First Big Deal - Just Received $7K For Our SaaS
I'm really happy we've done it. My first "large" SaaS deal.
Usually our customers buy individual seats for 25$/m.
About us
Bluedot 🔵 is a 4ppl team and we had only shitty MVP a year ago. We didn't know who is our ICP and just blasted cold messages to all types of people. One of our hypothesis was that our notetaker can be helpful for remote engineering teams.
How we found the customer
I wrote 600 messages to Engineering Leaders that have distributed teams across the US and Europe.
This particular company has 3K employees, and I randomly selected 5 ppl to DM on Linkedin. One person agreed to join a research call (i was using research calls as a way to sell). We added this person to Private Slack channel, and started sending our product updates.
Trialing
After a few months they agreed to trial the product with 1 free seat. Since our product was unstable, we both didn't feel comfortable rolling it out to the whole team.
Fast forward 3 months, bluedot was in a much better shape, and they wanted to onboard a part of the engineering team. I asked $300 for a 3-month trial, as I believed that smaller price would make it faster to start onboarding.
Well - I WAS WRONG
Even with this price, they had to create a business case for all stakeholders to get an approval. This is the moment when I realised that I could ask for more than $300 😅
Closing the deal
The trial went well, and many engineers liked the tool. We agreed to do a full rollout. Price negotiation was quite fast. I just asked how much they are ready to pay, and calculated what would be our cost to transcribe all the calls. Based on that we agreed on $7200.
It took us another 2 months to go trough a bigger and lengthy procurement + security process. And finally we got the money on our bank account 💰
Biggest challenge
The biggest challenge for us selling large deals is that we are building a product in a new category, and there is no budget for it. People don't even know if they need it, so you need to get a buy-in from the team.
It's not like selling a CRM or HR system where the need is clear.
But it's still possible and I think we proved it.
Glad to to answer all of your questions.
Congrats my friend, this is such an amazing story!
Thanks a lot! It's been quite a ride :D
How did you flip the switch from “research” to “will you be a customer”?
i tried to force it during my first calls, but then i realised it comes naturally.
if the person sees the value and asks more and more questions, gently offer to try it for free.
usually if ppl see the need or like the product they would say yes.
first it feels awkward, but then you get used to it.
Interesting. I'm definitely doing a similar approach. It sounds like if there is a need, it will be natural.
Hey Russ! Just read about your $7K win for Bluedot - that's pretty rad! Digging the hustle with those 600 messages. I'm curious, after landing this deal, any quick tips on handling those big, scary procurement and security hoops? Also, how do you keep the momentum going after such a big win? Cheers for any advice, looking to follow in your footsteps!
Hey Tony,
Honestly we where learning along the way. I would usually follow up every 1-2 weeks asking if they need any help.
It's about reminding about yourself all the time and making sure your application isn't lost somewhere.
What really helped us is having our internal champion. The person who loves our product. They did all the pushing internally.
Right after we signed, we scheduled another call to discuss the onboarding.
Hope it's helpful!
Thank you! It is very interesting
btw Russ, im doing a small interview style videos series (youtube) where i am looking for inspiring indies and to get to right audience and yours fit right. Let me know if you'll be up for a few minutes. Basically the seed idea and what pain points you solve etc. basic questions.
you're that reddit marketing guy! Congrats! LMK if you are looking for a late co-founder :P
First of all, I love this. I want to use this for my personal calls. I tried to sign up with google and it says you dont accept personal emails?
Why not? I would pay to use this.
we noticed that majority of ppl who signed up with personal emails don't pay.
to lower our costs, and focus on paid users we introduced this.
however, you can leave your personal details in the singup form and I'll send you a link with special code to sign in with personal email.
did you leave information in the form?
accidently deleted the post I just wrote.
it said
"thats fair and pretty smart, have you considered taking away the free plan then? That way only people who seriously have the problem would pay to use it (even the free trial method might solve that)"
I think people need a few free recordings to get the full value of our product.
you need to see the quality of our AI summaries and "bot-free experience" before committing to paying 25$.
This comment was deleted 2 months ago.
Thanks for sharing the story. I hope google buys your company at a good deal :)
When it comes to Research Calls through LinkedIn...doesn't it look spamy?
for some ppl it does - for some not.
for us it worked out :)
That's a super crazy deal. Well done mate.
thanks mate! more to come :)
What are the top 1-3 things you would do differently, if you had a mulligan?
I would ask for more money and maybe offer larger trial early on.
Other than that, I won't be able to change much in the process.
Wow! Amazing, congrats !
Thanks a lot!
Good job!
Thank you for your outstanding business! Your commitment to excellence and dedication to customer satisfaction are truly commendable. Much appreciated!
This is awesome!!
I’m in the process of building a software myself now. I’m I. the MVP process now and can hopefully achieve these kind of results
everything takes time. be patient and execute every day.
this deal wasn't fast by any means. 7K after 8months considered bad result by VC standards. but we are bootstrapping, so every $$$ is important.
Fantastic, congrats! We're starting business outreach now - appreciate your sharing this.
outreach is hard these days, but still possible. Good luck!
Congrats Russ!
Hope this leads to even more deals in the future!
fingers crossed!
Congratulations on the successfull deal!
How did you end up with the final price? You mentioned that you calculated the price based on the cost of call transcription. How did you choose your markup and how do you know the amount of calls the company will be transcribing, is it based on the data from trial period?
Thanks!
They had unlimited trial for 3 months, and it gave us some understanding of their usage.
When it comes to markup, we looked at our closest competitors and how much they charge. Not the best way i guess, but we are still learning.
Thanks for sharing!
Did they try to push back on the price?
honestly it was relatively easy to negotiate. I think if asked for 10-15K, they would be try to negotiation.
in this case it's a fair price for the amount of calls they do.
great result! Good luck!
thanks a lot!