Jennifer Johnson, CinchShare
How a Niche SaaS for Direct Sellers Hit $5M ARR
Jennifer Johnson is the founder and CEO of CinchShare, a social media marketing product for home-based direct sales businesses. In 2013, Jennifer, a stay-at-home mom, was trying to use Facebook to get more sales for her side business. The more active she was on Facebook, the more sales she seemed to get. But this often meant spending over two hours a day scheduling Facebook posts. And as a mom of four kids, it was really hard for her to find that much time every day. So she signed up for different social media marketing tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and PostPlanner. But they didn't actually save her that much time. She wanted a tool that would simplify and speed up all the repetitive tasks she was doing. Her husband didn't have experience building software but was technical enough to eventually be able to create a simple tool to schedule Facebook posts the way she wanted. He built it in about four weeks on evenings and weekends. And overnight, she went from two hours to just 20 minutes a day to schedule Facebook posts. Eventually, they built a website and started selling this niche SaaS tool to other home-based business owners. They had about 600 people join their Facebook group within weeks. When they opened for business, people flooded the site. Several hundred signed up on the first day. It wasn't all smooth sailing. In May 2015, a version 2.0 update broke everything. Hundreds of angry customers. Jennifer in tears. Her husband hyperventilating. But they rolled back, communicated transparently through their Facebook group, and their community rallied around them. Today, Jennifer's niche SaaS business does over $5 million in annual recurring revenue. The business is bootstrapped, profitable, and she's taken zero outside investment.
