Episode 603 | Bootstrapping HotJar to $40M ARR Using D2C Marketing
In episode 603, Rob Walling chats with David Darmanin, one of the founders of Hotjar. Hotjar was bootstrapped to $40 million ARR with a fully distributed team of 170 employees. David and his cofounders sold the company for a 9-figure exit in 2021.
From their incredible launch story and their unique DTC approach to sales and marketing in a B2B SaaS business to David’s mental models and the thought process behind selling the business, there is no shortage of key insights in this episode.
Topics we cover:
[5:07] How David initially financed building Hotjar
[8:11] The biggest difference between Hotjar and its competitors
[12:03] The unique approach that David took when launching Hotjar
[12:44] Lessons learned from a failed product launch prior to Hotjar
[15:01] How they built their initial launch list to 60,000 subscribers
[19:32] How to know how much to spend on paid ads
[24:53] Why David said it was easy to work 60-80 hour workweeks for the first 6-9 months of Hotjar
[27:22] The two key ingredients needed if you want to sell a low-priced SaaS product
[30:31] How they tripled their growth from $1M - $3M in the first year
[33:26] How their initial launch strategy gave them a major competitive advantage when they started doing content marketing later on
[34:03] What led him to sell Hotjar
[40:39] How long the exit process took
Links from the Show:
- David Darmanin @DavidDarmanin I Twitter
- Hotjar
- Episode 569 I The Life-Changing Decision of When to Sell your Company
- How a 7-hour workweek led to Anna Maste’s 7-figure sale I They Got Acquired
- Conversion Rate Experts
- Delivering Happiness
- Selling The Invisible
- The Dip
- Built to Sell
- The Great CEO Within
- Let My People Go Surfing
- Just Cause
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.