The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 4

Colin Nederkoorn, Customer.io

18 Months to $10K MRR Then Compounding SaaS Growth

Colin Nederkoorn is the co-founder and CEO of Customer.io, a platform that helps over 7,000 companies send personalized messages based on customer behavior and actions. Today the business generates $70 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of 250 people across 30 countries. But the early days looked nothing like that. In 2012, Colin and his co-founder John were working at a startup together. They started exploring ideas during lunch breaks, looking for something technically challenging, close to revenue, and built for their peers. Their original idea - a more sophisticated analytics product - fell flat when prospective users told them they already had 10 tools showing what people did on their website. What they needed was something to influence behavior. That feedback led to the pivot. They built a bare-bones product where customers would describe what campaign they wanted, and John would manually write MapReduce queries behind the scenes to make it work. They charged $10 a month and gated signups so Colin could talk to every single customer. The SaaS growth was painfully slow at first. Colin and John lived off savings and credit cards for years. Paid ads failed because the market did not have vocabulary for what they were building - terms like "triggered messages" and "segmentation" attracted the wrong buyers. A turning point came when Ramit Sethi told them they were wasting their email list by not communicating with subscribers until launch. Colin took that advice and started teaching conversion copywriting to their audience, building credibility in the email marketing space before Customer.io was even ready. That content-first approach became the foundation of their SaaS growth engine. By educating potential customers on how to write messages that convert, they created demand for the tool that would send those messages. It took 18 months to reach $10K MRR, but once compounding kicked in, the numbers got big fast. As Colin puts it, when you are compounding 50% or 80% year over year starting from $10M or $20M, the growth becomes massive. Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, gave Colin another key insight during those early cash-strapped days: the question is not whether you need more money - it is whether you need more time. That reframing helped Colin extend runway creatively rather than raising too much capital too early, which he believes would have shortened their window to figure things out.

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.