Our Email Signature SaaS Makes $700K/Year Using SEO
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi All! My name is Vol and I’m CEO of Solva, a multiproduct company that has created Newoldstamp(acquired by BlackPearl Group in 2022), owns MySignature (acquired by us in 2019), and is the creator of Cheqmark.
I started as a founder of Newoldstamp, back in 2015 in Ukraine. That was a leap of faith as I quit my job and put all the savings I had into launching an email signature generator. Yeah, not so many people believed that I could make a living from this pretty crazy idea. Now, we are a team of almost 30 people working on three SaaS products.
Today, I’ll mention two email signature products as their paths are connected but focus on the MySignature journey in particular.
When I started Newoldstamp, I was sure that our core audience would be marketers and salespeople who actively use emails daily.
Here is one of the first versions of Newolsdtamp.
However, in the future, I’d learn that our audience went way beyond this. And we could cover more industries and professionals if we successfully support their needs.
MySignature is currently our flagship product and was acquired by me in 2019 as a business extension to Newoldstamp. This allowed us to segment audiences and better solve their problems. Newoldstamp was now targeting medium-sized businesses and small enterprises at the same time MySigature covered one-person companies and professionals from different industries.
Today MySignature is transforming from a simple email signature generator to a marketing hub for small businesses, solopreneurs, freelancers, and creators. We have over 500k users from all over the world that create millions of signatures.
MySignature currently has email signature designs, signature management automation, signature analytics, email tracking, and launching MyPage (personal page and digital business card) early in 2024.
At this point, MySignature revenue is almost $700K per year, and it is fully bootstrapped, making half of Solva's revenue in total.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Before the startup era, I worked for a TV manufacturer. Factory was established long before my birth. I joined them as a marketer and was responsible for branding as well. I worked on rebranding and bringing new and fresh brand perceptions.
As the company had lots of overseas partners, email was a crucial part of daily communication, so I wanted to incorporate standardized and branded signatures for all employees. Unfortunately, at that time, there was no solution for making it centrally. So I had to go to each computer and recreate the signature manually that was created in Word. This is what brought my initial thoughts about the email signature solution.
I had no experience with SaaS, being an entrepreneur, software development, or launching my startup. But this idea had never left my mind. After a few months of research and finding a few competitors, I understood there was a niche and opportunity. So I started asking my friends who were developers to help me create MVP for free.
That was not an easy part, as everyone thought that this idea would never lead to sustainable business. Finally, I managed to persuade one of my friends, and we created a small and extremely simple service. It was a great support and help at the starting point. With $10K in my bank account, I quit my job and started my startup journey.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
As I had no idea how to build SaaS I spent a lot of time researching competitors as well as SaaS industry leaders to get my head around. As stupid as it might sound, I didn’t bother even to ask people around if they were going to buy it. I wouldn’t recommend doing it right now, but at that moment, there were around 3 competitors with paid features, which was a positive sign for me.
It was obvious that the core of the email signature would be a design with a more creative approach. Basically, at that time, the only alternative option for creating a signature would be using Word and tables. Signatures with additional elements created that way would corrupt email clients and look bad.
That’s why I focused on building an email signature generator that had a couple of templates, the possibility to add your headshot or logo, and 4 social media icons. I had my friend develop it for free, but I had no design vision. So, one of my first expenses was hiring a freelance designer. I spent around $300 on design. There was no fancy approach, discovery calls, and deep user research. I just acted on intuition and some feedback from early users.
We tested two different approaches. At first, we created a Chrome extension, but at that time, it was hard to support and keep an eye on all Chrome updates, especially when you don’t have a full-time developer. After a couple of issues, I decided to switch to a solution that would use the generator and a simple copy-and-paste method of installation. This version was set live as an MVP for the first users and was free for a year.
SEO has stayed our major strategy for both products and remains for MySignature. We have the top 5 positions on our major keywords in Google. Our strategy is pretty straightforward. We work on building links, and great content that is optimized for Google, and working on website optimization regularly.
Describe the process of launching the business.
My low budget didn’t allow me to run paid ads, so I took SEO as a key channel. Hiring an SEO freelancer for $100 per month and inviting the first marketer to work with me part-time for free as an internship.
Our free version started generating traffic and users. As traffic grew, I added live chat so I could get constant live feedback from customers. We add small improvements based on our customer's request. At one point, I started to get questions, “It looks awesome; where can I pay?” This was a signal for me to think of hiring a developer and start actively working on the paid version.
Within the first year, we got around 30k website traffic per month with a free version. About 20% of visitors created signatures. On New Year's Eve of 2015, we finished the last adjustment, and on the 1st of January 2016, launched our paid version.
At the end of 2016, our revenue was around $5K per month. We started getting organic mentions on Forbes, The Muse, MarketingLand, and many other trustworthy resources giving me more and more confidence in my solution and SEO strategy.
I started to hire a wider team that could help me to handle a load. After having a developer on board, I hired a full-time marketer and sales/support specialist. Since that time, our team has been growing.
In 2019, when my core team and I were participating in an acceleration program from 500 Startups, I boldly decided to acquire an emerging competitor. Our MRR at that point was $25k. It was a decent growth but still not enough money for making an acquisition. So, I took out a loan to buy out MySignature.
It was a smart business decision as it allowed us to differentiate the audience and accelerate our growth. At that point, I didn’t realize how strategic this move was and how it would influence our future. I followed my intuition. I just found a new competitor and started watching it.
In a few months, they started showing pretty good results in Search and got mentions on other websites. I just felt that was the right moment to start negotiating. The process was pretty straightforward as they still were relatively small, and I had support from our mentors in 500 Startups.
One of the key lessons learned is actually that there are no rules in how you will negotiate the price. Some will tell you that you should have a 5x MRR multiplicator to calculate the price; others will tell you that it’s 3x, but honestly, it all depends on your negotiation skills. It’s just a sales process. It took us some time to do due diligence. I needed to be assured that I would be able to cover my loan as well as hire at least one person to support this project as we bought out just IP.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
At that point, we tried to satisfy two different audiences with two different problems in Newoldstamp, which led to complete failure. Professionals and teams with up to five people had been looking just for the nice signature design; a bit bigger companies wanted to have a standardized design, as well as everything automatically created and added to employees’ email clients. It seemed that our flow couldn’t support this.
That’s why I suggested my team re-position Newoldstamp as a solution for medium-sized companies and SME, leaving MySignature for small businesses and solopreneurs. We used each website as lead generation for another until 2022, when Newoldstamp became a part of BlackPearl Group.
Having two signature solutions targeting different audiences allowed us to change the pricing for Newoldstamp. We removed 1-5 user options and added two types of plans: Branding and Marketing. Branding would just cover signature management, and Marketing would provide access to banner campaigns, scheduling, and advanced analytics features.
At the same time, we kept MySignature pricing the same as it was the highest offer on the market, keeping one simple plan based on the number of users.
This change gave us an additional 27% in revenue in the first month.
MySigature’s current traffic is around 200k users per month.
SEO has stayed our major strategy for both products and remains for MySignature. We have the top 5 positions on our major keywords in Google. Our strategy is pretty straightforward. We work on building links, and great content that is optimized for Google, and working on website optimization regularly.
To provide sustainable website traffic growth, we also work on localizations and building our presence not only in English-speaking countries. Currently, we have Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and German localizations. We are constantly launching landing pages in different languages to test if we can gain traffic and acquire new customers.
Closely connected to the channel to SEO is building referrals. On one hand, it gives us the opportunity to get additional backlinks, and on another one, also traffic that converts. We actively analyze resources that bring us traffic and paid customers to build relationships and partnerships with them and similar resources.
As our solution is low check and we are bootstrapping, our focus is on profitability. We actively measure all paid-per-click campaigns and, most of the time, use them occasionally. We test different approaches for running Facebook and Instagram ads, but for MySignature payback period would be over 12 months, making this channel ineffective. We concluded that it’s ineffective for us to chase cold leads that have never been interested in email signatures. We use promotional ads only on occasions like Black Friday or similar.
We also see high effectiveness in collaborating with creators for the reviews and being mentioned in expert/industry-related newsletters. This helps to bring new users as well as build brand awareness. This channel appeared much more effective than regular paid ads.
To support our marketing campaigns, we run Google ads on our brand name. Though we are in the 1st position in all locations, our competitors enjoy bidding on our brand name. So to be on a safe site where we get all possible traffic, we support us with brand campaigns.
I push my team to actively work with retention and churn. We constantly engage with our customers providing additional values, tips, and recommendations to update their signatures and improve emails in general. More importantly, we work on new features that would give more value and interactions with our tool, for example incorporating an email tracker.
This year, we tested new lead channels and launched them on the AppSumo marketplace. We achieved pretty good results, with $48K in revenue after AppSumo took their of 70% of all sales
The best time to start was yesterday. So start today! The world is spinning fast, and most of the time, there won’t be a better moment. So if you have something in your mind, start validating it, researching, and acting.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
MySignature has been profitable since the day it became a part of our portfolio. I managed to cover my loan in less than a year with two people working on the project, and now it creates an additional budget that we use for launching new products.
Our key metrics:
- Monthly traffic: 200k users per month
- Users: 9-11K per month
- LTV: $300
- Average transaction value $79
- Churn 3%
Cost per lead: $37
MySignature users:
I feel like our audience and my team have grown from signatures. After analyzing the data and growth possibilities, I came to the conclusion that we have reached the ceiling in this niche. If we want to improve our growth metrics, we need to go beyond signatures and provide much more value for a higher price.
Our strategic decision made last year is still relevant to make MySignature more than just an email signature generator. We launched an email tracker, automation for business. 2024 will be dedicated to launching two new subproducts as well as improving existing features.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The first thing I‘ve learned is it’s not a job; it’s a lifestyle. Your startup will be in your mind 24/7, even on vacations.
I'd say that your future success would depend on the first players you hire. Make sure you don’t work with toxic people. They will influence you and other people in your team, even if there are only 3 of you. The other important thing when your team starts to grow is to hire a recruiter or HR. It will save you lots of time and will free up energy for more crucial business tasks. Not making this step was my mistake.
One of the other things I’ve learned is it's always better to start, make, and test than theorize things. Sometimes we spend too much time discussing things, but we could see actual results and stop any further discussions. This approach would allow you to move as fast as possible, leaving behind all the competitors in your and related niches.
At one point, I had so much stress because I bet on everything to have this business with 0 experience. I started looking for communities, groups, and local business clubs. It helped me a lot to build relationships and networks that can now connect me with anyone anywhere I need. If you have questions you’re not sure about, ask for advice from fellow entrepreneurs. Like Minded people, most of the time, are ready to help and support each other.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
One of the right decisions I made was to set up Intercom from the very beginning. It’s now being used by the support team, marketing team, and sales teams to engage with our users.
As we heavily rely on self-service, we track user behavior at every step of the journey. For this purpose, we rely on HotJar and Mixpanel.
To analyze website traffic, I think we have a pretty common set of tools: GA4, Search Console, Ahrefs.
My team uses Ora.pm for task management and highly relies on Slack, which has fully substituted emails for internal communication.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I enjoy Reforge. I think this is one of the best places to learn new from the best in the industry as well as get feedback from the community. You get access to enormous use cases on topics like marketing, management, and product development.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Don't listen to anyone - just start your thing. If I cared about what other people thought about my idea, I would never have started my own business.
You feel it with your guts when it’s the right thing to do, so believe in yourself.
The best time to start was yesterday. So start today! The world is spinning fast, and most of the time, there won’t be a better moment. So if you have something in your mind, start validating it, researching, and acting. The same idea comes to several people at one time, so if you don’t do it, someone else will.
There will be moments when you feel burned out, exhausted, and with no inspiration to move forward. Take a deep breath, and give yourself some days off but don’t wait for inspiration. Start with little tasks, and one by one, you’ll be engaged with what you do.
One of the marketing advice would be to invest in SEO at earlier stages. SEO remains one of the most important acquisition channels bringing warm leads who are looking for solutions to their problem. Moreover, having top positions in search will have a snowball effect.
Where can we go to learn more?
Website:
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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