don't have the product or financial metrics around their business. I believe it's because they just don't want to know. They'd rather not know, right? They put their head in the sand, then actually pull that together. Literally, there's so many tools up there that will give it to you for free, that for you not to know what your turn or your expansion revenue or your activations are, your trials versus whatever they are, it's really just ignorance around, you know, getting that information and being scared to know. I mean, they've all come down to fear. I mean, it's got that's the reality. But the traits is those things. They're curious. Curious is a big one. They're driven. They have a, they have a vision. This is a big one. They have a vision for their future that's way bigger than where they're at today and they're able to expand that as they expand. You know, I think what happens sometimes people peter out because they actually hit, you know, I would just love to make 100 grand a year and then they hit it. And then they just stay there forever. We just find just not what I do. What I do is push people way beyond what they think is possible by showing them examples of that and reinforcing within them. That confidence and courage and clarity of execution to make sure that that comes a reality. And when they're looking for someone like you, there's a lot of coaches out there. How do they find somebody who's right for them? How do they audit that coach? Yeah, and I had a lengthy discussion. One of my clients, Liam, he's a founder of Time Doctor and he actually interviewed me so people want to search that interview. He's coming on. Yeah, but he is the one that asked me that question. I mean, here's how I hired my coaches. I want somebody's been there before. So Marcy, for example, one of my coaches back in the day, she built a company brought a public 5,000 employees. Right. So been there before. I had had results with other people. I think a lot of people are idiots of violence in the sense that they know they can do it themselves, but they're not really good at getting other people the same results. I want to I want to know that they've been able to get other people similar results. They would reference check the crap out of who they are. I think you should back channel. So if you see somebody on a Facebook ad, you should like see if you have mutual friends reach out to them. Is this person a good person? What have you heard? How long have you known them for a lot of fly by night coaches in the industry? It's unfortunate part that I, you know, I'm okay with because I understand that, you know, performance over time is the best. The best example of success is just keep being consistent. Do do what you do over long periods of time and eventually you'll separate yourself from everybody else. But yeah, there's a lot of coaches out there that. You know, come up and they're very flashy and they're, you know, they're they're selling with material things. But when it comes down to it, their students results should be speaking for themselves. And that's that's a big thing that I pride myself on is is client wins on a monthly basis and progress over everything. So I don't know, I think it's a personal decision. If you don't resonate with the person, if you're listening to me and you don't like the way I talk, you really shouldn't work with me because that's not going to get better. Yeah, that's probably going to get worse. And I think that's important to know is, is you need to find the person that you vibe with and that you feel is going to provide you with honest, direct, clear feedback. And if you don't feel that, don't force it. Right. I think it's a very personal decision on who you coach. Very good advice. Very good advice. I have a couple rapid fire questions from your insight in your career before I shift over. I just wanted to open the floor. Was there anything that I didn't know about SAS Academy or what you're working on now that I should have asked that you wanted to bring up. Yeah, no, I mean, so the way I look at my life is I've got charity nonprofit component called creators where I work at rescue helping them build their confidence to building businesses. So that's like my personal give back. SAS Academy and coaching is a big pillar of my life. And then the other one is my investments. You know, it's actually 40 companies now. Thank you. Well, now I'm in the acquisition phase. I'm buying SAS companies to put into my portfolio, not just angel investing. And so like that's kind of how I split up my time still very much an operator. Very likely that I'll be the CEO of another SAS company in the in the future that I plan on taking to either public offering or you know, really dollar valuation. But coaching will always be part of my life because I'm fascinated in the process of helping people curate a different world view to have them take actions around things that otherwise feel extremely uncomfortable and in scary like that. That's the the tactical stuff that I teach people to me. I almost take it as table stakes like that. You should just do that stuff when I'm more fasted in is why do people not make those decisions when they're clear as day. And how do you get somebody in the least amount of time to reset that perspective so that they feel more confident comfortable making the decision that they're not taking that they know you should be doing so coaching will always be part of my life. It may be reduced in the future from busy with actively CEOing company, but that's just give people perspective on how I look at my week. As I migrate into these these sort of career insight questions, I think that what you're doing as as a coach and you're sort of taking it outside of just the tactical. I just want to comment on this briefly because I see so many I see so many coaches that just focus on the tactical and ignore the human psychology component of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And I've spoken to lots of entrepreneurs before both on this podcast and just in my career. And I think that like you mentioned that fear that psychological component is such a huge piece. It's it's it's vastly misunderstood when somebody just wants to turn a side hustle and at their full time job. Especially as like a technical co founder or whatnot, if you can code the thing yourself and just starts making some money on the side and then all of a sudden you want to scale it. There's a huge psychological component depression, anxiety, fear, all these things that are these emotions you didn't expect when something is being successful. Right. So I appreciate that you sort of dive into that and you focus on it because a lot of people can replicate those tactical. But it's tough for the psychological anyways. Find that if you want to do it in a way that doesn't debilitate you or cause pain to the people you love the most, I mean up the sad part. Cool. Scott, I've got a few minutes. I'm late for another call, but I want to give you your rapid fire. Yeah, I want to I want to do a quick and then get get some places to go find find you online. Where do you continue to grow, learn what's your outlets and resources? I today invest in people. So anything I want to do, I literally just pay the top people to come into my world and reverse engineer what they're doing. Right now I've been spending a lot of time in the world of private equity and I literally reached out to the top three guys in my space, offered the pay them they were kind enough to refuse. And then I get to spend time with them and that's my where I'm at today. That's the way I do it. Okay, perfect. Two more. A lesson you would tell your younger self. Spend real money in yourself earlier. Start with the book, but definitely move into other stuff way sooner. And what does success mean for you? That I was an example of possibility to many people as possible. I love it. That's a good answer. It's a very good answer. Where do people go find more? What's your website, social, Twitter, Instagram? Yeah, I mean Instagram stories behind the scenes. Dan Martell dot com. Children Martell is the business stuff linked in. I'm active on all social networks for fun. Come check me out on TikTok. I'm not dancing, but I'm trying to add some entertainment and YouTube is where I teach everything I learn for free. Right. That's all I got. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Amazing conversation, man. Have a great day. That's all for today. Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast. You can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available, including iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, I Heart Radio, and many others. You can also watch this podcast on YouTube. If you haven't already, please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, family, co-workers, and peers. Please leave us a rating on iTunes. It takes about 30 seconds as it allows other people to find our podcast and let's our amazing guests reach even more people with their message. And remember, any rating is fine as long as it contains five stars. I'm Scott Clary from the success story podcast signing off.