Increased MRR by 3x in 6 months - Interview with GrowSaaS portfolio founder Henry Purchase

okay so today I'm joined by Henry the the founder of SEO space Henry could you just give the the listeners just a quick rundown of what SEO space is and and what people use your product for sure so I made the SEO plugin for Squarespace it's essentially a Chrome extension that will pop up on any Squarespace website that will tell Squarespace users how to rank H up on Google basic people call it the yast for Squarespace if you've ever used we breast yeah nice and when we so we've been working together for about six months or so now um if we rewind time a bit what was growth like or what was just your situation like back then when we first started working together yeah so I'd um I previously started a SAS business which failed so pretty much the situation I was in I'd use the experience that I had up until that point and I was basically I had hundreds of customers at the time and I was like I've never been in this position so already I was hitting sort of the the ceiling um and I really felt that in order to get to the next stage and needed to work with people who had been there and done it and got the T-shirt essentially nice got it makes sense and where are where are you today in terms of like Growth Company size don't have to be too specific but like just just to understand where you are today yeah sure so um uh Mr since we uh started working together has just under tripled um active customers is like 50% up so yeah you know customer growth has been steady it's since we work work together like the customer growth hasn't necessarily like gone up but what has gone up is the the arpu so I'm charging customers more my churn has gone down um and I would say that things are running a lot more as a SAS business should be um in terms of like proper systems in place proper tracking just proper if that doesn't so like yeah Mr has grown and I'm very sure that you've helped the Mr Grow you know it's almost tripled but the main difference that I see is it's a proper SAS business now with real tracking and real systems in place which I didn't have I didn't have before got it okay so uh yeah turning it into a real business I guess it would be the best way way sum so what what's like the to to help people understand the the kind of opposite to that so back before we started working together when we first started working together like what did it look like then like if if today your you're running a proper business like what sort of problems were you dealing with back then what was going wrong so i' I'd say I got i' I got product Market Fit already at that time my experience before was primarily using jir so I knew how to build a product how to run a tech team and yeah that was probably about it so where the pain points were was there was no like Nur there was no Emil flows onboarding the the everything was super manual and the the experience for customers wasn't personalized at all so for example there was no intercom in place that tailored the onboarding and the experience specific to the customers which is obviously like it that would have been reducing churn um that would have been increasing churn and and there was no like systemized approach in order to make decisions so everything was not on a whim but based upon feeling and experience there was no data behind anything which essentially meant in a lot of areas I was going blind particularly when it came to like support on boarding and datadriven decisions behind what I do to the product got it okay and so you said uh 3x Mr like you know what sort of activities or or things things have you done like what sort of levers have you been pulling um to to do that so you said arpu has increased so you know what sort of activities have been done to increase that what sort of activities have been done um one revisit revisiting the pricing plans um so restructuring how it was pricing what what the structure of the plans was um another part was like a guess zero across the whole process the first thing we attacked was the website so the website was completely redone before so like at SEO space I also have an agency and the software fuels the agency and the SEO space website was how I envisioned it was a hub it was like a hub you land on SEO space and whether you want our services our plugin the course whatever you could get it but then you know will and Liam were like well what do you want to grow and for me it was the SAS so they gave me that like TR that honesty and you know that no approach of being like well if that's what you want to do why aren't you pushing it hard so we completely restructured the website and then now we re we're we're revamping the UI of the SAS and so that cro Improvement is going to pass on to the website as well so I would say that's one really big area um then in terms of the tracking as well I had no concept or idea of where people were dropping off in the journey um you know where my bottlenecks were what was hindering growth and actually a couple days ago I had my highest ever free trial signups in the day so you can see and I'm and that that is the kind of thing like the software was growing and I didn't work with you guys because it wasn't growing it's because I was not confident in whether my decisions were impacting things and when you see stuff like your free trials come up my website visitors hasn't massively spiked and and correlating directly together you can see that it's becoming more of like a well engine that's all working together rather than like different parts are just glued which is probably what it was when we first started nice nice okay yeah and I mean there's a lot a lot of other things you've been doing behind the scenes like how busy you are with with like running um events you're you're doing some like lots of marketing activities in communities and stuff like that yeah the content really I I don't think the my content's still not fully there yet but it's definitely I would say it's running like a proper business which again I wasn't there before like all my tutorial videos are on loom for example and like with your experience on instantly and how you'll be able to you helping me with those support like it's some that support like it's little but all of my um all of my tutorial videos are now on a dedicated YouTube channel and playlist which again allows that to be an asset for my business which probably if i' have stood back I would have known but I didn't have the time to St stand back cuz I was working so hard and that's obviously where you guys came in nice got it and there's there's no like shortage of information out there right there's no short of people saying they work in the SAS industry and and they they know about SAS like what made you pull the trigger specifically with um myself and will it was just ex well one it came through a recommendation a knew will already um and so first it was a new will already will had mentioned your experience so like your experience it instantly your experience just in general in SAS and obviously Will's been there and done it um you know got the t-shirt for sort of where I want to go so it was just experience and the reason that I worked with you guys was I can find out the information I've already gone through and I've got the experience but that's ass business failed so for me I value just being able to cut through the fat send a loom video or go in a call and show you something and you'll just like do this look at this here's a framework copy that because I'm really good at executing shoting but I don't have the experience of in certain areas and I just want someone that has to tell me what to do and I'll do it and tweak it based upon my unique situation yeah yeah I think direct feedback like just clarity as well so you can just keep moving forward and you know what to work on yeah none of it's like it's not like the secrets it's all there but like you being able to understand my situation and you know maybe took a couple of months but because you know you guys aren't SEO experts but you were able to take what you knew and you different resources like the email marketing one was really good and then apply it help me apply it for my unique situation yeah yeah yeah sounds good um okay so covered 3x in Mr 50% in customer growth uh a lot of a lot of progress on churn as well I believe that was like um a main sort of concern so beyond beyond like numbers um would you say there are like sort of any other ways you know we've helped out or you've appreciated through through working with us um yeah I mean just on churn um I can go through I can just do that on a high level so like highest and people watching this are probably going to be like feel sick but at highest my churn was like um 18% um and then now we're like pretty close to single digit so it's still high but um I don't think that is far off where it'll sort of settle down to hopefully it settles down at like seven just because of the N show in and the type of customers um and and you asked like what what are the areas that you've helped out um so like I think the numbers are good right people ultimately care about numbers but um I sort of refer to them as like soft metrics there any other sort of ways that you've appreciated through working with us kind of the the hard to quantify things but you know youve just you found value in um obviously we' never met in person but I would probably I won CL you as like a friend but like as close as for someone that you've never met in person like I'm pretty sure we could go for a beer and go for dinner and have a laugh and we talk about work a lot but I could very easily see you as a friend which I think is um super valuable because when you're going through a SAS software Journey I'm a solo founder so I've got no one else that I can vent to no one else that I can speak to that really understands what it's like um so you know I would go as far as saying like 30 to 50% of the time spent in our calls is just more casual chatting about different direction you know anyone watching this if they're a SAS owner like everyone thinks about selling potentially one day so those convers ations like I'm not talking about selling right now and not necessar like the next year or a few years but at least thinking through those things is super helpful um because not everyone understands that um and some conversations you could can't speak to your team you can't speak to your misses um you so those softer things I guess no no I like that yeah uh it can be lonely just people on like the same wavelength just like even if it's just even it's just a bit of event things aren't going wrong a bit I guess unclear of of where to take things yeah that makes sense that's a good one um okay sort of final question then so it's going to be uh ideally startup Founders you know watching this thinking about working with myself and will at Gras um if someone's watching it uh right now and like they're on the fence about working with us you know what would you tell them yeah I guess um I think it comes down to the position that you're in like I think that if you have if you're in a position where you've got a great product and you you know you've either got product Market fit or you're getting really good feedback and you're finding that maybe like me that there's some areas that you know you can do it you know you know I knew I could do products but if there's areas which you know are going to be bottlenecks and are ultimately going to hold you back any percentage any significant percentage in terms of growth I think it's worth working with you because you know let's say you know as I said it's hard to like say how much it's really helped but it's definitely some percentage of the Mr even if it's like 30% well over the course of the year what does that do to my exit valuation or even whether you're able to exit at all because probably the mess that my business was like I wouldn't have been to exit without some like well if I ever exit I wouldn't be able to do it with the systems that had in place so I think it's a no-brainer both in terms of unlocking growth that you otherwise would't be able to achieve but then also like looking forward to that end position that if you do want to exit you know it's sort of a no-brainer because the ROI is going to be in the end it's going to be like the the the price you pay isn't really going to matter because the growth in the end is you know huge sweet appreciate it nice words cool well that's it thanks so much for your time no worries mate