Bootstrapping·Holly Stephens, Subly

Subly: Bootstrapping a SaaS from Zero to 60,000 Users

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Holly Stephens is the co-founder and CEO of Subly, a SaaS product that provides automatic transcription, translation, and subtitles for audio and video content.

When Holly was running an online community and marketing agency, she realized how effective video was in attracting customers for both herself and her clients.

But she quickly discovered how difficult it was to create subtitles and transcriptions for those videos and then share them across various platforms.

Holly wondered if this was also a big pain for other content creators and if there might be an opportunity for her to solve that problem.

She knew that the best way to move forward with an idea was to just get it out there and see what happens. So she quickly created a landing page.

The page was pretty simple. It described a fictional product that would make it easier to add subtitles to videos and invited people to signup and get notified when it launched.

She shared the link to the landing page in different Facebook groups and in a few days, about fifty people signed up.

That was enough for Holly and her co-founder Keyvan to move ahead with the idea.

For the next year, they still worked their day jobs but would meet in the mornings and evenings to work on their product.

Eventually, about a year later they launched their product and had around a hundred people signup. But the product was still free and they hadn't yet figured out how to make money.

And it took them several more months to figure out how to get their first paid customer.

Currently, Subly is doing around $120K in annual recurring revenue, the team has raised a seed round and have around 60,000 people using the product.

In this interview, we dive into how Holly validated her idea with a simple landing page, how she used LinkedIn to generate interest in the product, and how with a very tight marketing budget, they've been able to build a pretty significant user base in a relatively short period of time.

I hope you enjoy it.

This episode is part of our Bootstrapping series.

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