Crowded SaaS Market: $0 to $1M ARR Against 50+ Rivals

Omer Khan (0:09)

Welcome to another episode of The SaaS Podcast. I'm your host, Omar Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I took to Vitaly Veksler, the founder and CEO of Vista Social, a social media management platform for brands and agencies. In 2010, while working in corporate tech, Vitaly decided to build a social media management tool. It was his first entrepreneurial venture, and over the next nine years, he learned some tough lessons about building a startup. The biggest lesson, he spent years building advanced analytics features, when his customers really needed a complete social media management tool. It took him years to realize that and finally start getting some traction. Vitaly also had to learn everything himself, marketing, sales, customer support, you name it. His persistence eventually paid off when he sold the business in 2019 In 2020, he decided to take another shot with Vista Social, but this time in a much more competitive market. He and his small team faced a huge challenge. They had to build a product that could compete with the big players out there. And creating all the core features customers expected was a massive undertaking. But remarkably, they got it done in about 12 months. And that bet paid off. Vista Social reached the first million in ARR in less than two years. Today, the company has over 10,000 customers and a team of 15 people. In this episode, you'll learn how Vitaly's experiences and mistakes from his first startup helped him make better strategic decisions with Vista Social. What specific strategies and tactics Vitaly used to successfully enter and compete in an established market with lots of competitors. How targeting customers who hated their existing tools became a key growth strategy for Vista Social in a crowded market. The key differences in how Vitaly built customer relationships and support systems the second time around with Vista Social. And why focusing on a specific customer segment early on helped Vista Social gain traction faster than the established competitors. So I hope you enjoy it.

Vitaly, welcome to the show.

Vitaly Veksler (2:19)

Thanks for having me.

Omer Khan (2:20)

My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Vitaly Veksler (2:26)

Yeah, so Arnold Schwarzenegger once was asked, how does he sort of manage to get everything done? He said, listen, I used to wake up at five, go to gym. Then I went to work. Then I went to the gym again. Then I went to the acting school that I had a job. And then the next day I just repeated, people just asked me, you know, Arnold, how do I do this? Like, you know, I'm tired, you know? And Arnold said, sleep faster. So I just love the sleep faster parts.

Omer Khan (2:54)

Sleep faster. Love it. Great. So for people who don't know, tell us about Vista Social. What does the product do? Who's it for? And what's the main problem you're helping to solve? Yeah.

Vitaly Veksler (3:07)

Vista Social is a social media management tool, which essentially means that any brand, business, agency, anybody really, with any reasonable purpose on social media, can use our tool to effectively manage their social schedule content, respond to conversations, run reports, customize things. So quite literally, it's every business out there who uses social media for marketing, needs our product, and that's why we built it.

Omer Khan (3:34)

Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

Vitaly Veksler (3:42)

Yeah. So we are in our third year of operation. We have well over 1,000 customers on our platform, 10,000, I'm sorry, well over 10,000 customers on our platform. We are in a seven-figure ARR range, which we crossed into about a year ago. Size of team, I think we are right around 15 people, all globally spread out around the world.

Omer Khan (4:07)

Great. And did you raise money or are you bootstrapping this business?

Vitaly Veksler (4:11)

I've bootstrapped it myself because I did had a prior exit success, which allowed me to have the funds necessary to fund the early parts of the business. Although I have to say, super frugal operation to start, it was not a big lift to finance some of the early development and preparation work. Great.

Omer Khan (4:31)

So let's talk about that first product, which was Social Report. And this was something that you also bootstrapped, and it was also a social media management platform. So in many ways, you're doing this another time round.