This Company Hit 50K Users In Just One Year
I’m Chris, CMO, and co-founder of Hexact, Inc.
Hexomatic is our flagship web scraping and work automation platform enabling anyone to tap into the internet as their data source, automating 100+ sales, marketing, or research tasks on autopilot.
Since our launch last year we have helped over 50,000 businesses scale via simple, no-code automation. No complex software or enterprise budget is required.
Build an audience first before building your product. Then it becomes much easier to involve your audience in the early stages of development and generate sales even before you launch to the public.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
In the last 18 years, I’ve worked as a developer, and digital agency department head, became a full-time affiliate, created eCom brands, and after meeting my co-founders I got into the SaaS space with Hexact.
The idea for Hexact is that most day-to-day workflows require manual work, typically wasting at least 30% of our time. The problem is these can’t be automated without developers or enterprise-level budgets.
We came up with the idea of Hexomatic to automate many of the tasks we were doing manually, via our developers, or using different tools. For example, for SEO and sales outreach we would scrape Google, manually research each website, and then use different tools to find contact details.
We then validated the idea by surveying our existing Hexometer and Hexowatch customers as well as looking at feature requests and chat support logs.
Our biggest finding was that we were not alone, many of our customers either couldn’t afford automation, procrastinated on time-consuming tasks, wasted team resources on manual work, or had to juggle freelancers and complex apps to patch together solutions.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
Hexomatic is our third SaaS platform, so we were able to leverage many of the front-end, server, and web crawling technologies we developed for Hexometer (comprehensive website monitoring) and Hexowatch (change monitoring).
Our initial MVP focused on creating three core areas:
-A simple point-and-click web scraper to turn any website into a spreadsheet
-Ready-made automations to perform tasks
-A workflow editor to combine scraping recipes and ready-made automations
The idea was to make it easy for anyone to capture data from any website and perform tasks to enrich or validate the data without needing any coding experience or 3rd party software or services.
Describe the process of launching the business.
In order to accelerate product market fit we involved our existing customers before our launch during our last mile development.
To do this, we created a 7 day Kickstarter style pre-launch offer with a sales video in April 2021 inviting our existing customers to purchase early access to Hexomatic.
We sold out of the 3000 seats we had allocated within 7 days, helping raise six figures and validating our idea a month before the launch of our beta.
During this time, we surveyed our customers to understand their businesses, and biggest pain points, run polls, validate designs and prioritize our roadmap.
We then launched a private beta in May and for the next two months worked with our early-access customers to fix bugs, develop new features, and polish Hexomatic before our public launch in July.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
We have found that weekly product updates and keeping a close relationship with our community have been key drivers of growth.
Each week we share our product development updates, new features, or improvements made to our platform, many of which are from customer feature suggestions.
Another factor that has been pivotal in our success with paid ads has been creating an integrated ecosystem of SaaS platforms targeting different pain points of our target customers.
Hexometer monitors your website to catch problems before they affect your business.
Hexowatch monitors your competitors, alerting you when visual, content, source code, technology, or price changes are detected.
Hexomatic helps businesses find leads and automate time-consuming sales, marketing, and research tasks.
Hexospark is a unique email automation and CRM platform for 1-1 outreach designed to turn leads into clients.
Combined with our steady product development this enables us to cross-sell and increase AOV.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Hexact is profitable and growing fast, in fact, this year in July we hit our 100K user milestone across our Hexact platforms, doubling compared to last year.
We also nearly doubled our team size scaling our development, customer success, and marketing teams to grow our movement so we can impact more businesses in 2022 and beyond.
This has helped our platforms get recognized as category leaders and high performers on popular review platforms such as Capterra, G2, GetApp, and Software Advice.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
We have been very fortunate to cultivate a great team, this has been a key part of our success. As a founder or solopreneur it's very tempting to try and do everything, but to scale you need a solid team working together.
Customer success is also very underrated, but a key conversion factor. When potential customers have a question, being able to answer within minutes can make the difference between a bounce and a sale.
We also learned a lot about launching different SaaS products, with each launch helping us refine the process and methods. For example, we needed three major iterations for our first SaaS platform Hexometer to nail the experience and our product market fit.
As you can imagine refactoring carries a huge cost… But now, by involving our existing customers as early as possible we can validate sooner and build features users need versus just using our intuition.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Google Cloud, Stripe, Chartmogul, Slack, Sendgrid, ClickUp and a ton more.
We use Hexospark and Hexomatic for outreach, Hexowatch to keep an eye on competitors, and Hexometer to catch website issues.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Difficult to pick a few, I would say Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, Atomic Habits it by James Clear. I like to listen to how I built this and the Tim Ferriss podcast.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Build an audience first before building your product. Then it becomes much easier to involve your audience in the early stages of development and generate sales even before you launch to the public.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are currently hiring for more developers, content writers, and an SDR position.
You can find our vacancies here.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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