Case Study : How am I scaling SaaS intake at PitchGround using FirstSales.io
PitchGround was founded in 2018 by the Little SaaS team. It’s sole focus was to help online businesses grow with the help of software and education first approach.
We believe that education and software should be affordable, and easily accessible. When you combine them both, it creates a wealth of opportunities for everyone.
To truly make an impact, the team behind PitchGround has assembled together what we call an Education-First approach to educate the online businesses and help them with affordable software solutions, which earlier has been very expensive otherwise.
And like any business or marketplace, we have our own competitors that we must stay ahead of.
The way we differentiate ourselves from other marketplaces is by bring in high quality SaaS, rather than focusing on quantity.
Unlike other platforms we launch only 5–10 SaaS per month. They go through a thorough evaluation to filter and maintain the quality standards of SaaS that is being listed. That’s the reason why, not every SaaS that applies to PitchGroud gets selected as a Featured Deal.
Most of the SaaS intake happens because of cold email outreaching ( almost 90% ). We have used SaaS like Mailshake, Instantly, Lemlist…all of ’em are good software within their own right, but according to our outreaching scale these SaaS weren’t capable enough to handle what we wanted to achieve. Even with multiple accounts at multiple platforms, we were not able to achieve the scale and results we were looking for.
Plus, managing 200 accounts across 5–7 platforms is a managerial nightmare of its own.
That’s why we built FirstSales.io
To help us scale our outreaching efforts efficiently… and, more importantly, safely.
Before FirstSales we launched 100 SaaS on marketplace in 5.5 months, averaging 18.1 SaaS a month. But after using the features that we have on FirstSales, now in a month we have launched 31 SaaS. That is an increase in SaaS intake of 71% :)
How did we do it?
We combined Outreaching, A/B Split Testing and Email Warmup in one place.
In order to know what works, and what doesn’t, we needed A/B Testing at granular levels.
Now you might be thinking, WHAT’S THAT?
In other software, let’s say if you want to A/B test between 2 subject lines:
For that you just need to to create 2 different templates with subject 1 and subject 2 with body and signature remaining same.
And…creating 1 template will take you max 1 minute, right?
OKAY!
What if I ask you to create a combination of 10 subject lines, 10 body blocks, and 10 signatures.
That’s 1000 templates ( 10X10X10 ), and it would take you 1000 minutes to complete that.
But with FirstSales it took only 2 minutes to create this kind of combination, and we saved 998 minutes :)
This helped us focus those 998 minutes ( 16 Hours, 37 Minutes and 59 Seconds ) on prospecting for high quality leads, rather than creating templates.
Btw, FirstSales is the only outreaching SaaS to have A/B Testing of signatures as of today.
The reason we went with this level of A/B Testing is to find the best possible combination.
Wanna see the results?
We were benching 90% OPENS for every new campaign :)
Now, we are reaching out to more people but, in order to convert more we needed to make the right pitch at the right time.
Creating a normal sequence to just initiate the conversation won’t do any good for scaling.
The problem that we noticed was, people can be plain lazy or just super busy.
When they see our mails, they actually like the offer but they are so busy (or lazy) that they don’t put the effort to write 4–5 lines for asking out more information.
So, we fixed this with events.
Events help you to shoot an email to the recipient, just after they open / click the main email ( we focused on open ).
Here’s what our flow looks like:
And this literally was a game changer!
For every single mail / follow-up they opened, we were directly sending them the sign up instructions.
For us, FirstSales has been an advantage when it comes to cold outreaching, and a secret weapon when it comes to closing. As you can see, by simply using the events function within FirstSales a little differently, we’ve been able to increase engagements and add multiple partnerships that will bring in hundreds of thousands in revenue for PitchGround in only a few days.
Needless to say, we’re going to continue to experiment and optimize this process, but we are extremely happy about the results we’ve been able to get using FirstSales.
