How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

http://purde.net/2014/12/how-to-get-from-0-to-10000-paying-customers-in-saas/

by standrews • 12 years ago

212 60 12 years ago

purde.net

blumkvist12• 12 years ago

Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing

and the next paragraph

The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product.

Building a great product IS marketing. It's the most important part of marketing. It's at the beginning of any marketing plan.

Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the markets the company operates in. Advertising, sales, PR are only communication tools which fall in only 1P (promotion) out of the 5Ps.

The article continues to list marketing activities. In fact, it only lists marketing activities, while insisting they don't do any marketing.

Finding your LTCV is marketing (Price). Localizing is marketing (Place). Content, SEO, email are also marketing (Promotion). Finding platforms before others is also makreting.

All in all, I would advise the author of this article to read the wikipedia page (lol) about marketing before making attempts to speak on the subject.

standrews12• 12 years ago

Hey, thank you for chiming in. I'm not sure how you got the impression that I insisted we "don't do any marketing." - sorry if I wasn't clear. What I aimed to say was that product was the main reason for getting to 10k, and marketing tactics and strategies I described each contributed further.

blumkvist12• 12 years ago

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success.

It also leads to inventing terms like "content marketing", "inbound marketing", "growth hacking". Oh, the irony with the last one. A marketing term, to trick people who hate marketing, to do marketing...

I'm sure it pans out great for people like Rand Fishkin, Dharmesh Shah and Sean Ellis. The problem is, the people who fall for these neologisms get disconnected from the much, much larger marketing community. They get inside of an echo chamber. Instead of reading thorough articles, by authors which credentials are checked, claims are investigated and arguments - reviewed by peers, they get moz.com and quicksprout and kissmetrics, unbounce and optimizely. Well, I guess people get what they ask for - something easy, which does its "magic".

My last line in the previous post was a cheap shot and uncalled for. I'm sorry about that.

dsp1234• 12 years ago

The original post doesn't claim they didn't do marketing. In fact, the first sentence in the post is "Short answer: great product, some marketing and a bit of luck.".

The whole quote about "without any marketing is" is:

Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing: by describing it as "it's a piece of sales software" on an uncrawlable site without any design, without onboarding emails, without press mentions, without a single ad and blog post.

I took that as the author using hyperbole to critique how "enterprise" sales systems work by literally just existing.

ojbyrne• 12 years ago

Also, "... used by 20 or so companies" is marketing. Sometimes getting to 1 company can be challenging.

100timesthis• 12 years ago

Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market... Marketing is not a science

blumkvist12• 12 years ago

How come?

robotkilla• 12 years ago

This article itself reads like a piece of marketing to me.

standrews12• 12 years ago

The aim was to share what has worked for Pipedrive. Of course, I hoped to show myself and Pipedrive in good light in the process - sorry if the balance wasn't right for you there.

Kenji• 12 years ago

Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the markets the company operates in.

No. See Wikipedia: Marketing is the methodology of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service.

Marketing is about communicating the value of the product. Regardless of the actual quality of the product. Building a great product is not marketing.

blumkvist12• 12 years ago

Well, I spoke too quickly about the wikipedia article then. It must have changed, or I've read another page. The page which says that is wrong. Communicating product value is only part of the marketing mix.

Building a great product is most definitely part of marketing. For example there are methods and techniques which faciiliate it and are subject of marketing journals and marketing academia. One of these methods is the "segmentation-targeting-positioning" framework.

I can get you many more citations if you wish, or you can spare me the time, and search for them yourself. Perhaps you will learn something of value in the process.

freebs• 12 years ago

Marketing and lying about a crappy product does the company no good. People will either pick up on it right away, or leave soon after using/buying it.

Good marketing teams will evaluate your product VS the competition and use the good parts for communicating the message. Amazing teams will also take the bad parts and bring them up to the product teams so they can confirm weak parts and put them in the queue to get looked at.

Marketing a bad product will only last so long.

paulmckeever• 12 years ago

Not according to the American Marketing Association. Their definition - which is used as the textbook definition of marketing - goes like this:

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

Marketing is _not_ simply about communicating the value of products. Advertising something that doesn't help a customer create or experience value is not marketing.

I think you'd find this article and the comments interesting:

http://avc.com/2011/02/marketing/

tdaltonc• 12 years ago

Hate is love;

War is peace;

and everything is marketing.

Iftheshoefits• 12 years ago

Two things.

First, marketing is not a scientific discipline. Full stop. Calling it a science does real science a disservice, and reeks as we say down south of putting on airs.

Second, you're trying to make marketing encompass every piece of a business, from product idea to design to construction and beyond. It isn't everything. It isn't about designing or creating a product (other than marketing materials or services), even if marketing may help shed insight into the targets' needs. At some point you're going to realize that by attempting to fit everything into the marketing bucket that the term marketing ceases to have meaning.

lexap4• 12 years ago

Voice of reason, thank god. Are we working at P&G here? This is startupland, nothing is scientific in the academic sense, least of all marketing or customer behavior. "Peer reviewed?" Please....

lexap4• 12 years ago

Wow, I applaud you for defending marketing on HN. Bravo, brave soul. I wholeheartedly agree as well.

fookyong• 12 years ago

Having a per-user pricing model also helps :)

Sorry not trying to detract from the stat, but it's worth adding that bit of context. Per-user priced startups who create an awesome product are in a sweet spot when it comes to ramping up their paying customer metric. I admit I'm quite envious of SaaS startups like this, or like Slack that have nailed it on execution and can linearly scale their price according to the size of an organization.

Definitely something I tell new entrants to SaaS to bear in mind.

(I run a SaaS based on the more traditional "3 plan" model)

standrews12• 12 years ago

Good point. That said, in the first 3 years of Pipedrive it too had the good old "3 plan" model. There was no dramatic change in traction after flicking the switch.

downandout3• 12 years ago

Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing...The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product.

I'm sure that it's a great product. That's usually a prerequisite for success, but hardly guarantees it. For every extremely successful product, there are hundreds of equally great products that falter - primarily for lack of luck. This kind of statement shows an extreme lack of perspective.

simonswords82• 12 years ago

Out of interest why do you think they have managed to reach 10,000 customers?

downandout3• 12 years ago

The short answer: luck. Yes, they have created a great product and yes they did some marketing - the same things that their competitors did. Once the prerequisite hard work has been expended, there are innumerable factors that are completely beyond anyone's control that determine which products succeed or fail.

floody-berry• 12 years ago

Remove selection bias or straight up marketing spam from authors and the willingness of many users to believe anything someone who claims they're making money says and HN would be a lot emptier. One can dream..

gk1• 12 years ago

I think "How we did it" case studies are interesting and useful, but the moment you turn it into "Here's how you can do it too!", you're on snake-oil territory.

Edit: My beef is with the prescriptive tone of the post, as if getting 10,000 paying users is as simple as 1, 2, 3...

standrews12• 12 years ago

Very valid point and I agree. Tried to tame the inner professor on this one but guess I wasn't 100% successful.

graeme• 12 years ago

but the moment you turn it into "Here's how you can do it too!", you're on snake-oil territory.

You seem to be interpreting the post very literally. The author's tone is clearly different from snake oil salesman who have a flashing $299 course on SAAS scaling at the bottom of the page.

A helpful habit when reading an article is to ask yourself how the author would reply if you asked them a question. If you ask a snake oil salesman if they're certain, they'll say yes.

Whereas the impression I got from this article was that the author was constantly learning, testing assumptions. If you asked them "are you sure this worked? Would this work for anyone, in any circumstances?" I got the impression they would say "perhaps not" and discuss where they had uncertainties.

You can't include all uncertainties when writing. Such an article would be unreadable. Any writing requires reading between the lines.

lexap4• 12 years ago

What? He's saying worked for them. It's all good advice and he gives many caveats about how it may not work for everyone.

porter• 12 years ago

A decent product is just entry to the game. It sounds like what made pipedrive successful is AppSumo.

standrews12• 12 years ago

AppSumo promotion definitely played a role, but if I had to pick just 1 thing behind getting to 10k customers, this wouldn't be AppSumo. Furthermore, this wouldn't be any one thing.

jonathancordeau2• 12 years ago

...but if you had to pick one thing, what would it be? Curiosity abounds.

Context; I've been a paying PipeDrive customer for a couple years. Not sure how I originally was exposed to the product, (not appsumo), but I've stayed because the of the product.

wooyi• 12 years ago

Successful people always attribute luck because they usually underestimate their own special qualities or don't acknowledge it. This is the reverse Dunning-Kruger. While non-so-successful people will attribute other's success as luck because they think they also possess such qualities but didn't have the "luck". Creating a great product has less to do with luck than product/market fit. That is extremely difficult.

k__• 12 years ago

AFAIK the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect is the same as the regular one, since it also include skilled people who underestimate themself.

jonathancordeau2• 12 years ago

The probability of "luck" increases with marked investment in preparation. Preparation includes understanding the market and the problem, and building a product to solve the problems identified for that market. A great product does not beget product/market fit. Rather, a product that delivers a solution, communicated well to a market that needs that solution, may result in product/market fit (growth). Hence, understanding the needs of a market are critical. Therefore, research (preparation), a marketing discipline, is a crucial precursor for the elusive luck we all seek.

nissimk• 12 years ago

I thought it was well written and inspirational. Sorry you're getting so much negativity on here. I wanted to tell you congratulations and good luck going forward. Good work with this blog post and growing your business.

Obviously, this isn't the secret sauce that can get anyone's idea up to 10k paying customers, and there may be other factors that contributed to your success, but this is your perspective on successful marketing strategies from the point of view of a marketing guy and it looks pretty good to me.

Thanks.

standrews12• 12 years ago

Lovely comment. Thank you :)

softdev12• 12 years ago

I think the key sentence in this post is where they mention launching the MVP with 20 companies. If these are all paying, large businesses that seems like the founders had deep relationships already established in business. For most startups, launching with 20 businesses out of the gates would be a huge win.

In fact, one could argue that the real value of accelerators isn't their mentors but the fact that they provide an immediate source of other businesses willing to try (and pay) for the product. So for a company in an accelerator, it seems much easier to get to 10,000 paying customers than for a company that is building a product in a garage (without an accelerator).

In my opinion, going from 0 to 20 paying businesses seems to be relatively harder than going from 20 paying businesses to 10,000 total customers. Meaning that if you get traction with 20 businesses that probably means you're touching 2000 people indirectly (assuming 100 people companies) already.

lexap4• 12 years ago

Great work and congrats! I'm a user and love the product, surprise, surprise :)

Great advice on getting focused and measuring the hell out of everything.

standrews12• 12 years ago

Glad to hear that you're a user, love the product and liked the post :)

How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

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