How Our 2x Founder Built a Successful Marketing SaaS Product
The journey from a traditional marketing agency to a Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing product requires a shift that demands vision, adaptability to the changing times (something we all had to endure in 2020) and strategic foresight. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with the founder of Launched, the multi-channel ABM platform, Joe Allen.
Joe was the founder of a marketing agency that connected brands to their audience via creative, immersive experiences. The agency was started in Joe’s bedroom and grew to 25 heads over a period of seven years.
The Beginning of a 360 Transformation into SaaS
Joe started thinking about building a SaaS product after realising how fragile what they were creating was. When Covid happened, it was scary because so many customers decided to drop out and stop paying. During a worldwide pandemic, there were no doubt other priorities to think about for many companies. The marketing agency was intrinsically tied to the outside environment, and Joe wanted to build something that was going to surpass any of those environments.
Joe and the team were building an app at the time as a side project, and that was doing really, really well. The platform they built could generate leads offline, and then they’d upload the leads for clients to accept inside the platform with a direct integration to either their Hubspot or Salesforce account.
Another realisation that Joe had was that it’s important to create a business that can be scaled to last long-term, instead of one that relies on project by project contracts. Joe and his team started building an asset that is now called Launched Tech News. They built an asset that could be monetised and sold if need be –this was step one into the SaaS world.
The Evolution of a SaaS ABM Platform
After the publication was published, the ABM platform started having their own user generated content, along with content they created themselves. Both of these things grew their SEO as well as the brand of the publication. The dev team then created the lead function for accepting, rejecting, and uploading leads. This came at a similar time to the intent data capabilities, along with all the rest of the data sources.
At the moment Launched has just achieved a major database migration from MongoDB to snowflake, which was a massive job. Launched is also building the revenue attribution part, and there’s some exciting partnerships coming quite soon that we’ll wait to announce in the coming months. It’s an all in one account-based marketing solution, but the team is excited to be releasing it in phases according to the roadmap.
The Problem Their Agency Knew Marketers Needed Solving
Joe’s former agency partnered with many companies that needed to get an extension of their marketing team, so they had spent a lot of time with marketers. Founding the agency gave Joe the ability to understand a marketer’s perspective from being in their shoes and seeing through their eyes. The one problem they knew marketers faced was having too many tools that weren’t integrated enough. They weren’t able to get the data from one tool to the other, and the other.
So when marketers run a LinkedIn campaign, then a Google Ads campaign, it was difficult to try and target the same audience in both those places, and understand the revenue attribution behind it. Joe wanted to build a single platform that was not only easy to use, but was also affordable. They saw a gap in the market for a platform like that that was geared towards small to medium businesses– at the time the only players were super expensive and marketed towards enterprises.
How the Agency Gave Joe the Insight Needed to Turn to SaaS
The marketing agency gave Joe the understanding of what pains marketers go through on a daily basis, but it also gave him an understanding of, when building Launched as a company, how that would need to operate, compared to an agency. An agency is obviously scaled by people. SaaS products don’t. You can see what you need faster and you can grow faster.
Being a second time founder is also something that was truly invaluable for Joe. Especially being a founder in the same marketing industry, with a deeper knowledge of running a successful company. “You make a load of mistakes on the first time being a founder and creating a roadmap. You don’t make the same mistakes on the second time founder roadmap.”
The Journey Towards Product Market Fit and the Freemium Model
Initially when building the new SaaS product, Joe thought that they were going to be an enterprise product and focus on big, big marketing agencies or the HPs of the world. But actually, as they started building the product out, they realised that the product is more suited to the SME market that will get more value out of it. Launched is now focused purely on the IT tech and SaaS market end users, and they’re enjoying the product a lot more. So for Joe and the team, it’s been a learning curve to understand which market to go after.
Once product market fit was found, Launched focused on the freemium business model. Joe said, “I think a freemium model is a good way to get early adopters in, and it’s a good way to get people to come into the product and use it. And that’s why I also think free trials are a good thing, because everyone wants to touch the product. Why can’t you give somebody at least a week? This shows me one of two things, either your product doesn’t provide value in a week or less. Which shows me that the product requires lots of onboarding, lots of hand holding, lots of coaching to get value out of the product. So if you can’t get value within the first two weeks, the product is probably a big product, and customers are going to spend a long time trying to get the value out of it.”
The second value coming from a freemium model is being able to have warm leads and ambassadors that you can convert into paying customers. Good reviews about the product, even if it’s just the free version, is a good way to build credibility as a startup.
The Biggest Lessons and Proudest Moments as a SaaS ABM Platform Founder
One of the biggest lessons for Joe has been that everything takes a lot longer than he expected, and software development is a long game. As a SaaS founder, there’s a lot of things that you might want to have built into the product, but it takes a lot of patience for the dev team to rebuild and also work through bugs. Sometimes the team does such a great job building something, you get it out, and then you find five more bugs pop out of nowhere.
As far as Joe’s proudest moment, it’s right now, where the team is and what they have built in the time they’ve had. Anyone who saw the product from its infancy is blown away at how big and robust it is. He’s really proud of how quickly the SDR and marketing team have come together with leads coming in. He said, “I’ve got pockets of pride in each department, if you like.”
The Seedrs crowdfunding campaign that we did this Summer was also quite a proud moment for Joe. Seeing the marketing team develop the campaign so well, seeing that many people invested in Launched and believing in Launched was an amazing feeling.
Scaling Launched and Advice For Aspiring Entrepreneurs in the SaaS or ABM Space
The next biggest plan Joe and the team have is the next round of funding. Launched just finished its pre-seed round on Seedrs, and will very soon be aiming to raise a couple million in the seed round. The next funding round will be for scaling the team, mainly in marketing and engineering.
When asked about advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, Joe said, “My biggest advice, and it’s always been my biggest advice, is keep going. No matter what’s going on around you, it doesn’t matter what’s happening, keep going. Because no matter how good it is, it will change. No matter how bad it is , it will change. So keep going.”
We are excited for the future of Launched! There are good days, and there are bad days, but we are moving forward. The story of Launched’s metamorphosis from a marketing agency to a SaaS marketing product really shows how much adaptability, resilience, and vision is needed to navigate the dynamic landscape of digital marketing.
As the industry continues to evolve, we hope Joe’s story can serve as inspiration for other SaaS startups who are also driving innovation with their SaaS solutions.
