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Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

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Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#121

Post by evermike »

option_greek wrote: post #110
evermike wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the whole secret is in the product itself. At the very beginning we wanted to do everything faster - more features, more blog posts, more visitors, more backlinks etc. Did not work well. Then we decided to stop - pause any ads and promotion and 100% concentrate on the product, improve everything we have, do not add any big features. We talked a lot with our customers, found out what they liked/disliked…

Mike, How do you discover new customers ? (leads channel) And after discovering new leads how do you follow up ? do you send cold emails/cold calls ?

At the beginning, a huge part of leads came to us through the partner websites (tools we integrate with). Now there is more organic traffic. Someone mentioned us somewhere, referred to a friend.

The most important thing is to achieve the Aha! moment as quickly as possible. When you client realize the profit from using your tool. Integrations in our case. New lead register an account in Everhour, finishes quick onboarding wizard and can immediately see the timer button and other controls in his/her Asana, Trello, Basecamp or GitHub interface. It takes maximum 5 minutes.

Cold emails doesn't work well for us. Or maybe we aren't doing it well. Anyways, we try not to bomb our clients with tons of emails. Today it's annoying. If you need a hand, we have a chat window or we offer a free one-on-one demo.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#122

Post by evermike »

jotm wrote: post #42
evermike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can not agree. Salary of an engineer here is $3000-4000 per month (after tax calculation). Still less than in USA, but I can not call it a trifle. As for our revenue, I told the truth. If you do not believe it, well, I will not persuade you. I think a knowledgeable person can check math. BTW, in the article I attached a screenshot from our analytics platform (ProfitWell). What caused your distrust?

I can't see the original comment, but you mean $3000/month in Belarus?

Yes, it's the programmer's salary here. Of course this is not the starting point, it's a senior level salary, but this is not the upper limit.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#124

Post by Kerrick »

the_bear wrote: post #73
pcprincipal wrote: post #61

Question for this company / anyone who runs similar businesses - is $1MM ARR enough to pay 7 people? I'd be interested to know what they do in EBITDA and how they think about salaries. This is actually a general question I have about start-ups. The economics of having a business that makes $1 - $10mm in revenue and hires 7 - 100ish people is still difficult for me to understand. Yes, you can raise equity or debt beca…

Yes, I think $1MM is enough to pay 7 people, although it depends a lot on the specifics. My business makes $2.2MM ARR and has 17 employees (counting the founders). We're profitable, although we try to put about as much money as we can afford back into growth, so we're right around break even. There are a number of factors to consider when thinking about whether this is "enough" money. Location - We're based in St. Lo…

Oh hey there, you're in our building! We're on the bottom floor, Second Street. :)

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#125

Post by evermike »

ernsheong wrote: post #96
k__ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't extensions standardized for a years now?

Safari hasn’t joined the standards yet. You can do one code base for FF and Chrome, but Safari is a totally different beast.

Moreover, Apple is deprecating legacy Safari Extensions now and pushing developers to transition to Safari App Extensions – which are offered through traditional Mac apps via the Mac App Store.

More here - https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/09/safari-12-extensions-more/

It's another headache for us. So far we did not find any good step-by-step article on how to do it.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#126

Post by evermike »

andyidsinga wrote: post #112
evermike wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's true. I would also advise you to devote some time and collect feedback on such sites as Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, TrustRadius. Firstly, people search and read reviews before making their final decision. Secondly, reading about the competitors, they will find you. Third, sometimes bloggers use these sites to select the top 10 tools they will write about. If you are there - awesome. And finally, these…

thanks - really appreciate the advice and you taking the time to hang out here talking about your biz :)

No problem. I'm glad if you found something useful for your business in our experience.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#127

Post by evermike »

jwr wrote: post #119
evermike wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's true. I would also advise you to devote some time and collect feedback on such sites as Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, TrustRadius. Firstly, people search and read reviews before making their final decision. Secondly, reading about the competitors, they will find you. Third, sometimes bloggers use these sites to select the top 10 tools they will write about. If you are there - awesome. And finally, these…

Have you had any success with Capterra? I've been considering investing some time/money there, but I have doubts as to whether any customers actually visit those sites.

We did not try their PPC listing. Just keeping our profile up-to-date and ask our customers to share their experience about us there.

I cannot measure impact directly, but I think it worth my time to maintain a good looking profile at a resource with estimated monthly visitors = 7.4M (according to SimilarWeb).

Also, if you search for example "best time tracking software" in Google, they are on first page. And it costs $0.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#128

Post by djrogers »

brianwawok wrote: post #92
kumarm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where you are located. If its a US Based company, obviously not enough revenue to sustain 7 employees. The company is based in Belarus where salaries are lower than US: https://blogs.elenasmodels.com/en/average-monthly-salary-in-...

What? That is plenty to pay 7 employees in the US. Not in SF and not all senior developers.

No, it’s really not - you’re either forgetting or are unaware of payroll taxes, insurance, etc. not to mention rent, electricity, capital expenses, and every other expense needed to run a business come out of that $1m.

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#129

Post by evermike »

allannienhuis wrote: post #79
evermike wrote: post #74

Dear HN community. Just wanna thank everyone for such a warm feedback and interesting questions. I'll do my best to reply everyone. Although sometimes it's not easy to notice a new comment :)

this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news/geancn... does a nice job of highlighting new comments since your last view.

Looks like it doesn't work. Or I'm doing something wrong :(

Re: Growing Our SaaS to $1M+ ARR: 7 People, 3 Years, No VC Money

#130

Post by evermike »

charlesdm wrote: post #94
evermike wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It feels that you are speaking from your own experience. Indeed, it's hard. But not everyone understands this.

Do you think having access to "cheaper" talent (I don't mean they're worse in skill, but I guess there are less opportunities for capable engineers in Belarus) is a huge competitive advantage? Do you think you would have been able to build the same business in say London?

Hard to say. Most likely the result would be the same, but more expensive.

We have good technical people here in Belarus. But we have other problems. It’s almost impossible to find good Sales or Marketing talents here. I think it's due to the fact that we still have fewer product companies and more outsourcing. And of course English language. It's not native for us. While these positions imply impeccable knowledge.

Therefore, perhaps in London we could build sales/marketing team from day one and could sell better. But with the engineers it would be pretty much the same. Or even worse. I can imagine that we would probably hire people remotely, to save money, and this approach has some drawbacks.

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