Oh, and the business is fully bootstrapped with 40% EBITDA and 30% year-on-year growth 🤯
Check out the full story from COO Charles Tenot in Growth Unhinged: https://lnkd.in/gHN4Ps7k
The TL;DR:
1. Found a unique selling point in a crowded market (prospecting tools)
lemlist stood out by allowing users to personalize cold outreach at scale, including adding personalized images in their cold emails.
2. Embraced third party communities where users hang out
lemlist founder Guillaume Moubeche actively participated in & answered questions about cold emails & prospecting in Facebook, Reddit and Slack communities. These communities helped him find early adopters -- one Facebook post in Jan 2018 generated almost 300 signups for the beta.
lemlist remains community-centric with a) an active Facebook community of 30,000+, b) live webinars that reach 2,000+ attendees, c) a "build in public" mantra attracting 100,000+ LinkedIn followers.
3. Moved to multi-product quickly, adding strong differentiators
This included an email warmup solution (boosting email deliverability), integrating LinkedIn invites & DMs in sequences, and now an email finder & verifier.
4. Layered in more traditional acquisition channels beyond $15M ARR
These include the tried-and-true: SEO, paid search, paid social, and affiliates.
New signups are now over 100,000 -- all while maintaining a high conversion rate of 15% (it's ~15-25% for professional emails and ~3-5% for personal emails).
5. Recently switched to a reverse trial to improve conversion & adoption
lemlist used to follow a traditional 14 day trial model. After 14 days without buying, the account was frozen & after 3 months it would be deleted.
Now folks who don't convert can keep using the product for free (unlimited LinkedIn extractions, up to 100 emails and 25 phone per member per month).
This is building bottom-up acquisition, reducing friction for returning users, helping lemlist become relevant in the data stage, and improving conversion.
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Turns out that SaaS can be (highly) profitable. You won't want to miss this story.
sales bootstrapped startup
This post was originally shared by Kyle Poyar on Linkedin.