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.
