From $2M to $3M: A marathon in the desert
Chapter 3: Go big or go home
Expanding Horizons: The Vision for $100M
In 2021–7 years after signing our first customer — we reached $2M ARR. It was a great milestone, and it felt good. But we were also at a crossroads. From there, either I would sell the company or I would push further with a much loftier goal. The Saas M&A market was booming in 2021 and I had received multiple offers to sell my company for up to $10M. It is not easy to turn down that much money but to me, it was still day one and the other option was bolder and more exciting: aim for $100M ARR. I knew we had the team to get there but we would need to completely transform Wisepops to achieve it.
Wisepops started as a popup pure player that ranked among the best solutions in the market for the quality of its design and the performance of its campaign management features. I had started a second company that provided notifications to customers when visiting websites (think of the bell on most social media platforms). This company had its distinct team, technology, and customer base, and while it was early stage, the results were promising.
Our popups and notifications tools were both serving the same vision: helping brands connect with their audience better. But we needed to build a new experience… Combining popups and notifications would be the start of something completely disruptive: the very first onsite marketing platform. Over the past 7 years, I had worked with brands that were pouring big dollars into offsite marketing (emails, text messages) to drive traffic to their website. But once the traffic was there, little was done to keep the visitors engaged and turn them into customers. THAT was our $100M opportunity.
Building the first Onsite Marketing Platform
Merging two products sounds simple. It is not! Check out all we needed to do:
- 🧑💻 Team — Create a new organization to merge our two teams into one
- ⚙️ Tech — Make the products work together. Assemble and rebuild
- 🧬 Data — Build a new data infrastructure that supports billions of events, in real-time
- 💫 UX — Define a unified, consistent, and intuitive customer experience
- 🚀 Marketing — Update our marketing materials and build a new website
- 📈 Pricing — Create a new pricing structure and migrate existing customers
Not quite simple. We had budgeted 18 to 24 months to complete the whole merge…and so it began.
Welcome to the desert
We probably ran this marathon in one of the worst environments. Soon after we started, our customers’ business was slowing down. Post-COVID inflation was taking a toll on ecommerce and traffic acquisition costs were dramatically increasing. And to top it all, we were facing intense competition. Companies with large teams and deep pockets filled with VC money were building products directly competing against our Popup solution.
From Nov 21 to Oct 22, our MRR was just flat.
It was very challenging for all of us. Working on a long-term project without any business growth is tough — and all this pressure was weighing on the team and creating some tension. Burnout was never far away!
We were there👇, just knowing we had to push and get through it.
Powering through
It took us two years, but we did it! Our first release was our new website in March 2022, which officially made Wisepops the very first Onsite Marketing Platform.
The other releases came one after the other, one huge project at a time:
- Oct ’22: Unified Accounts (one customer account for both products)
- Feb ’23: Unified Billing (one subscription for both products)
- Jun ’23: Unified Setup (one setup for both products)
- Sep ’23: Analytics V2 (enhanced and unified analytics)
- Dec ’23: Revenue tracking (revenue attribution enabled by our new data infrastructure)
In less than a year after the release of our unified onsite marketing platform, the number of customers using both Popups and Notifications grew by 150%! It blew past our expectations and fully validated our initial vision.
Playing David Against Goliath
These two years had a major impact on us. Going from being a popup builder to becoming the first onsite marketing platform chasing a $100M opportunity completely changes your mission and the excitement you get from it. However, it comes with much more pressure too. We’re not the only players on the field (count around 11,000 other marketing technology companies out there…) and as a bootstrapped company, hiring 100 people to execute our plans was never an option.
Three things were instrumental in our success in building our platform:
- The team. We hire very few, and we only hire the best. Our team of 20 counts top profiles from Amazon, Meta, Revolut, Tidio, etc. When such a team is aligned and committed to delivering a vision (it meant sacrificing countless evenings and many weekends for some of us) — there is no limit to what it can achieve.
- A unique company culture. At Wisepops there’s no need to make people feel accountable and build a sense of ownership. Because we’re this small team of experts and we preserve a flat organization, everyone has a direct impact on the product. There’s no talking people into it. Each team member has a key role to play and we can’t make it unless all of them do their part.
- We had no choice. As basic as it sounds, we knew we had no choice but to succeed. We knew it could not take more than 2 years. We had to bring new features to our customers, especially in a highly competitive environment. And our team would probably burn out if the project had lasted longer! We did not want to actually end in the desert. That pressure led us to constantly challenge our roadmap and improve our productivity. We had to let go of many projects on the way, but that was the price to pay, and it helped us take our operations to a completely new level.
Recharging our batteries during an offsite in the French Alps
Once again, unusual choices made it all possible
Looking back, I doubt any of this would have been possible had we not been bootstrapped. Good luck telling your investors that you need to get your team and money invested in a vision that might drive growth two years from now. Most VCs simply aren’t that patient.
And doing it back in 2022 would have been extra difficult. VCs did a recent U-turn, moving away from growth at all costs to focus on short-term profitability. Our plan was completely at odds with that new logic. We were doing exactly the opposite of what VC investors were telling their portfolio companies to do. Sometimes doing the right thing means to be contrarian.
When VCs were pressing companies to scale down their growth plans, we were investing all we had in a risky 2-year-long project. When VCs were telling companies to increase margins and lay off employees, we were investing in the hiring of our first — outstanding — sales team. If we were VC-backed, that article would simply not exist. Or maybe I would be talking about how much I’ve improved our EBITDA…(yawn).
$3M check. Off to $100M
2023 ends on a high note. After all the tears and sweat, we topped $3M ARR.
This journey from $2M to $3M has been one of the most intense since I started Wisepops, but it has also been the most impactful one. We have turned a vision into a reality. We transformed Wisepops, not only on the product side but also as a brand, and as a company.
I am still amazed by what our team has been able to achieve. Our bootstrapped team of 20 created a robust and powerful platform ready to take a leadership position in a highly crowded, crazy-funded $bn worldwide market. We always knew that 20 people could do more than 200 if you hired the right people and created the right culture. This is an illustration of it and it’s just the beginning!
2024 will be a cornerstone for Wisepops. We’re all pumped and ready for the next run, and the sales pipeline already looks exciting. As always, I’m looking forward to writing the next chapter of this series — and I hope you’ll follow the story!
