2,000,000€ ARR
by Elliot BoucherFunny to look back and see that 1 year ago we were at €1m ARR.
Even though the growth hasn't exactly been as expected, we are still a profitable company and recently achieved €2m ARR.
Outbound sales is still non existant and we need to find solutions to grow faster.
Marketing is doing fine, with a x5 growth on SEO... But we are reaching the growth limit in our niche in France and we start to feel it. Our mini brand is now known by everyone, which is not that good if we want to keep growing.
We launched new products, smart alerting systems, statistics and improved others, assiduity, documents and survey.
However, the upsell represent only 2% of our ARR, we need to be better at that game.
Churn is low, people are happy and recommand Edusign, all good on that side.
Next step is to find a way to go international OR sell more upsell.
Also, excited for our next launch with a product that includes Open AI. Stay tuned!
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Congratulations! Those are impressive numbers.
I’m very curious, because it’s not the kind of product that I would think inbound marketing would be effective for. So, your customers actually google for solutions to this problem? Are they teachers? IT department at the schools? Principals?
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Oh yes, they do Google for it ! But that's the last step.
Inbound comes in multiple forms.
Some people have heard of us many times in various content, via partners, on social media, etc, before coming to us.
Others are just bored of paper and want to find a solution directly... It depends.Moreover, Edusign has a growth flywheel where users can be new clients. It helps.
It's teachers, IT, Administrative staff, dean... It varies.
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That's amazing; congrats and thanks for sharing! What would you say was your biggest channel in acquiring users? I can imagine something of this niche would've been challenging to figure in the early days.
You mentioned going international, any rough plans for that so far?
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SEO + Recommendation (and quickly other content forms, Podcast, Webinars...)
It was actually quite "easy" in the early days and it's getting harder now, hitting the ceiling.
International is going to be tough. We are looking at different markets but struggling to find leads. We may need to go a bit "harder" for it to work. Or maybe you have contacts ? :p
PS : Swapstack looks awesome. Would have loved to be able to use it on my audience right now.
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Ha, love that SEO always remains on top! Content is definitely an amazing strategy, glad it's working out for you.
Early days definitely got you far though, amazing how it worked out! I suppose as you move, it'll have to be new channels to try and constantly experiment on. One thing that I see posted a lot is the continuous work on SEO with blog posts which seem to be quite reliable.
I see! Which markets are you looking to start with? On the smaller side, I know many of the UK's institutions don't have this kind of product, mainly because it can be expensive so they stop looking altogether, but those that do are very passionate about using it -- Westminster University is a good example. Ha, not many contacts from me but I don't think finding leads would be too difficult!
Thank you! Are you running a newsletter as well? Give us a shout if you're looking to monetise that! :)
Best of luck!
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Congrats, $2m ARR is a big achievement!
our mini brand is now known by everyone
How did you get to have your brand known by everyone? What was your main marketing method?
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I think it's a combination of a few things :
- At the start, we took as much time as needed with everyone (even small clients that paid us 1€/mo for example) -> Generate ambassador
- We create tons of content (article, webinar, podcast)
- Our brand is different from our "boring" competitors. Using yellow is intentional.
- We are human. Sounds obvious, but being friendly can be a big differentiator.
- We repeat over and over again that our customers are important. We even have a public roadmap with votes. They love it.
And of course, the product is good and useful.
There are some things that you can't really control tho. Such as your competitor's attractiveness (not great in our area) or the market size (focusing on Education helps here).
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Hope that helps!
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Thank you, Elliot, it helps!
So it's mostly about putting yourself out there whenever you can and making sure customers are treated so good that they are willing to promote you.
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Congratulations! Most of us would consider your problems as good problems to have. 100% growth YoY, crazy! Keep it up!
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Definitely lucky !
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Hey Elliot, Congrats on hitting this milestone.
We can probably help you with your upsell problem but will need more info.
How can we connect?
Feel free to DM me https://twitter.com/honeydreamss