SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Free Customer Formula: How I grew Expandi from $0 to $7m in 20 months without spending money on ads
18 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What is the story behind Expandi's growth from $0 to $7 million?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
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Coming all the way from the Netherlands, please help me in welcoming Stefan Smulders from Xpandi to the stage. Hello, everyone. My name is Stefan, and indeed, I'm coming all the way from the Netherlands. And actually, this is the very first time ever I've been in the United States. So give me a second. Give me a second to enjoy a room full of badass founders. I see everybody is a bit too relaxed.
Are we ready to receive a couple of real value bombs? Yes. Some practical, practical value bombs. Do we have some power users here? Some LinkedIn power users? Who's using LinkedIn really heavily? It will be a really interesting next 20 minutes. Let me see how it works with this slide.
But as a small introduction, as a former agency owner managing a done-for-you service on LinkedIn, I was able to manage hundreds of customers, mainly C-level decision makers in the Netherlands. And actually out of frustration and a lack of everything all these tools had, I decided to design Expandi, the safest software for LinkedIn automation.
And in the upcoming 20 minutes, I'm going to show you a couple of things. I tried to divide these things as properly as possible because actually in the past 20 months, so many things happened. I will start with telling a bit more about the pre-launch. Actually, everything happened before we launched and put in our stripe mid-November 2019 at zero dollars.
We did a lot of things in distribution, so I tried to wrap up a couple of practical The strategies we used, which drove us very easy to 1 million in revenue within six months. We used and took advantage of communities to grow our business. We created winning playbooks and actually also did a lot of things in terms of engaging with micro influencers. So that are things I will share.
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Chapter 2: What strategies did Expandi use for pre-launch success?
I came across your profile. I also see you're working at company. Let's connect. Using these strategies and creating playbooks out of it by using Expandi, it helped us within six months to get towards the magical 83k MRR after our launch. And from that point on, these were actually the only things we did so far. We used Expandi for outreach.
It was the best proof that our tool was great to use and to achieve amazing results. And we just created playbooks. Playbooks of LinkedIn growth hacks and tactics. In depth and we break down everything we did to achieve these results. People loved it because at that time point nobody was doing such kind of similar things.
We invested a lot in manual content distribution and up towards the one million in annual run rate we did not even optimize any article in terms of SEO. We reached a lot of micro influencers.
these micro influencers they became our best friends and they gained a lot a lot of revenue for us i will tell a bit more about that in a second also groups and communities creating our own close facebook group helped us to get the best feedback from customers but also to kind of built kind of an army. There was a huge, I told it before, a huge bush around safety. Which tool is the best?
And there are a couple of Facebook groups where people, and especially the founders, were always pronouncing themselves.
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Chapter 3: How did Expandi achieve $1 million in revenue within six months?
We never did that. We always took an humble approach. And due to the fact that we were always reachable, that we came in and kicked in this niche as kind of a new kids on the block, people were very, very likely to help us, to promote us. And Expandi is the best tool. They have the best support. They are the most reliable.
Chapter 4: What role did community engagement play in Expandi's growth?
They are always reachable. And of course, they provided the best playbooks. So we never, ever did on our end kind of a promotion. And it was always kind of an Expandi army of people who really loved us since day one. And also because the fact that we were helping them,
to reach specific goals, make changes to optimize the product, listening to their stories, how we could help them getting more and better results. And after that, we gained a bit more money, so we were able to do more things in distribution. We teamed up with a very interesting agency, an agency which was specialized in SEO optimizing, and they rewrote all our articles
based on seo and at a certain point we we reached about 50 60k unique website visitors per month and i think that was after a year something like that so we gained a lot of inbound leads i think 90 of all our revenue came from inbound hundreds and hundreds of leads we received And it sounds like a joke but until two months ago we do not even had a proper onboarding.
We do not even use kind of onboarding flow or a lot of things to optimize at least. But it's maybe a very natural thing that if things are going very well that you also lose some attention and traction to do things better because at that moment you do not feel the pain. Micro-influencers may be quite interesting because actually it's a free promotion which we use.
We always liked the bootstrapped way with the growth hack mentality. We tried to do things differently. And one of the things we did since actually day one of our launch which still helped us very well, was that we searched on Google and in the beginning we did that manually for all people authors who were actually writing something about LinkedIn automation.
We put them in a CSV file with some custom placeholders and we approached these people. With some custom placeholders, we could personalize everything. The title of the article, the website where we found it. And we just wanted to become friends with them. We did not want to sell anything. And we always took a very humble approach with kind of a soft attitude.
So we never pushed people to sign up for Expandi. We never pushed them to promote us. And due to the fact that we became friends, we were able to use them in a later stage. And I will tell in a second a couple interesting names. We became really good friends with some industry leaders, some influencers. And the third part, I told already a bit about that, were the Facebook groups.
These Facebook groups we made kind of exclusive and I will tell in a second a bit more about the strategies we used to grow that Facebook group, to keep it engaged because growing It's kind of easy for everyone if you know what to do, but keeping it engaged with more than 60% is sometimes much or a bit more challenging.
Justin Goldlund from BAMF, maybe we all know his partner in crime, George Thatcher. It was one of the world's best growth hackers and marketers at that time point. And we approached, with the strategy I just shared, Houston. He was one of them. And as you see here, he was immediately interested in catching up with me.
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