How I came up with the idea for RocketHub

Let's launch a lifetime deals platform! That's what I told my team last year.

While the idea was brewing in my head for years, there were a few triggers that pushed it as a top priority for our team.

1. Gap in the Market - The market was dominated by one platform - essentially a monopoly - and it was clearly raking in $$$. So a proof-of-concept wasn't needed as someone else already validated it at scale.

After evaluating the other available options, there seemed to be only a few and they weren't that good.

I realized that becoming a "Top 3" leader in the space was not only possible but there was a clear demand for it based on community feedback. In my opinion, there's no point launching something were you can't be the Top 3 or Top 5 in the industry. The gap between #1 and everyone else was huge. So why not us?

2. Growth Marketing Experience - Without really planning it, we already had a tremendous amount of experience launching products and growth marketing campaigns. Productizing our existing services to apply the same growth marketing campaigns to lifetime deals worked surprisingly well without much effort. So all our businesses could just treat this new business like a client and execute.

3. SaaS Experience - as serial SaaS entrepreneurs, we actually had experience others didn't. We spoke their language, knew their struggles, understood their costs and tech stacks, and had empathy for their shortfalls. We could talk to them in a non-transactional manner. We have a soft-spot for SaaS indie hackers and bootstrappers.

4. Unique Differentiators - we don't launch anything without having some unique differentiators. In this case, we basically took all the reasons our own SaaS products didn't want to work with the big player(s) and flipped it in favor of SaaS founders so they'd naturally choose us. Everything from % of sales commissions, pricing, # of deals launched, attention to details, and the actual hands-on growth marketing team fully executing their lifetime deal campaign. We offered something that was truly attractive at zero cost to the startup/SaaS.

5. Do Things That Don't Scale - because our other businesses could support the staff and activities required, we could do things that don't scale. So every deal we run gets so much hands-on effort, the value alone - even if 0 sales - is worth $30k to our deal partners. We can't provide this level of attention and efforts forever but I'm confident we'll optimize, build greater reach, and things will get easier after we establish ourselves.

6. Quality Over Quantity - I realized the other players would list products we'd say "no" to. So rather than become the eBay of such deals, our hope is to become the higher-end platform. We'll only launch a few sustainable deals every month and they'll all be fully vetted - the product and the founders - by our team. Anyone who doesn't fit our criteria, we say "no" politely but still them the helpful advice. So you'll not see hundreds of Exclusive Deals on our platform for the foreseeable future.

7. Unfair Advantages - to help kickstart our growth, we were able to leverage our existing email lists and businesses. Finding such unfair advantages when launching a new startup is critical. It's great to think big BUT choose ideas where you have some pre-existing leverage. This can be assets, lists, resources, community, money, knowledge, authority, etc.

We've just passed our 1st year of RocketHub.com. Some mistakes made, some lessons learned, but no regrets. Startups require fumbling and are supposed to be messy. Regardless, things are looking good and everything is pointing up and to the right.