Went from $100 MRR to $1500 in MRR in 4 months
Hi IH! Been running xo.capital full-time for the past 15 months. We have 7 SaaS/microSaaS companies in our portfolio (2 exits, 5 operational).
Colddm.me was the last acquisition we did in November 2022 and is the tiniest in size. It was doing less than $100 MRR in November. Currently, according to Stripe, we are at $1512 MRR... not bad :)
Our main growth tactic was creating giveaways on Twitter. I've been learning about different PLG strategies, and we decided to "give away" customer success so a user's time-to-value is a fast as possible.
Here is an example of what we gave away:
- Strategy Guide on how to generate leads on Twitter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1efnb_xB9aM88T_FltPcK2F-UEV0aogpEY-GUJiRUF1U/edit?usp=sharing
We followed these steps:
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Create something compelling to give away for free. See above. Can be a list of leads, CTAs, idk something helpful and relevant to the target audience you want to reach.
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Make people retweet and comment to get the link to the doc. I use Tweet Hunter to automate this. Basically it will auto dm people who retweet and comment the link so you don't have to do this manually.
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Hide the thing you're giving away behind a google doc so they need to request access (you get their email).
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Add the email to your email newsletter so you can try to grab them as customers later (provide value first).
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Followup/engage with each person via an email sequence or on Twitter/LinkedIn. You can give away a promo code to help with conversion.
We are going to try running something similar on LinkedIn in April to see if it creates similar traction.
Have y'all tried something like this before? If so, what were the results?
Thanks for the post! Useful info! And congrats on growing that Mrr!!
thanks so much.
Damn, I've been seeing a lot of giveaways so far in twitter. I guess it could be effective in growing communities
My growth hack in twitter was giving away personalized messages and so. Engagements were good. https://founderscafe.io/post/how-to-make-a-successful-discord-5k-mrr Thankfully, I was able to reach 5k mrr just in a discord community
100% i think that works as well. are you the founder of founderscafe? ive enjoyed reading some of the PMF related blog posts
let me know if you're interested in testing out a giveaway. we are trying to productize giveaways as a service (Trygiveaways.com).
Looks like a very useful app, although I am not a fan of giveaways, they usually attract the wrong type of customers.
Dr. Doomain... love the name. We definitely learned how to do better giveaways over time. Quality give away = quality leads/customers. What type of "wrong" customers have you seen come through?
Thanks! Freebie seekers mostly
good point. i think thats one of the main values of using these giveaways specifically for freemium/free trial models so we can push people to a free tier.
You are right and thanks for sharing this doc file here its great!
of course. thanks for the response. amazing what you've done with churnfree to get it to $200k/mo. curious to hear about some of your growth plays. have you grown via inbound or outbound or both?
I read a tweet about a month ago saying that the main way you grew it was by using the product itself.
I've just added a similar feature as you guys, but for Reddit, to my own tool and have been using it to send out messages in bulk to people on Reddit. Since you were using Colddm.me to grow itself, do you have any tips on how exactly you did that (and how I can do the same)?
mentionfunnel looks awesome! i think i came across your tool somewhere else on IH.
RE: your comments -- 100% we dog food colddm to grow and it works but like cold email, DMs work a lot better when you build a funnel and start giving valuable things away rather than selling first.
twitter has some specific suggestions to maximize deliverability and not get caught in their spam (ie. self promotion, sending links, etc.). so we are starting to build out content (the most recent one we shared on PH: https://www.producthunt.com/products/twitter-dms-library) and using that to provide value. let me know if that's helpful at all.
if you want to try to run a giveaway on twitter for mentionfunnel let me know, we are testing a giveaways-as-a-service (trygiveaways.com) and would be happy to help if you're interested.
Thanks for the reply, Danny! I've signed up on trygiveaways :)
This is a helpful post, thank you! Would you mind if I asked how much you acquired colddm.me for?
I'm guessing $9,000 based on the founder's bio stating a 90x exit. This could imply a 90x monthly recurring revenue of $100.
https://twitter.com/0xshrini/status/1593607072498663427 - this is a tweet from the original founder right after we acquired it from him.
Hope that gives you some insight but leaves a bit of mystery :) haha
Haha, cheers
That's an interesting strategy! Also Cold DM sounds like a useful app, might try it out soon.
feel free to give it a test. send me a DM or email if you end up liking it and want to get a paid account. i can get you a discount.
also, if you think the giveaway strategy could be interesting for your businesses, let me know. im testing trygiveaways.com and would love to see if we can help you. lmk.