Josh Ho started ReferralRock in 2015 after seeing a stranger walk into a Honda dealership in Maryland, make a beeline for the salesperson and say that he was referred by a friend.
Their revenue is now $70k per month, completely bootstrapped.
How?
This posts explains…
I’m as guilty as the journalists.
Those journalists that go on a big rant about a big scary problem and then give an overly simplistic reason for why it’s happening.
Humans like to understand, or think they understand this complex world. But in reality, simple cause and effect do not exist. Just many cause-effects impacting everything around us all the time.
E.g. check out this system diagram showing stability in Afghanistan:
Which is why that sometimes in these email when I say that X company grew from nothing to $157m in revenue, bootstrapped using this single #saashack… you need to take my words with a pinch of salt.
This email is about multiple strategies.
And more specifically about the multiple strategies that Josh took with ReferralRock to drive them to $70k MRR.
When growing a SaaS business from nothing, you will need different strategies for different parts of your journey.
Combining Josh’s and our experience (we’ve now written about 70 SaaS businesses), this seems to be a rationale approach:
- Get all of your friends/network to use the product for feedback, this also kick starts word of mouth
- Start by submitting to startup listing sites, Product Hunt, IndieHackers, Beta List etc. to get early users and feedback
- Pure hustle on Twitter, Josh tweeted to people that mentioned the words: “referral programs”. At this point, Josh had been running a free Beta for a year and had reached 500 users.
- Kick-off content, organic social and SEO as soon as you can – this can take years to snowball and will be your most profitable channel when it does. Josh even bought expired, related domains on Flippa to point back to referralrock.com. Here’s Josh’s organic traffic over time, note the two years of slow but steady growth:
- You now should have some cash to play with – this can be re-invested into more content, sales resource or testing paid strategies
- Ultimately, you are looking for virality that somehow allows users to expose your product to others in their process of them gaining value from your software
What did we learn?
That actually, a combination of strategies will be responsible for your growth, not a silver bullet.