I reached 6K people on LinkedIn and finally sold!
ATTENTION! This post contains pain, blood, sweat and tears!
Hi guys,
I am Faruk, the founder of MonitUp.com.
MonitUp is a productivity tool designed to increase employee productivity for remote and hybrid businesses. B2B SaaS is a product and I am a technical solo founder.
We started development in 2020 and I left my full-time job in February 2023. I made my first B2B sale in January 2023 and had an MRR of $350. After I started working for MonitUp full time, I thought everything would go easier and faster, but it didn't happen that way at all...
After I resigned, I was completely focused on new features as a technical founder. I realized this in February, March and April. I can't make any new sales! I decided to stop feature development and focus on sales, but there was a problem. I didn't know how to sell a B2B product. Since my income was very low, I had to find a way to sell without spending money. At the suggestion of a friend, I started sending connection requests to people on LinkedIn. Here are the details: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/b2b-sales-experiments-with-linkedin-sales-navigator-060fde3e92
Of course it didn't work as usual: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-reached-3k-people-one-by-one-but-the-sale-0-a966616cd3
In fact, I almost sold to 2 big potential customers in December, whom I also reached through LinkedIn, but due to the budget and the customer's own processes, my 2 big sales were postponed to 2024. I continued to pursue this work via LinkedIn. Here are the current numbers:
I sent connection requests to 6K people from many different countries.
3K people accepted my connection request.
I held around 35 sales meetings in total.
I made an offer to 12 prospective customers.
And finally I made 1 sale, my MRR increased from $350 to $650.
Only one sale a year! Wooww! I know that's a terrible rate! I'm looking for faster and easier ways to sell, this week I'll try Google Ads with low budgets.
Sales process steps:
1- Make the first contact.
2- Try to get a meeting.
3- Try to start a demo.
4- When the demo period ends after a month, send an offer and try to sell.
Of course, as you can imagine, it takes months for a sale to be finalized :(
I would love to hear your suggestions for me.
Now let's talk about B2C.
To test the B2C side: I launched a product called Screen Time for Windows: https://screentime.monitup.com
Screen Time for Windows is a product that allows users to track, analyze and improve their PC usage habits with AI-supported recommendations.
It does the same job as the screen time application we are familiar with on our Mac PCs or iPhones, and even does more thanks to AI suggestions. Of course, the biggest difference is that this application works for the Windows OS.
I launched a ProductHunt for this product, but it did not receive the attention I expected, I only have 1 customer using this product.
I'd love to hear your suggestions for Screen Time for Windows, too.
First of all, congrats on the sale!
There seems to be something as people buy your product. I feel like you may not have the right approach or channel yet. I'd recommend you to have a look at the Bulls Eye Framework to test out different sales channels.
Just google: bullseye marketing framework
And you find many resources about it
Thanks for the advice! This is basically what I'm doing, trying to pin-down and focus on a few platforms, instead of all platforms at once!
Hey Chris,
I've never heard of the bullseye marketing framework before. Thank you for this nice suggestion, I will look into it in detail.
Actually, what I do is try the ingredients in the outermost ring. If there are things I haven't tried yet, I'll focus on them.
Thanks.
Congrats!! Sounds like you've gone from 0 to 1 and now 1 to 2!
Have you tried the LinkedIn campaign manager to promote posts? I am just about to try it, so I am curious if you've already had experience with it. I didn't see any mention about it in your IH posts.
I have to say—seeing your journey with cold connecting on LinkedIn provides a lot of perspective. You really level set my expectations, so thank you.
It sounds like we've been traveling a similar path. I quit my job last year as well to focus 100% on my startup and as a technical founder, too, I spent 98% of the time building while working closely with a pilot client for free and I did essentially no selling. I did have 3 demos and each time took the feedback and went back to the lab. I love the lab. LOL ...thus it is time to wear a new hat.
How have you grown as a person after doing all that LinkedIn outreach? I get the feeling you were feeling as uncomfortable so-to-speak about selling as I am currently. They do say growth happens in the uncomfortable....
Hey Justin,
Yes, I used LinkedIn Ads, I had a $500 coupon gifted by Microsoft. I created an advertising campaign and burned this money in the USA. I received a total of 127 visitors, but I did not get any sales or meetings:( After this experience, I decided to do the advertising processes with an experienced agency and now I agreed with an agency for Google Ads.
I don't know the exact number, but out of these 6K people, I probably tried to reach around 1.5K people from the USA. In fact, to gain confidence, I set my location settings to the USA on LinkedIn, but I did not receive any meeting or demo requests from the USA. Afterwards, I completely changed my route to Turkey, because I could both hold meetings and make sales in Turkey. There was only one problem, Turkish companies had no money :) Hard bargaining and discounts came into play there too.
Countries with 6K people: Turkey, USA, England, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, China, Korea, Singapore. Here I just tried to test the interest, I tried to understand which countries had the most interest, and Turkey was by far the country that showed the most interest.
Time is very valuable, especially if you are a man over 38 like me, time becomes more and more valuable. Therefore, if I am on the wrong track or if the growth rates do not make me happy, I would rather quit this startup and focus on a different statup. There are much newer jobs such as artificial intelligence, and maybe I will be able to earn this money in a few days with a new job I will do here. But it's hard to know, and it's not really easy to get somewhere. It is very, very difficult to determine the right time to quit.
As a technical guy, I used to think: "Let's launch the product, the rest is easy, the product will sell itself." However, it didn't take me long to realize that this was entirely an urban legend. The real challenge is to sell the product, somehow the product can be brought to a certain point. Therefore, if you are a solo founder and you are going to sell the product, I recommend that you start selling the product as soon as possible because there is a lot more for you to learn and experience there.
Product development will never end, and even if you develop the best product in the world if you cannot sell it, there will be no reward for it. Your motivation is like a tank of fuel, you have to make it to the next gas station before you run out of motivation and money.
I had to do a lot of sales meetings and I had to learn. I asked my experienced sales friends about some of the scenarios I experienced and asked them how I should act and what I should say. And I experienced this: Only you can sell to the first customers, you are in control of all the processes and you have devoted your entire life to this business from the very beginning of the product. After your products and revenues reach a certain level, you can transfer your sales job to an expert, but no one else can find at least the first 10 customers.
Such an insightful response! Thank you, Faruk!
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As a technical guy, I used to think: "Let's launch the product, the rest is easy, the product will sell itself."
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These were my words exactly 8 months ago! 😄
All right. I'm going to swing for the fences then because if the probability of striking out is high, might as well go for it.
Hey though, replace that mention of "quitting"... with pivoting!
Haha yes I will pivot :)
However, a proper Co-founder to handle the sales side would be nice. I hope you can find it. Additionally, investors suggest me to find a co-founder. If you have a simple SaaS application, maybe you can progress as a solo founder, but it is really difficult to be a solo founder in a large project.
Y Combinator had a note in their cofounder guidelines that you shouldn't get a co-founder if you need a sales person but instead, just learn sales.
Let's say you or I brought on a co-founder for the sales side, what percentage of equity should they get? ...YC also says a co-founder should get nearly half and if you don't want to give up a large part, you're looking for an employee. ....thus employees require pay, and salaries requires sales. So sales it is!
Finally, YC also rejected me 😄
YC is right :D
This is a really good question because I've been asking myself this question lately. If I cannot get a satisfactory result from my advertising experiments, I have the idea of finding a founding partner who specializes in sales.
Here I ask myself: Would I be more interested in owning 100% of a startup making $7K ARR or 50% of a startup making $700K ARR?
Founding and co-founding partnerships are difficult tasks; if there is no big slice of cake, no one will be motivated for a long time, and it may not be sustainable.
At these levels, it might be easy to make the decision to give the co-founder a 50% stake, but imagine 10 years later your startup exits to $30M and you have to pay that co-founder $15M. It's a little creepy when you think about it like that :D
I had the experience of doing a joint business with one of my childhood friends and I cannot tell you how difficult it was and we had to terminate the business because we could not get along. So I'm quite worried about the co-founder. This job is exactly like marriage and I have been married for 14 years and I am very hesitant about the co-founder job because I know how difficult marriage is :)
Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to work for MonitUp with a really experienced sales specialist, he was helping me, we attended sales meetings together, and I got ideas from him. After a while, I realized that although he was very experienced, he was not doing anything very different from me. So he didn't have a magic stick in his hand, we couldn't sell together in the meetings we attended, and I actually made all my sales without him.
So there is no short and easy way to do this, blood, sweat and tears are waiting for you :)
I leave a short video for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX6y0Nrwa1I
I've heard the LinkedIn ads aren't the way to go these days. Something about the algo that's difficult to understand 🤷.
Man, congrats!
Thanks Austin.
Congratulations on your sale! Your site looks very polished.
Thanks for sharing your journey. I was going through the comments and found that you have a competitor with quite good MRR. Here is what I would suggest if it is commercially feasible, you could change your model to a lumpsum pricing per month instead of per user.
Example you can have for Freelancers (say 10$ or 50$) and Businesses (say 500$ MRR) with unlimited users you may cap it at size of screen captures or charge beyond a certain limit but with a different pricing model you may become competitive for certain segment of users. Your customer acquisition cost is high so a higher lumpsum price might be better.
Other suggestion which is around why of your product, monitoring of users seem like an intrusion you might want to think about how do you boost employee productivity with the exact same tool that you have. This might create more opportunities.
Thanks again for sharing your journey, Very insightful and All the best!
Hello Enthudeveloper,
Thank you for your comments. The purchasing process is actually an automatic system where you enter your credit card directly and payment is received monthly. However, the potential customers I can reach are generally not used to this method, they generally prefer to make a single payment per year. Therefore, I can give discounts for them.
My potential customers generally don't care about the price. To test this, I gave a discount of around 50% to one of my potential customers, but still no sales were made. In this scenario, I think the problem is that I cannot adequately explain the benefits of the product.
Actually, before getting to the price, the main problem I have is the problem of reaching new potential customers. Since SEO isn't working well for me, I need to do this somehow, manually or paid. After solving these problems, I think it would be better to move on to deep thoughts and tests about pricing.
My competitors are companies that are almost 20 years old and it is really difficult to compete with them.
20 year old company > 2 year old company
300 employees > a few employees
$20M ARR > $7K ARR
This is not fair at all :)
Odds are stacked against you, but doesn't that make this competition interesting?
Looks like you are in market where mostly personal sales would be required. Good thing is your customer is not price sensitive atleast not in the range you are targeting.
You might want to try following; easier for me to say than for you to do so forgive me if I am saying which will be very difficult:
7K ARR is not a small amount of revenue. I agree you need to hit higher numbers but you are already above 500$ per month which is a great sign.
All the best!
Hey Faruk! Thanks for sharing your experience and showcasing how "riding the startup wave" is about. It's great to share what a realistic startup looks like.
I really like your website as it's clear on what you are offering and how this product solves a productivity problem.
Besides LinkedIn I would also try hybrid communities and remote workers and engage with those groups as well!
Good luck.
Hey Marianna,
Thank you for your wonderful comment.
We don't have a designer or anyone to prepare content, so we try to create these in-house with low budgets. I'm so glad you liked it, thank you for your support.
Fighting without giving up, an inspiring post. Thanks Faruk!
Thanks Cem.
I think it might be that not a lot of employers want to spy on their employees.
I just did a couple of keyword searches and it doesn't seem like there is a huge market for the software you have.
employee monitoring software
1K – 10K monthly searches
medium competition
$7.38-$52.13 bid range
employee time tracking app
1K – 10K monthly searches
medium competition
$10.34-$42.83 bid range
It looks like there are more companies making employee tracking software than there are companies that want to use it.
There are clearly SOME companies wanting it, but it looks like you have some pretty heavy competition when the bid ranges are that high.
Personally, I would do some keyword search validation for a new project and build something that has a lot of monthly searches, low competition, low bid ranges.
As for sales tactics, cold outreach is great, but you should also be getting most of your conversions from a killer landing page with ads driving potential users to it.
Content marketing, posting links to that content daily on your social channels, and running ads on google and facebook should be where half of your time goes.
The other half of your time should be spent reaching out to companies with cold outreach (emails, phone calls, LinkedIn). But you don't need to set up meetings. Just call or send a quick message saying something like, 'Hey, I'm Matt and I just built this app that I think you might get value from. If you get some time please check it out. If it looks cool to you let me know and I'll get you a coupon code for 3 free months. The URL is: mycoolapp.com'. That's it. Hit send or hang up then move on to the next one. If they get back to you you can follow up with them after a week with a quick, 'hey did you get a chance to check it out? I'm totally new to this and just launched so any feedback is really appreciated. Thanks!'.
But if they don't respond to you don't contact them again for at least a month. If they don't respond to that, you can contact them again 3 months later. Then take them off your cold call list if there's still no response. There are millions and millions of businesses in the US alone.
But don't set meetings. Just direct people to your landing page and make it worth their time to check out your product by offering them something for free. And nobody is impressed with a free month. Make it 3 months or 6 months or a year even for your first few customers.
PS - Also, I would never work for a company that used tracking software on their machines. It's a super scummy practice that nobody likes. Employees should be treated like adults and with respect, not have their every move followed like they are small children.
Hey Matt,
Thank you very much for your detailed analysis.
You are really right in your predictions, most companies do not want to do this, they are worried.
Yes, I am having a hard time attracting visitors from Google. I'm thinking of trying the ad in Turkey. Here the interest in this business is a little higher and the costs are much lower, between $1 and $3. So my strategy is to increase my revenues in Turkey, further develop the product and refocus on the US that way. Establishing a Startup in Turkey is not easy, $1 = ₺32,43...
There are many competitors, and my largest competitor has 300 employees and earns $20M ARR. This is a pretty good figure for me, but I'm having a hard time selling it :( I needed to earn much more MRR for all this time and effort.
In fact, most people I meet with in sales meetings are unsure of their needs, they are curious about the product and want to listen. This reduces sales rates a lot because it is really difficult to convince these people that they need this product and perhaps many of them do not really need it. Or they don't need it enough.
I really don't understand things like content marketing, I'm a technical guy :( But until I reach a certain income, I have to do it all.
Thank you very much for your cold mail suggestions. I will try these.
I want to turn MonitUp into an application that employees will also want to use. It should be an application where both employees and employers benefit, productivity can be monitored and increased, and companies can save money. But I don't know how to do this yet. Right now I'm just trying to understand what people need.
Faruq thanks for sharing your honest journey!
Thanks Prem.
Congratulations, great achievement and thanks for sharing it.
Thanks BilikiAI.
Hello Faruk
Well first of all congrats for not giving up. What resilience.
I won't be able to provide insights for B2C strategies and Screen Time on Windows but it may seem that you have a "volume problem" for Monitup. Or that you could at least improve and automate part of your sales process.
Did you send these connection requests manually? Did you write to your leads manually? Are you only reaching out to your prospects through Linkedin?
That would be interesting to see your sales pitch as well to see what could be improved.
In any case, it seems that you are using Sales navigator, which is already a very good start. Now if your product is good enough to be sold - which seem to be the case - I would suggest increasing the number of people you reach weekly.
From Sales Navigator you could use tools to find the emails and mobile phones of your prospects. Cold emailing scales very well.
Hello Viktor,
I did all this manually and one by one. It took me months...
You can see more information about the processes through these two links in the post:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/b2b-sales-experiments-with-linkedin-sales-navigator-060fde3e92
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-reached-3k-people-one-by-one-but-the-sale-0-a966616cd3
I used a few LinkedIn tools to automate this task, but I didn't like the results.
At the same time, I used a tool that allowed me to collect the e-mails of my target audience and I tried this with approximately 200 people, I sent a few e-mails, but I gave up these methods because I did not get results.
Of course, since I have no experience in these matters, I may not have done it correctly. The best way is for someone who is an expert in this field to do this for me, but I cannot spend money on it because my income is very limited:(
Its really helpful
Thanks Aishamushtaq.