Swipe Files - 📂 How Crisp grew to millions in ARR

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When you're in scale-up mode and you have KPIs to hit... the pressure is on to deliver demos and signups. And it's a lot to handle: multi-channel strategy, remarketing, landing pages, email sequences, revenue ops, conversion rate optimization.

42/Agency, founded by my friend Kamil Rextin, has worked with companies like Sprout Social, Klue, Qwilr, Uptick, Onfleet, and many more to help them with all things demand generation. They're always my top agency recommendation for specializing in SaaS demand gen. Go read some spicy takes on freemium, "inbound marketing", and category creation and then schedule a free consultation.

I loved this old (now deleted) Reddit AMA with the founders of Crisp on how they got to multiple millions in ARR.

Here are some of the highlights...

Curious how you guys come up with unlimited plan? Typical SaaS would charge based on usage.

We did a lot of different interactions on the pricing.

Initially, we had a $200 plan + $70 plan. We merged those two different plans with an Unlimited plan at $95 / month. This new plan got a great success!

Users loved it because it offered a great value for the money, and the end, they knew what they had to pay every month. It was predictable for users, and for us.

Overall, this plan was easier to market and sell, and easier for users to Understand.

In our opinion, it's the exact same model that Telecom Operators did in Europe. 20 years ago, you had plans where you paid 10 cents per text message. Nowadays, everything tends to be flat pricing, with Unlimited usage.

Any tips for navigating the switch from free to paid app? If you started over would you do it the same or go directly to paid plans?

If I started over Crisp, yes, definitely. Though, we would have worked on a paid plan probably earlier on. It's easy to slack building free features, it's good for the ego, but at some point you need to be able to pay the bills.

On the tips to navigate from free to paid, try not to anger too much the historical free users, who helped you build your initial product. Ie. do not lock out historical feature, rather restrict advanced uses on them, and build new features with more value for the paid plans.

Was it SEO? A freemium model? Growth model - how did you manage / plan to acquire users in a VC flooded market?

We do SEO, but most of our acquisition still currently come from the freemium model / "powered by Crisp" link on free chat boxes. We often have to explain to people, when they discover we're freemium, that we do not sell user data or targeted ads, we built a sustainable business model based on the free-paid duo instead. Wasn't all easy though, a lot of work!

On our DR, I'm not the one responsible for that feat, our CMO is working super hard on that part. From what I can tell his strategy is mostly about content and guest posts from other domains. No sneaky things, we play by the rules :)

Read through the deleted full post for more.

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →

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Swipe Files - 📂 How Crisp grew to millions in ARR

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