The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 15

Garrett Moon, CoSchedule

500 Posts to 7,000 Customers: SaaS Content Marketing

Garrett Moon is the CEO and co-founder of CoSchedule, a content marketing and social media publishing calendar for small businesses and marketing teams. CoSchedule helps over 7,000 customers organize their content marketing and social media publishing in more than 100 countries around the world. CoSchedule was founded in 2013 and to date has raised around $500,000 in funding. This episode is the story of two guys who ran a web design and marketing consulting business. One day they hatched a plan for a new SaaS product on a plane ride between North Dakota and Atlanta. By the time they landed, they were fully committed to the idea and had decided what they were going to do next. This wasn't the first time these two had launched a product. They had already tried four times without much success. But this time felt different because their idea would solve a problem their consulting clients were often complaining about - organizing content creation and social media promotion in one place. They started by writing a blog post about the problem and how their new product would solve it. They mocked up some screenshots in Photoshop of a product that didn't exist yet. Within 24 hours, they had 300-400 email signups from people interested in the idea. Then Garrett did something remarkably disciplined. He went through that email list, threw out all the Gmail and Yahoo addresses, and identified 10 potential customers. He created a slide deck and scheduled calls with each of them to get feedback before writing any code. The SaaS content marketing didn't stop there. Garrett blogged once a week about the entire process of building CoSchedule - sharing wireframes, early ideas, and getting community feedback along the way. After launch, they scaled to three posts per week, published over 500 actionable blog posts, and grew their email list to over 100,000 subscribers. What makes this story different from every other "we used content marketing" narrative is Garrett's Blue Ocean strategy. Instead of competing on volume, CoSchedule published fewer but dramatically better posts - several thousand words each, deeply researched, always actionable, and always including downloadable worksheets or resources. Most competitors wouldn't put in that level of effort. That became their moat. Garrett also shares the painful lessons about building features customers didn't want, why he deliberately avoided selling to his consulting clients, and why focus is the single most important attribute for any entrepreneur.

Ryan O'Donnell, SellHack

From Internal Tool to $1M: A Bootstrapped SaaS Growth Story

Ryan O'Donnell is the co-founder of SellHack, an online platform for salespeople that helps them find targeted prospects, build email lists, and verify email addresses. He started his career on Wall Street as a broker making 500 calls a day prospecting for new clients. He decided to follow his passion for tech and joined Right Media, which was later acquired by Yahoo. After spending three years at Yahoo, he left and began his startup journey. SellHack was founded in 2014 and is based in Cleveland, Ohio. The SellHack story begins with failure. Ryan and his co-founder Marco were working on a group gifting application that flopped. They pivoted to B2B, then added video messaging, but nothing gained traction. Through all those pivots, Ryan kept running into the same problem: finding prospects, getting their email addresses, and reaching out to them was eating up hours every day. So Marco built a tool to speed up that process. It wasn't meant to be a company - just an internal hack to save time. Ryan shared it with a few startup founder friends. Someone posted it to Product Hunt and Reddit. The tool went viral. Their servers crashed. They took the site down, put up a registration page, and collected email addresses. Ten days later, they launched with subscription plans starting at $9 a month. They were profitable on day one, generating $500 in revenue immediately. That bootstrapped SaaS growth story was just getting started. What Ryan did next was remarkably disciplined. He manually researched every one of those first 50 paying customers - their job titles, company sizes, locations, whether they had direct reports. From that research, he built customer personas: technical recruiters, VPs of sales at 5-50 person companies, and startup CEOs in New York and San Francisco. Then he targeted lookalike audiences through email outreach, phone calls, and Facebook ads. In two years, SellHack crossed $1 million in revenue. Ryan shares the customer segmentation process that drove that bootstrapped SaaS growth, why he now ties every feature request to revenue before building anything, and the onboarding mistake that nearly killed early retention.

The SaaS Podcast

1 Sale Then $5M Selling High-Ticket Products on Udemy

SaaS Content Marketing That Reached 100K Users for Free

6 SaaS Acquisitions Grown Without Any Marketing

3 Nightmare Years Then Scaling SaaS With Partners

Founder-Led Sales Got BrightFunnel to 7-Figure Revenue

Our SaaS Content Strategy Got 1,000 Customers With No Ads

Scaling SaaS to Multi-Millions on 40-Hour Weeks

How She Bootstrapped SaaS to $350K MRR With One Plan

Building Enterprise SaaS Features That Win Big Deals

Solo Founder Built a Vertical SaaS to $2M ARR

Scaling SaaS Revenue to $160K MRR With a Simple Offer

Zero to $20K MRR in 9 Months With Startup Sales

Signs You Chose the Wrong SaaS Co-Founder

A 12x SaaS Pricing Increase That Fixed Unit Economics

3 Tactics That Got Gleam to 5000 SaaS Customer Acquisitions

A Step-by-Step Framework for Getting SaaS Pricing Right

From Blogging to a SaaS Exit by Building Audience First

This Vertical SaaS Replaced a 120-Year-Old Eye Exam

Bootstrapped 7 Years Then Skipped VCs in SaaS Fundraising

500 Posts to 7,000 Customers: SaaS Content Marketing

7 Mental Hacks for the Overwhelmed Entrepreneur

From Internal Tool to $1M: A Bootstrapped SaaS Growth Story

The SaaS Distribution Channel That Drove 100% of Early Users

SaaS Product Validation With Zero Code and 9 Doctors