How We Got 800K Sign-Ups On Our Collaboration Tool Without Spending On Advertising
I’m Jamie Hanratty, co-founder of Metro Retro, along with Steve Whitfield and Lisa Angel.
Metro Retro is an online whiteboard designed for the meetings and workshops that software teams run. Where other collaboration tools are boring and require training, Metro Retro is fun to use and simple to pick up. It has all the tools you need in an online whiteboard like sticky notes and images, but it also has fun, interactive features that people love, like the confetti cannon for firing confetti streams across the board.
Most people use Metro Retro for its Retrospective meeting formats or “Retros” (hence the name). A Retrospective is a particular type of meeting that agile software teams hold, where a team gets together to reflect on what happened recently, how they’ve been working, and what they could improve in the future.
Our view is that if your team looks forward to and enjoys your meetings, this improves engagement and the effectiveness of your time together. So we get to build fun and silly features that probably wouldn't be appropriate for your accounting tool, but in our case it's perfect.
To date, Metro Retro has had over 800,000 signups without us spending a penny on advertising. Our signups first exploded over the pandemic and have not stopped since, primarily from word of mouth. We’re a small team but we’re profitable and growing, in a market expected to grow to $4,421.76 million by 2027.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Steve, Lisa, and I have worked together in various software teams for almost 10 years. We would run our meetings - like retrospectives - in early versions of other online whiteboards. Back then those whiteboard tools were innovative and exciting to use, but had a lot of limitations.
Metro Retro is originally Steve's idea. He is a full-stack developer and built Metro Retro in his spare time, with inspiration and ideas from using those early whiteboard tools. He and Lisa launched the first-ever version in 2019 and wrote about the very early years in his launch post.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
Metro Retro began life as a purely free tool with a Product Hunt launch and a fun video, growing to around 10,000 signups over the next year. But then signups exploded in March 2020 when the world went into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Signups doubled to 20,000 in the next three weeks and didn't stop.
With signups accelerating, Steve and Lisa asked me to join them as a co-founder in June 2020 to help monetize and make a business out of Metro Retro. It was an easy “yes” for me, as I was already a huge fan of using online whiteboards at work and I was impressed with what Steve had built.
How to monetize?
So we had a free tool that was gaining traction with a thousand signups a day, but it wasn’t making any revenue yet.
We discussed developing a paid plan immediately to start generating revenue, but we also had a vision for a bigger and better Metro Retro with features that we would charge for, competing with the established products in the space, and bringing our fresh ideas to the table. However, Steve was the only developer on the team, so realistically we had to choose one or the other.
It was a tough decision for us, especially as a bootstrapped startup living off our savings, but we chose to go ahead and build v2 of Metro Retro while leaving v1 running as a free tool in the meantime.
Even though it wasn't making us any revenue, v1 was great for acquiring new users. About 300,000 people signed up over the next year. But more importantly still - they stuck around, with tens of thousands of people using Metro Retro multiple times a week. Luckily for us, the server costs didn’t increase drastically as well, or that would have changed our situation.
Building the new version
We started by speaking to around 30 of our top users on video calls about why they use Metro Retro. I used the ideas from The Mom Test to structure these initial interviews. We also worked with a designer friend to create prototypes combining our vision and what we learned from our users.
We also surveyed a further 3000 of our top users with a Product Market fit survey. We found that nearly 80% of respondents would be “extremely disappointed if they couldn’t use Metro Retro” - a great sign. For those that said they would pay, the average amount suggested was around $21 per month. We considered this enough to validate that we had something people would pay for, and started the building process in September 2020.
For the next few months, our process was very simple. Steve would build a feature and I would test it, then we would release it to a demo platform. Lisa still had a full-time job, so she contributed in her spare time around work.
We try to be super personal with our customers. We’re transparent that we’re just three founders, with two of us working full-time on Metro Retro.
Once the new version was in a state we were happy with, we started our sales process. This began with demoing the new version to our most engaged users over video call, then giving them access to use it in their meetings. During this initial period, they could use it for free in exchange for their feedback.
Alongside this, we also had to start designing the business model. We spent a crazy amount of time researching and deciding our first pricing plans. Man, that took ages.
Having gone through this, I would advise anyone in a similar place to not over-optimize your pricing at the start, just go with a pricing model that feels vaguely right. It’s easier than you think to change your pricing later. We started our pricing model with per-seat pricing, at €6 per team member, per month. So if you have 10 team members, it was $60 per month.
I remember a consultant from Price Intelligently (now Paddle.com) gave up their time for free to help us work through our pricing ideas. We figured that as people were working in teams we could charge for every team member using the tool - it’s great for expansion revenue - with more team members comes more revenue.
However, I’m not sure I would go with this pricing route if I did it over again. It was difficult for a lot of our customers to justify buying a license per team member, especially for a new tool. Businesses seemed to be reluctant to sign off on per-seat purchases for tools that weren't mission-critical.
We might have been better off starting with more expensive individual licenses that allow you to invite other people to a board for free. However, the one positive is that the early customers who bought licenses were super invested in Metro Retro’s success, and most are still our biggest supporters to this day.
Our first actual paying customers were eventually signed to the platform in March 2021 - they were big users of the free version already, so I guess it made sense to upgrade to get the new features - which included a lot of the things they had been asking for.
That first customer signed up with 50 team members - that was amazing. The second customer doubled that with 100 team members, then the third bought 500 team members. We couldn’t believe it. Those were such exciting but nerve-wracking days - especially as none of us had ever done sales before!
Describe the process of launching the business.
We've never done any “big-bang” launches with Metro Retro. You see teams putting huge amounts of investment into their public launches, but we were fortunate that we already had a significant user base from the free version, so we simply used in-app banners and emails to inform them of the new version. By the way, I'm not saying don't do the big launch - we probably should have as well!
There will be a million avenues and opportunities you could follow - but you will have to say no to most of them. Pick well!
Interested teams joined an “Early Access” waitlist and we onboarded each team over a video call. All payments were made with manual invoices. The onboarding took a lot of time and effort, but it meant that we were making a personal connection with our early customers and learning a lot from them.
We followed this process for almost a year, onboarding new customers and slowly growing our revenue while continuing to build out the product features. Our customers loved Metro Retro and we had zero churn through the whole period, but in order to grow we needed to improve our financial situation faster than we were onboarding new customers. We were bootstrapped and didn’t want to take on debt to loans or investors, so customer subscriptions were our main (if only) financial lever.
We finally integrated self-serve onboarding and payments in March 2022, and in just one month we had enough new customers to change our financial runway. I look back at that moment and wonder how much earlier we could have integrated self-serve setup and payments - a couple of months, a year even?
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
On the whole, our happiest customers are those that we have personally spent time with, whether that is in onboarding, support, or asking for their feedback.
I love talking to our customers and hearing how Metro Retro has improved their team meetings. They're also not short on ideas and feedback on how we can improve!
We still don’t do much proper marketing to attract new customers, but that is changing. We will be testing a few new channels soon - like content marketing and partnerships. We have been lucky that word of mouth is such a huge source of traffic for us, meaning we’ve been able to focus on getting the product experience right, which we believe is the biggest factor in retaining customers. People genuinely love Metro Retro and are still telling their friends and colleagues about us!
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Well, we are profitable, that was the main financial goal from the start - to build a product and business that we like working on each day. We’re now thinking about how we reinvest back into the business: hiring, marketing, advertising, etc.
Our next steps are to solidify our positioning as the best collaboration tool for software teams. A customer recently described Metro Retro as “the state-of-the-art tool for retrospectives”, but we want people to be saying that for all their meetings.
While we’re starting off as a tool for software teams, it is highly likely that we will expand to other areas in time. Metro Retro will be a fun place to work with your colleagues regardless of your task, job role, or industry.
We’re also looking at how we can build better tools for our power users - like professional facilitators, agile coaches, and scrum masters. They continually introduce Metro Retro to new groups of people, so it makes sense to listen carefully to what they need!
Unlike a lot of startups, we didn’t build our product just to sell it in five years. We like making software and we work well together. This is our foreseeable future. We’re expanding the team this year, starting with a full-stack developer and a part-time marketer.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
There’s no getting away from it, we were extremely lucky with our timing, like many similar tools during the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote work was already becoming a practice, especially in the Tech industry, but the pandemic changed the world’s remote working needs overnight.
It didn’t feel right to celebrate or enjoy our success during Covid, but I did appreciate it when customers told us how much Metro Retro helped their teams connect.
We try to be super personal with our customers. We’re transparent that we’re just three founders, with two of us working full-time on Metro Retro. Many customers love that they can talk directly to us, the Founders, so I’m going to keep that going as long as possible.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We use Intercom for live support chat. I handle all customer support queries. It means I can respond quickly to any issues and use the opportunity to talk with our users.
We’re a remote team, and we've found Pop App great for screen-sharing while we're designing or making product decisions. You can control each other’s mouse directly, or just doodle on the other person’s screen.
Obviously, we use Metro Retro every day to plan, brainstorm, design, and organize our work. It's a collaborative canvas so most tasks can be done in it. It's great for "dog-fooding" your own product. In fact, in our analytics, I have the highest usage of all Metro Retro users. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not!?
The Google Suite is kinda boring to mention but is essential to a business - you can run pretty much any process with just Gmail, Google Docs, and Sheets.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I think I’ve listened to every episode of the Art of Product podcast over the years, even before joining Metro Retro. In a similar vein, I’ve also enjoyed listening to the Out of Beta podcast, as the hosts were at a similar startup stage to us. Both podcasts are the same format where two friends talk about what happened in their businesses over the last week.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
- Get involved in communities and ask for help when you need it. Other Founders will have struggled with your problem and are usually happy to share how they solved it. Don't just ask for help, but show in detail what you have tried and thought about already, and what exactly you're stuck with.
- Get over any fear or nervousness you may have and just “do the thing”. To be honest, I still have to tell myself this every day, 3 years on.
- Consider finding a Mentor. We have one who we talk to occasionally and has helped as a sounding board, especially for business direction.
- Lastly, there will be a million avenues and opportunities you could follow - but you will have to say no to most of them. Pick well!
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes, we are looking for two roles currently, get in touch if you can bring something to the team:
A Full-stack developer to help us deliver our roadmap
A part-time SaaS marketer to help us position and build awareness of Metro Retro.
We're also on the lookout for template creators - people who can help us build and promote great content like meeting and workshop templates.
Where can we go to learn more?
- Our website
- Metro Retro on Linkedin
- Jamie on Linkedin
- Steve on Linkedin
- Lisa on Linkedin
- Jamie on Twitter
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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