Learnings from 6 months of bottoms-up SaaS

Hey all,

Another founder reached out to me with some questions about how we've done bottoms-up growth at www.driveway.app

I thought it might be cool to open source the email exchange here. Hope it's helpful & best of luck building!

• Harrison & the Driveway team

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1. What channels did you use? (Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn posts, 1:1 email outbound, 1:1 LinkedIn outbound, etc)

We only really used Twitter. We did email outbound to friends and family, and would ask them for people they know who might be good. We tried cold emails and maybe got 1 interview out of 20 emails. We're now playing around with other communities where our ideal customer might be talking about our problems: Reddit's r/productivity, Ness Labs, wip.co, Indie Hackers.

2. How did you segment the right companies/individuals within those companies to talk to?

We asked ourselves, in our problem space, which teams and companies feel knowledge management problems the worst? And, which ones would use our product? And, where do we have some advantage? We saw cross-functional teams struggle with this, we both know product teams best, and figured a Head of Product or a Head of Engineering would have the budget to pay for our solutions. Fast-growing companies need to do a lot of knowledge sharing, once companies hit ~150 there's an executive-level conversation about knowledge management problems, and if they're tech companies they're likely to look for tech solutions. Healthcare tech companies have these problems the worst - but we realized it was too far outside our wheelhouse.

3. Did you ever send a self-serve sign up link, or ask them to hop on a call? Can you share any verbiage or templates you used?

We'd search LinkedIn for our waitlist signups to qualify whether or not they're worth interviewing. We'd email them with a subject line that included the ask "User research for Driveway?". We'd first thank them for signing up, then include something personal "I noticed you're a Product Manager", then I'd include a calendly link if they wanted to chat, "if not, no worries at all! Thanks for the support :)". Generally the shorter the email the higher the conversion. We'd use the interview to learn but also vet if we think they'd actually use the product. We allowed our waitlist to apply for March access. We manually add an onboarding tutorial to each account as a "Driveway Bot" user. We'd slow down adding orgs, or increase focus on certain orgs, if we felt we were getting diminishing returns on learning from new orgs.

4. What is ongoing communication with them like after they've signed up?

We started very high-touch. Each user had a bi-weekly meeting with us. On the off week, I would send each a personal email of what we shipped. Then we started only doing this for only important users, then we decided to add existing users to our waitlist changelog email to create one weekly email going to everyone. I didn't get many replies to the personal emails with "here's what we shipped". The bi-weekly meetings were helpful but after 2 or 3 with someone, we got diminishing returns and had more and more cancellations. We're now doing all research asynchronously over email.

5. Can you share your workflow? What is fastest?

In hindsight, we should've merged changelog email lists earlier. The trade-off is you can't say "apply for access", but sending an "apply for access" email one-off to the waitlist would've been way more efficient than the personal emails which were very time-consuming. I can't say if personal emails impacted user behavior in any way. We've gotten gifts for early users which I think is more meaningful.

6. How much time do you dedicate to this per day? Are there any goals on number of outreaches?

Sending the personal emails took about 1 day a week. We probably did >5 hrs of user research a week which ended up being too many data points for the team. I should probably be tweeting every day but Twitter is tiring. I (should) spend an hour every day posting in different communities. We didn't have any targets for outreach, we would onboard people fairly opportunistically if we thought we could learn from them - once we felt we had enough people to learn from we slowed down onboarding.

7. Have you done any testing on paid marketing or ad copy? If so, on what channels?

We tested with Google Ads for a month because we had free credits. We learned a bit about ad copy and what our CAC could be, but the channel was way more expensive than Twitter and produced leads of much lower quality - I don't think any did research with us or became users.

8. Any tools we should be considering?

If you do Google Ads I would do some SEM / keyword research - there are tools online for this that are worth a free trial for the data. Ultimately your best tool is going to be word of mouth.

9. What are key learnings?

Leverage influencers - Twitter is about impressions and signaling. The best tweets (10-30 signups) are people with a lot of followers talking about the problem and someone with a lot of followers replies check out Driveway.

10. What surprised you to the positive re: channel performance?

Google Ads has potential. Product <> channel alignment isn't necessary but can be helpful i.e. Twitter leads tend to like our product because our product kinda looks like Twitter

11. What surprised you to the negative re: channel performance?

Re: leverage influencers - it's hard to get signups replying on famous people's tweets, it's very hard to get signups just tweeting directly to your followers.