In early 2023, we connected with Joseph, the founder of Supademo, for an insightful interview. Now, in this follow-up piece, we delve deeper into the latest chapter of Supademo's journey. If you're curious about its origins, you can explore our initial interview with Joseph from last year for the complete backstory.

Where are things at since we last caught up?

It’s been a whirlwind at Supademo over the last few months. Since May, we ended up growing our team to five full-time, raising venture capital, and growing to hundreds of paying companies and over 8000 free users.

We’ve more than 10x our revenue since May to 6-figures in ARR and we anticipate we’ll grow significantly in 2024 as well.

What were the key factors that contributed to the growth and scaling of Supademo? How did you manage the challenges that came with scaling up?

Frankly, most of growth has come from happy users. There’s a viral element embedded into the core of our product. Folks create interactive product demos and guides to share them out with prospects, colleagues, or customers. And we’ve found that once someone experiences the magic of Supademo, they want to try it themselves.

From there, we try to make the initial signup and onboarding process as frictionless and fast as possible. The only friction we introduce is forcing folks to create a Supademo as part of the onboarding process, which accelerates the path to the “aha” moment of users realizing how easy, fluid, and fast it is to create a Supademo. We thought this was super important as a lot of folks have the preconceived notion that creating one is going to take a lot of time. And that’s just not the case.

Ultimately, relentlessly asking for feedback, distilling information into what’s actionable and pertinent, and ruthlessly prioritizing and shipping features has been the primarily way we’ve scaled growth.  

Otherwise, SEO, creating content, and building thought leadership on Linkedin on our personal founder profiles have also been effective secondary channels for growth.

You almost entirely grew your 2,000 monthly organic visitors over a 6 month period. How did you manage to grow organic traffic so rapidly?

To grow our traffic, we really focused on creating high quality, SEO-optimized content across top, mid, and bottom of funnels. Examples of top of funnel included creating instructional Supademos and blogs for popular apps like Figma. Tools like AHREFS and SEMRUSH are great for identifying both Top and Bottom of funnel search terms and keywords you can easily create content around and win fairly easily. Otherwise, bottom of funnel example includes comparisons pages to other tools and adjacent competitors in our space. There’s a ton of resources out there on how to start generating traffic - there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but luckily as a startup, you have the license to experiment quickly, measure results, and pivot to the next tactic - which is a huge advantage you should utilize to the fullest.

What % of your growth comes from organic traffic?

Almost all of it. We do little to no paid or social - outside of posting on our personal Linkedin profiles. Most of our customers find us through other Supademos, our blogs, or through partnerships with other like-minded SaaS platforms and entrepreneurs.

How have you incorporated customer feedback into evolving the product?

Absolutely. We connect with our power users on a weekly to monthly basis. It’s our job as founders to identify our ideal customer profile, discover their pain points, and build the ideal solution - so incorporating their feedback is a huge part of this process.

The one caveat I would add here though is that the customer doesn’t always know what solution they exactly need. Instead, they simply know the pain they’re experiencing. Hence, it’s so important to not blindly build what customers ask for - but instead listen across a wide spectrum of feedback and filter them into the ones that matter based on our vision of the world, what’s feasible, and what will impact the greatest number of our customers.

In hindsight, what would you do differently if you could start all over again with Supademo?

At this point, I wouldn’t do anything different. Whatever I say here will be based on survivorship bias - I really do think that every mistake and wrong path we took was a necessary step and learning to help us get to where we are today.

What advice do you have for other SaaS founders who want to grow healthy organic traffic that converts?

Firstly, I would really really think about your ideal customer profile. Once this is fleshed out, I’d  figure out where these customers hang out, what types of content they read, and who they follow on Linkedin or Twitter. I’d then engage with their content on a consistent basis (as well as your ideal customers’) to build authority, community, and general top-of-mind presence.

Once you’ve built a community, I would then start to build meaningful content on a consistent basis and work towards distributing and amplifying it using the network mentioned. The emphasis here is focusing on adding value, not on closing deals or being overly salesy. Secondly, I would focus on solving a painful enough problem well enough where customers are going to want to share your product with others.

Ultimately, if you build a beautiful product that solves a problem elegantly for a big enough group of users, word will spread organically. Ultimately, technology nowadays is really easy to build or copy - but network and distribution is much harder to replicate.

How much of a problem do you have with customer churn, and how are you addressing it?

We’re lucky to have really supportive customers and haven’t had major issues with churn. I think the key thing we’re focused on is relentlessly adding recurring and not one-off value. While we’re still in the early stages of practicing this, it’s something we’re embodying into any product or feature we build in the future.

Are you surprised or shocked by how things have turned out so far with Supademo?

Frankly, no! We knew we had a stellar team and an awesome product that could positively impact thousands of business around the world. Having built and scaled companies in the past, I definitely would not have committed to building Supademo full-time if I didn’t think our current level of success wasn’t possible!

What were the biggest challenges you faced so far with Supademo?

I think the biggest challenges is our general ambition to grow as fast as possible and with it my lack of patience at times. Building and compounding a software company takes times and oftentimes, we cloud our judgement and benchmarks based on flashy headlines on who’s raised money, who’s gotten to $X dollars in ARR in 12 months, or who has a 100 person team.

I’ve tried hard to remain steadfast in remembering that every business grows and scales differently and we should be focused on our own timeline and ambitions - not ones we see online.

What’s next for Supademo? How do you see it evolving in the next 5 years?

Our goal is to be the standard way teams demonstrate products and workflow - akin to Zoom or Calendly in their respective industries. In the next five years, we think we can empower over one million businesses with the tools to better educate and grow their customers.

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