Hey - Marc here.

Happy Saturday morning, motivated B2B SaaS Founders!

Here's at least one tip to keep in mind as you grow your B2B SaaS company:

Today's issue takes about 5 minutes to read.

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In today's issue, I share some key takeaways from a recent interview between Nathan Latka, the host of Daily Interviews with SaaS Founders, and Raul Kaevand, the CEO and founder of Instantly. They discussed their new SaaS going from 0 to $2.4m in 9 months using a genius growth strategy.

Raul is no stranger to failure. In fact, he has been a part of multiple failed startups in his career. He had done SEO and other digital marketing agency services until he pivoted into a lead-generation agency in July 2021 and grew it to around 15k when they started building Instantly.

About Instantly

Instantly is in a bucket with Lemlist and other companies that help scale your outreach campaigns through unlimited email-sending accounts, warmups, and smart AI. Instantly has four co-founders, one of whom is the developer that built it, while the other three are core folks from his lead-generation agency.

They launched their lead-generation agency in July last year and built Instantly internally. They only had 22 clients paying $2k per month. But since Instantly is doing so well, they shifted their focus from the agents with the consulting services to their new SaaS — Instantly.

Instantly's secret sauce is their lead-generation agency, which makes them work. The first clients they got were all who jumped on a call, offered a service in their lead-generation agency, and then used Instantly to help them get to those leads.

They now has five full-time employees: three people on the core team and a bunch of contractors that they used to run full-time.

P.S. Instantly now has 2,900 customers, coming from content marketing (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and from using Instantly to cold outreach to people directly.

Challenges

There are already a lot of other players in the space.

Their main reason for launching Instantly is to build it for themselves. They’ve been paying thousands a month for their agency, so they built their own tool. They didn't even plan on launching it, but when they did and started talking to people, they realized that what they had was unique that nobody else had.

Given too much equity in the wrong places.

It was a smart move, but he realized that marketing is just as important as software, so he brought on two other co-founders from their agency. Now, their developer owns 50% of Instantly, and Raul and his two co-founders split the other 50%.

Advice to Other Founders

Leverage platforms with a full stack market looking for partners.

A lot of agency owners can't find the engineer to build their SaaS. 2 years ago, Raul posted on Reddit, and someone (Instantly's developer now) randomly messaged him, talked, and started another idea—but it didn't work out because COVID hit just as they were about to launch. But then linked up again in July last year and started Instantly.

Don’t waste time on something that brings money but doesn’t have long-term potential.

They eventually decided to shut down the agency because their software had something unique, and it was going so fast. Letting go of his clients was difficult and took some time, but they had to do it — and wished he had done it sooner.

AppSumo is not a viable strategy for most companies.

Launching on AppSumo made sense for them to get their word out there. But sometimes, you don’t get the kind of customers that are going to be with you long-term and won’t count toward retention. You can use it to get started and then move completely off that model and reject lifetime deals.

Don’t make your community mainly about your company.

It’s common sense, but we see it all the time — people who are just trying to leverage their communities. for their own gain. But if you do it right, there will be a lot more room for everyone to grow.

Here’s how they did it:

Named their Facebook group “Cold Email Masterclass by Instantly.” This gave them an SEO advantage over competitors who also offered courses on cold emailing.
Applied Facebook SEO so that when people search for their keywords, it will give higher perceived value. They had control over this, giving them an advantage over other companies offering similar services.
Then added the branding at the end so people could still differentiate themselves from their competitors and make brand awareness.

Bonus

Raul’s favorite business book is “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters.
Intercom has helped them in building Instantly.
He wished when he was 20 not to get complacent when things go well, hoping that somebody had pushed him to come back and still keep going.

TL;DR

In 2021, Raul launched an outbound agency that got 20 customers with 20k a month in revenue. The software they built internally is taking off, so they shut down the agency and launched Instantly.ai. Today, they’ve got 2,900 customers, paying on average 70 per month for 200k monthly occurring revenue in under 9 months. They’ve done this with a team of about 15 and completely bootstrapped.

P.S. Here is a link to the full interview if you are interested in listening to the full episode: New SaaS goes 0 to $2.4m in 9 months using genius growth strategy

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See you again next week.

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