On Building & Growing a Document Automation SaaS to $2k+/MRR

This week I'm interviewing Jacob from Paperless.io, a document automation SaaS that's currently making over $2k/MRR. He shared an awesome process of how they've used LinkedIn + email automation to get their early users. Let's get started!

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Hey, I’m Jacob - I’m one of the co-founders at Paperless.io, a document automation tool designed for small teams allowing you to create, manage, send sign & archive intelligent documents and contracts in one place. Prior to joining Paperless.io, I started my own social media automation agency, Postingheld.de, which I still run today.

What motivated you to get started?

Documents and contracts are the basis of any business. Especially in Germany. This is a huge market with the smaller business segment being undeserved. We found out that over 87% of businesses still use paper-heavy manual processes or PDFs as compared to digital tools.

Existing solutions like DocuSign & Co are focused on going upmarket and are too complex, while our solution is keeping it simple, focusing on a great user experience, speed & simplicity.

So back to our story and motivation why we got started.

Back in 2020, at our previous startup (Mankido.de), we spent hours preparing proposals, collaborating on contracts, and chasing paperwork from our clients, staff and external partners. This is time wasted you can never gain back.

Frustrated and annoyed with the mess of legacy systems, paper, and PDFs struck together with eSignatures, we decided to do something about it.

Today, while we theoretically haven’t officially launched, hundreds of early access users and businesses are already using Paperless.io to work smarter, onboard new hires easier, close deals faster, and much, much more.

What went into building the initial product?

Initially, we built the solution to scratch our own itch at Mankido.de and in practice, we were our first customer. We used (and still do use) our own API to integrate Paperless.io into our CRM and existing applications and it’s such a game-changer for our own organization.

Only when some of our clients complimented us on the great experience signing digital documents (no PDFs) on their mobile, we thought about the opportunity to take this to market, and later in 2020, we finally did.

How have you attracted users and grown Paperless?

Our first channel was cold email outreach. We created a pretty incredible process of finding leads on LinkedIn, enriching data via a personal assistant and then personalizing outreach at scale. We had opening rates of up to 80%, reply rates of ~40-45% and this was just crazy. We also tested various industries and verticals to see where we could find the biggest traction.

In more detail:

We were using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build solid lists of interesting contacts. Trying different batches of leads (company size and industry) helped us come up with around 30 different target groups we were contacting.

Through Phantombuster we were exporting those contacts into an Excel File. Our personal assistant later searched for the email addresses with different tools such as Hunter.io Rocketreach, Leadleaper, Name2email, SalesQl, Signal Hire, Snovio and Clearbit.

The final Leads + email addresses were exported to a sales automation tool named Klenty.com. WIth simple A/B/C Tests we were steadily finding out which headlines and what content prompts leads to answer our emails. Four simple rules helped us achieve those crazy high numbers:

KISS - Keep it simple and stupid.
Nail the tone - Don’t smell like a salesman or marketeer
Simple yes/no CTA
Follow-Up x3

Depending on the answer and considering the Self-SignUp was not yet ready we were pushing hard for a 30 min call to generate insights and create a need/urgency. In the call, it was all about asking the right questions, but that’s worth another story :)

Initially, we let our early access users into our platform in exchange for feedback. Some of them converted to paid customers and we’re still heavily focused on interviewing and speaking with these early adopters to really nail our positioning, find product-market-fit and determine our best customers worth focusing on.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

As a SaaS, we charge €19 - 24 per month, per user for our business plan which includes all of our features as well as unlimited documents & unlimited templates. We’ll be pursuing a Product-Led go-to-market strategy and offer a 30-days free trial during which users can get to know the product and experience the value.

What are your goals for the future?

APIs, integrations & automation is what our customers want, so we will heavily focus on allowing users to integrate Paperless.io into any workflow or business process. For example, we see that sales teams start their processes for document signing not in Paperless.io, but in their CRM. HR people, on the other hand, use HR software. So it makes total sense for us to build integrations and offer a developer-friendly, well-documented API for anyone to use.

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

We’d probably focus on niching down even further and really investing time into customer research and development. This part of any go-to-market strategy is absolutely essential. It’s about really understanding undeserved needs and solving their pain. Build an Aspirin (painkiller), not a Vitamin (supplement) is what they say and I totally agree with this.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Speaking with customers and understanding their Jobs to Be Done has been the most helpful and advantageous thing we’ve started doing.

Where can we go to learn more?

You can connect with me at any time either here on Indie Hackers or via LinkedIn. And then, if you want to learn more about Paperless, you can go here.