John Li, Vimcal
70% Close Rate: The 4-Step SaaS Onboarding Call Framework
In 2017, John Li and his co-founder Michael got accepted into Y Combinator with an augmented reality idea. The market was not ready. They pivoted to a fitness app. That did not get traction either. After two years and two failed products, they had eight months of runway left. In 2019, they bet everything on their third idea: Vimcal, a calendar app designed to be the fastest scheduling tool for busy founders, VCs, and remote teams. But building a calendar app proved harder than expected, and by launch day they had just 1.5 months of cash remaining. They had already prepared legal documents to shut down the company. John's survival tactic was SaaS onboarding calls. He got on a 30-minute Zoom with every single user, perfected a demo script, and asked for a $15 subscription at the end of each call. His close rate hit 70%. When users matched the qualifying profile of using Calendly, Google Calendar, and Superhuman, the close rate jumped to over 90%. One of those SaaS onboarding calls changed everything. A user offered to write a $5,000 investment check instead of paying $15. More checks followed. John used the calls as both a conversion tool and a fundraising vehicle during the early months of COVID, when no one else was writing checks. John also built a waitlist with a Typeform that acted as a qualifying filter. Of tens of thousands of signups, Vimcal only let in about 20%. The first question asked whether the user felt overwhelmed by meetings, and 92% said yes. Qualifying questions about which apps they used and how many external meetings they had determined who got access. The company later stumbled when it dropped both the waitlist and the onboarding calls on the same day. Growth slowed for six to eight months until they rebuilt momentum by shipping every two weeks, landing a TechCrunch feature, and reintroducing onboarding call prompts in the self-serve flow. Today, Vimcal is a nine-person team that has raised $2.4M and is targeting $1.5M ARR with profitability in sight. John also launched Vimcal Maestro, the first calendar built specifically for executive assistants.
