efficient SaaS growth w/annoying customers

The love/hate relationship of 'founders building for founders'

A few months ago, we shut down Aware at $30k MRR, the tool we built for founders to manage their LinkedIn presence. (LinkedIn sent their legal team after us, and we decided not to fight them over it.)

Almost immediately after, we decided to put our efforts into ViewExport, an HR/Compliance SaaS product in the MVP stage that we had acquired a few months back.

While we’ve been able to grow ViewExport quite nicely and make our investment back within 5 months—and while we’re actively interested in acquiring more compliance tools—I’m excited to get back to our roots of creating products for Entrepreneurs.

But wait…

Why?! Founders Are Cheap And Hard To Work With

If you’re wondering why we would intentionally try to build tools and solutions for founders and entrepreneurs, you’d have good reason.

After all, small companies:

• Don’t have much budget

• Don’t have a clear idea of what they need and why

• Go out of business frequently, or

• Grow their business and outgrow their tech stack

• Are often stressed and need you to take their support tickets über-seriously

We saw this with building Aware: it was a high-volume lead gen process where we rarely did demos, except for larger buyers.

People had tons of questions ranging from highly technical to very basic. They needed a lot of help and hand-holding. They would join our live chat and say “agent… agent…. LIVE AGENT NOW.” and then proceed to ask a question that could have been answered in seconds by our AI information answer bot 🙈

Or we’d set up a live demo with one of the co-founders for someone despite them needing a solo license… just because they pushed for it and said they really needed help. We’d spend 45 mins helping them with their business, their personal brand, their LinkedIn strategy, using Aware, getting them set up. They’d be super appreciative. We’d follow up by email, hold their hand through the things they needed help with. Then they’d churn two weeks later.

It broke my damn heart every time I would invest hours with someone who was very eager to get help, only to realize later they’d put down a burner card for their subscription and had no intention of ever paying us a dime.

Overall: I can best summarize the way we got customers as easy come, easy go. Hordes of people would see our social media posts (and those of our influencer partners) every month, then sign up for a free trial. Our churn rate was in the high single digits each month on the solo licenses, and we had failed payments literally every day.

So again… WHY would we wish this on ourselves again?

Because We Went From $0 to $30K MRR on a Shoestring Budget

Thus far, I’ve told you the drawbacks of marketing to founders.

Now let me tell you why it was still pretty great.

First, the plus side of “easy come, easy go” is the first part: it’s easy to get people to try and pay at least something for your product, and for them to tell their friends.

Net of churn, we went from literally zero customers to 500 active paying subscribers (no freemium!) in 2 years:

With annual prepayment as the default shown on the website and 5% of people choosing that when they signed up, we ended up with a strong customer revenue-funded cash flow stream and $30k of MRR.

How was it so easy? Well, there are TONS of entrepreneurs, and more are created every day.

There are also a huge number of influencers talking to founders about starting and growing companies—working with them became an enormous lever for us to grow the product.

The TAM is wide, dynamic, and expanding all the time… that’s a major advantage and we want to get back to that.

And Because Of The Unstoppable Positive Feedback Loop

The other reason we are excited to serve founders and business owners again is that an incredible growth loop exists:

So as we get the flywheel going, it turns faster on all fronts:

• Marketing doesn’t “feel like marketing”

• Creating content is easy because it’s what we’re already thinking about

• Supporting community is natural and feels effortless

• All of this relieves some of the pressure to spend on advertising

• The relationships we build flow through to our acquisition deal flow efforts

And that’s pretty cool.

By contrast, our growth strategy for our current compliance platform is looking much different. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, and I’m excited about growing ViewExport with partners, resellers, advisors, and SEO. But you won’t catch us building a community for compliance professionals. Why? We just don’t know a ton about compliance or legal tech. And when we switch gears to “thinking about compliance and eDiscovery”, that’s a big change in our train of thought from what we think about much of the day (growing SaaS, marketing, coding, etc).

All of this creates a positive growth flywheel with minimal mental load. And when you can do something to reduce the friction required for you to invest in organic marketing, you should strongly consider tapping into that advantage.

How Are You Implementing This?

Some questions for you to ponder:

• In your own company, is there a big crossover between “what you think about all day” and “the kind of content you create for marketing”?

• Does at least one of the co-founders have strong real-world job experience doing the kinds of things your product or service helps its clients do?

• In what ways can you integrate ‘classic one-to-one customer support’, with ‘community building for marketing and learning’, to reduce the need to show up in many different places to serve your customers?

We often see bootstrapped SaaS founders succeed early on, grow revenue, and avoid burnout when they take steps to make it easy on themselves to do the things that cause revenue to grow healthily and sustainably.

-Alex and Mac