We bought Scout 6 months ago.
Here's our investor update:
- Growth channels
- What's worked
- What hasn't
Background
We bought Scout - business management software for dog walkers & pet sitters.
- Mission-critical product
- Steady growth / tailwinds
- Niche product, few competitors
- Natural expansion w/ more walkers
What's worked first...
SEO
We have 10x-ed our organic Google traffic.
- Moved from WordPress -> Webflow
- Updated and improved old articles
- Written a few articles per week
Spent: $8,000
Conversions: Majority
Capttera Ads
Capterra ads are profitable, but the potential scale is small.
These are the most dependable ads for SaaS because these potential customers are already comparison shopping.
Intent is super high.
Spent: $3,423
Conversions: 29
Google Ads
These have worked ok, but we think we can improve and scale.
There is some noise around related interests, like gig workers looking for dog-walking marketplaces that are harder to exclude.
Intent is pretty good here.
Spent: $3,067
Conversions: 6+
Remote Team
We have put an excellent remote team in place.
- Sr Developer (Latam)
- Jr Developer (Cleveland)
- Customer Support (Argentina)
- Writer (Philippines)
- QA (Philippines)
- Growth (Colorado)
Want to hire your own remote team for 80% than the US workers? Interview for free at Jules.
Now the not-so-great updates...
Facebook Ads
These never panned out. I suspect we are getting too many gig-type workers and too few business owners.
We still use it for retargeting with testimonials, but the ads just never saw conversions.
Low intent here.
Spent: $1,155
Conversions: 0
Affiliates
We just started using Rewardful to incentivize word-of-mouth. It is the best option when you're on Stripe.
Unincentivized word-of-mouth is big for us so this should speed things up.
Spent: $152
Conversions: 2
Money-Back Guarantee
We tried a 60-day money-back guarantee for 3 months.
It was fine, but many potential customers want to try out the product first and we are missing them.
We are moving back to a 14-day free trial without requiring a credit card.
This idea came from Jason Cohen's advice on growing from $0 to $1 million in ARR.
Other Experiments
Things we are starting but don't have results for yet:
- Freemium plans
- Raising prices
- Lead magnets
- More demos
- Newsletter
- Webinars
- Affiliates
- YouTube
- Courses
What else should we try?
Shoot me a message here.
If you are interested in buying your own software business, check out my course & community on it at IndiePE.com.