The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 4

Lav Crnobrnja, Vacation Tracker

60 Waitlist Signups to $2M ARR With Early Traction

Lav Crnobrnja is the co-founder and CEO of Vacation Tracker, a SaaS leave management product for small to medium businesses. In 2017, Lav and his team at Cloud Horizon, a services company he previously ran, struggled to manage employee leave with an Excel spreadsheet. As the team grew past 15 people, the manual process broke down. During a company hackathon, they decided to build a software solution. They created a simple landing page, spent about $200 on Google and Facebook ads, and collected a few email signups. Lav's co-founder, an AWS serverless hero, also mentioned the product during conference talks. But then the team forgot about it - they were too busy running their services business. Nine months later, Lav got an email from someone on the waitlist asking when they would finally launch. That one email was the early traction signal Lav needed. Around the same time, a major Cloud Horizon client canceled their contract after a private equity acquisition. Lav redirected two freed-up developers to build Vacation Tracker. The product launched with a six-month free beta for the 60 people on the waitlist. About 20 signed up and 10 became active users. Lav personally handled all demos, ran live chat, and gathered feedback that shaped the product roadmap. When the beta ended, their first paying customer signed up for $25 per month. Lav celebrated by buying drinks for everyone in the restaurant. To grow beyond those first customers, Lav hired Toggl's former CMO to build a two-year content marketing plan. The team published one article per weekday for a full year. Early content mistakes - like articles about summer reading lists and travel destinations - drove traffic but zero signups. Once they shifted to problem-specific content around leave accruals, payroll integration, and PTO policies, early traction accelerated through organic search. The Slack App Store became their second-best channel. Building the product Slack-first, rather than adding Slack as an integration, gave Vacation Tracker a genuine differentiator that competitors could not easily replicate. Eventually Lav stepped down as CEO of Cloud Horizon to focus full-time on Vacation Tracker. That decision, combined with COVID accelerating remote work adoption, pushed the business past its first million in ARR. Today Vacation Tracker serves 2,500 customers with a team of 20, approaching $2M ARR - all bootstrapped.

Evan Liang, LeanData

60 Customers From One Event When No One Knew Your Category

Evan Liang is the co-founder and CEO of LeanData, a revenue orchestration platform that helps B2B teams route leads to the right salespeople across every SaaS go-to-market motion. In 2012, while working at Caring.com, Evan kept running into problems stitching together CRM and marketing automation systems. He built an internal solution, and the experience sparked the idea for a startup. Evan recruited a technical co-founder, Kelvin, and leveraged his venture capital background to raise seed funding before LeanData even had a product. But raising money turned out to be the easy part. Finding customers for a category that didn't exist yet was a completely different challenge. As the solo salesperson, Evan signed LeanData's first 20 customers by selling the pain of dirty CRM data rather than a polished solution. Growth was painfully slow. Some sales cycles stretched to three years because prospects had never heard of lead-to-account matching and had no budget line item for it. Traditional marketing channels failed completely. Paid search returned nothing because nobody was Googling for a product category that didn't have a name yet. The SaaS go-to-market playbook that worked for other startups simply didn't apply to LeanData. So Evan and his team got creative. They started attending events and Marketo meetups where early adopters congregated. At one Marketo conference, they dropped the price to $2,500 and signed 60 customers in a matter of days - proving demand existed even if traditional inbound couldn't find it. Over time, LeanData built a community-driven growth engine. Customers who changed jobs brought LeanData to their new companies. The team launched OpStars, a satellite conference at Dreamforce that now draws over 2,000 attendees. Customer certification programs and customer-led selling at events became the core of their go-to-market strategy. Through it all, Evan had to manage investor expectations while growing slower than the venture-backed playbook demanded. He chose investors he trusted, stayed transparent with his board, and resisted the temptation to chase growth at all costs. Today, LeanData serves over 1,000 enterprise customers including Nvidia, Google, and Snowflake. The company generates 8-figures in ARR and has raised $42 million in funding.