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Vlad Malanin

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
See mentions of this person in podcasts
201 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

So, uh, we started our sales in 2022, early 2022.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

Uh, and we were doubling the, uh, ARR since then we had, uh, one year when we did a lot of major stuff that we decided to do.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

Uh,

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

Not easy decisions because these are the decisions which are red flags for the VCs.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

However, we decided not to deal with VCs at that point.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

And in 2024, we only had like 10% ARR growth.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

However...

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

What we did is that we cut all our expenses twice and the customer acquisition cost as well in half.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

And we optimized everything and we decided that we do not want to raise money from VCs and that's because the company is doing really, really well.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

The technology is great and we are really good with the cash flow.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

Customers love us.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

We have a very low churn rate and we also have a lot of growth within the customers because customers grow with us and we also open them the possibilities to use more of speed sites.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

Yeah.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

So first year sales were around like 400K from what I remember.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

And so we were growing at around 3 mil we were stalling.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

And that year, it's from 2023 to 2024.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

And we also decided to optimize everything because, well, I'm originally Ukrainian.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

My co-founder is Israeli.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

You can imagine the war started in 2022 in Ukraine, then in 2003 in Israel.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story

So that was the annoyingly tragicomical, I would say.