SaasRise Mastermind Recap - Oct 8, 2025

💼 Software Dev Accounting

Challenge: Founders are still wrestling with when to capitalize vs. expense software development costs — and how it impacts EBITDA.
Advice: Capitalize your dev costs and amortize over ~60 months. It cleans up your P&L, lowers visible labor expenses, and boosts EBITDA optics. Add back amortization when you calculate EBITDA, but don’t ignore those capitalized wages in your cash flow. For offshore devs, capitalize over 3 years for tax purposes. Keep research (expense) and development (capitalize) clearly separate, and treat product enhancements differently depending on whether it’s a new product or just an upgrade.

🤖 AI + Document Management

Challenge: How do you use AI to process documents without blowing up costs or compromising data security?
Advice: Start simple — use OCR to scan first, then send to AI for structured data extraction. Keep your AI sandboxed with an API layer so it never touches your main database directly. Use validation layers to check AI accuracy and map coordinates (XY backups) when it gets fuzzy. Format AI outputs in JSON so you can import data cleanly. Try ChatGPT-5 for power or Volter AI if you want OpenAI-level performance at a lower cost. The future: AI that quietly powers your workflows without you even thinking about it.

📧 AI-Powered Email Outreach

Challenge: Cold email response rates are tanking, and everyone’s worried AI-generated outreach is about to hit the spam wall.
Advice: Take advantage while it still works. AI-driven personalization is effective for maybe another 12–24 months before spam filters get too smart. Tools like Ken AI are still outperforming the pack for outbound campaigns, while Fixer.AI can handle inbox cleanup and reply drafting. Use AI to scale personal outreach now — but plan for a future where you’ll need human touch or hyper-targeted community marketing again.

⛪ Pricing Strategy for the Church Market

Challenge: Tons of demos, low conversions — pricing just doesn’t fit smaller church budgets.
Advice: Go usage-based or per-member pricing instead of fixed tiers. Start with $25–$50 plans for small congregations or $0.25 per active member. For platforms that include donation processing, test taking a small percentage of funds raised. Add features that matter — e-giving, SMS, sermon recording, email marketing — and use existing payment infrastructure from your coaching market. The key: make pricing flexible enough to grow with the church instead of forcing tier jumps.

🧰 Recommended Tools

• Ken AI – Cold email campaigns with real AI personalization
• Fixer.AI – Automate Gmail inbox management and replies
• Volter AI – OpenAI-compatible alternative, cheaper and solid
• ChatGPT-5 / OpenAI – For advanced doc processing and data extraction
• OCR Platforms – Pre-process docs before AI analysis
  

🛡️Phishing Attack Response

Challenge: One founder got hit by a sophisticated phishing attack — fake domain, spoofed caller ID, cloned login pages, the works.
Advice: Go on offense fast. Report the domain to Cloudflare, Google SafeBrowsing, and your bandwidth provider. Loop in legal. Have your team mass-report it, enforce 2FA across the board, and tighten up permissions.

✅SOC 2 Certification Planning

Challenge: Figuring out the right path (and cost) for SOC 2 compliance.
Advice: If you’re early-stage, tools like Vanta ($4–6K/year) or Sprinto ($4K/2 years) can save time and cash vs. full audits ($7–10K+). Leverage your cloud provider’s existing certifications (AWS, Azure) and plan for ongoing compliance work — especially if you’ve got offshore devs.

💰M&A Timing Strategy

Challenge: Should you sell now or grow? One founder’s company is flat but pulling 25% EBITDA margins.
Advice: It’s a seller-friendly environment. Profitable SaaS companies are seeing 10–15x EBITDA multiples. If growth has plateaued, explore a strategic sale or merger while multiples are still strong.

👥Equity for Key Team Members

Challenge: Rewarding long-term execs (CTO + Head of Marketing) without triggering tax issues.
Advice: Use phantom equity or stock appreciation rights — especially for international team members. 2–5% for a CTO and 1–2% for marketing head is typical. Always work backward from desired exit payouts (e.g. $1.5–2M each).

🤖AI Agent Monetization

Challenge: Turning AI into new revenue streams.
Advice: Focus on automating tasks your clients already pay humans for. Price at 25–30% of the human cost and you’ll often add $50–75K MRR just from AI-driven automation layers.

🌎Additional Highlights

👨‍💻EA Hiring Win

One member found a rockstar EA through Upwork in South Africa — an ex-EY pro with 15 years’ experience. Huge time leverage win after the group’s earlier encouragement to delegate more.

👶Personal + Community Updates

Ryan shared updates: welcoming baby Auryn (5 weeks old), scaling the Rise communities (SaaSRise, VentureRise, GrowthRise) from 400 → 1,000 members, and planning California in-person meetups. Also welcomed a new member in the healthcare SaaS space — tackling patient engagement + EHR integrations.

📰AI News Aggregator MVP Demo

Ryan previewed a prototype built with Google AI Studio — an app that curates and summarizes daily tech + business news.

Vision: Launching in 60 days as a free consumer SaaS with ad monetization. Starts with 5 topics → scales to 1,000+ AI-curated channels across news, deals, and social content.

🔐Security Best Practices

Talked about tightening internal access controls, limiting support team visibility into databases, and monitoring for suspicious activity.
Takeaway: sophisticated phishing and data-targeting attacks are ramping up — especially in industries like real estate and lead-gen SaaS.

🧰Tools & Resources Mentioned

Security & Compliance:

• Google SafeBrowsing / Microsoft equivalent – Report phishing sites
• Vanta / Drata / Sprinto – SOC 2 compliance automation
• Defense.com – Annual pen testing
• AWS / Azure / Rackspace – Use their SOC 2 reports for leverage

AI & Dev:

• Google AI Studio + Vercel – Rapid AI prototyping
• Twilio – Phone verification + telecom lookup

Operations:

• Upwork – Great source for high-skill EAs (South Africa recommended)

💬Overall vibe:

Another power-packed session — open, tactical, and collaborative. Founders helping founders solve real problems, share wins, and spark ideas for what’s next in SaaS + AI.

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