The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 18

Ruben Timmerman, Springest

Customer Acquisition Startup Strategy That Pre-Sold $42K

Ruben Timmerman is the founder and CEO of Springest, a comparison website that helps you find the right training program or course. Launched as a side project in 2008 from Amsterdam, the site now operates in four countries and compares over 160,000 programs and courses from about 5,000 education providers. The customer acquisition startup story behind Springest starts with a simple SEO trick. Ruben counted comparison sites versus actual providers in Google search results for education queries. He found nine or ten education providers and zero comparison sites - a gap Google's "query deserves diversity" principle meant someone would eventually fill. So he filled it. Within two months, Springest was taking off so fast that Ruben had to stop his consulting work. But the real customer acquisition startup breakthrough came from pre-selling. Ruben cold-called education providers, took them along the journey of building the site, listened to their feedback on how their sales and marketing departments worked, and then offered them a deal: pay 6,000 euros upfront and get an entire year of leads for free. He closed six or seven of those deals at roughly a 50% close rate, giving him the capital to hire developers. The lead generation model he built charged just 1% of the training course price per lead - a number he calculated on the back of a napkin by estimating 10% marketing budgets and one-in-ten lead-to-sale conversion rates. That model still works today, and Springest has expanded to booking transactions at 15-20% fees. Ruben also shares hard lessons about international expansion. Launching in Germany and the UK simultaneously with new people, new marketing methods, and new markets created unmanageable complexity. And in Germany, crawling providers first and calling them afterward backfired - they felt blindsided instead of invited. The customer acquisition approach that worked was the same one he used in the Netherlands: take providers along the journey first, then monetize.

Trevor Owens, Javelin.com

3 Methods to Get Early Traction Before Writing Code

This is part two of the interview with Trevor Owens, co-founder and CEO of Javelin.com. In episode 61, Trevor shared the story of how he built Lean Startup Machine into a business doing almost $2 million a year, and how QuickMVP reached $240,000 in annual recurring revenue in its first three months. In this episode, we get tactical. Trevor breaks down the exact three-step process he teaches at Lean Startup Machine workshops for achieving early traction before writing a line of code. The first method is customer interviews - but not the kind where you pitch your solution. Trevor teaches a three-point interview format: identify the problem, get the customer to tell a story about experiencing the problem, and ask the magic wand question about their ideal solution. If they can't describe a solution, it's probably not a big enough problem. The second method is pre-selling through landing pages and Google Ads. Trevor explains how $100 to $500 in ad spend can validate whether anyone actually wants what you're building. QuickMVP combines a landing page builder with a Google Ad creator so founders can test ideas in under a minute instead of the 45 minutes typical for first-time AdWords users. The third method is concierge delivery - delivering your product's value as a manual service before building technology. Trevor shares a powerful example from a Lean Startup Machine event where a team got $1,000 in pre-orders for a resume sorting app, then discovered through concierge delivery that customers actually needed hiring expertise, not just automation. The conversation also covers why almost every successful startup has pivoted (YouTube started as a dating site, Twitter as a podcasting platform), why 90% of QuickMVP cancellations come from founders who invalidated their idea but didn't know what to do next, and why the rate of improvement across iterations matters more than your first baseline test.