The SaaS Podcast

Stuart McKeown, Gleam

3 Tactics That Got Gleam to 5000 SaaS Customer Acquisitions

Stuart McKeown is the co-founder of Gleam, a growth platform that helps businesses drive engagement through giveaways, rewards, and user feedback. Stuart's background is in search engine marketing. He moved from the UK to Melbourne, Australia in 2005 and spent years at Hitwise before striking out on his own. Before Gleam, Stuart and his co-founder John built six or seven businesses that either failed or could not sustain growth. Their coupon affiliate site peaked at $50,000/month in revenue before Google Panda wiped out 90% of traffic overnight. They tried a Pinterest clone, a managed coupon service, and a web hosting comparison site - each teaching them lessons about platform dependency and revenue models. The Gleam idea came from running competitions on their own websites using expensive tools like Wildfire. They built a prototype in a weekend hackathon that outperformed every paid campaign they had ever run. Within four months of launch, they had 100 paying customers. In 18 months they had 2,000. By the time of this interview, Gleam had over 400,000 registered users, 5,000 paying customers, and $1M+ in annual recurring revenue. Stuart details three SaaS customer acquisition strategies that drove this growth: personalized cold email outreach that achieved a 90% response rate from founders and 50% from marketing teams, long-form blog content that took 6-12 months to compound but eventually generated hundreds of leads per day, and strategic integrations with Mailchimp (3,462 active customers), Shopify, and dozens of other platforms that opened new marketing channels and made Gleam the default choice in its category.