PLG & Growth·Bilal Aijazi, Polly

Freemium SaaS: From $8/Month to 7-Figure ARR

The "Punch in the Face" Reality of Startups

0:00Loading…

Listen on:

Like this episode?

Get real founder strategies for the AI era. Delivered weekly.

Free weekly newsletter · No spam

Bilal Aijazi's first paying customer spent $8 a month to run a fantasy football league. Today, Polly serves millions of monthly active users and generates multiple seven figures in ARR—with just 20 people.

In this episode, Bilal reveals the freemium SaaS playbook that took Polly from a clunky 5-step install process on Slack to one of the biggest third-party apps in the ecosystem. You'll learn how he identified which users would actually pay, survived when Slack built a competing feature, and why horizontal freemium products require a completely different approach to conversion.

Bilal Aijazi is the co-founder of Polly, an engagement platform that brings polls, surveys, and feedback workflows into the tools teams already use like Slack, Teams, and Zoom.

In 2015, Bilal was working at a consumer messaging company, watching apps like WeChat evolve from simple chat tools into full-blown platforms.

He figured the same shift would happen at work.

So he and his co-founder Samir started experimenting with simple solutions to collect feedback. Their first attempt was an email-based tool, but engagement was terrible. People just treated it like another survey to avoid.

Then Slack opened their API.

And Bilal noticed people on Twitter asking for Slack polls. So the founders quickly ported their product over, becoming one of the very first Slack apps ever built.

But the installation process was clunky. Five manual steps that required copying and pasting tokens between different screens. Yet 80% of people still completed the setup. So they were clearly providing something people wanted.

Then one day someone posted Polly on Product Hunt and they went viral overnight. They were getting thousands of new signups every month and struggling to keep the servers running.

Yet they had zero revenue.

Their first paying customer spent $8 a month for a fantasy football league. Then came the real challenge of building a freemium SaaS: figuring out who would actually pay.

Most users just wanted to do something casual with polls like pick lunch spots. But through hundreds of conversations, they found where the real money was. They focused on company all-hands, sales kickoffs, and other high-stakes meetings where feedback actually mattered.

Just when things clicked, Slack threw a spanner in the works.

Polly had built a workflow feature for automating feedback. They were signing five-figure deals. Six months later, Slack launched their own solution.

The founders had to make a choice. Stay on Slack and hope for the best, or take a massive risk and rebuild everything for multiple platforms.

They expanded to Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and embedded directly into presentations. Rebuilding their entire infrastructure was a huge undertaking, but they had no choice.

Today, Polly serves millions of monthly active users and generates multiple seven figures in ARR with just 20 people.

This episode is part of our PLG & Growth series.

Key Insight

Bilal Aijazi built Polly into one of the largest third-party apps on Slack and Teams by launching in 2015 as one of the first Slack apps ever - despite a clunky 5-step manual installation process that 80% of users still completed, proving real demand existed before the platform even had an app directory.

Key Ideas

Launch early on viral platforms - Polly capitalized on Slack's explosive growth by being one of the first apps available, even with a painful installation process
Separate users from buyers in freemium - free users picking lunch spots never convert, but buyers running all-hands meetings and sales kickoffs will pay for engagement tools
Diversify before platform risk becomes existential - when Slack built Workflow Builder, Polly had already expanded to Teams, Zoom, Google Slides, and PowerPoint
Build viral loops into the product - 12% of poll responders eventually become creators, creating continuous organic adoption without paid acquisition
Attach to expensive company rituals - all-hands meetings cost 150+ person-hours, justifying premium pricing for feedback tools that prove ROI

Key Lessons

🚀 Pain tolerance signals demand: 80% of users completed Polly's 5-step manual install process - in mobile apps that would mean 80% drop-off per step. When users willingly tolerate pain, you've found real demand worth pursuing aggressively.
💰 Freemium SaaS conversion requires separating users from buyers: Most free users picking lunch spots will never pay. The real buyers are internal comms leaders running company all-hands and sales kickoffs where feedback directly impacts business - focus all monetization efforts on them.
🔄 Surviving platform risk means diversifying before it's urgent: When Slack built Workflow Builder to compete, Polly had already expanded to Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Slides, and PowerPoint - turning what could have been an existential threat into multi-platform growth momentum instead.
🎯 Hook conversations into the product at key moments: Every Polly signup triggers an email asking for product feedback and offering demos. These hundreds of early conversations revealed exactly which use cases would actually convert to paid versus just drive viral free adoption.
💡 Creator pricing works for horizontal freemium SaaS: Charge the people creating recurring value (poll creators running weekly meetings), not every user who responds once. For enterprise tiers, shift to monthly active users for simpler administration that scales with actual organizational usage.
🏢 Attach to expensive company rituals that justify premium pricing: Company all-hands meetings cost 150+ person-hours in employee time. Products that prove measurable ROI on those high-stakes, recurring investments can justify premium pricing far better than general-purpose productivity tools that lack clear business impact.

Watch the Episode

Chapters

00:00The "Punch in the Face" Reality of Startups

00:33What Polly Does and Who It Serves

01:38Scaling to Millions of Monthly Active Users

02:30The Origin: Messaging Platforms Meet Enterprise

04:21Launching on Slack Before the App Store Existed

06:23The First Product: Polls in Slack

07:14The 5-Step Onboarding Nightmare (That Worked)

09:48Product Hunt Viral Moment

10:48Transitioning from Viral Bot to Real Company

12:17The Freemium SaaS Strategy

13:10The Fantasy Football Customer: First $8/Month

16:00Finding Buyers in a Sea of Free Users

19:48Free-to-Paid Conversion Challenges

21:45What Goes Behind the Paywall

24:08Horizontal vs. Vertical Approach

26:05Building Polly Workflows

26:53When Slack Built a Competing Feature

29:08Managing Platform Risk

33:09Why Technical Founders Must Learn Sales

35:26Building on Multiple Platforms Today

42:33Would You Start Horizontal Again?

45:17Lightning Round

Episode Q&A

How did Polly get 80% completion on a painful 5-step install process?

Early Slack users were so hungry to extend the platform that they tolerated copying and pasting tokens manually between screens—proving massive demand before Slack even had an app store.

Who was Polly's first paying customer and what did they pay?

A product manager running a fantasy football league in his company's Slack workspace paid $8/month—then asked if Polly could work for his HR team, revealing a much bigger market.

Why did Bilal Aijazi call most freemium SaaS users "pollinators" instead of customers?

Users asking "where should we go for lunch?" bring Polly into organizations but won't convert. The real buyers are people running expensive company rituals like all-hands meetings.

What happened when Slack built Workflow Builder six months after Polly launched Polly Workflows?

Slack acquired a company called Missions and built a competing product, stalling Polly Workflows adoption and confusing the market—even though it didn't do exactly what Polly did.

How does Polly's freemium SaaS pricing work for horizontal products?

Creator-based pricing charges only people who create polls, while enterprise tiers charge based on monthly active users—eliminating the friction of administering individual seats.

Why did Polly expand beyond Slack to Teams, Zoom, and Google Slides?

Platform risk forced the decision—when your core platform can build your feature, you need to diversify. Now Polly embeds directly into presentations for live engagement.

What's the key challenge Bilal identifies with horizontal freemium SaaS products?

You have to separate users from buyers—they're different people. Most users will never pay, but they help bring the product into organizations where buyers exist.

How did Polly identify which use cases would convert to paid?

Through constant customer conversations triggered by product hooks—every signup gets an email asking for product feedback, which surfaces the high-value use cases like post-event feedback.

What does Bilal Aijazi advise founders building freemium SaaS products?

Focus on retention over acquisition, identify monetizable use cases through customer conversations, and view free users as lead generation for finding your real buyers.

Book Recommendations

A Brief History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

More on PLG & Growth

Ryan Wang, Assembled

SaaS Pricing Trap: Usage-Based Models Need Minimums to Survive

Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, an AI platform for customer support that helps companies manage both human and AI agents more efficiently. In 2016, Ryan was a machine learning engineer at Stripe. He and his co-founders spent two years building before launching in 2020—the same day WHO declared COVID a global pandemic. Their momentum vanished. About a quarter of demos didn't show up. Their SaaS pricing model—usage-based with no minimums—meant customers could scale to zero without leaving. It took 8 months to earn their first dollar of revenue. In 2016, Ryan was a machine learning engineer at Stripe. He and his future co-founder Brian built ML tools to automate support tickets, but they realized the real problem wasn't automation—it was workforce management. That became the spark for Assembled. The three co-founders spent two years building before they launched in 2020. They lined up a TechCrunch story, hit the front page of Hacker News, and then their launch landed the same day the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic. Momentum vanished. About a quarter of demos didn't show up. It took them eight months to earn their first dollar of revenue. The SaaS pricing trap: When they finally got customers, they had usage-based pricing with no minimums. Customers could scale usage to zero. When usage flatlined during the pandemic, the team blamed themselves before realizing customers weren't leaving because of the product—they were just cutting costs. How Ryan fixed the SaaS pricing problem: 1. Shifted focus from chasing growth to serving customers who were getting value 2. Met customers in person, sat with support leaders, and built what actually mattered 3. Added pricing minimums to prevent revenue from dropping to zero 4. Built sticky features that justified the investment That hands-on approach worked for about 10 customers. Then it broke at 50. Onboarding took weeks. Some features worked in demos but failed in production. So they rebuilt onboarding to get it down to days and cleaned up the product so it could scale. Eventually they grew from their early customers to dozens more and reached 8-figure ARR.

David Shim, Read AI

Product-Led Growth to 8-Figure ARR with $0 Ad Spend

David Shim is the co-founder and CEO of Read AI, a meeting intelligence platform that helps teams capture, analyze, and act on insights from their meetings. David Shim had already built and sold a company for $200 million to Snapchat when he spotted his next opportunity: a reflection in someone's glasses during a Zoom call. During the pandemic, David noticed a fellow meeting participant's glasses reflecting ESPN.com - they were both distracted on the same call. That moment sparked a question: could AI measure meeting engagement in real-time? After cold-emailing Zoom founder Eric Yuan to validate the idea (Eric confirmed Zoom wasn't building it), David raised $10 million and launched Read AI on the Zoom App Store. The initial product showed engagement analytics - sentiment scores, attention metrics, who was distracted. Users thought it was cool. But cool doesn't pay the bills. Monthly retention sat at just 5%. Users would try the product, see their meeting scores, and never come back. David had built a dashboard when he should have built a decision-making tool. The breakthrough came when OpenAI released ChatGPT. David's team combined their proprietary engagement analytics with LLM-powered summaries, creating what they call the "narration layer" - capturing not just what was said, but how people reacted. Tone, emotions, head nods, who looked away. The transcript tells you the words; the narration layer tells you the truth. Retention climbed: 5% to 10%, then 30%, 40%, 50%, and finally 81%. Today Read AI adds 12 million accounts per year with zero ad spend. Every meeting report shared is a viral loop - all participants receive the notes, non-users see the value, and accounts multiply. Product-led growth at its purest.

Sergiy Korolov, Mailtrap

Product-Led Growth: From Internal Mistake to 7-Figure SaaS

Sergiy Korolov is the co-CEO of Railsware, a product studio that helps companies design, build, and scale successful software products, and the co-founder of Mailtrap, an email testing and delivery platform trusted by developers worldwide. Back in 2011, Sergiy's team made a massive mistake. They accidentally sent 20,000 test billing emails from their staging environment straight to real customers. The chaos was immediate. Customers were confused and upset, wondering if they'd actually been charged or not. To make sure it never happened again, they built a small internal tool to stop test emails from reaching real inboxes. When they shared it with the Ruby on Rails community, something unexpected happened. Developers loved it, and Mailtrap spread purely through word of mouth, eventually attracting more than 200,000 users. For the next five years, Mailtrap stayed free. It was a side project until 2016, when Sergiy finally decided to turn it into a real business. Instead of guessing, his team ran over 100 customer interviews and dug into usage data to guide pricing and product decisions. It took another four years to reach $1 million in ARR. Growth was slow and steady, not the overnight success story people imagine. And just as things started to pick up, a new challenge appeared. Customers wanted Mailtrap to handle production email sending too. That meant turning a product built to avoid sending emails into one that had to deliver them flawlessly. It was a risky move. The shift created a whole new set of problems, from dealing with spam attacks and deliverability issues to fighting brand confusion about what Mailtrap actually did. Suddenly, a product known for blocking emails had to prove it could deliver them reliably. Sergiy and his team spent months rebuilding their infrastructure, tightening security, and designing tools that gave developers more visibility and control. It wasn't glamorous work, but it paid off. Mailtrap evolved into a trusted, full-stack email platform used by teams around the world. Today, Mailtrap generates seven-figure ARR with a 40-person team and more than 100,000 monthly active users.

←All Episodes