Name: Daniel Kempe
Age: 32
What is your SaaS called: Quuu
Founded: 2015
How many people are on the team right now? 10
Where are you based? UK
Did you raise money? Yes, two small seed rounds of funding totally £150k.
Can you tell us what Quuu and Quuu Promote are and how you make money?
Quuu provides hand-curated content suggestions to save people time finding content themselves to post on social media. Quuu Promote is one of the ways we find content for them to post. We charge promoters a subscription fee to promote content via relevant and engaged individuals or companies across all the major social platforms.
What’s your background? What did you do before Quuu?
I worked previously as a telecom and networks engineer in the NHS. I also freelanced as a graphic designer and ran a branding agency before founding Quuu.
How did you get this idea?
The idea was created out of our own needs. We wanted to save time and find reliable content to post to our following, but we wanted a way to always trust what was being shared, so we created a set of rules that ensure content in Quuu is always the very best. The promotion side came about as a result of our guidelines. We could apply these guidelines to anything and charge for the process.
How long did you work on it before you launched? When did you see your first dollar?
The initial design and app was built within a week, we launched on Betalist to test the idea, then planned and launched a Product Hunt feature 3 months after. We started making money from that initial launch on Betalist.
Number of customers and free trials: 65,000+ users across Quuu and Quuu Promote.
80% trial conversion rate.
Approximately 4,000 paying customers on Quuu, and 1,000 paying customers on Quuu Promote.
Who are your clients? What is your target market?
Our target markets are individuals (entrepreneurs, startups), small-medium sized businesses that are active on social media, and agencies running social for clients.
LTV: $303
Churn: 8%
How did you get your first 100 customers?
Betalist and Product Hunt and networking on social and various slack channels.
What are the 2-3 main distribution channels that work best for you? What channel didn’t work out for you?
We’ve only just started exploring other marketing channels, as so far, we’ve solely relied upon our own service (Quuu Promote) to drive traffic and signups.
You had 5 successful launches on Product hunt! What are your most effective tips you can give to those who are about to launch their product there?
Networking with the right people (hunters), commenting and being active on PH. Sending out emails to existing users about the launch (without asking for upvotes directly). Offering a deal for PH visitors.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you encountered recently and how you solved them.
Driving traffic is easy, converting visitors to users, and then onto paying users is the hard part. There are many points of contact throughout the funnel you need to think about, so set up automatic messaging based on their position in the funnel to get them to convert to paid. Messaging could include, emails, in-app messages, videos and more.
Some of the tasks are not worth doing in-house. What do you outsource?
The only thing we outsource right now is paid advertising on Facebook and Adwords and that is still in the early experimental stages.
What are the 3 tools you and your team can’t live without?
Slack, Basecamp and Appear.in.
What was the #1 thing that helped you reduce churn?
Our community (Quuumunity). Providing helpful insights and making users feel part of something bigger makes people stick around for longer. They also feel like they should help spread the word about the product to friends and colleagues.
Tell us the biggest mistake you had through building and promoting your SaaS and what you’ve learned from it.
There are no mistakes, only lessons. We will continue to learn from everything we do.
If you had to start Quuu and Quuu Promote today, what would you do differently? Nothing. Genuinely, anything that didn’t go to plan we made into something positive and adapted to. Things won’t always go the way you expect them to, but if you are agile and adapt to the circumstances you’ll prosper.
were you ever offered to be acquired or invested?
We have had multiple offers to invest in us for a Series A, as of yet, no acquisition offers.
