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.

🔑 Key Lessons

🤝 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.
📉 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.
🛠️ 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.
🤝 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.
🎯 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.
🚀 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

Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/5
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email