XO Capital
Buy and grow SaaS companies
Trying to grow one SaaS product is hard enough. We thought it would be fun and smart to buy five different SaaS companies and grow them all at the same time.
We learned really quickly it wasn't going to be a one-size-fits-all. Even though 4/5 companies are product-led growth companies, each company currently uses its own unique growth plays.
ScreenshotAPI.net currently has around 170 customers. We acquired the business in late 2020 when it was doing $543 MRR. It's currently at $5,300 in MRR (according to Stripe).
It's a single-purpose, intent-driven tool with a very clear value proposition for an equally clear pain, so I knew I couldn't go and force the issue in acquiring MORE customers. We've been working on our content/SEO strategy, so if someone needed to automate screenshots, there was a good chance they'd find us.
Therefore, I decided to dig into the existing users and customers to find opportunities to increase MRR.
We were getting new users from really cool, marquee companies, so I decided to do extremely personalized outreach to identify any potential features we could build to upsell these users at large companies. I wanted to increase the ARPU and LTV.
Here's a play we found success with for ScreenshotAPI.net:
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Setup Metabase to send daily Slack alerts for specifically non-gmail users (ie. signed up with their company email address)
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Create a custom_field in Hubspot that allows me to add "Total Number of Screenshots Taken" (product usage data that I wanted to track and also highlight in my outreach) as a variable_field in an automated email
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Add these users to the HubSpot sequence asking for feedback, feature requests, and case study/testimonials.
After doing this for about 60 days, I was able to find two specific Enterprise-y features that I could pitch as an upsell to these users at larger companies. The results were encouraging:
Within 30 days, we closed 2 customers totaling $1800 in MRR and grew the total MRR by 50%.
You can read a more in-depth breakdown of some of the numbers and learnings on our Grow and Tell newsletter: growpage.io.
Feel free to email me danny@xoxo.capital if you have questions. Obviously, every company is a little different, but if you want some help hunting for your SaaS company, let me know.
Hi everyone. My name is Danny and I'm cofounder at xo.capital.
We've been building our portfolio of companies for about 2 years. We have 7 companies in our portfolio: 2 exits and 5 currently operating. I'm currently the main "operator" for all 5 businesses, and I have an awesome team who keeps things going for each of the companies.
We recently had one of our companies on acquire.com as a seller, and it was awesome just to connect with so many people like us, trying to build a portfolio of SaaS businesses.
I enjoy being in my little home office working away quietly, but it's become apparent I need to be better about exercising my writing muscles and just communicating in general.
Shout-out to this IH community because this is where I met one of my cofounders of xo.capital several years ago and because it's humbling just to see people putting themselves out in the public.
I hope to post once a week about lessons learned, company updates, and growth experiments we are testing, so tune in if you're interested.
In the meantime, I'm preparing to launch a newsletter called "Grow and Tell". It will be a fun and insightful way for people to share lessons learned about various growth experiments for their respective companies.
If you're interested in sharing a story, email me at danny@xoxo.capital. You can see an example of what I'm going for here: https://www.growpage.io/sheet-best/. Feedback on this is welcome btw :)
Cheers,
Danny
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Thanks for sharing, Danny! If you're looking to monetise the newsletter at any point, or want to talk growth / strategy, I know a guy ;)
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Hi Danny, interested in being featured. I have a few projects I'm working on that you can see on my IndieHackers profile.
- hacksocial.ai is a chrome extension that makes it easier to give more than you get on social media with AI-assisted replies
- gpt3meter.com is a payments infrastructure platform to enable openai app developers to easily implement usage-based billing. (This is a solution I planned as I ran into problems implementing payments plans that made sense on hacksocial.ai)
- Leadgraph -- not a founder, just an advisor. An all-in-one B2B search engine to enable reps to do research on target accounts and find contact info for their prospects. Granular search based on technologies and skills.
Worthwhile to continue the conversation?
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yessir! pinging your @gmail
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