Fomo: From a Small Shopify App to a 7-Figure SaaS Business
Ryan Kulp is the former founder of Fomo, a social proof marketing solution that enables online businesses to show purchasing activity on their website automatically.
In 2016, Ryan acquired a Shopify app called Notify (which later became Fomo) and grew it into a 7-figure SaaS business that he recently sold.
The Shopify app already had a few hundred customers, so it was less about a zero-to-one problem and more about how to make the investment worthwhile and grow to thousands of customers so he could quit his job and work on it full time.
In this episode, we unpack that story and share Ryan's journey:
- We share how he went from a few hundred Shopify customers to thousands of customers, with Fomo now being used on over 30,000 websites.
- We chat about how Ryan used cold email outreach to get initial growth and something a little unusual he did (that he's not proud of), but it worked.
- We also dig into how they used integrations with other products as a major growth channel and how they were able to add over 100 integrations quickly.
- Ryan also shares the lessons he learned from a bunch of other tactics that didn't work, e.g., content marketing, SEO, newsletter ads, and more.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Getting to $10K MRR
Weekly coaching, proven frameworks, and a community of early-stage founders.
Learn More →
Scaling to $1M ARR
Strategic guidance, direct mentorship, and a peer group of 6-figure founders.
Learn More →
Book Recommendation
- “The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” by Clayton M. Christensen
The Show Notes
Recommended Episodes
- Treehouse: How a Developer Bootstrapped an 8-Figure SaaS Company - with Ryan Carson [246]
- Qwilr: SaaS Freemium Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them - with Mark Tanner [261]
- Paddle: From a Failed SaaS Launch to a $1.4+ Billion Valuation - with Christian…
- Storyblok: Turning a CMS Prototype Into an 8-Figure SaaS - with Dominik Angerer [366]
- How a High-School Teacher Earned $5 Million With Online Coding Courses - with Rob…
- AMP: Speed and Customer Focus in Building an 8-Figure SaaS - with Patrick Barnes [408]
- SaaS Recurring Revenue: Lessons from a Former MMA Fighter - with Dan Faggella [163]
- Vacation Tracker: 60 Waitlist Signups to $2M Bootstrapped SaaS - with Lav Crnobrnja [406]
- SaaStock: Global Events for SaaS Founders, Executives & Investors - with Alex Theuma [256]
- ClickFunnels: Bootstrapping a SaaS to $140M ARR with Webinars - with Todd Dickerson [413]