Forget about investors:
build your own damn runway
what.
We believe that a SaaS can (and in most cases: should) grow without any outside money.
If you want to fund growth, the first thing to do is optimise sales and revenue.
After all, your sales are the area that is most under your control.
When you get sales and conversion right, you might not ever need any outside funding.
why.
Of course it’s tempting to look for investors – but it’s a long and costly process, and it means giving up ownership and control.
It also means a change of focus: instead of serving customers and onboarding more of them, you spend huge amounts of time pitching for capital.
And so you end up selling stock, instead of selling your product – and is that why you got into business?
who.
Growboots is a startup consultancy, run by two business veterans on a mission to help founders sell more and self-fund their operations and growth.
Antonio is a financial whizz and operations expert, and Martin is a thought-leading consultant in ethical marketing and sales.
Their combined expertise helps you to optimise your operations, and get as many paying – and staying! – customers as you can.
antonio herrezuelo.
martin stellar.
stage 2, summer 2021: mvp defined, ready to market.
We interviewed dozens of founders, and frankly, we were a bit disconcerted to discover that the vast majority (over 80%) has only basic segmentation in place.
Some SaaS founders don’t even have any segmentation at all! 😲
That’s a real pity, because the more specific your segmentation is, the more you can calibrate your messaging to the different segments.
And that’s really important for conversion rates, because not every user has the same needs, urgencies, problem sets, or use-case.
But if your marketing and on-boarding sequences try to appeal to everyone with a problem you can solve, without segmentation and specifity, you’ll find it hard to increase the percentage of free users who convert to paid.
Whereas if you create messaging that speaks – with precision – to exactly the mix of psychological motivators that a user has, they’ll find your message and value proposition far more attractive, and you’ll be able to convert more free users.
So, seeing how much money founders tend to leave on the table, we decided to create a simple methodology for analysing your database, and creating very specific segments.
Next, we help you create messaging the taps into exactly the problem-set and use case of your highest-potential users, so that you can drive up revenue and MRR, without having to increase your traffic or ad-spend.
In other words:
Our Free-to-Paid service helps you get higher ROI out of the time and money you’ve already invested in your business.
So, if you:
💶 Are in revenue
🔬 Have enough paying users so that we can perform a meaningful analysis
🆓 Have a sizeable database of free users to campaign to
📈 Want to increase the number of people who convert to paid
🏦 Are willing and able to invest (either paid service or retainer+revenue share)
Then let’s jump on a short call, to see if we’d be able to help you scale up and fund your growth with sales.
stage 1, spring 2021: research.
how.
What we know:
- Financial modelling and forecasting are crucial – but it’s a grossly neglected area and that causes unnecessary financial stress
- Lack of financial planning forces you to make decisions under pressure, and those decisions are rarely the best
- Sales, lead generation, conversion, retention: they can all be a lot easier than you think, provided you have a clear picture on your ideal client and different segments, and you use targeted messaging for each segment
- Marketing and onboarding might look like a numbers game, but actually it’s a people-game: there’s a lot of buyer psychology that you need to integrate into your marketing mix
- Everything is an experiment, and you can get a lot more revenue out of your user-base, if you set up the right KPIs and create testable funnels
What we don’t know:
- Where do you lose time, speed or money – and what’s the cause?
- Which areas can you improve – and what’s keeping you from doing it?
- Which annoying problems keep showing up, that you’ve resigned to or marked as a ‘someday problem’?
- Which problems are most costly, in terms of team, money, or productivity?
- What’s required to turn lame & annoying things into non-issues?
- What keeps you up at night?
- What would ‘success’ and ‘accomplisment’ look like for you?
next.
Currently, Growboots is pre-launch: we’re in research mode, looking to identify and validate the most important problems a bootstrapper wants solved.
In other words: we need to learn our people, and discover what our market really needs.
To do that, we’re offering bootstrapper businesses like yours a 20-minute audit – think of it as a drive-by consultation.
We’ll ask you a couple of questions that will help us learn, and we’ll reward you for your time with a few recommendations you can put to use in your business right away.
[Update 19 July 2021: Research completed. Result: 80% of founders leave money on the table because they have poor or no segmentation in place. You can download our 1-sheet here.]