It’s 2005, and Laura Roeder has just graduated from the University of Texas… Twitter doesn’t even exist yet.
What’s next?
She starts out by simply designing websites for clients and helping businesses use Facebook’s new “Pages” feature to build an audience to find customers.
Fast forward seven years, and Laura’s social media business has expanded to provide agency like services and sell digital product such as courses and eBooks.
Laura’s first online course launched in 2009, it was called: “Your Backstage Pass To Twitter” and grossed a modest $3,000 in sales.
It was only in 2014, that Laura teamed up with her husband Chris to solve a problem that her customers were facing, that wasn’t addressed by current social media software solutions.
MeetEdgar reached 2,922 paying customers with MRR of $144k within 13 month, hit the INC 5,000 list in 2018 and now have an estimated annual run rate of $3m with 5,000 paying customers.
So take a seat, grab an oat milk latte and strap yourself in for ten very consistent yet unconventional SaaS growth strategies.
Growth Lever 1 – Agency To Info Course To SaaS
This is hands down the most profitable, reliable and sustainable strategy for building a SaaS business.
And how did Laura leverage this?
During her time providing web design and social media services (Agency) as part of LKR Social, Laura developed a system and started teaching others (Info Course) about how to be effective at social media.
This system involved manual work and spreadsheets: its core approach was to build a database of your content that you can refer back to and continuously post through your social channels, driving traffic back to your site.
Laura thought:
Huh? Why am I storing this in a spreadsheet? Why would my social media tool not store an organized library of all my content?
So she decided to automate this process (SaaS).
Laura took $200,000 from the training business as seed capital for Edgar and her husband, Chris spent six to nine months building the MVP.
Laura already had the audience from LKR Social Media, as this had been running for five years and had an email list of 75,000.
11 months after this launch, MeetEdgar grew to $83k MRR.
Laura has successfully transitioned through these three different business models over the five year period:
- Providing web design and social media services
- Teaching social media strategies
- Building software to automate this strategy
With each stage, providing the platform for the next.
Why does this work?
- You LEARN an incredible about about your customer when providing a service or educating them
- You build a list of people that like and trust you, that all have a similar problem that you can promote your SaaS too upon launch
Now I’m sure Laura would have made it work, but it would have been a much longer and harder journey if she would have created Edgar from scratch, without the previous service and education business.
(EDITORS NOTE – it’s also the strategy we are using to grow bCast, we share more about how we’re doing this here).
LEARNING: There is no better way to learn about your customers and fund a SaaS business… than with an agency
Growth Lever 2 – Main CTA Micro Commitment
There are two core CTA’s that 99% of SaaS businesses offer:
- A free trial
- A demo
Both are great… they’re significantly better than “Buy now”.
Though since day one, up until a couple of years ago, Edgar’s core CTA has been:
Why?
It’s a lower commitment.
Simply submitting your email to apply to get access to the software takes less time and effort than signing up for a free trial or booking a demo.
There is also the small chance that you won’t get accepted to use their software… and everyone wants to be “part of a club” that they aren’t supposed to be part of.
Once submitted, you get linked through to the product after a couple of hours with a free trial (I know this as I “Requested my invite” a number of years back).
Here’s the funnel as outlined in a talk from Laura in 2017:
They have tested the following CTA’s:
- Get Your Invitation – this performed the best
- Request Your Invitation
- Get My Invitation
- Request An Invitation
- Request Access
- Get Started
According to Laura, this strategy doubled conversion from the home page through to free trial – they convert 10% of the people that land on the homepage.
10% for a free trial sign up?
Insane.
What does this mean in terms of volume?
Edgar current generate 500 leads per month from their blog… and 5,500 leads per month from their homepage.
(Edgar’s email list size currently sits at approximately 115,000)
You won’t see this on Edgar’s homepage now, as they have since pivoted away from “requesting an invite” and now offer a “free month”. This is different from a 30 day free trial that most SaaS businesses offer – more on this in Growth Lever 10.
We asked at what point they switched their homepage CTA away from “request an invite”:
In Laura’s own words:
Instead of trying 10 new marketing strategies, focus on the things that can actually make a big difference, like tests that can have you bringing in 20 new customers a day instead of 10.
LEARNING: Why not change your CTA to something that is a little lower commitment…
Growth Lever 3 – Simple Facebook Ad Copy Strategy
Most people don’t kick off with paid until they either:
- Raise cash
- Make a bunch of revenue
But remember, Laura has already “made a bunch of revenue” from launching Edgar to the LKR Social email list, giving Edgar a boost from day one.
In fact, post launch, Edgar were spending $40,000 per month on Facebook Ads. They purposefully architected their traffic strategy to incorporate more paid at the start and then more organic over time:
Here’s their paid strategy…
From research of their persona, Edgar knew that their perfect customer probably had or was using another social media tool.
Think about it: Edgar’s functionality is slightly different from normal social scheduling tools and if a person is already paying for one of these tools… they would probably be more likely to pay for another than someone who has never paid for a social media tool.
Therefore, Edgar took to Facebook Ads to target people interested in existing social tools – this is step one.
Secondly, they also knew that their persona was an early adopter, someone who was already paying for a social media tool back in 2014, must have been.
Using this targeting and ad copy that simply said: “Here’s a new social media tool”, Edgar started ramping up spend.
This strategy is time dependant as it would probably not be profitable today now that the use of social media tools is now much more common and therefore the people interested in them on Facebook would not necessarily be early adopters.
But back in 2014, this headline spoke directly to Edgar’s perfect persona, allowing them to scale to $40k per month.
Assuming a twelve month payback period, Edgar would have been paying $600 per customer with this ad spend adding 66 new customers and $3.2k MRR per month.
LEARNING: Think about your perfect customer, how can they be targeted on Facebook and what is the simple message that would resonate with them?
Growth Lever 4 – Intelligent, Employer Branding
When asked in a recent podcast interview: what is the best investment you have ever made in your business? Laura responded:
Every person on the team.
Furthermore, when you head to the Edgar careers page:
It becomes clear that there is something different going on here:
Laura explains that Edgar exists to create an awesome place to work… funded by the proceeds of a great product. Contrast this to most businesses that employ people to build average products to maximise shareholder profits.
Edgar:
- Has no shareholders (Laura owns 100%)
- Enforce employees to only work 40 hour weeks
- Has been designed for remote work
- Will pay for your home/office to get cleaned
This is really clever.
Laura knows that the success of Edgar depends on her ability to hire awesome people and that she can’t beat other SaaS businesses on salary.
So how can Laura hire the right talent?
By offerring prospective employees things that the larger, better paying SaaS businesses can’t: a better work-life balance.
And Laura set the tone from day one by taking three months maternity leave during the first year of the business.
And at the same time, this attracts a specific type of applicant that if sufficient, will help breed and continue a very specific type of culture.
As an Edgar employee states in this video:
It feels like if Edgar didn’t exist, we would all be friends.
LEARNING: Why would someone work for your SaaS over Salesforce or HubSpot?
Growth Lever 5 – Consistent Content
People ask me what’s the secret to SEO?
And I REALLY want to say the sexy things:
- Creating infographics with data from your SaaS
- Give discount codes to universities for the .edu backlinks
- Move from WordPress to Ghost to improve site speed
Now all these things valid…
But actually, the #1 thing you can do is…
STAY IN THE GAME.
Just like Edgar:
Here are the top ten posts with the highest organic traffic:
Let’s take this page: https://meetedgar.com/blog/what-is-igtv
It’s currently pulling in 4k sessions per month (valued at $7.9k) and ranks for 369 keywords:
It’s a good piece of content.
But at 1,732 words, it won’t have taken that long to create. If someone already knows and is using IGTV, they could feasibly produce this in a day.
I estimate this cost the Edgar team between $500-$1,000 to create. And now it’s pulling in $7k worth of relevant traffic per month?
(Remember, people interested in using IGTV are probably interested in putting the growth of their social channels on autopilot…)
Beautiful.
How did Edgar do this?
Well, not every post is bringing in an ROI like this… maybe one in twenty posts that Edgar produces will rank.
This is the secret…
Not even the Head Of Search at Google will be able to tell you which post to post and when – the algorithm is now better than all of us.
Our only option is to start… and then be consistent.
Just like Edgar have been since mid 2014.
LEARNING: SEO is a long term play, start now and stay consistent over years…
Growth Lever 6 – Compounded, Long Term Traffic Strategies
Check out Edgar’s super fancy traffic strategy:
Note that there is actually nothing fancy about it. These are just basic content, social and SEO activities that won’t have dramatic short term effects, but compound over the long term.
And actually, the list of the things that Edgar doesn’t do is more important than the list of what Edgar does do:
Let’s take one example…
Guest posts vs guest podcasts.
- Guests posts may take 4 hours to produce and a total of 2 hours communication with the host.
- Guest podcasts take 1 hour to produce and a total of 1 hour communication with the host
Though the time investment differs, the upside for the guest is pretty constant: you get a backlink, some social exposure and a little traffic.
Laura and Edgar discovered this early on… and doubled down on the strategy. They hired a person specifically to book Laura on ten-twenty podcasts each month batched into four podcasts per day for five days consecutive days during one week each month.
Now each podcast episode may not have a massive impact on growth… but when combined with the other organic strategies detailed above, leads to MRR growth like:
And actually, when we asked Laura: what is the most impactful thing you have done to drive growth?
She responded:
LEARNING: What are the three to five long term SEO, content and social strategies you can implement over years, not weeks?
Growth Lever 7 – Becoming Famous
It wasn’t necessarily just the audience that Laura built that has been responsible for Edgar’s growth, but it’s the fame, relationships and PR value that Laura has worked so hard on that opened doors.
So how do you become famous?
Laura actually taught this in an online course named “Creating Fame” that was sold by her information business: LRK Social.
It boils down to two things:
- Creating consistently great content
- Being seen around other famous people
Take DJ Khaled for example…
- Consistently producing great video and audio content over a period of twenty years
- Being seen around other famous people in the niche, here’s his album collaboration history:
As an aside, every music artist is doing this more and more:
But how does this equate to the online marketing world?
Laura has appeared on countless online entrepreneurship podcasts over the years…
Remember:
- Consistently good content
- Being seen around other famous people in the niche
In her own words:
“I was really big on guest blogging, and pitching myself for opportunities. This is something that I think I’ve been good at, that a lot of people just miss entirely.”
And here Laura reveals the final key you need to become famous in a niche:
The ability to pitch.
In her first year as the founder of LKR Social, she pitched herself to host a panel at South by Southwest, which at the time (and still is) and massive deal. And she landed it…
And so many of my friends were like, you just started this business, how did you get your own panel? That’s so cool. And I would ask them, did you submit a panel? Did you submit an idea for a talk or a panel to South by? And they’re like, no. Well that’s how I got a panel. I submitted an idea. You can’t get a panel unless you do. And whenever I wanna go to a conference, I pitch myself as a speaker.
‘Cause if I’m gonna go there, I wanna talk.
LEARNING: Get on podcasts, publish that guest blog post and boost your personal profile…
Growth Lever 8 – Leading With Story
Edgar’s first email to new prospects is an absolute beauty.
It’s the first email you receive when you sign up on the Edgar homepage to claim your free month.
Compare and contrast this to email you might receive from a larger, soulless software business?
It’s an email directly from the founder Laura…
(And I’m very confident that she has written this personally as I know she is taking up a few strategic projects in the business after stepping back from day to day operations)
Let’s break it down…
Here Laura explains the origin of Edgar whilst also empathising with the pain of the prospect and highlighting Edgar’s core benefit: social growth on autopilot.
It get’s better:
And:
Can you tell why we like it so much?
STORY.
Laura is giving us the background about her and Edgar, including sharing a “behind the scenes” image herself with the family.
Compare and contrast this to a larger, publicly owned social media software business (naming no names!)… yes it make Edgar looks small, but that is also an advantage.
Now I haven’t seen the replies to this welcome message, but I bet the reply rate and sentiment of language in those replies is significantly larger and more positive that Hootsuite’s welcome email 😉
LEARNING: Can you incorporate more story into your welcome email?
Growth Lever 9 – Ultimate SaaS Growth Strategy: Not Listening To Customers
- Typical startup wisdom: “Talk to your customers”
- Edgar’s startup wisdom: “Don’t listen to your customers”
For example, Edgar receive a large number of requests to integrate with Instagram….
However, as Instagram doesn’t allow you to schedule posts, the furthest you can go with automation is to prepare the post and then remind the user to post with email or push notifications.
This doesn’t align with Edgar’s core value proposition: social growth on autopilot.
So despite, this large number of feature requests… Edgar still does not integrate with Instagram.
So how have Edgar been able to thrive whilst almost completely ignoring customer feedback requests?
Two reasons:
- Expertise – After being the customer for a number of years, Laura’s knows the persona and their challenges inside out
- Mission – Edgar exists to enable business owners to grow social exposure on autopilot
The Edgar product team can therefore make feature decision based on these two guiding principles, reducing their reliance on the opinions of their customer.
LEARNING: What is the feature that customer may not want, but you think would add value or helps you fulfil your mission?
Growth Lever 10 – Get Free Month Conversion Funnel
Ok let’s take a look:
First off, the core CTA is very clear: “Claim Free Month”.
What’s the difference between a thirty day free trial and getting a free month?
Technically, these two things are exactly the same… but from a marketers perspective, these are quite different.
The word “trial” pre-supposes a longer commitment: “you’re just trialling this and we will automatically roll your forward onto the the subscription if you don’t cancel”.
This is what most SaaS businesses say on their homepage… and it’s hurting their conversions.
Simply tweaking the copy to remove the word “trial” and to describe what the customer is getting in a slightly different way should increase conversion rate.
It’s also interesting to see the persona that Edgar are targeting with their imagery on the homepage:
As we know from the welcome email shared in Growth Lever 8, Edgar is probably one of the only “women owned” social media tools, and we’re seeing women in images on the homepage.
I think this is some really clever marketing – obviously the Edgar product will work perfectly well for both sexes… but Edgar does have an edge over other similar tools in that the founder Laura, is female.
And therefore it would be reasonable to assume that a woman looking for a social media tool may favour the only social tool created and owned by a woman.
Back to the funnel…
We land on the thank you page and are given the code to claim out free month.
We are also influenced by social proof in the form of logo’s and quotes from businesses and influencers that the ideal Edgar persona would probably know:
And for the logically biased prospects, we get an ROI breakdown:
Moving through to the checkout we get a reminder of the WHY and of Edgar’s core benefit:
And on the second stage you get to enter your promo code and are reminded of the social proof:
Every human loves a bargain… and there is something about clicking a button to apply a discount code and seeing the quoted price reduce that is immensely satisfying.
And when a SaaS brand simply allows you to jump into an account and use the software for free for a month, without using a code – they deprive their customers of this experience.
And just like in any funnel, when you drop off… you will receive emails to bring you back.
This is also a great opportunity for a downsell:
This downsell is also 100% ethical as it is a different offer from the offer already present. It’s a fantastic strategy to “mop up”any potential buyers that didn’t convert due to price.
And of course, once a customer converts, are using the Edgar product and hit a usage limit… there is always the chance that the convert to the higher plan.
LEARNING: How can you incorporate social proof, discount codes and down-sells into your SaaS growth conversion funnel?
BOOM… a super original growth story that ignores many conventional SaaS growth doctrines, 10 growth levers fuelling one beautiful MRR growth graph:
What did we learn?
- There is no better way to learn about your customers and fund a SaaS business… than with an agency
- Why not change your CTA to something that is a little lower commitment…
- Think about your perfect customer, how can they be targeted on Facebook and what is the simple message that would resonate with them?
- Why would someone work for your SaaS over Salesforce or HubSpot?
- SEO is a long term play, start now and stay consistent over years…
- What are the three to five long term SEO, content and social strategies you can implement over years, not weeks?
- Get on podcasts, publish that guest blog post and boost your personal profile…
- Can you incorporate more story into your welcome email?
- What is the feature that customer may not want, but you think would add value or helps you fulfil your mission?
- How can you incorporate social proof, discount codes and down-sells into your SaaS conversion funnel?
Which was your favourite Growth Lever, please leave a comment below or on Twitter here:
We spent a week studying how @MeetEdgar grew to $3m ARR completely bootstrapped by solo founder: @lkr 📈
Here’s what we found 👇👇👇
— SaaS Marketer (@SaaS_Marketer) April 23, 2020
And be sure to add your email here to receive one of these case studies every two weeks.
Tom Hunt is the founder of SaaS Marketer and bCast (B2B podcast hosting for high growth businesses). He lives and works in Hackney, London with his delightful partner Rebecca and little dog called Bear.
