No product. No code. No technical skills. Nathan Latka was a 21-year-old college student when he started cold calling for SaaS customers on Facebook, selling $700 fan page tabs through pure founder-led sales. He collected $70,000 before writing a single line of code.
Nathan reveals how his SaaS sales strategy of ego-driven cold calling landed his first 100 customers, how he taught himself to code from YouTube over Christmas break, and the Skype call where a customer saw his internal tool and sparked the pivot from pre-selling SaaS services to a $30/month product.
Heyo grew to an 8-figure business with 10% month-over-month growth. Nathan raised $2.5M from investors who came to him after seeing monthly startup sales updates.
š Key Lessons
- š¤ SaaS sales strategy can validate before you build: Nathan cold-called 100 strangers and collected $70,000 for a product he hadn't built, proving demand with revenue instead of surveys or landing pages.
- š Failure funnels into focus: Nathan tried selling T-shirts, social consulting, and custom banners before landing on fan page tabs. Each failed idea narrowed his focus until he found something customers would pay $700 for.
- š ļø Internal tools become SaaS products when customers pull them: Heyo's drag-and-drop builder was built for internal use. A customer on a Skype call saw it, asked for access, and that single moment converted a services business into SaaS.
- š¤ SaaS sales strategy with investors means creating leverage first: Nathan built a mentor list and sent monthly growth updates instead of pitching. When mentors saw 30% month-over-month growth, they asked to invest.
- šÆ Picking co-founders too fast costs more than carefully: Nathan recruited two developers he had known for days. They later left. Cultural fit and shared risk appetite matter more than technical skills alone.
- š Product-led marketing compounds founder-led sales efforts: A "Powered by Heyo" badge on every installed tab turned each customer into a marketing channel. The next 100 customers came without additional cold calls.
Chapters
- Nathan Latka's background and how Heyo started
- What Heyo does for small businesses
- Morning routine and decision minimization
- Early business ideas before Heyo
- Cold-calling Facebook "executives" with SaaS sales strategy
- Selling $70K of a product that didn't exist
- The knock-knock joke approach to cold calling
- Teaching himself to code over Christmas break
- How an internal tool became a SaaS product
- Finding technical co-founders at Virginia Tech
- Growing from 100 to 200 customers with product marketing
- How investors came to Nathan, not the other way around
- Current business metrics and growth rate
- Why Heyo chose small business over enterprise
- Lightning round
Resources
