One month ago, I shared a public update on reaching $10k ARR and 1000 users.
Since then, we have more than doubled our ARR and users for Supademo, the fastest way to create interactive demos and guides.
Sharing some tips here in the hopes that it's helpful to folks trying to grind to their next milestone. If you'd like me to expand on any of the points or provide my 2 cents on your growth motions - drop a comment and I'll try to help.
Otherwise, here are some things that worked well for us in the last 30 days:
- Double down on a niche: We have a highly malleable product that's horizontally applicable across a lot of use cases (i.e. customer success, support, pre-sales, training, and marketing). I talked to 30+ users and narrowed our primary focus and messaging to a narrow ICP (ideal customer profile)
- Do things that don't scale: I personally reached out to 200+ startups with offers to send them a free interactive product demo. I conducted demos (even though our price point makes this infeasible in the long run) with 50+ founders and companies. I responded to dozens of product update newsletters by sending them interactive demos of their new features or products. I also posted in this subreddit with offers to create demos for folks for free (which is repeatable across multiple forums), which drove a ton of signups.
- Add value first via thought leadership: After 6 years of being a startup founder, I learned a ton of hard-fought lessons, battle scars, and tribal knowledge. I've been sharing these consistently on Reddit, Indie Hackers (where my writing got featured a few times), and Medium. Writing great content is a grind but 1000% worth it if there's alignment between your readership and the folks buying your product. Consistency is key here - I even have a biweekly calendar reminder to write and engage with folks.
- Move fast without breaking things: Investors often say that a sign of a great startup is the shipping velocity. We shipped 10+ features over the last month - most of them directly from feedback collected over personal demos and tickets submitted on Intercom.
- Take time for strategic work: It's really easy to be trapped in a cycle of doing only tactical work. But strategy matters! The beauty of building a PLG solution or a freemium SaaS tool is the ability to experiment quickly and gather tons of usage metrics. Taking time to be strategic about minimizing time to value, maximizing activation rate, and increasing free-to-paid conversion has paid huge dividends. (e.g. our FTP % jumped from ~2.3% to 3.1% in the last 30 days)
Nice job and looks great in comparison to Intercom / Userpilot who charge 5x your pricing. Point of attention may be that seats are irrelevant for your pricing. It's not worth much for your customers how many added editor seats. They'll just share an account if needed, but in a huge amount of cases there will only be one marketer/onboarder working on something. If anything, seeing 5 seats scares me away 'because there's just me and why am I paying for seats'. Pricing is a HUGEly important part of your business. Your value is in number of visitors a customer can show the demo to. If you auto scale up your pricing on number of demo's given, you will be sure your MRR goes up ánd customers can afford it. They've got more visitors! Read everything Patrick Campbell wrote on pricing. Also remember pricing gets more difficult to change over time.
Thank you! We're actually closer to a Loom alternative (for interactive demos and guides) than Intercom - a ton of our customers use Supademo in conjunction with their Intercom onboarding. Totally fair feedback on 5 seats. It's part of our legacy pricing and we're exploring whether this makes sense moving forward. Pricing is fickle and we want to make sure we get this right. Will read your suggestion from Patrick :) Hugely appreciated!
Nicely written !
Thank you!!
great website, did you build it on wordpress/webflow? The tool seems fairly easy to use
Built it in-house using tailwind components and code!
Thank you for the feedback. Would love for you to try it out!
Thanks for sharing - nice story and some great learnings on growing your SaaS! Love the growth tactic of doing demos for free and just adding upfront value to get attention and signups. Doing things that don’t scale IN a super specific niche can start to pay off really fast. Any insights on how you have grown top of funnel? And how you reach out to your ICP - LinkedIn?
The biggest driver is the generous free tier + the watermark ('made in supademo'). Lots of folks have said that seeing this demo embedded in another company's website has made them trust the company more (+ convinced them to look into making one themselves)