COR: Moving a SaaS Upmarket from SMB to Enterprise
Santi Bibiloni is the co-founder and CEO of COR, a SaaS product for creative and professional teams that intelligently suggests how to run their projects, finances, and resources in order to improve profitability.
In 2015, Santi was running a successful e-commerce agency in Argentina.
As the business grew, it became increasingly difficult to track the profitability of client projects. At first, Santi and his partners assumed that larger agencies had already solved this problem. But when they did research, they learned that this was a very common problem and there wasn't a good solution out there.
So the founders decided to build a solution.
Once they had built an MVP, they managed to get two other agencies in Buenos Aires to try out their solution. But those early users hated the product. It had lots of bugs and a poorly designed user interface. But even then, they were willing to keep using the tool because it was helping to solve a real pain.
That helped them validate the idea and raise an angel round.
But they spent most of that money on paid media that didn't really work. They tried running ads on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But at the time they didn't have a robust solution and selling via ads wasn't a good way to spend money.
They got to about $2K in monthly recurring revenue but growth was slow.
What helped them find traction was to move upmarket and focus on enterprise businesses i.e. some of the largest agencies in the world, instead of selling the product to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). That helped them to get their revenue to multiple 7-figures and recently raised a Series A round.
In this interview we cover some great topics:
- Santi explains how they went from a free trials & monthly payment business model to having no free trials and selling multi-year contracts instead.
- We deep dive into how they used both cold email and inbound marketing to drive the majority of their growth.
- And we share some lessons on how early-stage startups can move upmarket and how to sell to enterprise customers.
I hope you enjoy it.
Book Recommendation
- “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action” by Simon Sinek