VEED got to $6 million ARR without funding in under 4 years. Here are some insightful lessons from their inspiring journey.
1. Don’t quit if get rejected by Y Combinator or any other investors.
Sabba Keynejad and his co-founder got rejected by YC because they were no paying users when they started.The painful experience forced them to start charging users and it worked.
2. Take care of early adopters.
For their first 50 paid users, they took a personalized picture. Taking care of early adopters is important.You want them to root for you not for 1 month but for years and the VEED team knew that.
3. Road to 200 paid users.
Initially, VEED was not charging users. It was a free product with about 35K MAU and were growing 60% month over month.Then, they added a paid plan achieved £1,000 MRR in 6 weeks. If you can afford it, use this strategy.
4. Road to 50 000 users.
They achieve this number withOUT any marketing budget. They posted a lot in startup directories (IH, betalist, etc).They built free tools and shared it on Reddit. They also leveraged their network on LinkedIn.
5.They Used Quora.
Sabba went heavy on Quora. He achieved more than 408 000 content views with 139 answers.In the early days, answering questions in the niche of your product can be super powerful, take advantage of this because not many people use it properly.
6. They took advantage of SEO to grow.
SEO has been their main acquisition channel. They realized that the traffic from the competition was coming from SEO thanks to Web Similar.So early on, they learned SEO from scratch. Their SEO strategy is similar to Canva, with strong backlinks and many pages.
7. Launch a lot on Product Hunt.
They launched multiple times on Product Hunt. They launched guides, free products, new features and so on.All related to VEED obviously which gave VEED even more backlinks to increase the SEO ranking.
8. Launch a YouTube Channel.
When I was writing this article they had 37k subs. You might think it’s not a lot BUT for a SaaS, it’s MASSIVE.Most popular videos average 500 000 views.
9. Surround yourself with doers .
VEED’s founders took part into a London startup community. Surrounding yourself with like-minded people is essential to success.Learn from people just above you and share with people just under you.
10. Pros/cons of being an open startup
In a recent blog post, Sabba said they decided to no longer scale their growth.The main reason is that when you reach a certain ARR/MRR point, it can be detrimental when you bring too much new entrants.
TL;DR
- Don’t quit if rejected by YC.
- Take care of early adopters.
- Road to 200 paid users.
- Road to 50 000 users.
- Use Quora.
- SEO to grow.
- Launch a lot on Product Hunt.
- Launch A YouTube Channel.
- Surround yourself with doers.
- Pros/cons being an open startup.
