I Grew My One-Man Marketing Tool To $1M ARR [Update]
This is a follow up story for Attributer . If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hey again! My name is Aaron and I built Attributer.
Attributer is a simple tool for getting marketing attribution data (like the fact a lead came from Organic Search, Paid Search, Organic Social, etc.) into your CRM so that you can run reports that show you where your leads & customers are coming from.
We’re at approximately $1 million in ARR and are completely bootstrapped, and I am the only employee.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
My last StarterStory interview was just over 2 years ago and we’ve grown a bit since then. We were at $60k ARR then, and now we’re over $1 million now, so I guess we’ve 10x revenue.
This growth has largely come from our SEO efforts.
One of the benefits of Attributer as a business is that it works with literally hundreds of different tools, including virtually every CMS (Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace), every form tool (Gravity Forms, WPforms, Formstack, etc) and every CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, etc)
As a result, we have a huge SEO opportunity as there are thousands of people each month typing queries into Google like ‘How to capture UTM parameters in Gravity Forms’ or ‘How to get lead source data into Salesforce’.
So we’ve just been consistently writing blog posts that basically show you how to use Attributer to capture UTM parameters in Gravity Forms, or send lead source data into Salesforce.
We’ve written 500+ posts over the past 2 years, and they have driven most of our new signups and customers.
On top of that, about a year ago we noticed that we were getting a steady stream of inquiries from marketing & web design agencies wanting to use Attributer on multiple client websites, so we rolled out some agency-focused pricing plans which allow for it to be used on multiple websites.
This was a very rough experiment to start off with (we literally just put an ‘Agency’ plan on the pricing page which linked to a contact form), but over the past year, these Agency have grown to be about 20% of revenue.
So more recently we’ve invested in actually building some features for these agencies who are using it on multiple websites, like the ability to add or delete sites from your account through the UI (previously agencies had to email me when they wanted to use Attributer on a new client site).
Our growth model is basically to acquire new customers via SEO and then attempt to upsell a portion of them to multisite plans.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Staying mentally strong really. There are so many highs and lows of owning and growing a startup and just managing my emotions & motivation through that has been a challenge.
We’ll have bad weeks where we might get fewer new customers than normal (and maybe more customers than normal will churn) and it really impacts my mood and motivation.
So just managing that, trying not to get too down in the low weeks, etc. is an ongoing challenge.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Getting really clear on our growth model. When we spoke 2 years ago, we were only 5 months into the journey, only had like 60 customers, and generally a lot of it was still unknown.
For instance, we didn’t know what our churn rate was going to be because we’d probably only had a couple of customers cancel at that point. We didn’t know what our average customer lifetime value would be because we’d only been around for 5 months, we didn’t know whether we could find scalable ways to acquire customers, etc.
But in the past year, we’ve really got a good understanding of what those key metrics are, and have been able to use that insight to craft a growth model that can get us to $2 million in ARR and beyond (and stay bootstrapped with just me as the sole employee).
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Our growth model is basically to acquire new customers via SEO (which I outlined above) and then attempt to upsell a portion of them (20% of our signups are agencies) to multisite plans.
So everything we’re doing over the next 1-5 years is really focused on scaling up that growth model.
This includes:
Continuing to produce bottom-of-funnel content - We’ll continue to build out our stable of posts targeting bottom-of-funnel terms (like ‘Capture UTM parameters in Gravity Forms’ or ‘Get Lead Source data into Salesforce’). We’ve got about 450 posts now, and I think there are about 500 more we could create.
Start to create middle-of-funnel content - We’ll start to create content that targets people who may have a use for our product, but aren’t necessarily looking for it right now. For us, this could include writing articles like ‘How to track form submissions in Google Ads’. The article would tell them how to do that, but then also say ‘Are you interested in tracking Google Ads in your CRM? Check out Attributer’
Continue to build links - We’ll continue to build high-quality links to our website. A big area of opportunity for us is integration directories (I.e. the integrations directories on the Typeform or Jotform websites). These are all legit, high-quality websites and it makes sense for them to include us in these pages as we do integrate with their product, so I’m hoping we can get some good-quality links there.
Automate the promotion of our multi-site plans to agencies - Currently we don’t promote our multisite plans at all. It’s basically a miracle that 100+ agencies have figured out they exist. So I want to figure out some automated ways to identify agencies who have signed up and let them know these plans exist.
My advice is to ask ‘What’s the smallest possible thing we can do to validate this is a path we want to go down’
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
A series of essays by Brian Balfour called ‘The 4 fits of a billion-dollar company’(Brian is the former VP of Growth at Hubspot).
It’s something I had been thinking about for a while now but Brian did a great job of making it into a really easy-to-digest framework.
The crux of it is that to really grow, you need to have ‘4 fits’ between target market product, pricing & distribution channels.
So for instance, you can’t have a complicated product that requires salespeople to sell, and then try to sell that to small businesses for $29 per month as it would cost more to acquire the customer than they would pay you (a basic example, but hopefully you get the idea).
It really made me think about how the different parts of our business (pricing, marketing channels, target market, etc.) all fit together to create a ‘flywheel’ of growth.
Here’s an example:
Imagine we invest in making Attributer work with more tools (including scheduling software like Calendly, membership/community tools like Teachable, etc.).
This means we can write more bottom-of-funnel blog posts (how to capture UTM parameters in Calendly, how to track Google Ads in Teachable, etc.) which attracts more new customers.
And with this expanded set of integrations, agencies are more likely to upgrade to multisite plans because it can work with more of the tools their clients use.
This increase in agencies purchasing multisite plans leads to an increase average customer value. This in turn allows us to pay more for a customer, which enables us to invest in new channels (like Google Ads or Facebook Ads) because we can afford to essentially ‘buy’ customers through these channels.
As you can see from the above example, all the different parts of the business (product development, customer acquisition, upsells, etc.) all reinforce each other to drive growth.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
I think one of the biggest mistakes I see other startups making is investing too much time and effort into unproven initiatives.
In recent years, the whole concept of lean startups and minimum viable products has become pretty well known, and most tech startups are now pretty accustomed to starting with a minimum viable product, launching early and iterating based on customer feedback.
But those principles seem to get lost later on, and they’ll invest large amounts of development time into building a new feature or pricing model without a lot of validation that it’s actually worthwhile.
So my advice is to ask ‘What’s the smallest possible thing we can do to validate this is a path we want to go down’
The foray into agencies & multisite plans I mentioned earlier was a good example.
We had seen some early signs that this may be an opportunity (a couple of agencies contacting support asking about it) but instead of going and investing a ton of time building a new UI for agencies, new plan structures, partner programs with revenue sharing, etc. I simply put an agency plan on our pricing page that linked to a contact form. It took all of 15 minutes to set up.
Only once we had 100+ agencies upgrade to this plan did I actually invest any time into building the features & functionality required for it to be a long-term element of our business.
Where can we go to learn more?
You can head on over to our websiste to learn more and sign up for a 14-day free trial if you think the product could be useful
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