S4E13 – How AuthoredUp Achieved 3,000+ Paying Clients with Their Go-To-Market Strategy With Ivana Todorovic

In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, Joran interviews Ivana Todorovic, founder of AuthoredUp, a LinkedIn content creation and analytics tool. Ivana shares her journey from editing and blockchain roles to entrepreneurship. The conversation delves into founding and growing a SaaS company, covering challenges, strategies, and lessons learned.

Origin and Launch of AuthoredUp

Ivana reveals AuthoredUp’s inception in February 2022, with the beta launch following in July 2022, all bootstrapped. The product quickly gained traction, amassing over 3,000 paid customers and achieving 500K in ARR without offering services.

AuthoredUp’s Mission and Goals

AuthoredUp aims to empower individuals in enhancing their LinkedIn presence through effective content creation. Ivana targets helping over 10,000 users and experimenting with machine learning to enhance user experience.

The Journey to Entrepreneurship

Influenced by her entrepreneurial father, Ivana transitioned through startup roles before pursuing her own ventures. Despite a past startup’s failure, she drew invaluable lessons for AuthoredUp.

The Importance of Customer Focus

Understanding the ideal customer profile was pivotal. Starting with an internal tool and gathering feedback from friends helped AuthoredUp refine its market fit.

The Role of Free Beta in Building a Brand

A 13-month free beta phase aided AuthoredUp’s brand building and user engagement, despite its cost and risks, crucial for early growth without extensive marketing.

Overcoming Personal and Professional Challenges

Ivana faced rebuilding challenges but learned to set short-term goals and maintain motivation, avoiding comparisons with others.

Leveraging Community and Customer Relationships

Active engagement on LinkedIn and strong customer relationships fostered AuthoredUp’s growth and product development insights.

Product-Led Growth Strategy

AuthoredUp prioritizes product excellence, continuous feature updates, and customer feedback integration for organic growth.

Balancing Work and Personal Life

Ivana’s burnout experience emphasized setting boundaries and delegating non-core tasks to maintain focus.

The Role of AI and Machine Learning

AuthoredUp integrates AI for features like optimal posting times, enhancing user content creation without generating posts entirely.

Future Plans and Scaling

Scaling efforts target SMBs with tailored features and annual plans to boost revenue and reinvest in growth.

Lessons Learned and Advice for Founders

Ivana advises niche focus, strong customer relationships, and solving genuine pain points for sustained growth.

The Importance of Continuous Learning

Podcasts aid Ivana’s learning, ensuring informed decisions and staying competitive.

Ivana Todorovic’s journey provides insights into SaaS growth, focusing on ICP understanding, customer relationships, community support, and product-led strategies. Persistence and customer value drive long-term success in SaaS ventures.

Key Timecodes

• (0:52) – Joran introduces Ivana Todorovic
• (1:33) – When did AuthoredUp start?
• (1:46) – Is it funded or bootstrapped?
• (1:50) – ARR and customer numbers
• (2:04) – Service vs. product revenue
• (2:25) – Number of employees
• (2:33) – Description of AuthoredUp
• (3:33) – Ivana’s goals for AuthoredUp
• (3:58) – Product and customer focus as motivation
• (5:02) – Origin of the idea for AuthoredUp
• (7:20) – Early product validation and customer feedback
• (8:21) – From 200 free users to 3,000 paying customers
• (9:28) – How to Transition from free beta to paid subscription
• (10:58) – Long development period and challenges
• (13:01) – Financial and personal challenges during development
• (15:24) – Rebuilding the product from scratch
• (16:34) – Personal reflections on the challenges faced
• (18:02) – The importance of having short-term goals
• (19:15) – Learning from mistakes in previous startups
• (20:36) – Positive customer feedback and its impact
• (22:08) – Importance of community management and support
• (26:35) – Insights on current acquisition channels
• (35:41) – Leveraging AI and machine learning in the product
• (37:14) – Advice for SaaS founders aiming for 10K MRR
• (38:03) – Strategy for scaling towards 10 million ARR

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Ivana

If you cannot meet the standards of having a tool application that works, then probably you’re going to lose clients. Also, when it comes to reputation, you will lose reputation as well. Do not compare yourself with others because at the moment when you start comparing, you are like, Look at this SaaS. They are growing 10% MRR every month. Look at me, I’m not even making X or charging X, and I need to stop, and maybe I will lose. We failed because we build a product without having in mind who our ideal customer is, how we are going to sell, how we are going to promote. You can imagine a typical story where you have a big idea, you sit and work on it for a month, 8, 9, 10, 11, I don’t know how many.

[00:00:52.640] – Joran

In today’s episode, my guest is Ivana Todorovic. Ivana is the founder of  AuthoredUp.  AuthoredUp is a LinkedIn content creation and analytics tool to boost your LinkedIn growth. Before founding  AuthoredUp, Ivana has worked in various editor roles, worked in multiple blockchain roles before it was really a hype, and co-founder Talent Kit, which is her field startup. We’re going to have some great insights from that. Next to growing  AuthoredUp, she’s also involved at the European Commission as a subject matter expert and as a partner for European projects at the Serbia Institute for Research and Development. Welcome to the show, Ivana.

[00:01:23.660] – Ivana

Thank you so much, Joran, for having me. Cheers.

[00:01:25.860] – Joran

We’re going to dive right in. I’m going to ask you some quick questions to get to know you and to get to the company. Let’s start with the company. When did you start it?

[00:01:33.350] – Ivana

It was February 2022, the first idea started. In July 2022, we launched the first version, which was the beta.

[00:01:41.940] – Joran

That’s pretty quick. We’re going to dive into that more. Are you funded or bootstrapped?

[00:01:46.600] – Ivana

Bootstrapped, fully.

[00:01:47.710] – Joran

Are you able to share anything regarding your ARR?

[00:01:50.150] – Ivana

We are not disclosing ARR, but I can share that we have more than 3,000 paid customers and that we have more than 500K in ARR.

[00:01:59.230] – Joran

Is there any Any separation between service and product, revenue, or do you even offer services?

[00:02:04.570] – Ivana

No, we don’t offer services. We are asked a lot about the services part, but right now we are only providing product as a success. Sometimes for big customers, we do a few sessions of, let’s call it services, so coaching, learning, et cetera, just to get a team of 20, 30, 50 people to use  AuthoredUp.

[00:02:25.820] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. How many employees does  AuthoredUp have?

[00:02:29.880] – Ivana

Employees.

[00:02:31.200] – Joran

And in one or two sentences, what does it do?

[00:02:33.920] – Ivana

It’s a tool that helps regular people to build their personal brands on LinkedIn through content creation.

[00:02:39.990] – Joran

I love how you… Even on the site, I think you have regular people to really go for the Nice. Is this your first real startup?

[00:02:47.540] – Ivana

No. As you said in introduction, I had one with the same co founder, by the way, and that one successfully failed. We worked on it about a year and a half, I think, and we failed.

[00:03:00.600] – Joran

We’re going to dive more into that. May I ask how old are you? Are you young?

[00:03:04.300] – Ivana

Yeah, I’m 31 and soon to be 32. Nice.

[00:03:07.760] – Joran

Have you always wanted to be an entrepreneur because this is a second startup?

[00:03:11.200] – Ivana

I’m not sure. My father was an entrepreneur. His whole life, and I was working from my 12th or 13th year. I was helping him. It was fun. But then I said economic theory. Then I got more into startups, working for others. Then I realized that I really want to start something where I will be in charge and where I’m going to take the risk. Nice.

[00:03:33.550] – Joran

Do you have an end goal defined with Authored Up?

[00:03:37.030] – Ivana

Not in a monetary sense, but I have a goal to help more than 10,000 people to build their personal brands on LinkedIn. I have the second goal is to implement specific machine learning models that I always wanted to build to help people, so to experiment a lot with new technologies, and then also to make it fun.

[00:03:58.240] – Joran

It’s really, I guess, product orientated, of course. You really want to build a good product for a lot of people which they can use. Nice. You see a lot with bootstrap companies. Is that also the thing which keeps you motivated?

[00:04:09.480] – Ivana

Yes, but also I think the biggest hype I get is when I get a customer that I don’t know. They don’t know their name. I was never in contact with them, sending me a DM or replying to some email newsletter, telling us how much we helped them and that they wouldn’t be where they are when it comes to their personal brand, new job, revenue, leads, if there wasn’t for Outered Up, and that they would fail if there wasn’t a tool like this. That really, really keeps me motivated when they share their experience and how valuable they find the tool.

[00:04:49.030] – Joran

Yeah, so really getting successful clients who love your product and almost can’t live without it. Okay, well, this is a bit of fire round, so we’re going to dive deeper now. Let’s just go to the beginning of Outered How did you came up with the idea?

[00:05:02.820] – Ivana

As I mentioned, with the first startup, how we failed. We failed because we built a product without having in mind who our ideal customer is, how we are going to sell, how we are going to promote. You can imagine a typical story where you have a big idea, you sit and work on it for months, 8, 9, 10, 11, I don’t know how many, hundreds of features, and then you realize I need people. The name is Talent Kit because we were targeting recruiting take home assessments in a recruiting process. We were looking for recruiters to try out our product for free, but just to get some awareness. We tried a few channels. Again, it was bootstrapped. Someone told us, You should start creating content on LinkedIn. My co founder is not a professional marketer. I’m not a professional marketer or salesperson, nor is he. We went to LinkedIn and we really wanted to create something that will catch attention, but we didn’t know how to do it. We got into analyzing how the best creators are doing it. But again, it wasn’t us. All of the tools were for marketing teams, different schedulers for different platforms.

[00:06:14.480] – Ivana

You can do hundred different stuff, and you really don’t know what to prioritize. After a few months of doing that and talking to people, we realized that there are some features that are important. We tried to find such tool, we couldn’t. We decided to make it happen. Yeah.

[00:06:30.870] – Joran

Is that the moment that you also dropped then a talent kit?

[00:06:34.180] – Ivana

Yes. We were thinking we had two options. One was to pivot talent kit, but that would take a lot. We were not really sure about the idea. Then on the other side, we also felt like this can be something. At least, is this helping us? What I didn’t mention is that we built a very small tool internally just to solve the problem. We provided to a few people for free to our friends. They used it and they told us, This is nice. From that moment when we realized that, Okay, this seems to be useful, maybe we can make something out of it. But we didn’t have a whole vision for the tool. We just wanted to get to the stage where we can talk to people to understand what are the pains and then to solve them.

[00:07:20.440] – Joran

Yeah, so the opposite of what you did with the other, right? Not having an ICP, a lot of features, free product. Exactly. You now went for really… I mean, you might not have fully defined your ICP, but at least a small target audience, a small set of features going on to market and then figure out what are the pain points and who is our ICP.

[00:07:40.220] – Ivana

Exactly. We even knew that the features that we had at that moment are not valuable Not a subscription. Maybe it’s a small enough, so people are willing to pay for it. It’s definitely not a subscription or maybe some lifetime deal, some very, very cheap product. But we knew that if there is an option to communicate, even if we can get to Because it was a Chrome extension. If we can get to 200 people, that was our goal, to install the extension, that would mean that potentially we can reach out to most of them, get feedback, and then from there, understand what the tool should be. This was just the ticket to get to the stage. Then we’ll need to figure out how to build a real product.

[00:08:21.090] – Joran

Going from 200 people to now 3,000 paying clients. You maybe already answered my question. Did you know from the beginning it was going to be such a success?

[00:08:29.830] – Ivana

I had no clue because I didn’t feel it is a real product at the beginning. It had only two features. Then also, I didn’t know how to charge for it. I knew that it will be a long path from the moment where we… Because when we launched, it was for free. There was no skin in the game. Anyone can install. We didn’t even have a username, password, anything like a platform, like a website. Luckily, we get a lot of traction at the beginning. We had a huge help in community where people that obviously didn’t know us liked the tool, shared it in the feed, and then the installation started, too. We got to this 200 in a few days. But again, those are just free installations, and you cannot put a number on it. It took us a lot to understand and to figure out what is the product and when we are looking to get to the real thing and put a price tag on it.

[00:09:28.730] – Joran

How did you do that? Because I think a lot of people struggle with having a need something free. People are willing to use it. Sometimes people go to App Store to do a lifetime deal or something like that, so they have at least some validation, but still nothing like an actual subscription, somebody paying on a monthly level. How did you make that transition?

[00:09:46.730] – Ivana

Well, it wasn’t a transition. It was 13 months of building. It’s not that we just got an idea and there was a product. Plus, we made a lot of decisions at the beginning that cost us time. I still believe in these values. However, it was pretty complex to build a product like how it turned out. For the moment when we shipped the free beta, it was July 2022. When we started to charge, it was August 2023. It was 13 months of development where my co founder and I are sitting in Science and Technology Park in Serbia every day, six days per week, at least, and working like 70 hours per week. It was totally insane. A lot of people were telling us that we are insane that we should start charging, we should get to AppSumo. But we felt that if we, first of all, we had word of mouth. People started to love out or they were sharing it for free. That is something that, obviously, we didn’t have any resources to pay It is totally different when you provide something for free. Then you can get, we got to influencers that had hundreds of thousands of followers talking about how to reach out to us, asking us for features.

[00:10:58.050] – Ivana

That is how you start building relationships. That is something that helped us a lot. We basically wanted to be on that wave where we are getting free marketing while we are providing a free tool. But from the one, we had really high standards for the application We were doing customer support for free. We were doing everything that we could in order to not only get feedback, but we wanted people to feel great and to get out and up to be sticky as possible. Then at some point, you start to build features and you realize that people are coming to you and telling you, You know what? I would easily pay for this. How can I pay? You helped me. I really feel I should give something back to you. It’s not okay, this is free. And that you’re like, Okay, so this seems like something… Even though you still don’t have a number, it feels like, Okay, so people really value the service that you are providing.

[00:11:57.250] – Joran

Was that 13 months? Was that the moment from the free to actually the first payment?

[00:12:03.420] – Ivana

Exactly, yes.

[00:12:04.550] – Joran

How did you survive? Because you worked so many hours. You had 30 months. It’s a really long period. Yeah.

[00:12:10.410] – Ivana

We both were working in pretty good companies. We had some consulting gigs before. We basically vaporized our savings. At some point, we were like, Okay, we need to start charging because we really want to be able to survive. We had a few things that helped us. First of all, For our talent kit, we had some benefit from our country. It’s from EU. It helped us, for example, to pay for the office and also offices subsidized. Then we really kept all our costs super low, very very low, almost no subscription, only what you really need to pay. People were willing to help us and to do some stuff, not for free, but to put a cheaper price because they knew that we were really not making anything. That is, I think, how we survived.

[00:13:01.160] – Joran

In that period, I can imagine you probably had a rock bottom moment, either, I guess, financially, personally. Can you share some of those moments and how you got out of them?

[00:13:11.620] – Ivana

Yes. About it was November, so a few months, we are in free beta. We have a few thousand free customers, and we were really looking to add more features. We were shipping new feature every few weeks, and a lot of bug fixes and improvements in the meantime. But Then we realized that we cannot grow our third up anymore. It was version 1.0. There was no way how we can make it pleasant to use and to add more features. It was very restrictive. It was only part of the LinkedIn editor. We had to come up with a totally new UX, which means that we literally have to waste 70% of to start over with a new vision, with a totally new experience, how altered up will work. New features, it was totally insane because we knew that the first version people loved that they were using it. We knew it was almost building a second product and removing the first one because you cannot scale it. We spent a few weeks trying to make it happen. In that box, we couldn’t. Then we realized, Okay, we need to redesign everything, to rebuild everything. We hoped it will take two months.

[00:14:33.240] – Ivana

It took, I think, three and a half. I remember the moment it was Christmas, Serbian Christmas, seventh of January. I’m sick, my co-founder is sick. We are almost two months trying to make it happen. We cannot out. I remember sitting here and thinking, Am I really going to get into this? It was really insane. Somehow, day by day, I was like, Okay, let’s try. We need to do it. What is the alternative? To tell them, No, we build it because it’s too complex. We tried, and luckily, that version was much better than the first one.

[00:15:07.600] – Joran

I think a lot of startups go through this. I hear almost a similar story to what we had. In our case, it actually took six months to rebuild the entire app. What advice would you give somebody who’s going through it or might have to go through it? How do you keep yourself sane during these times?

[00:15:24.090] – Ivana

Short-term goals, and do not compare yourself with others. Because at the moment when you start comparing, you are Look at this, Cess. They are growing 10% MRR every month. Look at me, I’m not even making X or charging X, and I need to stop, and maybe I will lose. If you focus on stuff that is negative, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to succeed or it will be much harder. Short term goals, try to separate tasks as much as possible and to have three things that you are going to do that day just to keep yourself sane and to feel like you did something that day. Then tomorrow, you also have another three tasks. That is what helped us because at that moment, you are working on something. Previous startup, we are two years into this, no revenue, not even a clue when we are going to start charging. If we start charging, we don’t know if we are going to make money. To just put it into the perspective, we had a pretty nice jobs before. Everything was okay. Yes, we were working, but we were satisfied. You are like, Why am I doing this to myself?

[00:16:34.610] – Ivana

People are obviously on vacations enjoying their time, and we were trying to make this happen where most of the people are feeling like you are insane. It’s hard, but you need some support. Ideally, you have a partner, a friend, family, someone, or a co founder that is going to help you and keep small tasks in mind. After a month to six, I don’t know, you will probably make something that is much better than the first version.

[00:17:01.000] – Joran

I think it’s so relatable. I think at one point when you’re so deep in and you’re rebuilding the entire app, you run into so many challenges, it’s going to affect your personal life as you mentioned. You can’t go on holiday, you can’t go out for dinner every week or every month or maybe even at all.

[00:17:17.320] – Ivana

Yes, exactly.

[00:17:19.190] – Joran

I think maybe one thing I want to add for my personal experience, we made a mistake to not put it into shorter goals. I wish we did this podcast sooner. We rebuilt the app, we took six months to do it, and we made it this monster project, which was really demotivating because we were working it in the end goal and we didn’t define any shorter goal. For the devs, it was this huge monster project on when are we actually going to deliver the end result, which you’re on care about. But we should have cut it up into smaller projects to keep everybody motivated and also myself to figure out where are we actually with this project. Was this also your biggest company challenge as in rebuilding the-I think It was the biggest personal challenge.

[00:18:02.990] – Ivana

Failing with talent kit was also extremely challenging because you invested your time, your energy. Again, I mentioned that you have five, six, seven years of experience already in the industry. You didn’t expect that you’re going to make so many failures. To be honest, I remember that I was not making jokes, but I was reading Twitter, we were lurking, and it was super funny when I see that founders are saying I didn’t talk to customers. I failed, or I didn’t know how to set up something. I was like, Yeah, really? This is so newbie moment. If I were at your place, I knew what I would do. Well, it wasn’t for real, Obviously. I didn’t talk to customers. I developed tens, hundreds of features. Some of them are so funny that we are right now making jokes about them. It’s totally different when you are in the chair, when you are taking the risk, and when it is also your ego involved, when you need to go out and say, You know what? What I’ve worked for a year, it’s not going to happen. That was also super challenging. But yes, then this without it up.

[00:19:15.520] – Ivana

I don’t know what was more because they were not in the same time period. But yes, those were the two moments where I felt like I failed.

[00:19:23.170] – Joran

I can imagine if you have so much experience, you think that you know it all and then you make the common mistakes Yeah, that’s insane.

[00:19:31.590] – Ivana

How can that happen to you? That’s the question. Even how this mistake that you’ve read so much of it. Look at this book. You cannot see. I have a whole library here. I’ve read so much. I was a nerdy student. I was very precise and specific and thought that I will be much better than I would say a typical startup founder, but I wasn’t.

[00:19:58.200] – Joran

Today, how much are you reading right now?

[00:20:00.260] – Ivana

Not enough. Right now, I’m coming back to reading, but right now, I’m more into semi-scientific books. I’m helping me to understand the AI, for example, or where the world is going, so stuff like that.

[00:20:15.630] – Reditus Ad

Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile? At Reditus, we just launched a second site of the marketplace, which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates which have access to the audience you’re looking We do this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getreditus.com.

[00:20:36.780] – Joran

Let’s talk about positive things. Talk about the growth of Otterdop. So 3,000-ish paying clients right now. If we just go to your go-to-market, are there certain things you’ve done to grow to where you are right now, which you can talk about?

[00:20:51.600] – Ivana

Yeah. I think the main pillar, the main strategy was this beta that was super expensive when you count with salaries and everything that we had to do for 13 months. About 18 months, we decided to have zero revenues because we wanted to build a brand. That’s what really helped us to spread because we didn’t have connections, we didn’t have We have specific position and we were not LinkedIn influencers, so it was pretty hard to get from the stage zero where you are a regular person trying to create something on LinkedIn to getting access to people that really know what they are doing and that are for 10 or 15 years creators on LinkedIn. I think that that free beta really helped us a lot. I’m not saying that is a great strategy. You don’t know whether you have a product market fit. It’s expensive. If you don’t have investors as we did Even if you have investors, are they going to be willing to support such strategy? There are a lot of stuff going there, but that helped us a lot. Also, that helped us to talk to people and to build relationships. The second thing that is still helping us a lot is building relationships with our customers without trying to put in a sense where on LinkedIn, it’s easy.

[00:22:08.430] – Ivana

You have a person that has 20,000 followers and someone with 500 followers. But you cannot really say that the first one is better than the second one in anything. You need to get into understanding who they are and building relationships. The third thing that a lot about our values is that we believe as a company, you really need to make a great product. Even though a lot of SaaS founders are like, just ship it, whatever, try to understand what is going on. Yes, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you can ship something that is semi-broken and people would use it. But right now, especially in our industry, the market is super competitive and people have expectations. People are using Canva, ClickUp, HubSpot, using tools that have, first of all, brand, a lot of features, and are working pretty well. If you cannot meet the standards of having a tool application that works, then probably you’re going to lose clients. Also, when it comes to reputation, you will lose reputation as well. Still, we keep that one of our priorities. Every day we are checking. Obviously, we have a customer success team, but we are checking if there are any bugs.

[00:23:25.790] – Ivana

We are trying to fix them immediately to, first of all, understand what type of the bug Is it all an issue or misunderstanding? But if our customer doesn’t know how to do X, that is our problem. It’s not their problem. We are trying to make improvements all the time because what is already there on the market when you install they are all the other app, it should be available at any time to you. Then additional features, they are great. We are working on them, obviously, but you cannot prioritize only new features to get to new customers while telling your existing customers, Well, I don’t anymore because you are already in. That is something that I’ve realized a lot of founders, especially when investors are pushing them, are doing, we have the opportunity not to behave like that.

[00:24:11.290] – Joran

Is it also because you guys work a lot with influencers? Or if you are messing up the product, then what currently is your strength could also become your weakness? Yes.

[00:24:21.850] – Ivana

When you say working with influencers, we never paid an influencer to promote Outered Up. Even when we started to charge, they are still helping us. Obviously, we have an affiliate program, but the biggest influencers, they are not even looking for an affiliate program. They are like, I like the tool, and I’m going to tell it. I’m going to say it. That’s really nice because when you are invested, they also feel they should support you. However, again, that makes it even harder. Because you are not putting your money and here is X, give me one LinkedIn post, then your reputation is really at risk every day. When I get a DM, even if it is from a non-influencer, I’m really trying to resolve it immediately because if that person has an issue, probably there are more people with the same problem.

[00:25:14.380] – Joran

At the moment, you have 3,000 paid clients. I think you said four members on the team right now? Yeah.

[00:25:20.180] – Ivana

When we are talking only about employees, I am not counting on consultants. We have a lot of consultants. I think that right now more than five are involved. Plus, we have a lot of people that are helping us, not as consultants on a retainer, but here and there jumping in when we need some help.

[00:25:39.240] – Joran

Because you mentioned also you have a customer success team. Is that then part of those four employees or is it an outside team?

[00:25:45.710] – Ivana

No, we have the inside team, and then we also have some help from the outside. But when I say customer success team, it’s literally the guy who is a customer success manager. Then my co founder, me, and our developer, like Vania. We are a team, plus other people because I’m all the time in Freshdesk. That’s the tool that you’re using, checking the tickets, the team. It’s funny because I think in our channel that’s called Support, you have the most activity in all channels that we have.

[00:26:20.580] – Joran

Nice. I love it. Everybody is still in support. When we talk about your go-to-market, have you made any critical decisions? If you’d done X, Y, Z, wouldn’t be here. I think the beta is definitely one. Are there any other moments in the journey until so far?

[00:26:35.770] – Ivana

Not something that I can point out, like, Okay, here is the thing. But being consistent in helping people. Beta is one part. You give a product, you ship it and you try to make it work. Then the second part is being there for the community. I think that community management, basically being on LinkedIn and talking to people, saying, I apologize, or, This is not how Outered Up should work. We are going to get into it. Or, Thank you so much for mentioning us. Or sharing insights because we are doing a lot of research, so we can share something that they may find insightful and they can use. Helping but being consistent with that, you also, again, you get a lot of back because people then start to tag you. Even if they are not your customers, they ask you. They even tag Outered Up, not me personally, because you’re also trying to have Outered Up as a brand, not only to build personal brands.

[00:27:33.370] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. Are you able to tell anything regarding your current acquisition channels? What is working well?

[00:27:40.080] – Ivana

Yeah, it’s product-led. We are basically trying to make a great product. We are trying to ship new features. We have an open roadmap. Anyone can vote who is our customer, suggest a feature, and we are looking at that all the time and our customer support. Then we’re basically building what people want or trying to fix the process. That’s the main thing, I would say, right now. Then, again, community management, where we are active on LinkedIn as Outered Up, but also, I would say, my personal brand. I wasn’t posting for some time, and right now I’m back and we already see positive results when it comes to free trials and it comes to upgrades a lot and retention, getting people not to cancel or will get back to Outered Up after a few of not paying and not posting on LinkedIn.

[00:28:33.020] – Joran

Yeah, might make sense. If they start following you, then they see you posting, then they’re like, Oh, I actually have to pick it up myself again as well.

[00:28:40.590] – Ivana

Yeah, and I’m posting about LinkedIn Insights because we have been working on analysis. We are doing it almost weekly. It depends how the trends are going. We know whether impressions are down, which content types perform the best, what features LinkedIn is building, what is coming. A lot of stuff that is super hard to understand. Plus on that number of profiles and millions of posts that we have access to, we also have an opportunity to build machine learning models. We have models, we have statistics, we use it heavily to understand what is important. Then I can also share that. Then it’s not my gut feeling. It’s not an influencer said, Why? It’s not based on my 100 posts or based on my few clients. It’s based on 3, 4, 5, 10,000 profiles, 2 million posts. This is how something performs. That is when I think this is the biggest external analysis of how LinkedIn feed works. I don’t know any company that is doing it more deeper than we do. Obviously, LinkedIn has much more insights. They know how algorithm works, but they don’t want to share. We are trying to figure it out based on the data set that we have access to.

[00:30:01.240] – Ivana

Love it.

[00:30:01.850] – Joran

Well, definitely, we’re going to link a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can start following you. Are you using any processes, frameworks you learned from any of those books or elsewhere?

[00:30:12.400] – Ivana

When it comes to startups, I’m listening to podcasts, to be honest. I read typical startup books, right? You need to read Peter Thiel myth and stuff like that. But I’m listening a lot to podcast because I’m commuting and I like to spend these 30 minutes in every direction listening to podcasts, listening to other founders, and then also listening to specific topics that I’m interested. When I was starting to think about our affiliate program, I think I listened to 10-20 different episodes of different podcasts, figuring out what really works, what doesn’t, for which industry, understanding the concepts, so I can, first of all, make a decision. Then also when I start, I’m already better than the beginner because even though I don’t have an experience, I at least listen to a lot of successful or less successful stories, and I know where to look at.

[00:31:09.270] – Joran

That’s interesting. When you go into a new acquisition channel or something you don’t know, you listen to a lot of podcasts educate yourself, and then you also become a subject matter expert. As soon as you start talking to tools, at least you don’t have to go to the basics and you can- Yeah, at least I know how to ask questions, and at least I know what is important and what are the expectations When it comes to affiliate program, I learned pretty fast that after one, two, three months, you cannot expect much.

[00:31:39.020] – Ivana

That you really need at least six to see whether that channel works for you. If you obviously follow some steps, I’m trying to figure out what is realistic. I don’t stop the program before maybe it can skyrocket. Maybe it won’t, but maybe before it grows. Or if I don’t wait too much resources and time figuring it out, if I can figure it out pretty fast, I don’t need six months. Nice.

[00:32:08.150] – Joran

I love the process. I’m happy that with this educated decision, you actually came to read it. I’m happy about that. When we talk about Altered Up, is there anything or maybe in your entire startup journey, anything you have regret on which you haven’t done or you didn’t do sooner?

[00:32:24.000] – Ivana

First of all, I was working too much. You can’t work too much because you feel like, especially at the beginning, I felt all the time that I need to be there. I need to be active on LinkedIn, and I had almost a burnout. Then I stopped, for example, creating content on LinkedIn because it was just too much. I didn’t know how to make my life outside of checking LinkedIn notifications. That is one part. The second part is I didn’t start to outsource many things. I was trying a lot of stuff by myself, and I think that I I also wasted time because I didn’t get a consultant or get help. I was trying to figure it out by myself. Obviously, I learned a lot, but at that moment, I don’t think that was a good decision. It’s much better to focus on what you are really good at while trying to figure out some other stuff through working with consultant, getting a SAS, or any other type of help. For example, I was doing some designs and I’m pretty bad at designing. You can see I’m designing my LinkedIn posts. They are pretty funny, but I don’t expect people to follow me because I know how to design something.

[00:33:37.070] – Ivana

However, for example, for my blog, I would spend a few hours trying to make a background image, which is totally insane. I could pay someone, and first of all, the quality would be much higher. I had enough to pay for 10 background images for 10 blog posts, and that is basically the only thing that I really needed. I had to learn that, unfortunately, by doing it, but I hope that will think, what is the return on investment when it comes to doing specific tasks?

[00:34:06.100] – Joran

How did you fix your LinkedIn issue? Did you turn off the notifications? Deleted the app?

[00:34:10.800] – Ivana

I didn’t delete the app because I still had to be active. I still had to talk to people in DMs and to respond. But one thing that I realized, at that moment, I had to stop posting. It was just too much. Because it’s not about posting when you are, I don’t say popular, but you have a personal brand as I do, and you also You want to be very polite. Then you also want to reply to every comment, get into discussions, and you also want to do it as fast as possible. That means after I would post, I would get who knows how many comments It’s like 30, 50. If I respond to all of them, that’s an hour and a half of my time. If someone responds, again, if sometimes LinkedIn notifications don’t work, I don’t get notifications. I feel like, Oh, I should have responded. I didn’t. I feel bad about it. There is a lot of mental process that is happening. Then I realized right now when I’m back that I should have been there for X minutes per day, try to get into discussions, but I cannot expect from anyone else, also I cannot expect that from me, to be able to get every comment, to respond to every message, to every tag, because it’s not really how the system works.

[00:35:27.950] – Joran

I think they had a buck in a long time that you just didn’t receive the notification. I can definitely feel the stress. Final question before we dive into last question. How do you currently leverage new technologies like AI, machine learning?

[00:35:41.490] – Ivana

When it comes to machine learning, we build and we plan to build even more internal models. Altered Up, by the way, doesn’t have a GPT wrapper, so you cannot go to Altered Up, click a button and get a LinkedIn post. It’s not how it works. Our philosophy is basically, you are an expert, you have an idea, and you’ll do everything to help you communicate what you already have in mind, but please keep your tone and voice. Having that in mind, we are right now implementing for the next version a different machine learning and AI models, but they won’t do full text generation. They will, for example, help you to decide what is the best time to post for you, help you to search through embeddings, different types of posts so you can get an inspiration, suggest you a hook or and then based on enough text that you already put there. Basically, our idea is to have different small AI and ML tools that are supporting you rather than trying to take over the content generation. Because in full honesty, it is super simple to build a tool where you press a button and get a LinkedIn post.

[00:36:54.570] – Ivana

It is much harder to do something that is more precise and specific and personalized for each customer.

[00:37:01.670] – Joran

Makes a lot of sense. Cool. Let’s dive into the final questions, revenue-related. So from to other SaaS founders, what advice would you give them for somebody who’s just starting out and trying to grow to 10K monthly volume revenue?

[00:37:14.960] – Ivana

That was our goal, main goal at the beginning. I would say, try to niche down as much as possible. Try to get one type of the ideal customer that you have in mind, feel amazing when they are using your your product and try to make your product to be much better than the alternatives because you probably don’t have a name, brand, etc. You really, really want to have relationships at the beginning, solve one real pain, and charge enough so people feel great when they are paying you and they are looking to support you in the future.

[00:37:50.630] – Joran

Love it. When we go beyond 10K monthly recurring revenue, so we’re going to make a huge step right now towards 10 million ARR on your journey yourself as well. What advice would you give other SaaS founders?

[00:38:03.320] – Ivana

To be honest, we are not even close. I cannot give advice from my experience, but I can say what we plan to do. We are at a pretty low pricing point. We are at the beginning, first of all, we were targeting only individuals. It’s super hard to get to 10 million with a product that costs $20 per month. What we plan to do is to scale and to try to help SMBs. You already have insights from the individuals. Smaller companies probably need something like that plus additional features. You are basically looking to get from this $20 to $100 or $200 at least per month from companies You are not looking for enterprises for big companies, but if I can sell, for example, 10 or 20 or 50 licenses rather than one, that makes it much more easier for me to reach that call. Again, also when you are not doing individuals, but you are looking for companies, you can also prioritize annual plans which are going to help you with the cash flow, and then you can reinvest channels in experience in support. That is what we plan to do. We We’ll see how it will go.

[00:39:16.040] – Joran

Maybe we’re going to put you on later on the podcast again and see how it went. Nice. Let me try to summarize the episode in just a couple of sentences. I guess starting out a tool of your own need is a great way to start. Start with small features, get feedback, define your ICP with their pain points, make a great product which people feel great about and make them feel great. So one pain to get the 10 product can be a really great growth channel. You took 13 months of building to go from a free version to a full product with subscriptions. Long free beta did help you to build a brand. You did it also with an open roadmap, as Mr. Kutner says, providing a lot of support and really focusing on the product to make it feel great. You did it by saving upfront a lot and also taking advantage of the EU benefits, subsidies, et cetera. We look into that. When you’re in the point where you have to rebuild your app, go for short term goals to make it actionable. If you’re diving into a new project, listen to relevant podcast to educate yourself.

[00:40:13.860] – Joran

And reading doesn’t mean you make the common mistakes. You will probably have those as well. I think that was a bit the summary. Thank you for coming on, Ivana.

[00:40:23.840] – Ivana

Thank you, Joran. It was really a pleasure.

[00:40:26.170] – Joran

Nice. If you want to get in contact with you, where should they contact you?

[00:40:29.210] – Ivana

Yeah, just No, follow me on LinkedIn and you will learn a lot about LinkedIn and personal brand and content creation. I can promise that.

[00:40:36.950] – Joran

Yeah, I would definitely recommend to follow Ivana. 3,000 paid clients, they are connected to a lot of LinkedIn profiles, millions of posts, and she shares weekly insights based on real data, so no assumptions there. Thanks again for coming on. If you like this episode, give us a thumbs up or a review on the channel you’re listening, and we’re going to add a question to this podcast episode as well. So happy to hear your thoughts.

[00:40:58.980] – Ivana

Thanks again. Thankthank you.

[00:41:00.990] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing luck growing your B2B SaaS.