Kid Doing $1M ARR on His SaaS?

Happy Thursday,

Eric Siu here. I recently met a 20-year-old doing $1M ARR on his SaaS when I was guest lecturing at USC.

And it’s for this reason that I believe we're going to see the rate of badass founders increase as the cost of knowledge continues to decrease.

Here's what I learned:

This was the most talented class I guest lectured to by far.

People in their early 20s with the desire to make an impact on the world. One guy has a services business doing $2m a year, and he is starting a SaaS.

He asked me if he should start looking for a job. I asked him 'why?' and it looked like it clicked for him.

Sometimes, you just need a nudge in the right direction. The SaaS student asked the lion's share of questions.

He would be polite, but as soon as he felt no one else had a question, his hand would shoot up instantly.

Curiosity followed by intense action-taking is hard to beat.

I've always found the students who ask the most questions win in general.

There were also other students doing eCommerce. In general, people were either doing products or software. Probably because it's been ingrained in them that service businesses suck. I used to think that as well.

That is until I realized that the grass is greener where you water it.

All kinds of businesses can scale to significant levels.

Time in market > timing the market. It takes decades to build something significant. When I asked who thought billionaires shouldn’t exist, zero raised their hands. I'll typically ask this question to gauge how the class thinks.

Usually, when it comes to the younger generation, at least 30-40% of them will say billionaires shouldn't exist.

When I asked why billionaires *should* exist, the response was, 'What's the incentive to keep working if my upside is capped?'.

Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome.

I had a linebacker from the USC football team come up to me afterward with super smart business questions.

Athletes are already getting smarter about their money and investing because they've seen it work for the people that they look up to.

Today’s students are evolving much faster as the cost of knowledge continues to decrease. The information that we feed to the next generation matters.

It all compounds. As the cost of knowledge comes down more, we are going to see more kids 5-6 starting 7-fig businesses on their own eventually.

We should welcome this success because it means that our society is progressing faster than we could've ever imagined.

Keep in mind that this has a trickle-down effect not just from the increase of young badass founders that we're going to see but talent across the board.

Imagine being able to hire someone from high school to run your marketing. That is already happening.

If you need help with your marketing, feel free to hit up my ad agency, Single Grain. It's what we live and breathe. 😉

To your growth!
The Leveling Up Team