How to Nail it,Then Scale it ($105m arr)

Airbase, Brightedge, Yardstick, Scraping Bee and more

Author

Okerosi Davis
May 11, 2024

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/

Building and hiring high performing Sales Team

Lucas Price joined Zipwhip when it was doing $250k in revenue, and scaled it to $100m leading the sales team.

He recently hopped on a SaaStr webinar to share the journey to building and hiring high-performing sales reps.

As the current founder and CEO of Yardstick (which helps growing sales teams find new talent that matches the profile of your top performers), Lucas shared several insights. Below are some of my takeaways;

From the screenshot above, being coachable, adaptable, and with a growth mindset are clear qualifications of a sales rep willing to be agile with the business requirements.

As for resourcefulness, it boils down to being lean, overcoming challenges that come with sales, and being creative about the solutions you come up with.

1/ To reduce cognitive bias when analyzing for the skills, use a scorecard.

2/ Use role-plays to help predict the success of the sales rep if hired and is faced with a specific task scenario during sales.

3/ Build an interview plan that includes behavioral and structured interviews

2/

How BrightEdge scaled to $105m ARR

Over a decade and a half, Jim Yu, Founder of BrightEdge has built the enterprise SEO platform to over $100m in annual revenue.

Jim recently hopped on SaaSOpen to share nine lessons around building a winning team, managing time as a founder, and scaling the company.

The one key lesson on scaling that stood out for me is; nailing the fundamentals before adding more fuel to the fire.

By this, Jim meant three key areas:

1/ Find the segment that will give you a competitive edge in the market

2/ Ensure the segment is valuable enough with a higher price point

3/ Ensure your Go-to-market (GTM) motion can deliver on acquisition and retention in the said segment.

Founder-led Sales ( hitting the first $1m arr)

Am from listening to Thejo Kote, founder and CEO of Airbase, a spend management platform for mid-market and enterprise companies. The SaaS Podcast episode is filled with insights on building an 8-figure SaaS business.

One that may sound like a broken record is constantly talking to customers. Thejo mentions with founder-led sales, he closed their first 15 customers before hiring the first VP of Sales.

If as the Founder you are hiding from talking to customers, your company will fail.

The validation process through conversations with CFOs and accountants made me a lot smarter about the problem and helped me understand the layers and nuances that exist in the problem.

The mistake of not validating the problem and jumping into building a solution can lead to products that don't survive first contact with the market.

3/

Getting the 100 customers

I came across a post on Reddit sharing several startups, on how they got their first 100 customers. Here are two examples worth noting;

Marie founder of Llama Life, a productivity app ($51.4K+ revenue) got her first 100 users using Snowballing effect. She shared great advice that I want to add here verbatim,

“Need to think about what you have that you can leverage based on your current situation. eg..When you have no customers, think about where you can post to get the 1st customer eg Product Hunt.

If you do well on PH, say you get #3 product of the day, then you post somewhere else saying ‘I got #3 product of the day’.. to get your next few customers. Maybe that post is on reddit with some learnings that you found.

If the reddit post does well, then you might post it on Twitter, saying reddit did well and what learnings you got from that etc. or even if it doesn’t do well you can still post about it.”

Another tip she shared is to build related products that get more viral than the product itself.

These are small stand-alone sites that would appeal to the same target audience, but by nature, are more shareable.

On these sites, you can mention your startup like: ‘brought to you by Llama Life’ and then provide a link to the main website if someone is interested. If one of those gets viral or ranks on Google, you’ll have a passive traffic source.

Creator Highlight: Chris Walker

The Chairman of Refine Labs and CEO of Passeto Chris Walker recently hopped on Andy’s Pod channel to share the Dark Social Content Flywheel ( a strategy that leverages live events, real-time audience interaction, and strategic content repurposing to create a continuous cycle of engagement and growth) they are using to help clients scale with LinkedIn ( both organic and ads).

Partners & Resources

Road To Capital Newsletter - Get insights on Startup financing and venture capital uncovered for (technical) founders with a non-financial background.

How Rention .com Scaled to $22m arr in 4 years ( Product In Reverse)

Do you have feedback on this latest issue?

Hit reply and send me your thoughts.

I read every email.

Thank you for reading.

God’s speed.

 Okerosi