282: Bootstrapping a SaaS in a Market with Well-Funded Competitors - with Michael Cooney

In this episode, I talk to Michael Cooney is the co-founder of WhatConverts, a product that lets you track phone calls, web forms, and web chats, back to specific marketing campaigns so you know exactly where your best leads are coming from. When Michael was running a digital marketing agency, it was a real pain to track and report where leads were coming from. He partnered with a former employee to launch a new startup with a simple idea to track any form on any website, just by adding some tracking code. He showed the product to his agency clients who loved it. And it didn't take long to signup their first 5 customers for $30 a month. For the next 18 months, the two co-founders still had to work their day jobs and find time in the evenings and weekends for their new startup. During that time, they were able to keep growing and finding new customers. It looked like they'd be able to work full-time on their SaaS business soon. But their honeymoon period ended abruptly when new well-funded competitors entered the market and spent a ton of money on marketing. Michael's bootstrapped startup couldn't compete with those companies. They had to find another way to compete, differentiate and grow their business. Today, WhatConverts has about 1,000 customers and is doing over $2M ARR. The company is still bootstrapped and has grown 40% in the last 2 years. In this interview, we talk about how they've built their SaaS business, how they're competing with companies that have raised tens of millions of dollars in funding, and why they believe they can bootstrap their way to $10 million a year. I hope you enjoy it. Enjoyed this episode?

You can listen to 282: Bootstrapping a SaaS in a Market with Well-Funded Competitors - with Michael Cooney online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

282: Bootstrapping a SaaS in a Market with Well-Funded Competitors - with Michael Cooney is an episode from The SaaS Podcast - SaaS, Startups, Growth Hacking & Entrepreneurship (formerly ConversionAid Podcast) by Omer Khan.

This episode is 54:34 long.

This episode was published on Mar 24, 2021.

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