The inside story of self-funded SaaS growth – Rob Walling – MicroConf Europe 2015

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: softwarebyrob.com
Twitter: @robwalling
Slides:

Talk Recap

• last 15 months of my story as a founder – mainly Drip

3-Step Marketing Playbook

• Build something people want
• Find your position
• Scale

Build Something People Want

• Drip: Revenue at Launch: 100% (All numbers relative to that)
• Stayed the same for ~6 months
  • new trials slowed down after launch
  • 40% trial-to-paid rate
• Rules of thumb
  • visit to trial 0.7%-2%
  • trial to paid: 40-60%
  • First 60/90 day churn: 20-40%
  • Post 60/90 day churn: 4-7%
• “Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster” – David Ogilvy
• Ask for cancellation reason in a short email
  • How to filter out the useful feedback?
  • Lots of “too pricey” feedback –> Do NOT lower prices; change your product to justify price!
  • Ask customers “What do you need Drip to do to make $50/mo worth it?”
    • “I like automation rules like Infusionsoft”
    • “Tags and a rules engine”
  • Gut feeling: “Marketing automation will justify the price”
    • checked out Infusionsoft via Google image search
    • talked to mastermind group
• Build feature or not?
  • Does it fit my vision of the product?
  • Will this feature matter in 2 years?
  • Will it grow the business?
• Rules Engine
  • Didn’t want to build it: too much work; enterprise-y; not fun
  • building in small steps
  • Revenue went up to 150% – People started talking on Twitter, etc
    • No marketing during that time ==> trial numbers went down
    • Churn rate went down
    • Trial-to-paid went up
    • ==> Product/Market fit

Find Your Position

• If you are in a market with ANY competition, you need to pick a position
• Invent a category (e.g. educate people on “Marketing automation” in 2003)
  • Usually something for funded companies
• Compare features
  • bad path
• Take a position in a category
  • comparing features makes you a commodity
  • better: “One click SaaS metrics for Stripe” – Baremetrics
  • “Drip is the best way to send emails to your prospects, trial users and customers based on who they are and what they’ve done.” –> Worst. Headline. Ever.
• The Choices:
  • Compare Features
  • “Email Marketing”
  • “Marketing Automation”
  • Mastermind group: “Fuck it! Call yourself ‘Lightweight Marketing Automation That Doesn’t Suck'”
  • That headline totally crushed it

Scale

• MRR today: 580%
• First steps:
  • set up email course
  • Retargeting

Concentric Circle Marketing

• Circles
  • Your Audience
  • Colleagues’ Audiences
  • Cold Audiences

• Circle 1: Your Audience
  • Figure out a way to talk about it in a way that your audience appreciates
  • added “Launch. A Startup Documentary“
• Circle 2: Colleagues’ Audiences
• Circle 3: Cold Audiences
  • “Powered by Drip” widget link
  • adding integrations to other software, get featured on “Integrations” page
  • SEO

Tactics we haven’t used

• no split testing (for a lack of time)
• paid acquisition – just recently started
• AppSumo deal
• Webinars – just recently started
• Outbound email – just recently started

-Christoph