---
title: 'How to Grow a SaaS Company: 5 Proven Strategies'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=4u_Z-9Ah2Wc'
video_id: '4u_Z-9Ah2Wc'
date: 2026-07-14
duration_sec: 0
---

# How to Grow a SaaS Company: 5 Proven Strategies

> Source: [How to Grow a SaaS Company: 5 Proven Strategies](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4u_Z-9Ah2Wc)

## Summary

This video shares key strategies for growing a SaaS company, based on the founder's experience growing Exploding Topics from zero to a multi-million dollar business. It covers product-led growth, weekly newsletters, product launches, shipping features faster, and SEO.

### Key Points

- **Product-Led Growth** [00:00] — Making a version of the product freely available drove early traction. Exploding Topics was free for 10 months, leading to a #1 Product Hunt launch and thousands of visitors.
- **Weekly Branded Newsletter** [02:30] — A consistent weekly newsletter with a fixed format (Exploding Topics Tuesday) grew to 90k subscribers with 50% open rate. It keeps the brand top-of-mind and acts as free retargeting.
- **Product Launches to Email List** [05:00] — Using a course-launch model (pre-launch, launch, deadline) for new features generated 25% of MRR. A simple 3-email sequence with scarcity drove conversions.
- **Shipping Features Faster** [07:30] — Prioritizing faster shipping of features (e.g., trending startups, trending products) reduced churn by half and accelerated MRR growth. Features that took 3 months now ship in 3 weeks.
- **SEO: Top and Bottom of Funnel** [10:00] — SEO grew traffic from 0 to 400k monthly visitors. Initially focused on top-of-funnel content (trends), then shifted to bottom-of-funnel content (e.g., 'trend spotting software'), which doubled trials to 600/month.

### Conclusion

The key takeaways are to leverage product-led growth for early traction, build a consistent newsletter for retention, use launches to convert subscribers, ship features rapidly to improve metrics, and invest in both top and bottom of funnel SEO to drive trials.

## Transcript

in this video I'm going to show you how to grow a SAS company including all the stuff I've learned from growing exploding topics from xero to a multi-million dollar SAS company I actually never thought I'd be making this video because I actually launched another SAS I wouldn't call it company SAS product in 2017 called yo rocket that ultimately failed and I learned some stuff from that project that I applied to exploring topics but for the most part my lesson from that project was don't get into SAS like I'm not a developer I don't have a lot of technical expertise but when I came across sort of a beta version of exploring topics that my co-founder Josh was building I decided to partner up with him and then we rebranded it and relaunched it as exploding topics later and since then I've learned a ton about growing a SAS company including many mistakes Lessons Learned things that worked really well growth hacks and I'm going to share everything about that in this video so let's just jump right in with the first thing that has made the biggest difference in terms of growth which is product LED growth so you probably heard of product lead growth it's you know it's a fancy term for basically having a piece of your product or a version of your product freely available that's really what explaining topics was in the early days we didn't monetize until about 10 months after launching so the entire project was product-led growth because I wasn't even sure how to monetize exploring topics so we just put basically put everything out there for free and that decision if you can't even call it that because it was just the only thing to do was to put it out there for free it ended up being a game changer for us in terms of getting early traction and as you know if you start a SAS company it's really hard to get early traction because SEO takes time you might have a budget for Facebook ads even influencer marketing takes time like everything just takes time but if you have something cool that you put out there and it's freely available it can spread on its own like look at Chachi PT right like that one from zero to 100 million users in a couple months because it was just something everyone could just use as opposed to needing to sign up for a trial or answer your credit card information people could just test it out and realized early on it was really cool now not to say exploding topics is anything like chat gbt that's a game changing technology but it was cool and interesting enough to get us early attraction in fact when we launched on product on we're a number one product of the month when we launched which is huge tens of thousands of visitors tons of email sign ups and was great with early traction and if we just had the same thing but you had to log in or create an account it wouldn't have done as well it was the fact that it was just readily available so if you have a SAS product think of how you could take all of it or some of it and just make that your home page on your website that is just a great way to get early traction and was a huge game changer for us in fact we still basically have that now we hide our best trends for pro members and we blur it out on the home page so you can't see that stuff but the basic functionality is there that anyone can try and that still drives tens of thousands visitors per month the second thing that's made a huge difference in terms of growth has been a Weekly Newsletter which I had a newsletter with backlinko but it wasn't on any regular Cadence it was kind of like whenever I published a blog post or we did a launch or I just kind of had something to say I would just write a newsletter and send it out with exploding topics I really wanted to try like a weekly branded newsletter and I called a Brandon newsletter is because these are newsletters that come at a regular Cadence they have the same format and the same structure so think of like morning Brew or something like that the structure is essentially the same every single time you get a newsletter and I wanted to replicate that but do it on a weekly basis so we launched exploding topics Tuesday and we didn't have a huge subscriber base starting out like basically all of it was from that product hunt launch but since then we've grown to almost 90 000 subscribers I should probably make a video about that actually we have a 50 open rate on that newsletter and it's because the content's good but more importantly the format is really consistent this branded newsletter format you know what you're gonna get but you don't know exactly how it is I kind of compare it to Shark Tank right that show's super popular because the format is the same every single time like a startup is going to go through the door they're gonna pitch the Sharks Mr Wonderful is going to say something snarky and that's pretty much every episode but you don't know all the variables you don't know what startup is going to come in you don't know what deal they're going to do it's the same thing with a brand new newsletter the format's the same but the content is different every time so in our case we just just share four interesting trends that we found that week and some insight analysis around each Trend it's pretty simple it takes almost no time to put together and it's been a huge growth driver for us for two reasons first of all just being top of mind it's almost like running retargeting ads for free instead of running retargeting ads just every week someone gets a reminder that you exist and we have a little call to action to sign up for a paid SAS um in every newsletter the other benefit was once you have a newsletter you have an email list and then when you launch something new like a new SAS product or a new feature you have a huge list of people that are used to opening your emails that are there and I'll go over more detail about how we do product launches at exploding topics but yeah that's been huge for us because if you create something new a new feature how are you going to get the word out yeah you can share it on social media but very few people are gonna really see it versus a newsletter where thousands of people can read it and open it and they're used to seeing your stuff and because you provided so much value every single week over the course of months or even years your subscribers are sort of accepting that once once in a while you're going to pitch them exploring topics we do like two to three launches a year and that's it to keep the list fresh and the rest is just pretty much per value so the third thing that made a huge difference for us were product launches to the email list and this is something I kind of adapted from backlinko and the whole course launch model uh to explore any topics so most online course businesses have this launch model where you open up enrollment for a few days and then people sign up and then you close it and that worked really well at backlinko and I was wondering if you kind of do the same thing with exploding topics now obviously it doesn't make sense with a SAS company to like only let people sign up during a launch but I was thinking what if you use the same model where you have the anticipation before the launch you do the launch and then you have some sort of deadline would that also work with SAS I never really seen it but I thought it was worth a try so we first launched like a paid version of the product we did this it was the same thing like we before we launched we did a pre-launch is what it's called is where you say hey we have this new thing coming out and we're solving this problem that you might have and then when you launch you're like Hey we're launching and then there's a limited time element of some kind and then you sound like a final reminder of the day of that launch got us from zero to 10K mrr in a month and then from there we've done them regularly and I would say looking back like at all our mrr I would say like 25 come from launches even though we've only done maybe like five or six since we started the company the rest is just people signing up but that's huge like I think that's 25 of people that are pushed off the fence that you're being that's what you're basically doing with the launch you have people that are on your list already they know who you are they probably considered your product because you're pitching it subtly in every newsletter but the launch gets them off the fence and that can be a huge difference for us so in terms of how we structure them we use a very simple three email structure where before the the launch we either include it in the newsletter or have a separate email that's like a pre-launch where we discuss what the feature is what's coming out why it's important how it can help you then we do the launch we're like it's here we have the new thing it's live you can try it out we subtly mentioned that there's some sort of scarcity either in the sense we're going to raise our pricing which we've done a couple times already or there's a limited time bonus or recently we added a new plan and we gave everyone a free upgrade but if you signed up now you got you know that upgrade before we rolled it out to everybody and then the last email is just very simple it's like five lines it's like basically here's your last chance to do it if you want to great if not you know we'll go back to the newsletter schedule next week that way people are unsubscribing like crazy and that works really well it's really simple I'm sure if we did some sort of complicated you know if they open it send them this email and click on this but we just send it three emails to everybody and it seems to work really well so the next thing that really made the biggest difference in terms of new mrr was shipping features faster and this is something that we've really only ramped up over the last four or five months and already seen a huge difference in terms of trial conversion rate churn and all the other important metrics that come to running a SAS company so why is this like such a big deal and why do we struggle with it for so long well like most SAS companies we had this laundry list of improvements you know know do this we'll have this they can do that the problem is it's a lot easier to like write something down than to actually code it and ship it we didn't have really the Manpower we had my co-founder Josh coding mostly everything we had one guy in upwork that was doing a decent job and that was basically the entire like Tech operation and the rest of the staff were marketing people and support staff now we've ramped up and basically found more developers that are helping us and we're shipping features super fast obviously there's still a backlog but I'm surprised at how quickly like you can measure the impact of a feature we launched two features recently one was called trending startups which was a list of trending startups along with data like how much funding they have how many employees and then we have a trending products feature which is physical products along with data like Amazon sales average pricing things like that and those are two pretty big features that would have taken us three months each and now we launched each of them in like three weeks it's night and day and since we launched both of them especially together I think they made a big difference we've seen churn go down by almost half over the last few months and mrr is just growing really quickly even though it's a little flat in the beginning of the year it's really picked up and I think it's really from Shipping features faster and for us when we prioritize what to work on we're really prioritizing what we can ship faster now over the long term that's maybe not a good strategy because you might have like a game-changing feature that just is going to take months to work on and no one's going to see it until it's launched I get that but for now we're just shipping as many features as possible and we do have one big feature in the pipeline which is a new and improved Trend search we already have Trend search but we want to make it a lot better but that's going to be like two months of basically not shipping anything which right now we're seeing such a huge results from shipping on a regular basis that it doesn't make sense to pause shipping just to work on something big I can see like both sides of the argument but once you have enough users and you have some users it's really just about shipping improvements for them and seeing how they react you also get a lot more feedback from people because you're shipping something new they notice and then they're more likely to tell you like oh I like this thing or I didn't like this thing or I wish I had that as opposed to just keeping your website the same for three months you launch something new three months you launch another feature three months who wants another feature it's not even enough of a Cadence for people to notice or to realize the web app is still being worked on and it's still something that's Dynamic and they can give their input on so last but not least SEO has been absolutely huge for exploding topics like I mentioned in the beginning we really focused on that product-led growth we went from you know getting like 20 000 visitors a month pretty early on partially from the product hunt launch which obviously it went from like 20 000 down to like five but it was five thousand visitors that were coming just to visit the site we didn't have really any content we weren't doing any link building we weren't really writing anything it was just the web app was useful enough for people to visit it which is great because as you know SEO can take three to four months for you to see some results and in our case once we started ramping up SEO everything changed like we went from zero to four hundred thousand visitors in a couple years which is crazy even surprises me like I'm like head of SEO basically at exploring topics on planning the topics um finding writers um managing all the content that's coming in and even I was surprised at how fast it grew I think it's because we I took the backlinko model which was in a super competitive space you know the online marketing space I was competing against other people who knew about SEO and I applied deploying topics it just took off um it was a lot easier so the main thing we did in the early days is focus on middle and top of the funnel content software Trends technology Trends business Trends things that people were searching for kind of what we help with but not exactly or you know we realized a lot of our customers were VCS and investors so we created these startup list moves that were like fintech startups SAS startups pretty top of the funnel like those people are searching for kind of what we do but not directly recently we've been transitioning to more bottom of the funnel stuff and I kind of wish we did it earlier actually bottom of my funnel is where you're just like someone's searching for literally what you do like Trend spotting software like boom like that's literally what we do now not many people are going to be searching for this stuff but it's your Target customer so it makes sense to have a presence on the first page for these keywords so we scaled pretty quickly we went from like zero to probably 100 of these over the last six months just finding different angles for bottom of the funnel content where people are in buying mode if you're in SAS people are either searching for like your category or software category the problem you solve or a competitor or alternative if you can nail all four of those you're going to have easily like 50 or 100 or 200 bottom of the funnel content pieces that you can write if you look at your Google analytics you'll probably notice the conversion on those is insane now the raw number of conversions might be a bit low because not many people search for them and that's why you have to produce so many of these that's actually been a game changer in terms of the number of trials that we get per month so our traffic has gone up by let's say 25 over the last six months or something like that but our trials have more than doubled and the reason for that is because traffic's going up but it's really because these people are landing on these bottom of the funnel posts that we just didn't even have before like we just didn't exist it's like when you look at Google analytics over a time frame and you see the page it's like that infinity sign a bunch of them are like that because we just published them so that got us a presence for these keywords that people are searching for maybe not exactly what we sell in all cases but very similar uh basically the category or the problem that we solve and that's pretty much it those are the things that made the biggest difference obviously I've been running this startup for like three years now tons of things that we've done but those are things that made them biggest difference in terms of mrr which is obviously the most important thing so that's about it to recap the most important things you can do to grow your SAS company from my experience of growing one is first of all have a piece of your software or your entire software available for people to try now it can be a very limited version it can be one feature that you pull out but that's going to help you stand out especially in the early days where it takes time to get traction with other channels the next thing is consider a Weekly Newsletter now it is tricky because you do have to commit to it like it doesn't work if you just do it every now and again the secret sauce is that every week at the same time with the same format it's been huge for us and it's something that we are still building all the time and focusing on how we can get more value from the email list how can we grow the email list how can we provide more value to the email list and it's something that a lot of SAS companies sleep on because they're very focused on like getting that trial right away getting that demo right away a lot of people that reach out to us for demos especially Enterprise They tell us they've been on the email list for like three months it just keeps us top of mind and when they're ready to buy something or they're like oh we're going to start something new and we need Trends exploring topics like we're top of mind which is huge like I said it's like free retargeting then the lesson that I've learned you know it's not kind of obvious but like shipping features faster even now we're thinking how can we ship features faster the speed of light going from this Improvement seems like something we should do to actually pushing it live is really has been the biggest Difference Maker for us so far this year in terms of mrr now we've done other stuff traffic has grown we did a launch overall the thing that's made the biggest difference is launching these really really like game changing features as quickly as possible and the secret is really just getting more really good developers working on this stuff and lastly SEO has been huge for us I mean we're getting 400 000 visitors a month which is just crazy actually most of it even now is still top of the funnel but it was all top of the funnel or middle of the funnel before now we're mixing in this bottom of the funnel stuff and I'm seeing a huge uptick in the number of Trials we're getting like 600 trials a month now and before we're getting like 250. the biggest difference is yeah traffic's going up and that of course unfortunately increase the number of Trials you get but that bottom of the funnel stuff has made a huge difference they convert like crazy and it makes total sense like that person's searching for the problem you solved they're ready to go like they're ready to sign up as opposed to someone who's like problem aware and all that b-school stuff that's actually where the newsletter comes into play because instead of being like trying to convert that person who's just like I'm looking for startups to invest in or I just want Trends in the you know software world or fintech Trends or whatever getting that person to like sign up right away for your product is probably not going to happen but if you can get them on the newsletter and then drip value over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks when they're ready they're more likely to sign up so if you're doing a lot of the top of the funnel stuff and not including the newsletter you're missing out on a huge opportunity that's the bridge that gets you from like top of the funnel visitor to actually converting down the road now I'd like to hear from you do you have a SAS company do you want to start a SAS company if so what has worked best for you I'd like to hear your thoughts in the comments and I'll see you in the next video