The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 15

Randy Rayess, Outgrow

Engineering as Marketing Built a SaaS Lead Generation Empire

Randy Rayess and his co-founder Pratham were running VenturePact, a marketplace for software development services. Their sales team kept hearing the same question: "How much does it cost to build a mobile app?" So they built an interactive calculator and put it on their website. It became their biggest lead source almost overnight. That calculator sparked the idea for Outgrow - a platform that lets non-technical marketers build interactive calculators, quizzes, assessments, and recommendation tools without writing any code. The SaaS lead generation approach was simple: instead of advertising at customers, help them with their most common questions and capture qualified lead data through the interaction. But marketing Outgrow proved challenging. Nobody was searching for "interactive calculator builder." The category barely existed. Randy could not rely on SEO or paid search because customers did not know they needed the product. Instead, Outgrow leaned into events where mid-market digital marketers gathered, educating them on the concept through presentations before selling the tool. They also used their own product as a SaaS lead generation engine - building ROI calculators, content investment assessors, and knowledge quizzes that generated leads for Outgrow itself. The bootstrapped company grew to 3,000 paying customers with plans ranging from $25 to $600 per month. One customer generated over 90,000 leads from a single book recommendation quiz. Another saw 7x engagement improvement over paid social posts. Outgrow scaled to 40 employees entirely without outside funding, seeding early customers from VenturePact's existing client base before expanding through events, SaaS lead generation with its own product, and viral loops from the "Powered by Outgrow" branding on every piece of interactive content.