EP23: Paul Farnell, how does growth happen with a SaaS startup?

On the show today is one of the best bootstrappers in the business:  Paul Farnell of  Litmus.com joins me and shares some great stories.

Highlights

“It felt magical to send an email to a random address, and then showing screenshots of the HTML email design. It was a magical thing when we got it working.”“We found a technical challenge in automating Lotus Notes 7 on an old version of Windows, and then delivering that result to a beautiful Rails app”“There are a lot of business opportunities in that stuff that people just grind through on a daily basis. Think Stripe, Litmus, etc…” – Justin Jackson“If you look at our curve of revenue, it starts very slowly for the first 2.5 years, and then gradually picks up pace in the last year or two.”“2.5 years in we were well under $1 million in revenue a year, probably $200,000-$300,000 in revenue per year. At 2.5 years we had about 500 users. Now we have 100,000 users (7 years in).”“When we switched from Euros to American dollars, that week we saw a huge increase in sales.”“How come America still seems to be the place where web apps thrive?”“The environment in America is different than Europe. There are bigger entrepreneurial hubs.”“In the early days, one of the things that set us apart was the designed of the software. I’m not sure how replicable this would be now.”“We’re a company that has side-projects: we build other apps that (if successful) we roll into our main product.”

Show notes

Paul on TwitterPaul’s blog posts on LitmusPeanut Software archived pagePaul’s presentation at FOWD

Sponsors

Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter:  @sprintly

Shout outs

Shout-out #1: Kyle Fox’s blog post on product management. I’d like to give a shout-out to Kyle Fox who’s written a great blog post called “ Multi-tasking is the heart of product management” Go to kylefox.ca to see that!Shout-out #2: Product People newsletterShout-out #3: Save 10% on domains at Hover.comShout-out #4: Get $25 off at Ting

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