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!

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About Christoph

Christoph lives in Munich, Germany and is bootstrapping his own SaaS application as a part-time entrepreneur.

He likes to write on this blog about anything of relevance to single-founder bootstrapped software startups.

Comments

  1. Eugen Paraschiv says

    Hey Christoph – unfortunately the “central hub” link doesn’t work.
    Cheers,
    Eugen.

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