The SaaS Club Newsletter

Hey Reader

Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club:

 In this week's newsletter:

• 🎧 Flodesk: From early failures to $27M ARR
  

• 🤝 Attio: CRM that works like Notion & Figma
  

• 🚀 PropelAuth: B2B SaaS auth made simple
  

• 🤔 Why selling outcomes trumps selling benefits
  

• 📗 A book on the power of quick thinking and intuition

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🎧 Podcast

Flodesk: Bootstrapping a $27 Million Email Marketing SaaS

Martha Bitar is the co-founder and CEO of Flodesk, an email marketing platform designed to help small business owners create beautiful emails.

In 2018, Martha was working at HoneyBook.

She would see small business owners struggling to make decent looking emails. So she thinks "We can do better".

So what does she do? 

She teams up with her designer friend Rebecca and dev Trong to build an email platform that doesn't suck.

The kicker? None of them knew about email platforms.

They were in way over their heads.

Their prototype confused users.

This wasn't a minor setback. They had to start over.

• Simplify the prototype.

• Show new designs to users.

• Identify what still didn't work.

• Rinse and repeat.

They did this over and over again. Eventually, they got to a software prototype they felt confident about building.

But Martha knew great design wasn't enough. 

They also needed a growth strategy.

So they came up with two super-clever tactics.

As a result, they hit $1M ARR just 4 months after launch.

Then things got rocky.

They still didn't know enough about building and running an email platform and struggled with repeated outages.

Their platform even crashed for 4 hours on Black Friday. Their customers were left in the lurch during one of the busiest sales days of the year.

But the founders kept pushing, learning and improving.

Today Flodesk has 80,000 happy customers.

And $27 million in annual recurring revenue.

All without any VC money.

In this episode you'll learn:

• How the founders turned early setbacks into success by focusing on simplicity in design and user experience.

• Why they chose a $35 per month pricing model and how it's impacted their growth.

• What two growth tactics the founders used to go from zero to the first $1M in ARR in just 4 months after launch.

• How Martha and her team navigated major technical challenges and built customer loyalty despite repeated outages in the early days.

• What key strategies they used to bootstrap their way to $27 million in ARR without any venture capital.

I hope you enjoy it!

Check out the full episode on:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Web

🤝 Attio: The Next Generation of CRM

Attio is the CRM for teams who love products like Notion and Figma. It's powerful, configurable, and takes minutes to set up.

Attio delivers value faster than any other product out there - with a simple tactic during onboarding: they sync your work email & calendar, instantly mapping all your interactions and enriching them with valuable insights.

The result? In less than a minute, you're looking at a comprehensive view of all your email relationships, enriched with additional data. This gives you time back to focus on what truly matters.

Join companies like ElevenLabs, Replicate, Modal and more in scaling your startup to the next level.

Try Attio for free today

🚀 PropelAuth: Authentication for B2B SaaS

PropelAuth is authentication your whole company will love. 

If you're tired of your dev team getting bogged down with authentication issues instead of building your core product, it's time to use PropelAuth.

They take care of all the complex auth stuff - from Enterprise SSO to user analytics - so you can focus on what really matters: your product.

PropelAuth integrates quickly for devs and provides built-in tools for your customer-facing teams. It's the full package.

Sign up for free (no credit required). And when you're reading to upgrade use code SAAS24 for 50% off the Growth plan for 6 months!

Sign up for a free account

🤔 SaaS Insights

Stop Selling, Start Transforming

Don't sell product features.

Don't even sell product benefits.

Sell the desired outcomes your customers are hoping to achieve.

Example:

1. Selling Features

• "We've got 100s of beautiful email templates."

2. Selling Benefits

• "Create marketing emails faster and improve productivity by 52%."

3. Selling Desired Outcomes

• "Send emails that get customers to know, like, and trust you more."

 📗 Book of the Week

This week's book recommendation is from Martha:

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

"Because it tells you that sometimes your intuition tends to be right, and it's a matter of when do you need to seek that extra validation.” — Martha

🌟 Help Spread the Word

Enjoyed this week's newsletter? Please do me a favor and forward this email to someone who would benefit from it as much as you did. 

Sharing is caring, and it helps us grow! ❤️

😍 Let's Get Social

Want to get more social? Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Have a great week!

- Omer

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