Peony

Yesterday me and my co-founder sat down for a heart to heart conversation about what we learnt the most from scaling our startup https://www.peony.ink/, we finally had the time to relax a bit as summer tends to be a bit slower and also we are profitably scaling the business. We are currently at nearly 7,000 users, but I want to answer something that we've got asked a lot in the recent few months, which is about our explosive growth, especially given that we started working on things back in 2021 but nothing came through until we launched Peony data room: "What made it work finally?"

That's honestly one of the toughest question to answer, but I figured I would love to write about it regardless in case if it could help other founders who are in the mud right now, looking for inspirations and tips.

How we found the idea:

1. I was in finance and I didn't know what the difference between most of the data room providers are, and in finnace you are trained to behave like your herd, so for a long time the idea of having a better VDR was just hidden somewhere in my head. It wasn't until a catch up with a old banker friend that made me realize perhaps we should re-examine the field.

2. We spoke with every major provider in the space, and realized we didn't enjoy the entire onboarding process for any of them --- yes that's right, as a junior back in my early days, I hated using VDR.

3. There goes the idea of launching Peony

How we went from 0 to 10 users:

1. This is the hardest part of the entire journey usually, but luckily this time, most of my old finance connections were willing to give it a shot (I was warming up the idea to them for a while), unfortunately I screwed up my first 4 demos in a straight row and got some of the less close friends telling me they will try it later haha. But I'm very grateful for all of them regardless, they pointed me to the right directions about who actually needs this. I was able to get my first 6 customers here

2. I then cold-called roughly 90~ folks and 3 were down to meet, none converted but everyone introduced me to at least 2 people who are willing to try, and that's how we hit the first 10 users.

Scaling it from 10 to 100 users:

1. This part's focus was on building out the product to be more usable, honestly, we had a bad launch, but that doesn't matter, a launch is a launch, you just gotta put your thing out there for people to judge.

2. As it turns out, we nailed one function really really well, our gated permission workflow is easier to set up than all the other data rooms on the market, and that became a word of mouth engine.

3. Launch on Product Hunt

4. Outreach on twitter

From 100 to 1000 users:

1. We started to do blogs on our site, comparison posts with others, we were very honest about our limitations, looking back we could have been more aggressive on positioning but also this made our first 1,000 users relatively sticky, because we were doing filtering through being honest

2. We posted a lot about how to do xyz with our product, which initially was made for customer support purpose, but they did turn into acquisition engine as well.

3. We started to post about our journey, although not all that frequent, we did get some folks who are willing to give it a try, and the long tail effects from them are tremendous.

4. We leveraged our existing user base and called up 60% of them for more introductions, yep, old fashioned, but it works.

From 1000 to 2,000 users:

1. Our growth here slowed down a bit, partly due to seasonality (this was around December last year), and partly due to how our engineering capability were struggling to keep up.

2. We set up posthog, mixpanel etc to be more analytical about our growth, we also checked our traffic frequently on Semrush to ensure we are keeping track of everything that's happening, we looked for terms that we are performing well and doubled down.

3. Make pricing really clear and make onboarding simple --- this has always been our dream, and we nailed it around this period, I believe it helped to offset part of the slow growth of seasonality here too.

I think the growth from 2,000 to 7,000 customers deserve its own post as we've adopted a different strategy since, I'll save that for another time.