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

Show Notes

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 Twitter
• Paul’s blog posts on Litmus
• Peanut Software archived page
• Paul’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 newsletter
• Shout-out #3: Save 10% on domains at Hover.com
• Shout-out #4: Get $25 off at Ting

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Creators & Guests

Host

Justin Jackson

⚡ Bootstrapping, podcasting, calm companies, business ethics. Co-founder of @transistorfm (podcast hosting).

What is Product People?

A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them