Edusign
Online signatures for Education
Funny 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!
Our journey to 1M ARR hasn't been easy. However, I would say that we have been lucky to stumble on a good idea that could have product market fit.
Funny thing, it still feels like day one.
There is a mountain of work to do and 17 people in our team doesn't feel that much right now.
Next step : 3M ARR. The fire needs to grow !
It has been a crazy year for Edusign !
We bootstrapped the company up to 60k MRR (100k revenue last months) in 18 months.
I still believe that talking to customers is the best way to create a great product, marketing and drive more sales.
Now, we are going to raise $1,2M to try to grow even faster... I guess that the "Indie" road kinda stops here, but it has been a hell of ride. Hopefully, only the beginning.
Send a pm if you have any questions, always happy to help !
June has been a crazy month, we doubled our revenues and hit 8k.
We learned that we could aim for bigger clients and September is going to be HUGE.
We already have secured strategic partnerships, won contests and are going after big clients.
Our onboarding process and sales automation helped to scale :D
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Hey, great stuff so far, and I really enjoyed your interview on the podcast! Is there an end-of-year update that you can share?
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Hey Bonder,
I'm glad you enjoyed the podcast :)
Yes! A few months later we are around 25-30k in MRR (harder to calculate with deals on a yearly basis and a consumption-based model)
We are a team of 7 people, the demand is still crazy and we are in a perfect position to raise funds to go abroad.
The product is better and more connected, with partnerships with Microsoft in place for example.
Ping me if you have specific questions ;)
Cheers,
Elliot
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The covid-19 crisis was our rocket fuel
We have increased demand for our services since the start of the crisis... just in time when our first MVP was finished.
After many mistakes, countless hours of work and many many feedbacks we successfully sold our services to more than 150 companies.
That makes 112k emails in Mai... let's automate now !
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Great product! But weren't there already several similar products out there? How did you get your first users?
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Hey Sonibvc,
We started with a website optimized for SEO before having a product.
Some competitors were ahead of us... but we focused on having a great customer service, very reactive and close to our clients.
We built the product with them, and still do.
I believe that's how we got our first users, and the majority of the ones we have now are from word of mouth from that good customer experience + seo.Cheers !
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Would love to hear the details behind the work you’ve put in, the mistakes and the learnings :)
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Funnily enough, the mistakes aren't so much about the product but more about teamwork remotely.
We really had to learn to communicate effectively when you are in a rush mode.
Allowing some time for a videoconference every 2-3 days made the difference (before that we only found time for 1 every 1-2 weeks).- give as much details as possible to your dev when writing, this will save you time!
Marketing wise we didn't have to do anything... we just had the chance to have good SEO before that.
Sales wise, automation is key, we missed some opportunities because we forgot to automate things. However, you need to find balance, because spending time with clients is really, I mean REALLY, what can make a difference when you start.
You gain much feedback to improve your product and people recommend you because you listen.Product/dev wise, we had to learn to prioritize and deliver imperfect things. The goal is to go fast, really fast, so work, work, work and deliver. BUT, stay smart and prioritize before rushing into it, or you'll waste precious time (we sometimes did).
Finally, give your clients an amazing experience, and it will grow naturally :)
Feel free to ask questions if you want some more info!
Best,
Elliot-
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Thank you for sharing. This echos some of my own learnings from previous endeavors. One thing that I learned the hard way -- is to overcommunicate than undercommunicate when talking to developers. Just thinking "oh they'll understand" is a huge mistake. You have to literally spell everything out or it's open to interpretation - which can cost a lost a lot of time and money ;)
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11 Comments
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?
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.
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?
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.
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!
Congrats, $2m ARR is a big achievement!
How did you get to have your brand known by everyone? What was your main marketing method?
I think it's a combination of a few things :
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!
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.
Congratulations! Most of us would consider your problems as good problems to have. 100% growth YoY, crazy! Keep it up!
Definitely lucky !
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