📂 How PageCloud did $1M in sales before launching their SaaS product

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I've dug out this article from the Wayback Machine, but it can be finicky, so I've pulled out the most interesting excerpts here:

SaaS marketer Henry Brown can tell you how marketing a pre-revenue SaaS product typically goes.

It’s a guessing game.

You create hype around features you think people will love and what you believe your product will be able to do. You collect emails based on that hype.

The problem is, you don’t really know if the leads captured will actually lead to revenue. Sure, people are interested enough to sign up for more information, but does that mean they’ll buy the product?

Without a product ready to ship, you don’t really know.

That’s how it usually goes.

But during the early days of PageCloud, a visual website builder that competes with apps like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace, the team decided to do things differently.

They converted lean startup methodology used by developers into their marketing mix. With no publicly available beta, they evolved their pitch using feedback from designers, developers, and business owners into a robust idea that got the attention of seed investors and—more importantly—attracted actual paying users.

During the six months before PageCloud launched, 10,000 people bought licenses for it, paying money for a product they’d never tried—netting PageCloud a total of $1 Million in revenue.

Craig and Henry started attending as many meetups in the Ottawa area as they could to pitch the concept of PageCloud. They pitched to the four groups they believed would be most interested in their product:

1. Business Owners

2. Digital Marketers

3. Web Designers

4. Developers

“We had a hypothesis of how we would pitch our product to each audience,” Henry explained. “We filmed ourselves pitching and then really pushed hard to get a lot of feedback about what these people liked or didn’t like. It enabled us to really craft this fantastic, value-heavy elevator pitch.”

Using lean startup methodology, PageCloud used the feedback from their sales message the same way the creator of a minimum viable product (MVP) would get feedback for the product itself.

Henry explains they used the process to “get ahead of some of the most common objections that we thought our current target markets would have.”

After each presentation, they came away with more information than they had before about how different audiences reacted to their pitch.

Developers, for example, were wary of limited access to the backend code.

No problem. Developers would have full access to the backend. So, Craig built a new line into the pitch to address that concern.

The designer audience needed a system that worked with common design apps like Photoshop to save time integrating their work.

Done. Added to the pitch.

Business owners wanted the ability to make quick edits on their own without needing advanced tutorials or specialists.

Also done. Also added to the pitch.

“We tried to appease or address some of these concerns right away,” Henry said. “I think the immediate pitch of PageCloud’s thesis is: ‘Haven’t you ever just wanted to move something one inch to the right, or the left, and you can’t, and it cost time, money, or both?’”

As they worked on the product, the marketing team at PageCloud began to discuss the idea of running a true pre-sale campaign.

Instead of asking people to “sign up to be notified,” they would ask people to actually “pay in advance” if they were interested in using PageCloud when it released.

Henry and others on the team saw how people were becoming more comfortable with funding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter—people investing in a product even before the product has been built. They thought a similar model could work with a software product.

“We thought, why not software?” Henry told us.

So they ran with it.

Guaranteed Lifetime Discount People who signed up for PageCloud before it launched were guaranteed a lifelong $99-per-year rate (as long as they remained a current customer), regardless of future pricing changes.

They used three primary methods to drive sign-ups:

Instead, they focused on promoting the presale offer.

A month before presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt, PageCloud built the ability to pre-order the product into their website and moved all its marketing efforts away from email capture and list-building.

This was positioned as a 65% discount compared to the price of the product after launch.

By itself, this was a major incentive to sign up for the product. Customers entered their credit card information to sign up, but—importantly—PageCloud didn’t begin the customer’s annual subscription until the official launch in November of 2015.

Hyperbolic Video Ads on Facebook Henry explained that entering a saturated market with competitors boasting multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, “anything we could do to get eyeballs cheaply was great.”

They quickly found the biggest return on investment on video ads shared on Facebook.

PageCloud spent just under $600,000 on Facebook ads during pre-sale with the majority used to boost video views. On a scale of 1-10, the video’s relevance scores averaged between 8 and 10.

Their videos featured masked product shots and simple but dramatic teasing copy like “Website creation is about to change forever. Find out why.”

They were also able to use their appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt to capture more interest.

The bold claims paid off and the videos scored thousands of views and likes and created viral organic shares.

“People loved to share it with their own commentary,” Henry said. “People saw it and it incited a reaction in them. Either they really agreed with what we were doing and were like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’ve been waiting for!’ or they saw us as a threat and were like, ‘Oh my God, I hate this!’”

Whether for positive or negative reasons, people shared the videos with their community, which was fine with Henry.

For a new product like PageCloud, any share was a good share.

They Used an Ingenious Referral Program “Refer a friend during the pre-sale period, and we’ll give you a third of your money back.”

“Refer three friends and we’ll refund your entire purchase and you get to use PageCloud for free, for their first year.”

That was PageCloud’s referral offer, which was good only during the pre-sale period. Together, the two promises drove almost 2,000 of the 10,000 sign-ups—representing almost $200,000 in annual recurring revenue.

The referral program was easy to use for customers who signed up. After a customer pre-bought the service, PageCloud’s welcome email included Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn email buttons with pre-populated copy and the customer’s referral code.

Henry explained how the refund also helped alleviate user’s concerns of investing in a new product.

“By referring three people, you weren’t really committing to anything. You knew that you’d be able to spend a full year with PageCloud after we launched to test it out. If you didn’t like it, you could cancel before the year two renewal without spending a penny.”

The referral program was especially impactful in the last few hours before PageCloud’s launch.

The company pulled in over $100,000 in sales during the final 24 hours before launch by hammering ads and email campaigns about the referral program.

“It wasn’t so much that the pre-sale campaign was ending,” Henry said. “It was that the opportunity to get this for free [via the referral program] was ending.”

The buzz around the $99 lifetime discount and the money-back referral program also earned PageCloud an unusual amount press coverage which, as they would soon find out, makes it much easier to attract the attention of venture capital investors.

PageCloud then raised $8.5 million in seed and Series A funding in the year after launching its product.

—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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📂 How PageCloud did $1M in sales before launching their SaaS product

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