How a SaaS Startup Used Engineering As Marketing to Drive Growth

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Randy Rayess is the co-founder of Outgrow, a platform that lets marketers build and launch interactive calculators and viral quizzes that help engage your website visitors and generate more leads.

Outgrow was founded in May 2016 and is based in New York. The company has over 3000 paying customers and has been bootstrapped from day one.

Previously, Randy worked in venture capital, private equity and at startups in financial services, transaction processing and machine learning.

How do you market and sell a product that your prospective customers don't even know they need?

These customers aren't searching for your product or any product like it. But if they knew that your product existed, they'd buy it.

This week's episode is a story about two guys who were in that situation. They were running a services business and helping their clients with software projects.

And they kept hearing the same question from their prospective customers i.e. "how much does it cost to build an app?" It was taking their sales team a lot of time to answer this question. So they built an interactive tool and put it on their website.

Then they started customizing the tool, so their clients could use it on their websites. And that's how a new SaaS business was born.

But marketing the SaaS product beyond their clients proved to be challenging. No one was looking for a solution like this. So they had to figure out how to reach new customers and help them understand that they needed this product.

There are some great lessons here on customer development. And we explore how to market a product that no one is looking for.

This episode is part of our Bootstrapping series.

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