Quarterly update
€6.1K MRR, 2 paying customers, 3 new demos, 5 users in total
Not bad for a 3 month old startup. Revenue is quite concentrated but I am really proud that we managed to validate the hypothesis and monetize already.
Breakdown:
€6K MRR → Software Consulting Services
€0.1 MRR → SaaS Subscription
Ongoing Sales Cycle:
2 Leads → Negotiating €6K MRR with Bid Management Services.
3 Leads → Negotiating €0.3K MRR SaaS Subscriptions
1 Lead → Submitted a proposal for €60K ARR in Grants and Government Contracting
Forecast for next month:
8 Leads → Estimating +€0.3K-2K MRR SaaS Subscriptions
Event highlights
Pitching at WeLoveSaaS in Amsterdam
Last week one of the startups that was meant to pitch cancelled their slot. I managed to hustle my way into the microphone and made some great connections and potential leads from the event.
Yep! That’s me realizing that when the MC meant that we would pitch “Open Mic”, it meant that there’s not enough time for me to pull my slides.
Product update
Introducing Language Filters – submit proposals in your language.
Some of our customers were able to find relevant tenders but not necessarily in a language that they speak. Opening cross lingual bid management services could be good.
One of our users is looking at applying to some smaller grants and tenders! Here’s what he had to say:
“There is no way that we are at a point where we can apply to tenders that are not in our language.”
We listened and delivered!
Is there a feature that you want?
New UX
Prototyping with Airtable
There comes a point in the life of a startup where you have to decide between renting or building your own solution.
Juan’s thoughts on Airtable
It is becoming extremely cheap to build new products! What used to take around 5 developers and a designer, can be accomplished by one person.
The engineer in me wants to go build, but building a whole product from scratch is time consuming. At this point in our journey, Airtable is making it really easy for us to manage and demo to new customers.
Sure, I’m sacrificing some of the UX, so my customer still needs to go the Airtable website for now. As long as people are happy and the tenders we recommend are good, these are minor nuances.
Exploring Go to Market
We’re planning to go big on marketing efforts
I’ve focused on building products my whole life and neglected sales in the past. I’ve come to appreciate the predictability that comes with marketing systems. Efficient capital allocation needs to come first. Forecasting doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s a fun exercise that helps us measure how well we actually understand the world.
Extrapolating our COLD email campaign below → We are achieving a customer every 10K emails. We have a list of 500K business emails in Europe. This should bring us 50 customers and 50-200K in ARR by the end of the year.
This assumes little churn, that we do not improve the offering or messaging, and that buying behaviour follows a normal distribution within Europe.
In practice, I expect this to improve with time. Things that we are finding out: Bigger companies want case studies, once we build a few we will be in a much stronger position to target them.
I personally think there is still more room to improve our targeting here, but we have a system that is working today.
We are starting with inbound marketing as well. Things we will be exploring next are:
Cold Calling
Linkedin (Inbound and Outbound)
Google Ads
SEO
Advisor Corner
Help us refine our Go to Market
If you know Marketers / Founders that made over 1M$ ARR in Sales by selling SaaS to +100 companies without significant concentration, we’d love intros!
That’s it for this quarter.
Thanks for making it this far, we are just getting started — and as always, stay curious! 💛
The Tender Market team
P.S.
Go check our site → https://tendermarket.eu