I think am at about over a hundred episodes.
And in the past I've done quite a few videos
on building a scalable go-to-market machine,
so you can grow your SaaS Business faster.
There's a bunch of principles.
Now, if you're new to the channel,
you can go watch this playlist.
Inside this playlist it's all my core videos
on how to drive growth.
You don't have to go yet.
I'll link to it below,
you can binge watch it after.
But, I thought it would be good.
Now that I've covered so many core principles
and scaling go-to-market machines,
for your SaaS Business,
it'd be good to walk you through an example.
And I thought it would be cool to actually walk you through
the exact go-to-market machine
I used in my last SaaS Business, ToutApp.
And it's my hope that when you look at this example,
you'll be able to understand
the principles a little bit more,
and you can apply them to your own SaaS business
so you can drive growth faster.
Intro (upbeat music)
What's up everybody?
You're welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK on this channel.
I help SaaS founders like you,
accelerate your path,
to the next stage of growth
which means grow faster,
with an Unstoppable strategy.
If you're new to this channel,
be sure the subscribe button
and that bell icon.
I drop a video like this
three times a week,
Monday, Wednesday, sometimes Thursdays or Fridays.
We kind of pick,
we flip a coin and figure out which way to go.
If you prefer them on a certain date,
Let me know. We're trying to figure that out.
Anyway, hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
because I dropped an episode,
three times a week
to help you grow your SaaS business.
If you are part of my SaaS,
go-to-market coaching program.
If you're a part of this community, welcome back.
It's really great to see you guys over here.
So, back when I started ToutApp,
I actually built the first version of the product.
I was an engineer.
I did a double major.
I did computer science and business,
and I was really more of a computer science guy.
And I learned very quickly in my startup journey
that unless you embrace sales and marketing,
your startup's not gonna go anywhere.
And I don't mean just hire sales and marketing people.
You need to actually embrace sales and marketing.
That's what I learned.
And I think that's still true today,
which is why I run this channel,
that teaches you how to understand
go-to-market, sales marketing distribution,
because that's the thing that kills startups the most.
But back then I was more of an engineer
and I just built the product.
And I knew that I needed to learn more.
And fortunately for me,
I was building out ToutApp.
We were a sales engagement software.
Fortunately for me,
all my customers were either VPs of sales
or VPs of marketing.
And so I'm like, oh,
my customers can teach me.
I can actually talk to these people and learn
as much as I can.
And that's really when I started my
like the last seven, eight years,
of digging deep into how to drive SaaS growth,
how to get go-to-market machines going.
That's why I'm so passionate about this stuff.
So through that journey,
I learned how to build SaaS,
go-to-market machines.
And so in this video I'm gonna walk you through an example
of how we took ToutApp from zero to 7 million ARR,
and then sold the company to a market leader,
using this exact go-to-market vision.
I'm gonna show you exactly what we did.
So if you're excited digging
go and smash that like button and let's dig right into it.
Okay. So the first thing we really figured out
for our go-to-market machine,
and we talked about this a lot in the channel
was we really hone in on our ICP.
When we first started we were selling
email productivity to anyone that's sent a lot of emails.
By the time we were done,
we were selling to enterprise sales teams,
fast growing companies,
'cause we knew that had a lot of salespeople
and they needed help.
So we started focusing on VPs of sales
and then later on,
it really went into directors of sales development reps.
So that's who we were selling to.
And what we knew,
very early on,
was there's gonna be certain places
where these people congregated.
And so the first strategy we really got going
was market places.
We knew that sales people used email a lot
and they needed help.
We also knew they used CRMs.
And so believe it or not,
a big part of our demand generation,
big part of the customers we brought on,
they discovered us through market places, sales people,
we had a self service part of the business.
Sales people would go into the Chrome web store,
and discover that they could plug in
ToutApp into their Gmail and get
a certain number of features
to help them be more effective in their sales process
to send out more emails,
use templates and tracking.
That's how we got our start,
Google Chrome Store.
Then we realized,
all the VP of sales
and the enterprise sales teams,
were buying Salesforce.
And they were looking for additional pieces to plug in
because Salesforce doesn't give them everything.
So they went into AppExchange,
looking for solutions.
So we actually had a marketplace listing for Salesforce.
And through these two things,
we actually got a significant amount of business
that's coming in inbound,
to either start a trial
or talk to sales.
Over time, more and more business came
through this marketplace
is because we actually put a lot of effort
into those, those listings.
We've got a ton of reviews
and that actually got the flywheel going.
The second thing that we had,
were essentially manifestos.
I'm a big believer in creating a manifesto
writing a manifesto,
talking about the big transformation you're building
in your business,
and getting it out there.
And I used this stuff,
it worked for me
and that's why I preach it now.
And I teach others to do it.
So, we wrote a manifesto.
Our first one was How to Write KickAss Sales Emails.
It was so popular at one point all you needed to do
was type in kickass emails or kickass sales emails,
and ours will be first.
And so we wrote that,
and that manifesto
more and more salespeople discovered
through social and SEO,
and they would then sign up for the product.
And most of the times we would actually go start a trial.
And then if they were a big company,
we would actually have a sales person reach out.
So that was the second.
Between these two things,
these two things took us from zero to a million ARR alone.
We had amazing customers.
We had enterprise deals coming through
with companies like Responses, Dropbox, Exact Target,
amazing brands that were buying a product just,
but just with these two,
we got from zero to a million ARR.
Then we raised our Series A
after we got to a million ARR,
we raised our Series A
and we raised was actually a small Series A.
It was a $3.3 million Series A,
and that's when we added outbound to this mix,
we actually added outbound.
We didn't do outbound early on.
We tried, we could never get it working
because we didn't have our messaging figured out yet.
We didn't have our ICP figured out yet.
But once we dial this in,
by the time he got to a million,
we turned on outbound SDRs.
And essentially back then,
what we had essentially was a two to one ratio.
For every two AEs,
we had one STR.
And we also had an MDR one MDR,
because we had these two things brought a lot of inbound,
and anyone that was a small team,
it would just go to the MDR
and they would try to close the deal.
And it was like a five K deal.
Over time we have stopped surprising floor,
but at certain points we did that.
So basically, we had outbound
and between these three things,
this essentially took us
from a million to 3 million ARR.
And this was done in one year.
And we grew through our percent in one year.
And then with that,
we raised our Series B,
which was from Andreessen Horowitz.
We raise another 15 million.
So, that's the example I wanted to walk you through.
We started with marketplaces,
got a lot of demand.
I did a lot of
we had the manifesto.
I did some blogging over here
talking about the journey and that got us
some initial customers,
but really it was this one,
these three things.
We turned on step-by-step in each of these phases
and it accelerated our growth.
And all the way up to selling the company,
these three things were our continued revenue drivers
that actually created demand, created pipeline,
and we were able to close it.
Now we were a sales engagement platform.
So obviously outbound was a big piece.
But interestingly enough,
to get to a million ARR,
we didn't use Tout for outbound,
we used tout for managing all the inbound leads
that were coming through,
and being very proactive with them.
It was only after this point we started to do more
of the outbound.
So that's the example I wanted to walk you through.
This is literally the machine that we used
to go from zero to 7 million ARR
go through a Series A,
Series B and then exit the company.
This is the exact process that I teach inside of my
SAS go-to-market coaching program.
So I will link to the playlist below that talks through more
of my SaaS growth videos.
It talks to different principals on building
a go-to-market machine.
So if you're getting value,
I would definitely check out those videos as well.
But I will say
if you are building a go-to-marketing machine
and you want the cheat codes,
you wanna move faster,
you wanna work with me
and I can coach you to do
this kind of thing a lot faster.
Then I invite you to check out my
SaaS Go-To-Market Coaching Program.
Just go to tkk.com/gtm
or follow the link below.
It'll give you all the details.
It'll help you get on a strategy call with me
where we can discuss if I can help or not,
based on regarding your SaaS business.
And if it makes sense,
we'll work together
and I'll help you implement all this stuff
and accelerate your path,
to the next stage of growth.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to hit that like button.
Also, if you haven't already hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon.
So I drop more videos like this,
actionable strategies examples,
stories from startup life,
actual things that I've done
and that and now I teach.
If you have us fellow SaaS founder will get value from this.
If you're part of a WhatsApp group,
our SaaS community,
please share this video,
it will mean the world to me and my team.
You put a lot of effort into these videos.
And lastly remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life
and their business,
but when you are with us,
yours gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you the next episode.