How I started a SaaS company, whilst working a 9-5 job, and studying full time at UCLA

How do you start a SaaS company in college when:
- You don't know how to code or design
- Only have $800 in your bank account
- You're an international student, not knowing anyone
Here is my journey:

Started College half-way across the world- Sept 2016

The decision to drop everything I had back home to move half way across the world was fueled by one reason: Growth
UCLA had all the opportunities I'd ever dreamed of to grow so:
- I averaged 2-3 business workshops/ talks/ seminars a day
- Came home at 12, got my school work done by 4 and slept

For a page with 2000 likes:
25 thousand+ unique reach
25$ average Ad Spend max

I implemented an automated social media strategy using tools such as Buffer which not only saved Carisma costs incurred through freelancers, but also allowed for greater lead nurturing. Upon identifying Carisma's ideal target customer, I was able to run a hyper targeted social media campaign accroding to my given parameters and utilized FB pixels & re-targeting to increase the campaign's conversions. As a result we was able to reach hundreds of thousands of our target audience for an average ad spend of $25-50.
​(0.001c per each highly targeted audience reached, 7x cheaper than industry average.)

Tapping into the power of giving,
Receiving 34% revenue of revenue in return

With my mission for driving growth, I looked for innovative avenues to drive business. I initiated and executed a gift card strategy. This further targeted local customers and allowed them to pick an occasion, select a treatment to gift and send a personalized giftcard. This quickly became viral and allowed me to run targeted ads such as birthday giftcard offers to those who had their friends’ birthdays coming up within 2 weeks and valentines day gift cards in the month of early february. This initiative increased Carisma's website traffic, local reputation and now makes up 34% of their revenue from their nation wide operations.

Grew mailing list by 200% in 6 months

Through the evaluation of Carisma's digital analytics, I identified that their target audience was a lot more engaged on email than any other platform. Whilst the trend in digital was moving away from email, I found that this channel out performed all others. By creating on email automations and building workflows that traced email engagement, I was able to customize their email marketing to the way their audience interacted with them and segment accordingly. Through these efforts, I began converting high quality leads with open rates running around 54% (industry average = 13.68% ) and grew their list 200% in 6 months.

Search Engine Optimized

I began the process through a rigorous keyword research. I understood the issues in migrating to a new site and broke their old site down according to high - low impact pages which Iidentified through an indepth SEO analysis. Then I began analyzing and optimizing every part of the website to better rank for our keywords and initiated the content marketing campaign. As a result numerous pages began ranking in the top 5, for our targeted keywords. I also got the official Google My Business sidebar which increased the organic traffic to our site and the number of call we recieved significantly. Supplementing an integrated organic SEO and a PPC campaign proved to be of great success and the same frameworks are still being operated.