Becoming the market leader with 10x fewer features

Elliot Boucher started a business while he was in school, then built it to $300k MRR... $380k if you include his recent strategic acquisition of a product doing $80k/mo.

I caught up with him to understand how he did it. We talked about how to win, even when you have fewer features than your competitors. 👇

Living by the Pareto principle

James: How do you do it?

Elliot: I live and breathe by the Pareto principle.

James: How so?

Elliot: Basically, I try to do more of what moves the needle, and remove or delegate the rest.

In the beginning, that meant leveraging technology to save time on support. Asking three questions before having a human take the support ticket helped to cut time spent by 80%. But it also pissed off 5-10% of my users.

James: And you were okay with that?

Elliot: Once Edusign started taking off, yes. I very quickly chose to ask the questions.

Later, it became a matter of delegating. I had to choose between doing everything myself with 100% precision or delegating with 70-90% precision.

It was a tough choice. Everything in the company was my baby. But learning to delegate was really important.

James: Not easy.

Elliot: The trick is to realize that some actions can reduce the time spent by 80% without losing quality. So try it! It’s always possible to go back.

Hitting $380k MRR

James: How is Edusign doing?

Elliot: Today, we help more than 2,500 customers and 3 million students manage their training documents and learner attendance.

And let's talk numbers! Edusign generates an MRR of roughly $300k, and AppScho is around $80k.

James: Where did this all start?

Elliot: I was still a student when I embarked on the journey of founding Edusign. At that point, I’d had a few small successes with e-commerce, Udemy, and SEO websites.

James: What is a “small” success?

Elliot: I was making €100K per month within a month of launch with the e-commerce business.

James: Why stop doing that?

Elliot: I wanted to shift my focus toward long-term projects. Repeat business is hard to get, compared to SaaS.

James: And the other businesses?

Elliot: The SEO websites are still generating a few hundred dollars a month passively. And I’ve sold over 25,000 courses on Udemy.

James: Okay, so you had some entrepreneurship under your belt. Why did you start Edusign?

Elliot: We had noticed the inefficiency of sign-in sheets in the world of education: manual signatures, data entry and follow-up by school staff, paper archiving, etc. and decided to solve it.

Initially, Edusign was only used for face-to-face courses. With covid, we developed new functionalities to create a complete product, at the service of higher education establishments and training organizations.

James: Good timing.

Elliot: Turned out that the problem was 10 times bigger than what I first thought. It’s not about digitizing paper. It’s about making sure that schools get their money, which turns out to be a “must have”; not a “nice to have”.

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Finding high-intent keywords

James: How did you grow it?

Elliot: First of all, we decided to focus on SEO — particularly on high-intent keywords. Today, 50 pages of our website bring 40% of the business.

James: Not bad!

Elliot: And it was 90% at the beginning!

This deliberate targeting of high-intent keywords enabled us to attract qualified leads and convert them into customers effectively.

James: How do you know if a keyword is high intent?

Elliot: It's all about whether the person is just searching for more info, or if they're looking to buy.

So, for example, "attendance sheet" is not a good keyword because the searcher is probably looking for a template. But "attendance software" is high intent because they're probably looking to buy.

James: So what's your process with SEO?

Elliot: We shoot a lot and see what sticks. And we only work on the stuff that lands. We optimize 20% of the content for 80% of the result. Sometimes even 5%-95%.

James: You love that Pareto.

Elliot: But ultimately, we started by building those 50 pages for high-intent keywords that we thought we could rank on. Backlinks are something we developed over time… But not so much, really.

Now, we’re expanding the strategy to broader keywords to keep pace, both in France and internationally.

Leveraging word of mouth

James: What else has helped you grow?

Elliot: Word of mouth played a big role in our growth trajectory.

James: How did you make that happen?

Elliot: I believe that the product and customer experience are the best ways to increase word of mouth.

One of our greatest strengths is our customer support. We have a rapid response time of less than 5 minutes per email and we strive to provide a "wow" experience that exceeds expectations.

James: That’s pretty fast.

Elliot: It’s a lot easier to do at the beginning when one or two people are working on the product. That’s a superpower for indie hackers.

James: What else helped?

Elliot: We used a strong branding strategy, using yellow and blue to create modernity and intuitiveness, and to stay in people's minds.

James: What’s important about yellow and blue?

Elliot: One of the main questions when starting a company is, “How am I going to position myself in the market?” Or, at least, it should be.

Turns out that in our market, the brands are quite bland, not very modern, and filled with blue and gray. I wanted something different to position Edusign as intuitive, modern, and friendly.

Yellow is a hard color to use. It doesn’t work out all the time and is associated with strong feelings. However, it also symbolizes youth, energy, and fun — everything our market isn’t showing signs of.

James: And you think this played a role in your WOM growth.

Elliot: I do. Our branding brought us many loving users. But it’s not just about the colors. To work, the brand must show everywhere.

Support must be quick and friendly. The UX/UI must be modern. The sales calls, the emails, etc.

Branding is a living organism that should always be aligned with what the company wants and delivers.

James: Did you ever try affiliate marketing or incentivized referrals?

Elliot: We tried referrals and affiliates, but they weren’t really a hit.

We are lucky to have a product that is B2B2C. Our primary users are schools, but training organizations also use it. And they use it in various companies, which automatically spreads the word.

That’s why we refuse to offer a whitelabel or even non-branded solution, even for clients paying 50k/year — it’s too valuable to us!

James: Before we move on, you're a marketing expert — what are your best tips for indie hackers?

Elliot:

• Never forget the basics. People try to be smarter than they need to be. For most businesses, it’s better to be good every day than great once in a while.

• Always think from the customer's perspective and show the problem and benefits.

• Get good at experimenting and moving fast. Remove variables from experiments so that you are more likely to know what really worked, what didn’t, and why.

Winning with fewer features

James: There’s a fair amount of competition in your industry.

Elliot: We grew with a product that had 10x fewer features than our competitors. And now we’re the leader.

James: Reaching feature parity with the big dogs is tough for indie hackers. So how did you win?

Elliot: Better customer experience, better branding, and a great offer to start with. That’s it.

James: Have you caught up on features?

Elliot: We increased the number of features to match competitors and go even beyond. I firmly believe that we have the best product on the market by far right now.

In the beginning, we only needed early adopters. But to convince a bigger part of the market, we needed to build a better product. And that never ends.

James: How do you build a better product?

Elliot: Sit behind the user’s desk. Literally. Speak with them. Ask the right questions. Go deep. Then ask more.

I very often hear early-stage founders say, “I did lots of user interviews”. And then they tell me that they interviewed eight people.

I interviewed 500 and spoke with 5,000 during the first year of Edusign.

James: Did you look at your competitors too or were you solely focused on potential users?

Elliot: You know, people say you shouldn’t look at the competition, but I think that’s terrible advice. You should know your competitors very well so that you can differentiate and position yourself as the leader.

The key is to look, but do not copy without understanding.

Change your pricing

James: Talk to me about pricing.

Elliot: We changed our pricing strategies often. I believe this is one of the best things to move the needle rapidly.

James: What worked?

Elliot: We increased the price by 4x for SMBs and by about 50% for enterprise clients. It was very impactful.

James: How did that impact existing users?

Elliot: We try not to change the price for existing users — or at least not too soon.

We did make the decision to move the users on usage-based pricing to a subscription after a while for technical reasons — it’s hard to maintain a totally different billing system. However, we gave them 2 years to do it. Not too brutal I would say.

James: You started with usage-based pricing?

Elliot: Yes, we wanted minimal friction to encourage trial and adoption.

James: Was it helpful?

Elliot: Yes, it enabled us to drive usage and gather valuable data for rapid iteration and improvement.

We were ready to help even the smallest customers, often providing personalized support and guidance, regardless of their spending level. I could spend two hours on the phone with a client that spent 5€/month.

James: Would you recommend others start with usage-based pricing?

Elliot: Yes. Saying, “It will only cost you what you use” is better than saying, “It’s $99 every month even if you don’t like it.”

James: Why did you move away from it?

Elliot: With subscriptions, you know what to expect. It’s also easier to show value with packages. And we realized that, even though people were far from using everything in their subscriptions, they still stuck with us.

It was also better for us financially. A “1,000 Signatures” subscription at 99 euros is perceived as 10 cents per signature. And we invoiced 25 cents per signature on a usage-based pricing. But in reality, with the subscription, people pay more than 50 cents on average.

This is not as true for bigger customers, however. The usage remained a big factor for them!

Acquiring strategically

James: You mentioned a product called AppScho.

Elliot: We recently acquired it to expand our expertise and offer our customers an even more complete product. It’s a mobile app for communication in schools.

James: Can you share what you bought it for?

Elliot: I can’t legally tell the price we bought it for, sadly. They were making €1M ARR.

James: What will you do with it now?

Elliot: We are going to rebuild everything from the ground up tech-wise. The product idea is great, but it's built on old foundations. We can make it more powerful, flexible, and scalable while integrating it perfectly with our existing products.

James: So you’re essentially buying the brand and users?

Elliot: Yes, the acquisition is going to help us bring the best solution on the market for higher education more quickly, thanks to their expertise and client base.

And it made sense because AppScho was already a perfect partner to Edusign and integration was on its way.

Just-in-time learning

James: You took this from a student's side hustle to a huge business with 50 employees. How did you learn everything you needed to know along the way?

Elliot: I like just-in-time learning. It's a really accessible superpower.

James: What’s that?

Elliot: Learn what you need, when you need it. For example, when I needed to learn about Sales, I read 5 books in a month to get up to speed. But I didn’t read about it in advance.

James: Makes sense.

Elliot: In the beginning, I learned everything by consuming content. I’ve read over 50 business books, listened to hundreds of podcasts, and watched countless interviews.

And I still include this type of learning in my daily work.

James: Which of those 50 business books do you recommend most?

Elliot: Made to Stick, Principles, and The Personal MBA.

James: Solid choices. Any parting words?

Elliot: Many of my ideas failed before Edusign became successful. Keep trying!

James: Where can people find you?

Elliot: You can check out Edusign and I'm active on Linkedin.

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