The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 9

Jon Fagg, Skedda

How Freemium SaaS and SEO Built a 7-Figure Business

Jon Fagg is the co-founder of Skedda, a reservation and scheduling system for spaces such as meeting rooms, sports venues, professional studios, and more. In 2013, Jon and his co-founder were running a sports facility in Melbourne, Australia. They were struggling to manage reservations and bookings. They looked around for the right software but could not find a good solution. So they decided that they would build a tool and thought they could also sell it to other businesses. But neither of them could code and had no idea how to build a software product. Jon persuaded another friend who was an engineer to join their team. The only problem was that he was doing his PhD in Germany at the time. So they had to work remotely across different time zones to build the product. But the founders had no idea what they were doing. They did not have a background in starting a software business. So even though they managed to build a product, finding customers was painfully slow. It took them well over 18 months to find their first 10 customers. Also, it did not help that they were all working part time on this side project. They tried a bunch of different things to get customers, including sending handwritten letters in the mail, but nothing seemed to work. It looked like this would be nothing more than a side project that never went beyond a handful of customers. But a couple of years into working on this business, they made two key changes. They introduced a freemium SaaS model and invested in SEO. Within six months, that combination opened the floodgates. They suddenly had more traffic to their site, more people signing up to try the product, and many of them were converting into paying customers. Today Skedda has about 4,000 paying customers, generates multiple seven figures in annual recurring revenue, and is a team of 15 people. And their business has been bootstrapped all the way - with no paid marketing spend.

Ryan Fyfe, Workpuls

Early Traction: He Couldn't Get 10 Customers to Pay

Ryan Fyfe is the co-founder and COO of Workpuls, an employee monitoring and time tracking software. Previously, he founded Humanity, an employee scheduling software product. In 2010, Ryan set out to build better employee scheduling software. Early in his career, he had worked in the service industry and experienced the pains of scheduling shifts both as an employee and manager. He believed there was an opportunity to build an easier solution. He targeted the lower end of the market and quickly built a basic scheduling solution. He didn't do customer interviews or much market research. Instead, he trusted his gut that based on his experience, there was a need for his solution. But getting early traction was disheartening. He went from being excited about how his product was going to help hundreds or maybe even thousands of small businesses to struggling to get even 10 customers. People seemed interested in his product but always seemed to have an excuse for why they couldn't or weren't ready to pay for it. And things got worse when Ryan realized that it wasn't working out with his co-founder and decided to buy him out. Suddenly he became a solo founder of a product that he believed in, but one that was clearly struggling to get traction. And now Ryan had to do everything from product, marketing, and sales on his own. But after a lot of persistence and hard work, he figured out how to sell his product. He went from having a struggling product that nobody wanted to bootstrapping it to $100K ARR. And then after raising VC funding, he went on to grow the business to over $12M ARR, 150 employees, and 40,000 customers including companies such as Nike, CNN, and Lyft. Eventually, Ryan recognized that he was better at building than operating and handed off the CEO role to someone who had grown up within the company. The business was later acquired. Now Ryan is applying every lesson he learned to his current startup, Workpuls - starting with customer segmentation, pricing confidence, and early traction strategies he wishes he'd used the first time.