Startup Story: How We Got 5000+ B2B Users in One Year
Back Story:
AeroLeads is a lead generation software started with a vision to provide an intelligent solution to the otherwise cluttered sales processes. This is done by automating the process of finding the relevant prospect details associated with the business of our clients irrespective of the business type.
The idea was conceived by Pushkar Gaikwad in December 2014 as a side project. Pushkar, the founder of AeroLeads, had started various other ventures such as WorkMonk and InBoundio in the past. This former entrepreneurial journey made him realize how oppressive lead generation was.
With his team, they took some time to build their product and test it extensively to ensure that the results were consistent across multiple searches to check all the parameters. In April 2015, a team of three based in Bangalore launched AeroLeads as a bootstrapped firm.
The Journey:
AeroLeads helps find the contacts of global businesses with email addresses and phone numbers of decision-makers. Therefore, this software helps to save a considerable amount of time for all professionals in sales and business development.
Within the first 50 days of releasing the beta version, AeroLeads acquired over 250 B2B users.
Focusing on the customer or user, in this case, is the key to the growth of any startup. Listen to your customers. We always give high value and importance to customer feedback and this has been vital in our growth. Most often, our users have the best product ideas. Incorporating such ideas automatically makes the product more desirable to the user.
Understanding our first small set of customers has made the software what it is today. This helps you to quickly correct your mistakes and fine-tune your product or service.
The best feedback you will get is from your product users. The best feedback that we have ever got is from AeroLeads users. We have asked questions on various web marketing forums like WarriorForum, Reddit, and HackerNews, and received helpful replies. But the best real feedback I got was from current users.
Beta testing is a boon when it comes to testing the waters. The AeroLeads team took a few months and solely concentrated on beta testing. This helped us understand the market better and helped us curate this powerful software.
The high rate of early adoption of our software gave us a tremendous boost and helped us gain insight into the market demand and user preference.
And in just about a few weeks AeroLeads landed a Fortune 500 client. We got IBM as a paying customer. Being a bootstrapped startup with close to zero marketing budget, it helped us a lot to have such a client as it validates the product and you can always leverage on such clients.
We at AeroLeads believe that a good product speaks for itself. Hence, we concentrate most of our resources on building and bettering the product than on marketing the product. Not to say that we aren’t putting efforts into marketing at all either. We’ve struck the right balance and that has enabled us to expand our reach. This approach has enabled AeroLeads to be featured in various publications such as The Hindu, YourStory, The Indian Startup Show, and just today, The Deccan Herald.
Bootstrapping is the way to go for start-ups. Since our founder Pushkar had already founded a couple of ventures, he learned that what matters is the product alone and everything else would just burn the limited finance of your startup. Rushing into forming a private limited company, investing huge sums into marketing when your product isn’t finished, having a plush office, etc, all just burn money. Always look for cheaper alternatives as you can expand as and when required.
Yes, we bootstrapped our startup to profitability!
Freemium or offering free trials is a very effective marketing technique. We offer the user a stipulated period free trial of our product, which has helped us grow awareness quickly.
We are aware that these users may never turn into our paying customers. So the conversion rates of these users become meaningless. But these users can become our best advocates. It also means that we give back something to the wider community.
Before building a team and raising money, startup founders complete the full cycle of product development and sales. And especially if you’re bootstrapping, make sure the core team of co-founders do all this by themselves. It doesn’t matter how small and trivial the task is, do it once and then you can delegate to others.
We were lucky to have a good balance of expertise across the team of three, from backend technological and developing skills to marketing and experience in setting up, growing, and selling successful businesses.
As we have grown, we have employed two more staff. Even though we are still a small team of five, we come together as a smart team that works hard and achieves far more than many teams greater than us.
Now that smart team of 5 caters to over 5000+ B2B users from across the globe. AeroLeads now also offers a Google Chrome Plugin to simplify the process. We believe our product can go places and one day even a Fortune 500 Company by itself.
This is our story as of yet. You may also refer to the article written by our founder Pushkar Gaikwad on How to Successfully Bootstrap Your Startup for more insights on bootstrapping.
Thank you for your support.
Do you want to generate leads at a low cost? Download our Chrome extensions and start exploring it for free.
Other Recommended articles from AeroLeads:
Top ZoomInfo alternatives for B2B prospecting in 2023
Best Lusha Alternative – AeroLeads Email Finder And Verifier
Top Hunter.io email finder Alternatives in 2023
Best RocketReach Alternatives in 2023
Try AeroLeads for Free! Signup Today itself.
For any queries feel free to contact us at hello@aeroleads.com or chat with our support team from our homepage.
Pingback: Startup Story: How We Got 5000+ B2B Users in One Year
Great story, and congratulations on your growth!
Thank you Steve.