The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 17

Vincent Cassar, Keeping

3 SaaS Growth Hacks That Doubled Cold Email Response

Vincent Cassar is the founder of Keeping.com, a Gmail extension that adds helpdesk functionality into any Gmail or Google Apps account. Instead of forcing teams to migrate to an external helpdesk like Zendesk, Keeping lets you manage customer support directly from your inbox. Vincent first caught attention by publishing the Growth Hacking Experiment, a transparent documentation of every SaaS growth tactic he tried with Keeping - including the results, both good and bad. The resource attracted the exact audience that would also need a helpdesk product: startups and small businesses interested in growing their customer base. In this conversation, Vincent shares three specific SaaS growth tactics in detail. The first is cold email follow-up. By following up three to four times with non-responders using tools like Right Inbox and Boomerang, Vincent increased his response rate from roughly 10-15% on a single email to 40% across the full sequence. The key is keeping each follow-up extremely short - sometimes just "did you get the email I sent two days ago?" The second SaaS growth hack is Quora marketing. Vincent answers questions related to customer support on Quora with short, five-to-six line responses, always placing the URL near the top. The result: 35% of Quora visitors sign up for a free trial, making it his highest-converting traffic source. He also discovered that adding a screenshot of the product below each answer drives significantly more clicks. The third tactic is pre-launch customer feedback. Before building the first version of Keeping, Vincent cold-emailed and cold-called as many potential customers as he could to validate whether email-based helpdesk was a real pain point. Those early conversations created rapport with future customers who later converted and sent referrals. Vincent also shares a failed experiment: automating Twitter replies with a bot that searched for relevant hashtags. The bot sent generic responses and sometimes entered infinite reply loops with other bots, angering real users and risking account suspension.

Mike Muhney, VIPOrbit

Finding Product-Market Fit With $15K Left and a Napkin

Mike Muhney is the co-founder and CEO of VIPOrbit Software, a company focused on building great contact management products. Their flagship product, Vipor CRM, is available on iOS and Mac platforms. The company was founded in 2010 and has raised over $4 million in funding. In 1986, Mike co-founded a software business that eventually failed. With only $15,000 remaining from an angel investment of $100,000, he and his co-founder had a choice: close down or come up with another idea. A mentor suggested a brainstorm breakfast, and over four hours they sketched the menu structure for what would become ACT! Contact Management Software on a napkin. That moment of finding product-market fit changed everything. They built a product they needed themselves - a digital version of the paper Daytimer organizer with seamless integration between contacts, activities, and notes. ACT! went on to create an entirely new software category. Mike became a celebrity in the tech industry, speaking at major conferences worldwide. Seven years after that brainstorm breakfast, they sold ACT! for $47 million. Mike walked away with just under $5 million from his 10% stake. But the story after the exit is equally revealing. Mike struggled with a sense of emptiness and fading relevance. He launched Celebrity Soft, signing Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley for a fantasy golf game - only to have Jordan pull out without explanation, collapsing the entire venture. He spent years at Deloitte Consulting and SalesLogix before the itch to build his own thing returned. In 2009, sitting in his home office reading a BusinessWeek article about the app economy, Mike had his second finding product-market fit moment. He realized the CRM industry had reached fewer than 14 million users worldwide despite billions of smartphone owners. He started VIPOrbit Software to build the contact management tool he still needed himself - the same motivation that produced ACT! decades earlier. Mike is also candid about the fear that accompanies entrepreneurship at every stage. He describes the "front office" enthusiasm that entrepreneurs project versus the "back office" fear of running out of money, not being discovered, and watching time run out.