Multi-product as a strategy (+$100m ARR)

Hello and welcome to Product Weekly - 2 cents on proven product marketing among SaaS companies. It’s read by startup founders, creators, and product marketers looking to constantly learn. Support on Patreon and get weekly resources directly in your inbox.

To new subscribers, welcome onboard, and thank you.

Update: Am renaming it Product Weekly. In the coming weeks, I will be sharing two more issues ( Product In Reverse on Tuesday and Built By Creators on Thursday)

Stay tuned for the deep dives;

1/

How I built iContact to $50m ARR ($169m exit)

Over a decade after the exit, Ryan Sillis, who co-founded iContact hopped on SaaSOpen to share the product marketing insights that helped scale his SaaS to $50m ARR.

As Ryan concluded his presentation during the event, he shared key marketing channels that he is currently consulting with other SaaS founders in his latest venture Saasrise - SaaS CEOs community.

Here are my 2 cents from the 20 minutes presentation;

Bootstrapping to $1m ARR before VC funding

At the launch of iContact ( email marketing platform), it was going up against giants like Constant Contact and Microsoft, hence Ryan crafted a unique way to scale to their first $1m ARR.

In those, getting into the competitor’s customer base was hard, so Ryan and the team ‘sneaked’ into Constant Contact’s customers ( 100k as per the presentation)’s newsletter and emailed them with an alternative offer to switch.

And this is how they scaled to their first 500 customers.

Additionally, SEO, affiliate, and outbound email helped iContact to its first million-dollar revenue.

When Unit Economics makes sense 

When looking to scale, you want to measure the impact of every marketing channel you are investing in. Ryan shared that on calculating their unit economics to determine the live time value (LTV) it costs $500 to acquire a customer with an average of $1800 live time returns.

As of the exit, iContact with 250 employees was spending $2m per month on marketing.

Building a 70 Sales team

Ryan hired Kevin Fitzgerald ( CEO of Tatango) as the VP of Sales in 2008. Kevin helped scale the mid-market sales team to 60+ members and added $20m ARR to iContact in his tenure ( up to 2012)

Kevin shared a simple piece of advice with Ryan - adding a shared account manager, they would take the same product and sell it at 20x the price.

They executed this well by also adding a couple of features and selling the product as iContact Enterprise.

When you look at the org chart above on the sales team side you will notice there were 30 SDRs, Ryan reported that half were doing outbound reach out while the other half were reaching out to the 16,000 monthly trials they got from paid ads.

Best customer acquisition channels ( 2024)

As I mentioned above, Ryan advises several SaaS CEOs on growth strategies to help them go from $10m to $50m ARR.

With paid ads, you can run custom audience ads by uploading competitor’s customer’s email into LinkedIn or Facebook. To obtain these emails, use tools like Apollo or Zoominfo.

2/

Typeform Onboarding Flow ($91.2m) - slide deck

This week I came across an analysis on Reddit on Typeform’s onboarding flow. Aside from ensuring you make it simple for customers to get on using the product in a couple of steps, here is what the Typeform onboarding flow looks like;

1/Optimize your sign-up screen - The first sign-up screen for Typeform that the user sees is very benefit-oriented. It uses a lot of social proof, product shots, & value-added copy rather than shipping a generic-looking sign-up page. This creates a great first impression on the user and primes him to be a successful Typeform customer from the get-go.

2/ Use progress bars during user onboarding - Typeform uses progress checklists during the user sign-up flow to help the user visualize his progress. This also helps with user retention & reactivation as Typeform triggers email sequences to remind the user to complete his journey & perform key actions.

3/Use tiles to show options to users - Typeform gives users three options by which a user can create his form. Each option is embedded in a tile and has an icon, a 3-4 line header & a subheadline (all benefit-heavy) that prompts the user to take action. This screen is super important from a Typeforms perspective because it is the pre-activation step before the user does the main action - create a form.

4/Use tips to guide users to perform key actions - To help users create their first form (which is their activation metric), Typeform uses tips to prompt & guide them. These tips are super actionable & reveal non-obvious information while also showing the power of the platform. The screen is also designed in such a way that the user can execute on the tips right from the screen itself in just a few seconds. Tips are used consistently across the entire user journey.

5/Use models to zero in on one action item - Typeform uses modals in the user journey, especially in cases where it wants the user to perform one key task (like creating a form using AI). This keeps the user laser-focused on that one key task & reduces noise. This is crucial when you're optimizing for user activation.

6/Use In-app messages & banners in the main dashboard - Since Typeform is PLG, it has a static In-app banner that reminds the user to upgrade. It also has tooltips to get additional context on pricing or how to create a specific feature. The dashboard also uses suggestions to prompt the user to get to the activation step (which is creating a form).

7/Leverage in-app customer support - Typeform has an in-app customer support component that users can access at any time & ask questions related to the product. This is pretty standard practice nowadays.

Multi-product as a strategy ( Lattice’s scale to $100m ARR)

The people management platform - Lattice has scaled to nearly $100m ARR using a multi-product approach to growth.

The CEO Jack Altman shared a presentation on SaaStr a couple of months ago on how the strategy worked for them.

Note: The insight to doing a multi-product strategy is to think about the user journey and their chronological needs to build a holistic solution.

Why go multi-product

Jack emphasizes that compared to a decade ago, it makes sense to scale with a multi-product approach but in a strategic manner. Some of these reasons include;

1/It’s cheaper to build software now.

2/ We have better tools and systems for collaboration and more.

3/Cheaper access to capital from investors.

3/

Ping He built four products generating $255k/mo in revenue. In a recent interview on Indie Hackers, Ping shared how he scaled the products.

HYCU is the data protection platform for SaaS. The CEO and co-founder Simon Taylor hopped on the SaaS Podcast to share his insights on building in a competitive market.

One is a partnership as an acquisitions channel and content marketing that provides knowledge (thought leadership content).

Pendo the product experience platform. Todd Olson of Pendo hopped on a call with Peep Laja from Wynter to share insights on creating a new category and scaling beyond $100m.

My key takeaway is building an independent content brand that can create a larger community and drive demand for the product.

Note: Becoming a media company has immense upside for SaaS companies - spend less on ads that currently have very high CAC

Do you have feedback on this latest issue?

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Thank you for reading.

God’s speed.

 Okerosi