The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 12

Tope Awotona, Calendly

Calendly Founder Tope Awotona: Product-Market Fit After 3 Failed Startups

Tope Awotona is the founder and CEO of Calendly, a scheduling platform that eliminates the back-and-forth emails required to book meetings. Tope Awotona grew up in Nigeria and moved to the US as a teenager. After graduating from the University of Georgia, he landed a sales job at IBM and spent the next seven years in enterprise software sales. But he always wanted to be an entrepreneur. So he spent his evenings and weekends trying to build businesses. First, he read an article about PlentyOfFish.com making millions and decided to build a dating site. He bought domains, created a holding company, and purchased dating software—but never launched it because he lacked the skills and resources. His second startup was an e-commerce site selling projectors. He made some sales, but the margins were terrible and he had zero interest in projectors. His third startup was another e-commerce site, this time selling grills. Same problems: thin margins, no passion, no traction. Tope realized he was focused on "ways to make money" instead of solving problems he cared about. He told himself he wouldn't succeed unless he found a problem he was passionate about solving. It took another year before he found that problem. After wasting an entire day trading emails to schedule a single meeting, he searched for a scheduling tool. Everything on the market was slow, clunky, and poorly designed. He spent six months researching competitors, studying their user communities, and identifying what they did well and where they failed. Unlike his previous attempts, this time he went all in. He emptied his bank account, flew to Ukraine to hire engineers, and committed everything to building a better product. The bet paid off. Calendly launched in 2013 as a free product (not by choice—they ran out of money before building billing). That accident turned into one of the best decisions they never made. The freemium model combined with viral sharing made it easy for users to spread the product. At the time of this interview, Calendly was generating $30M ARR and serving 4 million users, largely bootstrapped. Tope's journey from three failed startups to finding product-market fit offers a masterclass in patience, persistence, and solving problems you actually care about.

Tim Soulo, Ahrefs

How Ahrefs Used SaaS SEO to Grow from 15K to 250K Monthly Visitors

Tim Soulo is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Ahrefs, a SaaS startup that provides SEO tools to help grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your market niche. In 2015, Tim joined Ahrefs as head of marketing. The company had spent several years building their blog, but it still was not generating much traffic or leads. Tim decided that publishing higher-quality content regularly on their blog was going to be one of his top priorities. But after a year, he still had little to show in terms of traffic and leads. Eventually, Tim figured out the problem. They were creating high-quality content, but they were not optimizing it for SaaS SEO. They were not doing keyword research or doing on-page optimization. That is not uncommon. A lot of companies make that mistake. But the startup that Tim worked for was in the business of SEO and their product helped their customers to grow search traffic. So it was pretty crazy that they were not thinking about SEO on their own blog. Once he figured out the problem, Tim made a simple change - he started by doing keyword research to find out what people were searching for and then focused on creating the best content around those keywords. And in a couple of years, their blog traffic grew from 15,000 to over 250,000 monthly visitors and has become one of the biggest drivers of new customers and revenue growth. But the real story here is about a SaaS startup that is incredibly product-focused and breaks a lot of rules and conventional wisdom about marketing and growth. They do not have a target customer or persona. They do not do growth hacks. They do not use analytics software or track conversion rates. They do not even do traditional SaaS SEO optimization. They focus on building a great product and educating people on how to use that product through their blog. And that approach is working - they are bootstrapped and doing over $40M ARR with just 45 people.