SaaS growth tactics that grew a simple product to $40k MRR in 18 months

29-year-old Joseph Lee has had many failed ideas. He's also had a few resounding successes.

His previous company was making $170k/mo until it tanked during the pandemic, forcing him to make a huge pivot to salvage what was left. During that pivot, he came up with an idea for a new product — and that product is currently bringing $40k MRR.

I caught up with him to learn about the growth tactics that got him where he is today. 👇

Bypassing the job market

I’ve never had a real job.

Like most startup founders, I’ve been building and hacking products since I was super young — I was an avid Dragon’s Den watcher as a kid and that was a huge motivator for me.

At 15, I started my first venture buying and selling wholesale electronics. I was fortunate enough to have parents who allowed me to pursue my own unique interests. Having this latitude to try different things and fail quickly really affected how I do business.

I attended university at UBC in Vancouver, where I worked some part-time internships to give myself some financial runway. This enabled a level of financial flexibility for me to attend hackathons and work on side projects, which helped spark my first successful company.

I’m 29 now and I’ve gone on to create a dozen or so products and services — most of which have failed.

Pivoting during the pandemic

One that didn't quite fail was North America’s first demand-driven marketplace for seafood. It was bringing in around $170k/mo, but with COVID19 shutting down restaurants, supply chains, and seafood companies — essentially the three pillars of our business — we lost nearly 90% of our revenue overnight and had to figure out a new direction for the company.

Now, it's called Freshline.io. It's an e-commerce platform built for food distributors and wholesalers. And it’s at mid 5 figures in MRR.

Coming up with a $40k MRR SaaS idea

It was in 2020, during that big pivot, that I really saw the need for Supademo.

One of the biggest challenges I was having with the pivot was demonstrating the value of our complicated, esoteric product to an audience of tech laggards (owners at wholesale distributors). The videos, screenshots, demo tools I used were clunky, time-consuming, and one-way monologues that no one ended up watching.

In contrast, when I was able to conduct a demo with a screensharing product demo in an interactive, back-and-forth way, they immediately got it. So, I realized there was an opportunity to scale this magical “aha moment” with better product demos — I built Supademo. It’s the fastest way to create elegant interactive product demos.

Since launching last year, 15k+ founders, marketers, and operators have started leveraging Supademo to scale onboarding, drive adoption, and close more deals. It’s currently at ~$40k MRR.

4-step SaaS validation framework

Realizing my own need wasn't enough, though. Here’s the 4-step framework that I used to validate it:

Step 1: Identify notable problems

Compile a discovery questionnaire of non-leading questions focused on identifying problems. Ultimately, you should walk away with a set of core customer problems via customer discovery sessions, discussions with founders/industry veterans, and indirect secondary sources.

Step 2: Define your focus

This step helps us define which problems are worth solving. During this time, we should filter through all of the information we gathered from the first step, assess the most critical problems, and look at similar solutions in adjacent problem spaces and opportunities. Create a March-Madness-style bracket. Then ask these questions, weight your answers, and see what wins:

• How is the customer solving the problem today?

• How does the problem make them feel?

• How often did this problem come up?

• How big is the market? Is it growing?

Step 3: Develop your hypothesis

Think of potential pitfalls. Then, start building hypotheses around potential solutions, target customers, or distribution channels. This should give you a clear vision.

Step 4: Deliver your solution

Crystallize your hypotheses into a tactical, time-bound experiment. You’re building a business to make money, so it’s paramount that validation is tied to the commitment of money or time invested — not on a facade of hypotheticals.

During this stage:

• Build out potential low-fidelity solutions and proposals to key problems.

• Hone in on any additional discovery questions or interviews needed to further build knowledge depth within the singular problem.

• Evaluate which audiences or distribution channels best resonate with the solution.

• And of course, test the solution.

Building a SaaS MVP

After validating demand, I teamed up with my partner, Koushik, who is a wizard when it comes to scrappy product building. We were both exploring opportunities full-time after leaving our respective companies. Hence, money, time and skills weren’t factors for us getting this off the ground.

We’re both self-taught programmers, having picked up various skills from building our own startups and products over the last 10+ years.

I rarely code on a day-to-day basis, though. I primarily run product (feedback, scoping, roadmapping, prioritization), growth, and operations.

Koushik built Supademo using NextJS and Tailwind for our frontend app, a combination of PlanetScaleDB, NodeJS. MySQL, and PostgreSQL for our backend and database.

SaaS growth tactic #1: Things that don't scale

After the MVP was built, we gained initial momentum by doing things that didn’t scale, like offering to create demos for companies, manual outreach, and tapping into our networks.

We also launched on Product Hunt, which is a great way to create initial velocity. I wrote a launch guide for that.

SaaS growth tactic #2: Viral loops

Our biggest growth channel is the viral loop embedded into the core Supademo experience. It’s responsible for over 70% of our acquisition.

Essentially, users create a Supademo to share with customers and prospects — they house these within onboarding, support docs, sales follow ups, or on websites. And when viewers step through the magic of a Supademo, they’re often inclined to explore how they can leverage it themselves to save time or scale growth.

Add a reverse trial and freemium plan, which I'll get to in a moment, and we’ve been able to kickstart virality.

SaaS growth tactic #3: SEO

We also rely on SEO, which currently brings in 20-25% of signups, depending on the month. We’re averaging ~3-5% visitor-to-signup conversion.

Founders should focus on SEO from day 1. SEO takes a lot of time to accrue and build up — the earlier you can start, the faster you’ll be able to analyze, iterate, and drive outcomes. It shouldn't be the primary tactic in the early days, but don't put it off.

At Supademo, we do large-scale, top-of-funnel content like this programmatic “how-to” blog post, as well as high-intent pages focused on commercial keywords.

The two tactics have different intents. One is for general awareness whereas the latter is built for conversion. Top of funnel drives 85%+ of traffic. But high-intent drives 85%+ of actual conversions.

SaaS growth tactic #4: Sidecar products

We also do "engineering as marketing". We build complimentary free tools (AKA sidecars) to drive qualified leads to the main product.

Our first sidecar was Supascreenshot. It helps people snap and share unlimited beautiful screenshots for free. And it contributes about $1k MRR of that $40k.

It's currently a feature within the Supademo platform itself, but we plan to make this fully detached from Supademo as an ungated, free product that doesn’t require signup or a plan.

Another example is plgdemos.com, which we're gearing up to launch. It’s a free directory where founders can explore product-led tools by watching demos without having to book a sales call or set up a trial.

We may monetize it via advertising and featured placements. But, ultimately, our goal is to showcase Supademo within this directory in a non-salesy way, while encouraging other companies to create a Supademo to list on the directory.

SaaS growth tactic #5: Co-marketing

We do co-marketing partnerships with startups in similar industries. For example, we’ve done this with Brikl, Journey, and Paage — we post about their company, how our products work together in harmony, and why users from each customer base should try the other platform.

In each case, it’s driven significant impressions on LinkedIn (10k+) and gotten us a handful of paying customers.

SaaS growth tactic #6: Reverse trials

Supademo is a freemium tool. And it comes with a reverse trial. Like I said above, this is key to our viral loop.

Anyone can sign up for free without a credit card and access all of the features in our highest tier plan. After 14 days, users choose to upgrade to retain their premium plan or downgrade to a free tier.

I absolutely recommend using reverse trials. Many companies find themselves contemplating whether they should offer a free trial or a free plan. Reverse plans are the best of both worlds.

They drop customers into the highest tier plan, letting them discover and try the most powerful features up front. In addition to helping “wow” new users, reverse trials eliminate the paradox of choice between plans — helping them land on the one that works best for their specific use case.

Learn to be a jack of all trades

I think a lot of my success comes down to my ability to wear a really vast set of hats to deliver outcomes for my business. While I’m not an expert in any particular field, I’m a fast learner and consider myself dangerous enough across growth, design, engineering and sales to add value without needing to hire too early.

Ultimately, that should be the founder’s job: doing whatever you need to do to move the needle for the company.

And the best way to become a jack of all trades is to learn by doing. Rather than reading books or taking courses, I run experiments, ship them, and iterate on the results.

The most important growth tool for SaaS founders

The other — and perhaps most important — factor in my success is luck. And I think that goes for the majority of founders.

While I do think founders need to be able to recognize and execute on the luck they’re given, a huge amount of entrepreneurship is out of their direct control.

So the smartest founders aren't necessarily the ones who win; it takes a unique confluence of luck, idea, opportunity, and execution to be really successful.

With so much outside of my control, I find it’s best to optimize my journey for learning, growth, and impact. The last thing I want is to pour my heart and soul into a product, then consider it a failure for not meeting my financial expectations.

I'd rather consider my product a gateway to learning, growth, and personal fulfillment. That way, I ultimately end up in a much better spot and enjoy the journey regardless of the outcome.

What the future holds

I want to have no regrets at my death bed. I want to leave a lasting legacy — an impact felt beyond my time on earth.

So I plan to build an enduring company that maximizes outcomes for my customers and my team. That’s way more important to me than money or fame.

You can follow along on X, LinkedIn, or my personal site. And check out Supademo.