SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How we got 5,000 on our SaaS waitlist using community
22 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What community-building strategies helped achieve a 5,000 person waitlist?
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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Awesome. Hey, everyone. It is so good to be here. Usually I am on stage speaking about hiring and culture and building thriving teams. So for the hiring segment at the next conference, put me down. But it was really fun to actually look back and find something in our company that we did that was really tangible and actionable that I could share with you guys.
And that is how we managed to build a 5,000 strong wait list before we launched our product. So basically what I'm going to talk you through is this idea of building a community first brand and why we take that approach and this opportunity to authentically co-create what we're building with people.
how we did that through using a tool which we used a survey on the future of work so we reached out to everybody asking them what do you want to know what do you what is important to you when it comes to the future of work because we are building the future of work and that was how we were able to engage them and then as we got all of those results and published them what it meant for our company moving forward so
Who is GrowMotely? Just so you actually have some context about what we're talking about. We are a SaaS-enabled marketplace for remote work. So we help any company anywhere in the world find, hire, and retain and pay talent anywhere in the world. So when we were launching, we were thinking, well, which side of the marketplace do we want to build first?
And one of the hypotheses we had was if talent join our community and our marketplace, they're not going to expect to get a job the day they sign up. But if a company joins and posts a job, they are going to want to get applications. If they don't, they may not come back.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest define their company's mission and vision?
Doesn't need to be anything crazy. And then we told people how long it would take and why we wanted to use this. We did a bunch of social media posts and started building our email list and then emailing people regularly, getting them to help us build the future of work, co-create the future of work with us.
We spent about $500 a month boosting posts and boosting some other social media posts to just continue to grow the community and awareness around what we were doing.
And then added one of these pop-ups to our website as well so that all of that extra traffic that was coming to our website, even if they didn't do the survey or what have you, we were capturing their email addresses for pre-launch and it was just continuing rolling through that marketing campaign.
So in terms of publishing, which is what we did next, once we had created, we had over a thousand, I believe, if my number is right there, over a thousand responses to the survey. So it was a really robust, exciting, interesting survey that we had a lot of amazing information in about the future of work. And so we spent quite a bit of time actually in this part.
I showed you at the start the timeline. We spent about a month actually putting this together really nicely because we knew now we had this amazing piece of marketing material that we would be able to use into the future. That was the piece that really took a lot more time, that we spent a lot of time on design.
We actually did an interactive web page that detailed some of the parts of the survey, and then you could download the full report. We added something like this to our website to say that you can download the report here.
And so really it was about spending a lot of time making this report very beautiful and we were able to then send that out to all of the people who had joined our campaign to co-create the future of work and they were able to see the results and continue to be engaged in this journey of co-creation. And we also were able to generate a lot of media and sign-ups from
doing this survey and we still do today. When I was preparing this presentation, I noticed that we still have people downloading this original survey like every single week, journalists and different people who are interested in it. So it's ended up being a really powerful tool into the future as well.
I also built a list of journalists on LinkedIn, so I just searched my existing connections and then also searched journalists in certain areas and added them as connections and then got their email list. That was a bit of a lengthy process, but I was able to create a press release when we first published the survey, and I was able to put that out.
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Chapter 3: What survey tool was used to engage the target audience?
His first glance at the survey before we publicly published it and used it for all of the media and PR.