Bonjoro: Building a SaaS Company in a Bear Suit
Matt Barnett is the founder of Bonjoro, a SaaS product that helps businesses to build relationships with their customers at scale using personal video.
Matt used to run a small market research agency in Sydney, Australia. Most of his clients were based in other countries. So he decided to use video to help him build relationships with those clients.
Every day, he'd check to see what new leads they had and then on his morning commute (which was on a ferry across Sydney Harbor) he'd record personal videos on his phone for each potential client.
The quality of videos wasn't great and sometimes there was so much noise on the ferry, that people watching the video couldn't even hear Matt properly.
But they all seemed to love getting those videos.
One day, a client asked if they could also use the tool that he was using to send those videos. But the truth was that they didn't actually have a ‘tool' – they'd just cobbled a few things together with Slack, Zapier and a lot of manual work to record, publish and share those videos.
It seemed like an interesting project, so Matt and his team decided to spend a weekend building a basic tool for that client. They weren't able to spend much time on it and it looked awful, but it worked.
But that was enough for them to be able to charge the client $15 a month.
And that's how Bonjoro was born. Within a year, Matt had completely stepped away from the agency and was working full-time on Bonjoro.
In this interview, you'll hear more of that story and we dig into how Matt's acquired over 40,000 users by building a viral product and partnering with influencers and affiliates.
I hope you enjoy it.
Book Recommendation
- “Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business” by Pat Flynn