it took 3.5 years but we crossed USD 100K MRR. AMA

[krevikes]

@chanhhobieu

re a total waste, LinkedIn is gold if you invest the time.

CAC has gone up over time, currently ~2K

87% of our tra

Could you share a little about how you built your SEO? It seems that 87% comes from organic search means you have a really good SEO.

What's your main strategy of doing SEO and how long does it take effect?

Right now I'm a startup and my MRR just reaches $1k, and now I'm going to build my SEO from scratch so thankful for your sharing!

 

[chanhhobieu]

@krevikes SEO:

• strategy: target extremely long-tail, esoteric searches with low volume but high intent. we wanted people to find us feeling like you do when you google a random microsoft error code and find a forum post from someone that solved your exact problem.
• write ~500 word articles for these long-tail terms. the content doesn't need to be extensive, just accurate
• write 3-5 of these articles per week for a year
• SEO moves VERY fast now, you can see results within 1-2 weeks and adjust accordingly
• after establishing a baseline of ~200 articles, switch to a maintenance strategy of (1) refreshing articles, (2) unpublishing low performers on important keywords, and (3) identifying new keywords

 

[krevikes]

@chanhhobieu Thanks! Learned a lot.

A few other questions:

1. Do you use SEO tools, if so, which one? (I'm now using Ahrefs)
2. How did you build backlinks? Or you didn't, just publishing blogs?
3. Do you use quest blogging? If so, how?

 

[chanhhobieu]

@krevikes

1. Semrush
2. We didn't -- just wrote content. In the early days I don't think a backlink strategy makes sense. Just create good/useful content that people naturally want to share and you will end up with backlinks and ranking
3. No, never

 

[bunnycloud]

@chanhhobieu What felt like a bigger milestone: 100k MRR or 83.3k MRR (AKA 1MM ARR)?

 

[chanhhobieu]

@bunnycloud 1MM ARR

 

[aldaelen]

@chanhhobieu How did you acquire your first customer?

What's your sales process like? Is it long?

 

[chanhhobieu]

@aldaelen See here for first customer:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/18ljug8/comment/kdy8v1m

Almost 100% of our sales are human-led. Typical funnel is:

• Prospect hits our long-tail SEO googling esoteric crap like "shopify gross merchandise sales qliksense"
• Prospect books demo or downloads whitepaper >> short drip email series
• Free trial (critical because we have a super esoteric/technical product that CFOs don't understand)
• All that in 30 days

From there it differs by prospect and deal size. We work with some very large brands which means they have procurement, IT, security, legal, and related processes that we have to step through. That can take 6+ months depending on the company. For smaller companies and deal sizes, they sign up same day with a credit card

 

[juda1986]

@chanhhobieu Wow congrats, i have a few questions?

How did you get this idea?

Do you have competition?If yes how do you diffferentiate yourself from others?

 

[chanhhobieu]

@juda1986 Got the idea observing the problems my friends/peers/network talked about. Ex: looking at my LinkedIn feed and noticing data topics coming up from laypeople over and over again, and the solutions they talk about require dev work.

We have tons of competition (literally hundreds of companies do this), e.g. Pipes/Daasity/etc. We stand out by overinvesting in data quality (accounting-grade accuracy) and staying super narrow (only doing data for 2-3 related platforms instead of 100+ connectors) which lets us release quickly

 

[juda1986]

@chanhhobieu oh ok i see.

thanks for answering and wish you even to cross 200k MRR!

 

[judy123]

@chanhhobieu What is your scaling process?

 

[chanhhobieu]

@judy123 I created a flowchart diagram showing how value is created and delivered through our business, with RACI for each node. Iterated on it with individual functions until everyone agreed it was a fair representation. Now we use that during monthly roadmap meetings to ensure we're thinking holistically about scale:

• What other features are impacted by this feature
• How many customers can the feature serve without additional features / processes
• What does the maintenance burden look like and how do we improve the ratio over time
• What does GTM look like, where does this live on the website, how does it fit into our content ecosystem
• etc.

I don't treat it like a checklist, but I expect my team to have considered these questions

 

[krevikes]

@chanhhobieu Which channel do you think has the most ROI? For both inbound and outbound reach?

Like for organic search traffic what strategy you think is the most effective?

And for outbound reach what platform or email script do you think reaches most niche?

Thanks! Already learned a lot from your story

 

[chanhhobieu]

@krevikes I think it's a mistake to consider channel ROI in isolation. I think our success is partly because we don't use the traditional saas growth marketing playbook, we invest in harder-to-measure channels and multichannel strategy because we have conviction. And it's tough to generalize what will work for others from our experience.

Ex: we get great ROI on organic linkedin posts, but this works because our industry is super active there -- people post, there are dozens of active and well-run groups, etc.

But I also can't evaluate the ROI of linkedin in a vacuum. When I ask a prospect "how did you hear about us?" they say "you kept coming up in google results for our ecommerce data questions, then I looked up the company on linkedin and read a bunch of your posts, you seem like good people so I booked the demo."

 

[sevvalen]

@chanhhobieu Thank you for the valuable responses

 

[arielah]

@chanhhobieu How did you get your initial customers? What marketing channels converted for you? Does offline networking events help?

 

[tom9824]

@chanhhobieu Congratulations on the milestone! I see that you’re using Stripe, have you asked Stripe yet to renegotiate your fees? If yes, at what MRR did you ask and how did it look like?

 

[chanhhobieu]

@tom9824 We do use Stripe, for so long that our pricing is lower than all existing plans (e.g. we do not pay anything for invoices, not even the 0.5% fee). I'm afraid to ask for lower CC fees because ~75% of our revenue comes through ACH, so adding that 0.5% would hurt

 

[tom9824]

@chanhhobieu Ah I see, thank you for the input and I wish you great growth