The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 20

Josh Ledgard, KickoffLabs

Tested 5 Ideas With Landing Pages Then Built the Winner

Josh Ledgard spent years running a 30-person product team at a Dallas-based company, working 60-hour weeks. When his wife was pregnant, he decided to leave and build something of his own. He teamed up with his co-founder Scott, and together they brainstormed 50 different business ideas. Their SaaS go-to-market approach was unconventional. They narrowed the 50 ideas to five finalists, then built landing pages for each one and drove traffic to measure interest. The idea that got twice as many email signups as anything else was a tool for building landing pages - the very thing they had just done manually. KickoffLabs was born from scratching their own itch. Launch day was underwhelming. They made about $10 in the first month and had maybe three paying customers. But Josh refused to wait for organic discovery. He spent 20 minutes a day on Twitter finding people who mentioned landing pages or competitors, then sent personalized messages referencing their bios, schools, or specific frustrations. He posted detailed answers on Quora. He even targeted users of a competitor called LaunchRock that was restricting access, telling them "real entrepreneurs don't wait in line." That personal SaaS go-to-market hustle defined KickoffLabs' early growth. Josh and Scott personally emailed and gave customized landing page advice to the first 1,000 signups. They built features whenever two or three paying customers asked for the same thing. By the end of year one, they could pay themselves a reasonable wage. The bigger challenge came from retention. Since half their customers were launching new businesses - and most startups fail - churn was built into the business model. Josh had to expand the product beyond launch pages into ongoing campaigns, contests, and integrations with Mailchimp and Salesforce to attract customers with recurring needs. Today KickoffLabs has about 1,000 paying customers, generates $35,000 to $40,000 per month, and has helped customers generate over 3 million leads. The SaaS go-to-market lessons Josh learned in those early days still drive the business. He runs it with a small team, takes five-week family trips to Ireland, and works far fewer hours than his corporate days demanded.

Kirk Simpson, Wave

From Free to 1M Users: Wave's Freemium SaaS Playbook

When Kirk Simpson was running his own small businesses, the only reason he survived financially was that his sister happened to be an accountant. He tried QuickBooks. He tried other accounting tools. None of them were built for someone like him - a micro business owner with fewer than nine employees. That frustration became the seed for Wave, a freemium SaaS accounting platform designed specifically for the 30 million micro small businesses in North America that Intuit's own research said were managing their finances with spreadsheets and Word docs. Kirk and co-founder James Locri, who had spent 15 years in tax software, set out to build a product that did the heavy lifting automatically - bank feeds, receipt scanning, invoicing - so small business owners could stop dreading tax season. They bootstrapped the early days, brought on contractors, and launched in late 2010. Within weeks, they had their first thousand users. Then in early 2011, a stroke of luck changed everything. Kirk listed Wave in the brand-new Google Chrome Store for $5. An editor featured it, and signups exploded overnight. By the end of 2011, Wave had 100,000 users. By 2012, nearly 500,000. And then they crossed a million. The freemium SaaS model was central to Wave's growth. The core product was free, with revenue coming from ads, payroll services, and payment processing on invoices. But Kirk learned the hard way that fast growth brings painful tradeoffs - the team scaled from 30 to 80 people too quickly, and the product expanded too broadly before the management systems were ready. Kirk shares the specific tactics Wave used to acquire users at scale, how they stayed disciplined about building for the small business owner instead of drifting toward accountants and bookkeepers, and why he believes management maturity is the unsexy factor that separates startups that survive from those that do not.