Laura Roeder, Transitioning from a Consulting to a Product Business, BoS USA 2016
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Laura talks about not letting the past limit your future at BoS USA 2016. See all talks here: http://businessofsoftware.org/2016/07/all-talks-from-business-of-software-conferences-in-one-place-saas-software-talks/
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Laura Roeder, Transitioning from a Consulting to a Product Business, BoS USA 2016
- 1. Don’t Let Your Past Limit Your Future Laura Roeder - @LKR - LauraRoeder.com MeetEdgar.com
- 2. Or how I got from here to here.
- 3. From 2009 - 2015, I ran a social media marketing training company.
- 4. There were a few things I didn’t love about the model. I was central to the business. There were inherent scaling limits. I was stuck doing work that I didn’t love.
- 5. I wanted to do a SaaS company, BUT . . . I didn’t know how to code. I didn’t know how to design a software product. I had zero experience working around software in any capacity!
- 6. Then I met this guy.
- 8. We did NOT build a bunch of ideas to see which one would take off.
- 9. We tried our best to invalidate BEFORE code was written. (And still started code on two projects before abandoning them early.)
- 10. My criteria: 1. Are prospects actively looking to BUY a better solution to this problem 1. Is our solution better than what’s out there
- 13. We did not purely bootstrap MeetEdgar, we self-funded from the LKR profits.
- 14. The Team You Need to Launch Software 1. Dev team to build software (in our case, 6 mo of PT work) 2.Hours from designer to create logo/basic marketing site 3.Hours from writer for initial marketing copy/email sequences
- 15. If you don’t know software, listen to the advice of people who do.
- 17. Our plan was to have a half training, half software company. (But that didn’t happen.)
- 18. The most important mindset: YOU ARE LAUNCHING A NEW BUSINESS.
- 19. You would not open a retail store by throwing a few t-shirts on the floor and seeing if anyone stops by to buy them.
- 20. If you “wait and see if it gets traction”, you are giving up.
- 21. If you treat it as a “side project”, it will remain a side project. Make it a core part of your business plan.
- 22. Hit 50k MRR within First 6 Months
- 23. BUT in 2014, 90% of our income still came from LKR.
- 24. The Pivot: I decided to go all in on software, shutting down LKR once we reached breakeven from MeetEdgar.
- 25. WHY would I do this? We were still making $1m from LKR.
- 26. 1.Because I wanted to.
- 27. 2. Because the potential upside was larger with MeetEdgar than LKR.
- 28. 3. Because building two businesses takes twice the time, effort, and cash.
- 29. That wasn’t the only pivot going on in my life . . .
- 31. Remove yourself as the bottleneck so the business can keep growing right past you.
- 32. During the three months that I was on maternity leave, we went from $74k to $110k MRR.
- 33. We made the hard decision to give up LKR, and let it become messy so we could stop devoting resources to it.
- 34. First MeetEdgar blog: Dec 2014 Last LKR blog: March 2015 Switched newsletter branding May 2015
- 35. Set the priorities for each quarter and stick to them.
- 36. By the end of 2015 - 2.2m ARR from MeetEdgar
- 37. Here’s how we did it.
- 38. No growth hacks. No hockey sticks. No viral coefficient.
- 39. Stop thinking about one-off tricks or hacks, and start focusing on your funnel.
- 40. Stuff we don’t do: -Integrations -Partnerships -Biz dev -Free trials -Free plans -One-on-one sales -Sales team
- 41. Organic is slow, paid is fast.
- 42. 2014 2015 2016
- 43. In September 2016, we’re at 3.5m ARR.
- 44. Make a plan, not an experiment.
- 45. Don’t let your past limit your future.
Editor's Notes
- I knew marketing, he knew dev - started to think maybe we could build something together, but it took us two years before that would happen
- Explain social brilliant, i was standing in our kitchen in london, chris said he could build it in one week!
- Chris was building - rest of team was still focused on LKR, very little work was required from anyone else
- This set a financial expectation - edgar needed to make at least 1m/year
- Yet that is the gameplan people have with software
- So here’s what happened once we launched - we grew quickly
- For context, we did about 1.2m revenue in 2014
- You can’t expect your team to do double the work in the same time frame, be realistic about your priorities.
- 2015 was about 2m annual revenue - Took us about a year after launch to reach breakeven for Edgar, for us that was about 125k/mo
- Right out the gate we spent 40k/mo in facebook ads