§ 01 · The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Three weeks in and the logo is almost done. The Noob has workflows, an automated onboarding tour, and a vision -- the only thing missing is clients. The Pro asks one question that collapses the whole plan.
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:43
01 · The Setup
Noob reveals he has been building for three weeks with zero clients. Pro asks the one question that frames the whole video.
00:43 – 01:54
02 · The Three Levels
Pro introduces the framework: Level 1 DFY, Level 2 DWY, Level 3 self-serve SaaS. Noob is starting at Level 3 while technically at Level 0.
01:54 – 03:50
03 · Level 1 -- Done For You
DFY explained with home services as the example. Client never logs in. Simple problem-solution sale. Build one, get a case study, sell the second.
03:50 – 05:14
04 · The SaaS Fantasy
Noob pushes back -- he sees people with hundreds of SaaS clients. Pro points out nearly all of them built an audience first.
05:14 – 07:42
05 · Level 2 -- Done With You
DWY explained through the dental office example. Third-party support only makes sense at 30-50 clients, not at five.
07:42 – 10:10
06 · Level 3 -- The Dream
The self-serve SaaS model. Three qualifying questions: audience? proven offer? proof? Noob answers no to all three. The desert convenience store analogy.
10:10 – 11:54
07 · What Actually Happens
Most Level 3 starters end up doing DFY anyway -- but at DIY pricing, paying for unused tools. The cosplay CEO line.
11:54 – 13:14
08 · The Move
Stop building. Start selling. If selling feels scary, do research -- Google Maps, Facebook Messenger, real conversations.
13:14 – 13:50
09 · The Progression
Level 1 teaches you what you need for Level 2. Level 2 teaches you what you need for Level 3. You cannot skip it.
13:50 – 14:14
10 · CTA -- HighLevel Guild
Plug for the HighLevel Guild community. Free via affiliate HighLevel signup. Final line: ditch the SaaS, go get your first client.
Visual structure at a glance.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:08
model
The Three Levels of HighLevel
- Level 1: Done For You
- Level 2: Done With You
- Level 3: Self-Serve SaaS
A progression model for GoHighLevel businesses. Each level requires skills and proof built in the previous one. Most beginners skip to Level 3, which is why most fail.
Steal for any positioning video or course framing the right starting point for a new service business
03:01
concept
The Problem-Solution-Result Sale
The done-for-you sales conversation in three sentences: problem is X, solution is Y, together we make that equal Z. Simplicity is the point -- no features, no software pitch.
Steal for cold outreach scripts, DM templates, sales call openers
Lines you could clip.
11:03
"Stop building. Start selling."
11:39
"You trying to figure out what color to make your website and your app and which third party support company to hire is just procrastination disguised as work."
09:29
"You've basically built an automated amazing convenience store in the middle of the desert and you're wondering why nobody is walking in."
11:44
"It's literally cosplay. Like, you're dressing up like a CEO when you have zero clients."
Things they pointed at.
How they asked for the click.
13:40
product
"We cover all of that in my community, the HighLevel Guild, which you can join 100% for free by signing up for or upgrading to the next level of HighLevel with my link."
Soft and well-earned -- lands after 13+ minutes of genuine value. Affiliate angle disclosed implicitly; direct pay option also offered.
Word for word.
HOOK opening / re-engagementCTA the pitch metaphor analogy
00:10HOOKI have a bunch of really cool work flows that are gonna make it so easy to sell this. And literally, all I'm waiting for is my logo to be done and just a few other graphics for the website. And then I'm ready to launch.
00:27HOOKI mean, like, once the site's done, how are you gonna get customers? Well, I'm gonna post about it, but I'm also setting up, like, this automated onboarding video tour so people can just sign up.
00:38HOOKMany clients do you have right now? None, but I don't if not the point. Stop you right there
00:48HOOKIt's what everybody does when they sign up for HighLevel, and it's the reason most of them never make money. Well, what do you mean?
00:56HOOKI mean, there's three levels to this whole thing. Okay? And you're starting out on level three when you're technically not even past
01:04HOOKlevel zero yet. You need to start with number one, and you're attempting to do level three on day one.
01:15HOOKAnd by the end of this video, you're gonna understand why level one is the actual easy money that people talk about. Level two is where you actually grow, and level three is something that you and most people have no business attempting until they've done levels one and two.
01:32So what's level one? Level one is done for you, d f y.
01:39This is where you go find a business, you talk to them, you figure out their problem, and you solve it for them using HighLevel. They don't log in.
01:47They don't build build anything. They might not even know there's a desktop app, but they pay you because you're getting them a result that they weren't getting before.
01:57But that sounds like an agency. Like, I'm not in the business of trading time for money like all those agency owners. And this is exactly the mindset that's keeping people stuck.
02:07HighLevel is a tool. The plumber, the HVAC contractor,
02:12the dentist, the tree trimmer, they don't care what software you're using. They don't wake up thinking, wow.
02:19I really need a nice SaaS product. The business owner wakes up thinking, I just need the phone to ring more.
02:25And you make it ring more for him, and then you charge him for it. And you deliver it using high level on the back end. But doesn't that depend on me doing everything?
02:35Like, I'm trying to scale here. Okay. Slow down.
02:39You have zero clients right now. Scaling is not your problem. Getting your first client is.
02:45And this is what nobody tells you about done for you is that it's so much easier because the sales conversation is so much simpler when you're not talking about features and, hey, I'm gonna replace everything in your business, and you're gonna be able to use this awesome software. You're just saying problem is x, solution is y, and we can make that equal z together.
03:07Would you like to talk about it? Okay. But, like, what does that actually look like day to day?
03:13So you Let's take home services as an example and tree trimming as the sub niche within that.
03:20You go talk to some tree trimmers and figure out what their problems are and then you build a simple solution using HighLevel that solves that problem. It might be speed to lead. It might be like a call connect workflow.
03:34It could be Google review requests. It could be voice AI or chat AI if they're running ads, any of those small
03:42little services that solves a specific leak in their current business.
03:48And then you sell one client, you get a case study, and you use that case study to sell the second client. And they never log in to the software? Like, I spent so much time building this.
03:58Maybe, and I mean maybe, you give them the mobile app so they can respond to leads every once in a while. But they're not in the workflow builder.
04:06They're not in the funnel builder, they have no business being in there, and every time you give them access to something else, one of two things is gonna happen. Number one, they're never gonna use it, or number two, they are gonna use it and then they're gonna break it and you're gonna have more support problems than you want.
04:23But, like, this still feels so small. I see all these people with, hundreds of SaaS customers completely do it yourself where they sign in and build everything themselves for $800
04:35a month. Yeah. But how many of those people do you think started
04:39by building a software that people could just go to the website, check out, and sign up with everything themselves? Literally, maybe five of them, and all of them had a massive audience that they launched to.
04:52Most everyday run of the mill successful high level agencies got really good at solving a run of the mill everyday problem for a specific niche, and then once they got to 30 customers, 50 customers, a 100 customers, they started getting into the economies of scale in level two. Okay.
05:11But when does level two come in then? Level two is done with you. This is where you give the core system to the client,
05:20but you're still involved in supporting them and actually using that on a day to day basis. To be honest, if you're in home services, you may never get to this point because you'll still be building so much on behalf of the clients, but if in a different niche, this may make a lot more sense.
05:37What do you mean about the niche? So think about dental, for example. If you're working with a dental office, you've got the dentist himself or herself,
05:44and then you've got the front desk people. They're the ones that are actually using the software. They've gotta know how to use the calendars, the conversations,
05:52and maybe a few of the other manual tasks that you have to do every day inside of HighLevel. So what you would do for them is package a snapshot that has all of the automations that they need inside of there, the calendars and the text templates, and then you would train them on an ongoing basis on how to actually use that.
06:10And that's harder than done for you. Why? Well, because you have a training component now, and it's up to the client to actually
06:19adopt the product. And driving product adoption is actually much more difficult
06:25than just doing everything for the client. It's its own problem. It's its own set
06:31of solutions that you have to come up with for it, and your churn is gonna be higher if you're relying on them to actually use the software every single day when it's not a 100% automated for them. So
06:43would this be where, like, third party support companies come in? This is where they start to make sense for some people. If you've got 30 to 50 dentists on your software and the front desk people are asking questions about how to use it every day and they reach out to you every single time for every single question,
07:03your time is better spent trying to get new dentists on your software. So you could hire a third party support company. They come in.
07:11They can answer those level one support chats so that if anything needs to get escalated, you actually have time to help with that. So if I get five clients and I'm paying for a support company,
07:23you're paying somebody to do something that you should be doing yourself. If you only have five clients, you should know all of them by name. They should be able to message you, and you should be taking care of their needs
07:36on a done for you basis. Done with you doesn't come into place until you have dozens of clients. Okay.
07:44So now we're at level three which is what I wanna build anyway. Yeah. The thing everyone is trying to build because it's what gets sold as the dream.
07:54This is where the client finds you. They sign up on your website because it's so compelling and amazing. They onboard themselves using your knowledge base and product tours, and then
08:05they start using the software in their own business every single day, give you amazing reviews, tell all of their friends, and there's no long term commitment from you, and you . Yeah. But that's the dream.
08:17Right? Passive income, recurring revenue. Yeah.
08:20But let me ask you something. Do you have an audience? Not really.
08:23I mean, I have a few 100 followers. Do you have a proven offer that you've sold to more than 10 people? No.
08:32Do you have case studies, testimonials, or proof that what you do actually works? I mean, not really. Then who is signing up for this SaaS?
08:40Like, genuinely, who is making it to the checkout page and actually putting in their credit card? Because you just told me you hadn't thought past finishing your beautiful website. And I'm not making fun of you.
08:52This is where most people are, but the dream that's sold around this skips past the hard part that most people don't wanna face. What's the hard part? Distribution.
09:02Getting eyeballs. If you're Dean Graciosi and Tony Robbins and you launch a high level SaaS to your massive email list and literally everybody on earth that knows you, then, yeah, build a self serve SaaS because you've got the hard part taken care of already. But you with no testimonials,
09:19no proof, and no idea where your next client is coming from have basically built an automated amazing convenience store in the middle of the desert and you're wondering why nobody is walking in. So it's not that the model itself is bad?
09:33No. It's actually great. It's just that it's the last thing you should build,
09:39not the first. And here's what's really happening. Most people try to start here where you are and end up doing all the done for you work anyway.
09:47They can't get the self serve sign ups, so they eventually just go out and start doing prospecting and closing people one on one. But they don't change their pricing, so they're doing done for you with a do it yourself price point.
09:59And they're paying for a bunch of extra tools like third party support, white label knowledge base, and white label onboarding tours that nobody's actually using. Ouch. I'm not saying it to be mean.
10:10I'm just saying it because I see it every single day. People spending weeks trying to make their website pretty when they should just be spending the afternoon calling 10 to 20 businesses and starting conversations. Because the reality is the afternoon of calling people could get your one client closed that actually covers your high level subscription, and then everything after that is profit.
10:31So the white labeling, the, like, knowledge base, the custom theme that I've put in there, you're saying none of that matters?
10:40I'm saying none of it matters yet. They don't care about the colors of your app because they probably shouldn't even be seeing the desktop app anyway. They don't care about the white label knowledge base because you're gonna be doing the work for them.
10:54CTAAnd you trying to figure out what color to make your website and your app and which third party support company to hire is just . Alright.
11:05CTAThis feels like a personal attack. Good. Because the people selling you theme builders and the fact that you need white label support for your clients with zero clients are just making money off of the idea that you have that you're going to be a SaaS owner.
11:31CTAAt some point, absolutely. Invest in the brand, make things as seamless as possible, make it so that you can close 20 clients a month instead of just four.
11:50CTAThey feel personally attacked by everything you just said. What are they supposed to do? Stop building.
11:56Start selling. And if selling feels scary, then just do research.
12:01Walk out your front door, get on Facebook Messenger, get on Google Maps, and just start talking to people. And be upfront about the fact that you're doing research research on the x y z business model, and you want to see if they'd be willing to have a chat. Figure out what their day to day problems are.
12:16Sometimes they'll tell you. Sometimes it's kind of coded in what they're saying, and then build a simple solution in high level that actually solves that problem. It's not gonna be nine times out of 10 what your favorite YouTube guru told you to sell.
12:29It's going to be whatever your niche actually needs that they will say yes to. Okay. That's level one, and then here's what happens after that.
12:39You close your first client, and you learn more in the first two weeks of setting them up and getting results than you would in six months of building a do it yourself SaaS that nobody actually uses. And what you'll learn is the things that they actually need, the things that they lie about, the things that they tell the truth about, and all of this will support the infrastructure that you build to then go to level two and level three because they're built on experiences,
13:03not guesses. So level one helps you build level two. And level two teaches you how to build level three.
13:10You can't skip this natural progression. You can try, but you're just gonna end up back in the same spot six months later, but you're gonna have spent a bunch of money on tools you don't need, and you're gonna be demoralized.
13:22Look. If you're watching this and you realize you may have skipped a step or two, that's okay. Most people just need somebody to sort of tell this message to them in a way that resonates so that they can start working on the right things.
13:37CTAIf you want a clear path on how to actually do this, everything from picking a niche, building an offer for that niche, getting sales meetings, having sales conversations, delivering for them, retaining them for a long time.
13:50CTAWe cover all of that in my community, the HighLevel Guild, which you can join 100% for free by signing up for or upgrading to the next level of HighLevel with my link. There's also a direct pay option available if that's better for you. All the links for that are down below.
14:04CTAPlease stop building a software company and start building a service that uses software. Ditch the SaaS. It can come later.
— full transcript
§ 05 · For Joe
Start where clients are easiest to close.
WHAT TO LEARN
The sequence matters more than the model -- done-for-you is not a consolation prize, it is the only path that builds the proof and experience that makes everything else possible.
- Clients pay for results, not software -- a business owner who wants more phone calls does not care which platform you used to make that happen.
- The done-for-you sales conversation is short because it is about one problem, not a product demo -- that simplicity is why it closes faster.
- Giving clients access to more of the platform creates more support problems, not more value -- limit access to what they actually need.
- Third-party support and white-label infrastructure are Level 3 investments; bringing them in at Level 1 is paying to look like a business before you have one.
- Every real client engagement teaches you what the market actually needs -- months of building a self-serve product with no users teaches you nothing.
- Distribution is the hard part of self-serve SaaS, and it cannot be bypassed by a better onboarding flow or a cleaner logo.
- The natural progression from DFY to DWY to self-serve is not a ladder you climb -- it is evidence you accumulate, and each level requires the one before it.
- When selling feels uncomfortable, research conversations with real business owners are a productive substitute -- they reveal what to build before you build it.
- Most people who skip to Level 3 end up doing Level 1 work anyway, but at Level 3 pricing and overhead -- the shortcut costs more than the long way.
- A case study from one client is the asset that gets the second client -- the software build is not the asset.
