Exceeding $8.5M ARR With Our Social Media SaaS Product [Update]
This is a follow up story for Metricool. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi! I'm Juan Pablo Tejela, CEO at Metricool. Metricool is the Swiss army knife of social media, for everything and everyone. More than one million professionals, agencies, and brands use Metricool as their one-stop shop for social media and online ad management.
We are an easy and intuitive platform for all social media tasks: for everyone, whatever your skills, knowledge, and resources.
An authorized tool for Google My Business, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Pinterest, Youtube, TikTok, TikTok ads, Google ads, and Facebook ads, we are Meta and Google Partners. From a business point of view, Metricool is a SaaS with a Freemium model.
You can either register for free or subscribe to one of our Premium plans, unlocking more brands and features. My wife and I embarked on the Metricool adventure 5 years ago and now we have over 1.5M users, more than 31,900 subscribers, and we have exceeded $8.5 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Metricool has been growing by 90%, almost doubling MRR and Revenue. In addition, we have achieved it by staying within profitability. Two categories have been instrumental in achieving this growth:
Constant improvements in the product increase the functionalities to provide more value each time to the user. We aim to release one major new feature every month. It is a big effort but it generates short-term results.
Our features that have seen the most positive reviews are LinkedIn carousels, being able to auto-publish stories and our multiposting feature. With constant Slack communication and Asana, our product team splits tasks to ensure that new features are being released timely. They also take into account feedback from other teams to prioritize what our users are wanting to see.
Increase marketing channels both deepening current channels and increasing channels. We are hoping to venture into the podcasting sector and explore what that could look like within our platform. We have seen how popular podcasting has become over the last few years and think it could be a valuable feature.
Additionally, we are eager to expand all of our current channels to the German market.
The marketing channels with the highest performance for us are Google and Youtube. Our weekly click data over the year is shown in the graph below as an example of our reach.
Therefore, this year we are making more effort to generate content on Youtube to try to grow as a search engine and match the traffic we receive from Google.
We have been working to optimize our blog content this past year to provide Metricoolers and others in the marketing space with resources, social media news, and product updates here at Metricool.
We also underwent a big project this year to change the interface and copy of our website and ensure all three languages translate adequately.
Each week, we analyze and compare our website metrics, using both Google Search Console and Looker Studio to provide us with accurate and insightful data on how we can improve.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Metricool has doubled the team from 30 members to currently 60 members. During this process, it has been a challenge to build a group of managers who are capable of making decisions within their area and coordinating the different teams among themselves, reducing dependence on me, which had already become a bottleneck.
It's important to surround yourself with the best people without skimping on salary or incentives to attract them.
The challenge has also been to create geolocalized teams by language in the United States, France, and now Germany. Organizationally, we have had to adopt English as the company's primary language, and adapt our marketing strategy by language rather than replicating what was already working for us and adapting it.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
It is not something learned only in the last year, but I can continually reaffirm that the most important thing is the team. It's important to surround yourself with the best people without skimping on salary or incentives to attract them.
But once they form a team, the most important thing is to provide the best possible working conditions, where creativity and involvement with the project develop. It is not something easy to achieve, because there is no magic recipe. It requires observing, learning, and continually improving.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Metricool has a good market position in Spain and Latin America, but the country that is growing the most and where we are making the most effort is the United States.
However, the United States could be 20 times bigger in our Revenue than it is now. In the coming years, we will try to achieve a relevant position in the United States market and other European countries such as France, Germany, or Italy.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I mostly listen to podcasts and my top 3 are:
Saaster - Interviews where they share stories of companies similar to ours, inspiring case studies from which you can learn a lot.
Itnig - Equivalent to Saaster but with case studies of European and Spanish companies.
Product Hackers - Focused on growth techniques for companies, where there are also interesting interviews and success stories.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
Set your goals in the medium-long term. We are often too anxious to see immediate results and we put our efforts into short-term strategies that are not sustainable over time.
I have seen other companies in our niche that are based on functionalities that violate the policies and terms of use established by social platforms. They grow fast, but their decline is just as fast.
What works for Metricool is to design solid and long-term strategies, making sure that every step we take keeps us on the right path. Maybe we will go slower but I am certain that we will get further.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
The idea is to incorporate native people from the countries in which we plan our internationalization. Both to enrich the company and also help us better understand the country where we want to focus. As for job opportunities, we highly recommend following us on LinkedIn. We post all job opportunities on the platform!
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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