An entrepreneur who decided to drop his first 300 customers to make $6 million in revenue.

Hey Indie Hackers, what's up? I got the opportunity to interview a very interesting SaaS founder recently.

This post tells his story:

TLDR - Stefan's first 300 paying users were not his ideal customers. He decided to start from scratch but had no funds. Raised $50k from those 300 customers and used that money to fund his new idea. His company Expandi did $6 million in revenue in 6 months.

Part 1

Stefan figured one of the biggest problems of the people using lead gen and IP tracking software on their websites was to find an effective way to follow up with their website visitors.

So he made a list of prospects by scraping websites with IP tracking scripts and reached out to users with a potential solution of using LinkedIn to send follow-up messages to their website visitors.

He also approached marketing managers on LinkedIn to understand their most significant problems around follow-ups and prospecting. But...

Part 2

Stefan was testing Expandi in the Netherlands before going global.

People in the Netherlands weren't accustomed to using LinkedIn as a sales/outreach channel.

So they were spending a lot of time educating their potential market.

First, they had to educate them on using LinkedIn as an outbound channel. Then they had to educate them (and actually sell) Expandi.

That's when Stefan realized that his first 300 paying users might not be his ideal customers after all.

He'll need to change his approach.

Part 3

To get at least "some" money from the first 300 customers, Expandi gave out an annual payment offer along with helpful LinkedIn messaging templates and strategies.

60 members opted in for the annual offer, which generated $50k in revenue for Expandi.

Now they had money to test their idea global, with a better audience.

After the feedback of the first 300 customers, Stefan decided to define his ideal customer needs in a better way.

Since he was an agency owner himself, he started Expandi because:

He faced many challenges with automation tools in terms of safety

Many of those tools were not appropriate for managing multiple accounts as an agency.

So he decided to only focus on agencies and growth hackers.

Agencies and growth hackers were already managing multiple profiles using LinkedIn and automation tools.

This cut down the education burden for Expandi and made it easier for them to sell their service.

Part 4

Expandi launched globally in mid-November 2019.

There were a few things the team did pre-launch to prepare for the big event -

The Expandi team scraped a list of prospects from Facebook groups of their competitor tools.

They used tools like TexAu to convert email addresses into LinkedIn profiles.

The team then used its tool to reach out to these people on LinkedIn to build relationships and learn from each other about outreach.

The team also asked for feedback on their tool.

The feedback of these people was used to create a comparison page between Expandi and its competitors.

As a result of this "feedback sequence", Expandi got over 500 demo calls through this experiment.

The experiment was later turned into a DIY guide for those who wanted to scrape leads from Facebook Groups and reach out to their potential audience on LinkedIn.

Stefan created a list of micro-influencers talking about LinkedIn and used his tool to send out customized messages to each asking for their feedback.

Eventually, some influencers became very good friends with Stefan, which led to Expandi being backed by some popular names in the industry.

At the moment, Expandi relies on content and partnerships to grow its user base.

Expandi focuses heavily on content production and distribution. It has more than 60k unique visitors on its blog every month.

Besides that, they also have a lot of exciting affiliates and white label partnerships.

As of today, Expandi does more than $6 million in ARR (completely bootstrapped)

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