Cloutly

After almost 2 months in the works, we finally got a 'YES' for our first, large enterprise deal: a national retail company with 75+ locations.

This is a huge milestone for us (and for me, personally) which will essentially 7x our MRR from where we are now. We're not paying ourselves yet, but this deal will give us some massive wiggle room to invest in scalable marketing efforts.

I've spent a lot of time over the past 6 months listening to the IndieHackers podcast, watching Latka interviews, watching SaaStock videos, hanging out in Facebook groups etc. trying to learn from other successful founders.

I've learned more than anything, the secret is persistence.

In 'Good to Great', Jim Collins talks about the 'Flywheel'. There's no singular thing most historically great companies point to and say, "That's what made us successful". Instead, it's the little things. A thousand little things push the flywheel forward until it all compounds and moves kinetically.

Since September, continued pushing the flywheel and forging new partnerships with marketing agencies using cold email.

We're at 20+ agency partners right now, all thanks to a cold email strategy that even I didn't predict could be so fruitful.

Wrote up a post detailing everything that went into making our cold email campaign a success, including the list building, the tools, the outreach, the copy... and it turned out THOUSANDS of marketers and salespeople from across the world really loved it!

Was featured by Lemlist for this campaign, too.

Overall: excited, hopeful, thankful.

Bring on 2021.

Hell yeah. Had some great conversations with prospects this week, which came to a peak with our first official agency partnership (which means they'll sell Cloutly to their clients, and earn a commission for doing so).

So, how did we do it?

Our go-to-market strategy had to be low-cost, or no-cost, to start. We needed to gather customer feedback, get insights on churn, and figure out what we should spend our time building and refining. To that point, I didn't want to jump into paid marketing straight away; it could have been a very expensise learning exercise.

Instead? Good ol' cold email.

Yep. It works, if you know how.

First tip: quality over quantity. Personalise your email; keep it super short; prospect, don't sell.

I sent 36 emails over 2 days which resulted in 86% open rate, 33% reply rate and 26% interested (ie: meetings booked) with agencies.

to be continued...

It's a small world. Got talking to a friend over drinks one weekend. I knew he was a developer, but what I didn't know was that he was a full-stack engineer... and a really good one!

After a few more conversations, we agreed to partner up! Statistically, this now drastically improves our chances at making this project a success, and it's been a massive motivator.

There's only so much you can do alone, and I owe it to the company and our users to find a technical co-founder who can help Cloutly grow.

My experience working with an outsourced dev agency has been mostly good (I got lucky) - and for a long time I thought we'd be fine - but one thing I came to learn is that when the server crashes on a Friday night, it's lights-out until Monday.

Expect the best, plan for the worst and prepare to be surprised.