This founder grew his product to $6M ARR by taking advantage of being small

Elliot Boucher started building at the age of 10 and had a 6-figure e-commerce business by the time he was 18. Then, he decided to build something more sustainable and built a SaaS to fix a problem in a low-tech space.

Now, Edusign is bringing in over $6M ARR.

Here's Elliot on how he did it. 👇

From first dollar to $6M ARR

I started hacking stuff online when I was 10. By 12, I made my first euro. By 18, I had over 100k in monthly revenue in e-commerce.

Then, I went to a business school and realized I wanted to build something that added value to the world. Something that could last. And something that would allow me to travel. At the time, almost 10 years ago, I was following Indie Hackers, listening to Tim Ferriss, and visiting NomadList. That's when I decided I was going to build a SaaS.

After talking about my ideas and problems with pretty much everyone I knew, I stumbled onto a nice problem to solve: Attendance tracking.

We used to have a piece of paper that we needed to sign twice per day. It was a real pain for everyone involved: students, teachers, and the admin. So I convinced another student, who would become my cofounder, to start building a small tool to solve that issue.

Fast forward to today, Edusign is a student experience platform. We provide higher education institutions with a "super app" that:

• Improves student experience and centralizes tools

• Reduces support and admin workload

• Improves company image and acquisition

We're currently bringing in over $6M ARR.

Catching up with leads

I started with a lot — and I mean a LOT — of user interviews.

Attendance tracking sounds very simple, but I quickly realized the problem was much more complicated than it seemed.

We didn't sell digitization, for example, but an assurance that schools would get their funding. Then the time-saving aspect became the most important value proposition.

So after dozens of interviews and a clear positioning and business model defined, I started to build an SEO-optimized website. For two main reasons:

• My competition wasn't great at it

• I knew I wasn't bad at it, given my previous experiences

After a few weeks, we started receiving 20+ leads per day. The sales side was "easy" at the beginning, when it came to acquisition. The tricky part was making the product follow.

So we tried to stick to the core value of our product and built fast with constant customer feedback.

I believe two things helped us quite a bit in the beginning:

• The user experience was always considered. You can always make the UX better, but it "just" has to be way better than the alternatives. Which wasn't that hard in our vertical.

• The support response was insane. I poured so many hours responding live to clients and taking calls. Literally working more than 14 hours per day for the first few months. I should have hired faster.

Fun fact: We had so many bugs. So many. But people were always giving us a great NPS score because we were human about it. That's the main thing I would highlight for Indie Hackers. You only have that strength as a very small team. Our NPS score never reached that peak again.

Mistakes were made

So many challenges... Feels like we encountered them all, and yet new ones always come :')

At the beginning, managing the quick growth while building the product and the team was definitely super hard. We had to learn everything on the fly and made many mistakes.

• We built features we shouldn't have.

• We hired people that weren't a fit.

• We focused on things that didn't matter and forgot some that were important.

But we survived, so far!

In retrospect, it's easy to want to change the past, but we didn't know 10% of what we know today, so I don't know if changing anything would have been better. My opinion is that you should give it your best shot, at least to get the ball rolling.

That being said, some things I would have done differently:

• Hire a bit faster when growth is truly kicking. Take a bit more risk.

• Hire more senior people faster, as soon as you have the money for it.

• Do not add new product lines too soon. Even 1m ARR wasn't enough, we should have scaled what we had, and maybe integrated other services rather than building them ourselves.

Unexpected advantages

Being small is the greatest gift indie hackers have. I loved being able to align the whole business without having to turn a 50-person boat, which takes more time.

Some things that helped:

• Being very close to the user. Literally inside a classroom. Talking with 3000+ people the first year (yes, really).

• Having some strong tech/startup fundamentals. I read a lot and met experts. And I also focused on just-in-time learning, which helped to make hard decisions with confidence.

• Doing things that don't scale. Yes, Paul Graham is very right in my opinion. Customer happiness compounds, and looking for scale at the beginning isn't always the best way to do things.

A marketing mix

Here's a rough spread of our growth channels:

• SEO: This has been our biggest growth channel since the beginning. It started as 95% of our acquisition for months and declined over time with more and more referrals coming in. Now, it's about 40-50%.

• SEA (advertising): 2-5%

• Events and webinars: 5% — We've invested in some and still do, without pushing too hard.

• Outbound: 2-5% at the beginning. Growing now to 20%.

• Partners: 15% — the best partners are natural, but positioning is important here!

Here are a few other small things that helped a lot:

• Email nurturing sequences

• A good website

• A different business model at the beginning (on demand and no subscription)

• Being nice and open — always a good strategy imo.

Revenue growth

We use a SaaS model and charge a subscription based on features and volume, per student.

Revenue growth happened naturally as we made incremental improvements. But we had a few big jumps:

• We decided to add new products/features to sell - Account Managers are useful to upsell here.

• Shifted focus to higher education and hired a sales team for enterprise deals and tender offers.

• Acquired a company called AppScho, which grew our revenue a bit as well!

• And we are currently expanding internationally with a presence in LATAM mostly, but also Spain, Italy, or the USA.

Tech stack

Here's our tech stack:

• Node.js, TypeScript

• Angular (+ Ionic for mobile)

• MySQL

• PostgreSQL for statistics

• Anthropic & WorkflowAI for AI features (changing soon)

• GitHub & AWS (CloudFront, CloudWatch, Elastic, ...)

The indie hacker advantage

Here's my advice.

Talk to users and potential clients — I'm not talking about 10 of them. I'm talking about 100+.

Look for friction points in what they do. DO NOT try to sell right away.

Be nice, do things that don't scale, and build a first simple solution fast, even if you need to start from scratch again after you prove that it works.

Finally, use the asset you have that big companies don't: human interactions, time, and empathy.

What's next?

I'd love to see Edusign being used by 10m+ students every month worldwide.

Besides that, the goals are a bit more personal. Trying to be a business owner and not an employee in my own company, while having some fun building stuff!

I'm a very lucky man who has pretty much everything I need. And that has nothing to do with money — I'm not liquid rich yet.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit edusign.com