A New Formula for Lean but Effective Venture Building

This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.

Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver

Lately i’ve been neck deep in the work of lead gen as we’re setting up a lead gen agency.

But more than that… we really want to get good at this whole driving demand thing. As this has always been the weakest link in the ventures i’ve created in the past.

So I want to take the highest risk element and essentially focus on that first.

By doing this I hope to get clear answers to the key questions like:

• Who is the customer and what is their primary pain point?
• How big is the market/demand for solving this pain point?
• What is the best acquisition channel(s) for targeting them?
• What is the best messaging to use to target them?

And so by validating these things… hypothetically you then mainly just have execution risk. And execution with the method i’ve developed is my bread and butter.

But let’s roll it back and give you the framework.

My Framework for Lean But Effective Venture Building

So there are six main concepts to my venture building method:

1. You start with only a single generalist CEO
2. There are no employees. Only contractors (I use mainly Upworkers).
3. You utilize my ‘everything is a task’ Clickup method (almost no meetings, rapid responsiveness)
4. You test demand first and fulfill with a service.
5. You execute the service with vetted contractors.
6. If the service seems like an attractive business, you begin to productize it. And so eventually you ideally have a successful SAAS.

Let’s now give an example of this framework at work

Say that I have an idea for a business… let’s say that I think AI-generated SEO is a major opportunity. So I start as the single ‘generalist’.

I then start thinking about how I test demand and I land on two approaches: cold outbound email and ads that drive traffic to funnels. Both are geared to set up calls with me, the founder.

I create all of these activities as tasks in my structured Clickup space.

I then start posting jobs on Upwork and find solid folks for cold email, building funnels and running paid ads. I test several with the idea of keeping the best one or two.

As we start our paid ads we test various industries/niches… and see where we are getting the highest clickthru. We then start to focus on those niches more and test variations of our ad and landing page copy.

We also start pushing out 300-400 cold emails per day.

After a couple of weeks I am fielding 5-10 calls per week and learning more and more about the pain point. And i’m using this to improve my copy and approach.

Eventually I get to the point where I am closing perhaps one new project per week. For each one I close I manage the project myself using my Clickup system, but the actual implementation is done by 1-2 Upwork experts that I found in this niche.

Each week I’m taking on a new client till I have about ten of them. A few of them churn but I’m starting to see that this is an interesting, profitable business. And I just keep adding more upwork folks to service the clients.

Using my ‘everything-is-a-task’ Clickup method I’m still able to stay on top of managing the workload of all ten clients myself because everything just flows through as a stream of notifications that I’m constantly clearing.

At some point I decide it’s time to start to productize. I take several of the most manual & redundant processes that my Upworkers are doing and I create a no code app out of them using Bubble.io.

I ask my Upworkers to start using it and keep tweaking it based on their feedback till it’s good.

Now I start to offer my new SAAS to some other clients. Using the same outbound cold email and funnel strategies that I was using before to find them.

Very soon I’m taking on paid clients to my SAAS. And I start to wind down my agency business to focus more on the SAAS.

Note that at no point have i taken on any external capital because it was never needed since I had a thriving (profitable) agency business quite early on.

Why this kills most traditional ways of creating businesses

Let me break down where I see the advantages:

Advantage 1: I can run this model in almost any niche that Upwork covers well. So there are tons of opportunities.

Advantage 2: I bootrapped and did not take on capital.

Advantage 3: I hired and onboarded Upworkers in 1-2 days. No employees. Plus I paid only for work done (not their time).

Advantage 4: I did not need cofounders. No months of searching for the right person. I found all the complementary skills I needed on Upwork.

Advantage 5: I used my Clickup system to scale relatively easily as the sole manager. In my system I can manage up to even 50 people direct… on client execution, marketing, etc.

Advantage 6: I build my product to replace my service. In other words I had already figured out ‘Product Market Fit’ with my service and was simply automating the approach into the SAAS. Which massively de-risks it.

Advantage 7: Pretty much zero fixed costs. If things didn’t work I could have wound things down at the drop of a dime.

Closing Thoughts

With an approach like this… you can start tons of businesses almost overnight with very little capital.

And you probably have far less risk than a traditional startup.

This is essentially what folks like Iman Gadzhi (a high school dropout who is still in his 20’s) did. He created a successful agency called “IAG Media” and then replaced his agency with his own SaaS, Agenciflow.

And apparently Agenciflow had 16k+ paying agency customers and 7-digit revenue within its first 90 days.

The game is evolving around you. You either evolve with it… or you become a dinosaur.