I was invited earlier this year to give a talk at MassChallenge Switzerland explaining how Gmelius managed to get its first 100k daily active users with a marketing budget close to $0.
Growing an early-stage SaaS startup is a daily challenge! As founders or team members, we constantly have to think of efficient ways to acquire users and penetrate a potentially crowded/noisy market with very scarce resources. This leads to a situation where we feel lost, confused, and anxious because of the amount of stuff we need to focus on to make it happen.
Gmelius was founded at the end of 2016 and we managed to reach our first 100k daily active users 14 months later. This was an exciting and demanding journey that I try to summarize in the below presentation by focusing on what worked and what did not.
[slideshare id=109978423&doc=growingasaasstartup-gmelius-180815125820]
If I had to pick my best decision and my worst one, those would be, respectively:
- Integrate our service with a large and fast-growing eco-system, i.e., G Suite.
- Postpone the development of a KPI dashboard for our company. More on this topic: When to build a KPI dashboard for your SaaS startup?
