Two Years in the SaaS Trenches – Jordan Gal – MicroConf Europe 2016

The MicroConf Europe 2016 Talk Recaps can be found on the central hub page.

Website: Carthook.com
Twitter: @JordanGal

• Started out with solarlightstore.com – didn’t know a thing about eCommerce
  • sold after 12 months
• Lessons learned:
  • eCommerce doesn’t have MRR
  • 4000 customers, but as soon as you stop advertising revenue is gone
• With the next business, I don’t want to do development. I’m going to focus on marketing
  • Got lucky while looking for a developer for the next project
  • Having expertise in eCommerce was helpful in convincing developer to come onboard

Carthook

• Carthook is a cart abandonment software
• Initially brute forced my way into sales
  • scraped a list of potential customers
  • hired VA to find email addresses
  • wrote tons of cold emails
  • Result: 20 first customers
  • Lots of conversations with strangers/potential customers
• At around $3,000 MRR I was unsure on whether to go all-in or just let it grow by itself
• Got a acquisition offer shortly after
  • acquisition didn’t go through, but it showed me that this idea is bigger than I estimated
• over christmas 2014 a bunch of friends offered to fund Carthook with roughly $100,000
• I had lost my developer because he got offered his dream job
• Early January a new signup on the mailing list: A developer trying to reverse-engineer Carthook
  • Started a conversation with him
  • met in Los Angeles
  • decided to work together and raised money
• We scale to 10x and immediately hit a wall in tech
  • key lesson: Be prepared to rewrite your MVP
• After rewrite, we focused on integration marketing

The rest of the notes have been removed on request by Jordan. 
Jordan, thanks for a great & candid talk!

-Christoph