How Prospectify Grew SaaS Revenue from Zero to $20K MRR in 9 Months

Matt Ekstrom is the co-founder of Prospectify, a B2B prospecting platform that helps you to automate your lead generation process.

Prospectify uses data search, data enrichment, and verification systems to help you build highly targeted prospect lists.

The company was founded in January 2016 and was self-funded for the first year. At the end of 2016, the company raised $1 million in funding.

Show Notes (Time Stamped & Clickable):

00:23 Welcome and introduction
02:56 What gets Matt out of bed every day to work on his business
03:57 What makes Prospectify different from other prospecting tools
07:20 Why the co-founders decided to build Prospectify
10:08 Why build another prospecting tool, when there are already so many in the market?
12:37 What did the co-founders do to validate the idea e.g. customer development interviews?
14:36 How long did it take to build the first version of the product
15:29 Going from zero to $20K monthly recurring revenue (MRR) in less than 9 months
16:35 How was Prospectify able to grow revenue, so quickly as a bootstrapped business
16:54 Importance of understanding your ideal customer profile Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
18:09 Choosing the right integration partners to help grow your SaaS business
19:01 Looking at one example of successful integration – Reply app
20:59 How does the integration with Reply work and how does it help Prospectify?
22:20 How do you get value from an integration beyond the technical work?
25:17 Specifically, what the founders did to go from zero to $20k a month recurring revenue
27:15 Two simple tactics for converting more free trial users into paying customers
29:49 How the team did outbound sales and how they used Prospectify to find leads
35:10 Recap of 3 growth strategies that helped Prospectify grow quickly
35:56 Exploring the big lessons and/or challenges the team learned
36:48 The difference between beta users and the right beta users
41:13 Some things that Matt wishes that they had done differently
41:36 Understanding the value you provide different customers and how to price your product
44:02 Getting too many customers too quickly can also be a big challenge
46:30 Closing their first round and how they're going to spend $1 million
47:57 Lightning Round