Getting laid off due to covid and going full time on your SaaS with Zack Naylor of Aurelius

Zack Naylor of Aurelius Labs talks about establishing his MVP, co-founding a company, finding the first customers, and building his SaaS product to its current state.

Zack Naylor, Co-founder and CEO of Aurelius Labs, has been assisting entrepreneurs in researching customer insights to facilitate the development of excellent products. He talks to Geordie about his journey. 

What You’ll Learn

• The meaning of research, according to Zack
• How Zack came up with his SaaS company
• How did Zack come up with his MVP?
• How Zack and his co-founder structured the company
• How Aurelius Labs acquired its first customers
• Why word of mouth marketing is an effective strategy
• Strategies that Zack and his team have used to achieve growth
• Importance of remaining active on social media platforms
• Why Zack and his co-founder were against the idea of acquiring venture capital

In this Episode:

Market research plays a critical role in helping companies understand the needs of their target customers. Getting feedback from your audience enables you to manufacture the ideal goods that meet customer demands. Zack says his company specializes in user experience, people, product, and market research.

The SaaS Company is often defined as an analysis tool or research repository. According to Zack, Aurelius Labs is an all-inclusive platform that allows entrepreneurs to capture feedback, notes, and data from calls, customers, and usability testing.

Zack and his team help entrepreneurs to evaluate such data and convert it into core insights. Further, you can leverage the Aurelius Labs platform to search, share and reuse the data based on your needs. Zack gives his definition of research which you can learn about by listening to the podcast. 

 

The ideal Aurelius Labs customer is medium-sized businesses and user experience teams. Zack’s background lies in product strategy and user experience. It is no doubt that he ventured into a related industry. Zack says he spent 15 years of his life working in this industry.

Together with his co-founder, they worked at a consultancy firm and would be hired to work on SaaS projects as a team. Zack says he learned a specific lesson and identified a particular challenge from interacting with different clients. What lesson and challenge was this? Listen to the podcast to find out.

Zack tells the exciting story of how he came up with his MVP. Find out all the details from the podcast. After Zack shared the MVP idea with his co-founder, they started building it immediately.

The platform was bootstrapped for approximately five years, during which they also had full time jobs. They were later laid off at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. From there, they decided to focus on Aurelius Labs full-time.

Building an MVP can be a long time-consuming process, as Zack explains. He says they redesigned and redeveloped their application a record three times. Listen to the podcast to find out why they scrapped the app three times. Launching a company can be a challenging process but acquiring your first customer is equally hard.

Zack recalls how Aurelius Labs got their first lot of customers in this podcast. What started by charging customers per project is today an established company complete with three plans that customers can choose from. Zack gives a detailed explanation of how the payment plans work and how they help customers choose the right plan for their needs. You will get all the details from the podcast.

Zack runs a podcast which he says does not market his SaaS Company. He mentions why he launched the podcast, and you can find the reasons in this podcast. Navigating through the COVID season has not been an easy task for different companies globally.

Zack says they have adopted various marketing strategies to push the growth of their company. However, they have experienced a decline in some of their marketing strategies over the COVID season. Still, he is confident that things will get better soon.

According to Zack, his team has been occupied with product development, leaving minimal time to apply a wide range of marketing strategies. He highlights some of the techniques they have used before to push for growth and you can determine them from the podcast. When did Zack and his team get their big break? Zack has an interesting answer to this question. He mentions that regardless of how good your company is doing, there is always a risk ahead.

Sometimes you may be excited that you are finally making it. However, the feeling doesn’t last as often a cloud of uncertainty engulfs you, and you start wondering where you should go from there.

Zack and Joseph, his co-founder, were against getting venture capital from the beginning. Find out his reasons from this podcast. Zack concludes the podcast by saying you do not have to incur considerable risks to start a business that you are passionate about. 

Resources

• Zack Naylor LinkedIn
• Zack Naylor Twitter
• Zack Naylor Aurelius Lab