Sept. 15, 2022

How to Build a Successful SaaS Product When You Have Zero Experience with Robin Eissler, Founder and CEO of BoosterHub

How to Build a Successful SaaS Product When You Have Zero Experience with Robin Eissler, Founder and CEO of BoosterHub

In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Robin shares what you need to start building your SaaS product when you have no experience, how to find the right people and mentors to help you, and how to drive a product-led growth strategy that will boost your s

You don't have any technical background, and you have no idea where or how to start building your SaaS product. But there is a problem you want to solve. Should you take on the challenge or leave it for someone else to deal with?

This is the exact problem Robin Eissler, the Founder and CEO of BoosterHub faced. When Robin began her SaaS journey, she knew nothing about what developing software products involved. 

In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Robin shares what you need to start building your SaaS product when you have no experience, how to find the right people and mentors to help you, and how to drive a product-led growth strategy that will boost your sales.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • How does BoosterHub enhance booster clubs
  • What is a booster club
  • Building a SaaS product with zero experience
  • How to transition from sales-led to product-led growth

Boosting the Nonprofit Space

BoosterHub provides infrastructure for nonprofit organizations, specifically high school booster clubs, for their athletic and fine arts programs. It also enables volunteers to jump into the organization and have a ready-made set of tools that help them communicate, manage volunteers and fundraise.

BoosterHub popped into my head like Hey, we need to use one tool to do all of this. And I was at a time in my life when it was time to start a new venture. So we decided to jump in and do it - Robin Eissler

Building a SaaS Product With Zero Experience

Before starting BoosterHub, Robin worked in aviation and was also the Founder and President of Sky Hope Network. She says that running a new business is all about duplicating and adapting the systems and processes of the previous one. If you didn't have to deal with SaaS before, like Robin, a great idea is to find a mentor that will guide you. Also, spend some time learning basic SaaS principles and tools to get started.

Running a business is really all about systems and processes and then duplicating those systems and processes - Robin Eissler

 

From Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth

The first BoosterHub customers were beta testers. The team adopted a classic SAS marketing strategy of building the funnel, prospecting, looking for contact information, working through the process of nurturing those leads, and selling them. In the beginning, you can start too with a sales-led approach, where you try to find the right people and present your product. As the product develops, you can take on a product-led approach.

We're definitely trying to move to as much product-led as we can. I think the nature of our business will always remain some percentage of sales led just because of how booster clubs operate and the relationship model there - Robin Eissler

 

For more interviews from the SaaS Origin Stories podcast, check us out on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast player!

Transcript

Robin Eissler: What we've learned since then, it doesn't really matter how much we test something or how much we think somebody's going to use it. As soon as we put it out to the users, they find some way that we didn't test, and they find a way to use it that's different than what we expected. Sometimes good and sometimes bad, but we've learned that pushing something out in its minimum state is really the best thing to do because you can then take that user feedback and perfect the products.
Intro: Welcome to SaaS Origin Stories. Tune in to hear authentic conversations with founders as they share stories from the earlier days of their SaaS startups. We'll cover painful challenges, early wins, and actionable takeaways. You'll hear firsthand the dos and don'ts of building and growing a SaaS, as well as inspirational stories to fuel you on your own SaaS journey. Here is your host, Phil Alvez.
Interviewer: Okay. Today I have Robin Eissler, the founder of BoosterHub. I'm very excited to have her on the show. She's a long-time friend and I'm excited to share more about the product. Thanks for coming on the show, Robin.
Robin: Hi, Phil. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Interviewer: It's great to have you. The first question that I like to ask our guests, it's to tell us a little bit your product, and specifically, what problem does your product solve?
Robin: Absolutely, so BoosterHub provides infrastructure for nonprofits, specifically for high school booster clubs for their athletic and fine arts programs. It enables volunteers to jump into the organization and have a ready-made set of tools that help them communicate, manage volunteers, and fundraise.
Interviewer: Got it. let's dive deeper.
Robin: Let's do it
Interviewer: I understood big picture, but before Booster, how they were trying to do and how you make their lives better?
Robin: Before BoosterHub, booster clubs typically are using 15 to 20 different tools or software applications to do simple things like send emails to 150 people or sell t-shirts online. What it creates is a very disjointed series of tools that don't talk to each other and are very difficult for volunteers to manage. Most booster clubs are managed by volunteers. They have all these tools that don't talk to each other, no one knows how to use them all, and then a new volunteer comes in and they have to start the process all over again. BoosterHub enables them to set it up once, have all the tools talk to each other, and then gives the volunteers more time to spend with their kids and be on the sidelines, like cheering on their kids instead of behind the computer working on a spreadsheet to try to get it into some other system.
Interviewer: Ah, Yes, that's definitely a huge problem to solve, like imagine having to use a bunch of applications being all confused. How did you come up with that idea?
Robin: I was the president of my daughter's volleyball booster club, and I was actually getting ready to turn it over to the incoming president. I made a list of all the tools I was using, and I had 18 different software applications. I had the social medias and we had Square and we had a website login. I thought, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to figure out how to turn these all over, and worse than that, I'm going to have to teach somebody how to use all these and that's just a nightmare."
Then there were a lot of problems with security and accountability. There's no way to track who did what in each system. Even like our bank account, we had used the same login for five years, so somebody from five years ago could log into the bank account, which is crazy. BoosterHub popped into my head, "Hey, we need to use one tool to do all of this." I was in a time in my life where it was time to start a new venture, so we decided to jump in and do it.
Interviewer: That's amazing. I see so many products being built that way. Basically, it was a problem that you experiment yourself and you are like, "I'm going to solve this problem so other people don't have the same pain that I'm having right now." It was a big pain that you had. I think that's the right way to come up with product ideas. Basically, you left your job as the president of the booster club, which, by the way, was volunteer, and now you're ready to start a new venture. That's how it went, right?
Robin: Yes. I had another company that I had sold in 2017 and had actually taken two years to just be mom, to focus on the kids who were finishing up high school. Of course, within about a week of selling and retiring from my other business, they asked me to run the booster club. Of course, when I jumped in I'm like, "Holy cow, this thing runs just like a business, but it has no business tools so we need to solve that." I transitioned from the role of volunteer and then started up the new organization.
Interviewer: Before we keep diving deeper on the story of BoosterHub, could you tell us a little bit what a booster club is? Maybe someone doesn't know what that is. How does it work?
Robin: A booster club is effectively called a school support organization. What happened was about 20 or 30 years ago, they started reducing the funding for kids' extracurricular activities, whether that be the marching band or the football team, or the choir. What happened is people sprung into action and started creating nonprofits that could fundraise and volunteer and help support these organizations. A lot of your extracurricular activities in your high schools are funded not through the school district, but through these nonprofit organizations called booster clubs.
Those booster clubs are incorporated nonprofits, so they have some IRS technicalities they have to deal with, and requirements. They manage volunteers. Some of our clubs will have 2000 to 3000 volunteer sessions over a season that they need to schedule people and arrange people, and then they fundraise. We have some seven-figure clubs that race over a million dollars a year to support their activities. They're effectively running online stores and point-of-sale stores and people management systems and all of these types of things. All of that to help the kids do the activity that they love, be it music or sports or any number of activities.
Interviewer: That's just mind-blowing to think that parents get together, they organize themselves and they do everything so they can go and they can fund their kids and what they love. It's mind-blowing. I think it's cool that you are making easier to do that.
Robin: That's the goal.
Interviewer: Of course, you had an exit, you went into retirement, which you ended up working for free for a couple of years and now you're ready to start this company. Why do you think you were the right founder to start this company?
Robin: It's always the right time, when an idea comes to you, and then you just happen to have some recent experience and the set of skills to make it work. I've done a lot of volunteer work over the last 20 years through different things, through our kids' schools, through aviation, those types of things. Then also, I've run businesses and doing those two things together always on the volunteer side, I always saw need for improvement for ways to sustain the organizations, way to turn the organizations over to the next volunteers.
Then also being a mom, that side of it, my official title at BoosterHub is team mom. Because I've been the mom on the side of the field here and on the kids. I know that you're out there doing this so that your kid can excel at whatever activity they're doing. The world sets you up for what you're supposed to do next. I had the merging of all the traits needed to found BoosterHub.
Interviewer: That's awesome. How did that experience coming from a different industry, but you build a successful business, you exit that business? How did that help you in your journey to create your SaaS because you're going from, you were in aviation, now you're going to build a tech product is different, but I imagine a lot of things translated what were the things that we were able to pig back from your previous experience?
Robin: Running a business is really all about systems and processes and then duplicating those systems and processes. That part of it was relatively easy and in how we're going to set up this company, what we're going to do, and the systems and the processes that we're going to create. Obviously, the software side was totally new. We had never done much that. I did have a little bit of experience building some customization to our CRM at the previous company so had done just a little bit touched here and there on that.
Definitely used those practices that I'd used for the previous 25 years and building the infrastructure of the company, building the processes, building the project management tools, and things like that. Then along the way, we had some great mentors, Phil, you being one of them, teaching us the software side and how to develop software. I think my role has become, I don't write code but I have learned how to develop software and get things accomplished and do it in an efficient way.
Interviewer: That's great. By the way, it was definitely amazing to be part of the experience with you. One thing that I remember when we first met, and we're going to talk a little bit about that a little bit, was that I felt like you were bringing a level of sophistication that those nonprofit organizations didn't have. You have transferred that sophistication that you had when you were running your organization and you're like, "I want to bring the sophistication for nonprofit for these parents that they never maybe even run of the organization before," because you had the experience. I feel like that's one of the biggest things that you brought to the table when you were building this product.
Robin: Yes, I think so. Even just simple things as emailing, in a lot of booster clubs, they literally send out an email with 300 people on the carbon copy, and we know from a business perspective, that's a really bad idea for a lot of different reasons. Just something as easy as giving them an email tool where they could manage lists and not have to do something that could create some communication disasters along the way.
There was a lot of room, and for the most part, there weren't any established tools for booster clubs currently. We're really the first in that space and really help bring together the specific needs of the booster club, which is its own animal. It has very specific requirements.
Interviewer: That's amazing. Of course, you understood those requirements very well. Now you have the idea when there's certain requirements, you're ready to build your product. Tell us a little bit about how you went about funding that first, and how did you build? Who built the first version of the product for you? Of course, I know the answer.
[laughter]
Robin: Well, I have to admit. We started the process. We knew nothing about software, so we started doing some research. We spent about three months just researching development companies and how that process works. Honestly, just learning what's UI? What's UX? What does this mean? What's Jira? We were breaking down, we've never heard these words before.
I think one of the big things that DevSquad brought to the table that was huge for us was a tangible meeting where we could take our business idea to you and discuss that idea and break it down into pieces where we could actually see how this process is going to look. I think that's a great tool that you offer with that initial introduction meeting. I'm not sure that we would've ever gotten started without that, so that's a really great way to get started. Then in terms of funding, we are a bootstrapped organization, and we're still planning on staying that way. It takes a lot of resources, but for the time being, we're self-funded and plan to continue on that path.
Interviewer: Awesome. It's just like, you went about what made the difference for you to choose DevSquad, which by the way is my company for everyone listening to the show. [laughs] You were looking for someone that could help you do the planning and the strategy of the product, and we have a product just for that. It's our Sprint Zero. You flew to Utah and we really got in the same room so we could plan and roadmap the product. That was probably the biggest challenge. How do I know where I'm going to go? Can someone help me with a map?
Robin: We had the idea, we had a lot of the pieces already sketched out, but meeting with your team really helped us have a more realistic picture of what that was going to look like and a timeframe and a cost. We had met with about a dozen companies via Zoom and phone calls. We add quotes ranging, [chuckles] you name it, we had a quote for it. We really had no idea what we were jumping into, but that Sprint Zero meeting was really effective in giving us realistic expectations, helping us build a roadmap to get the product built, and feeling like we had done something tangible. It's great to have an idea, but that first step is sometimes the hardest step to take.
Interviewer: Nice. Now we have a plan. Walk us through including the plan from MVP and even from transition to bringing your own team. Of course, we help you implement the first version of the plan and then you transition to get your own team.
Robin: Yes. We started with the goal of building the MVP, which I still squack and yell about, "No, no, no, we have to have more than that." It's always good to have the development team say, "No, let's give them the minimum first." One is, I think, setting up the MVP was about 30% of the size that we wanted of the original product, but it turned out to be that was exactly what we needed as we brought it to market. So much of what we have today has been revised and updated since our MVP, and mostly based on the user feedback.
What we've learned since then, it doesn't really matter how much we test something or how much we think somebody's going to use it. As soon as we put it out to the users, they find some way that we didn't test and they find a way to use it that's different than what we expected. Sometimes good and sometimes bad, but we've learned that pushing something out in its minimum state is really the best thing to do because you can then take that user feedback and perfect the product. We started with the MVP and then we started with a fairly good group of beta testers.
We had about 15 beta testers on the original system, and all of those beta testers are still with us. They're all customers now. That's worked out really well. Then we transitioned into a paid product. We were in beta for about three to four months and then transitioned into the paid product. It took us about a year from start through building the MVP and then doing the beta test and then on into the paid side of it.
Interviewer: I love what you say about you need the customer to be giving you feedback so you can keep improving the product. That's for who you're building the product. That's why it's so important to try to get to market as quick as you can. Maybe if you're getting to market, it could mean just having beta testers because the beta testers really help you improve that product until you start eventually charging for the product.
You already answered one of my questions, which is how you got your first customers. They were all your beta customers, but well maybe expand on first how you found the beta customers, and then after the beta customers become your first paying customers, how you went and got more customers after that.
Robin: Yes, sure. The first customers were beta, and most of those beta testers were local booster clubs that we knew somebody in. A few of them were not. They were people that had heard through social media or through locally here in our town that we were building a product. I think somebody had asked me, "When did you know that the idea was good?" I was in the grocery store one day and the president of one of the booster clubs chased me down and said, "Hey, hey, I heard you're going to build a system for booster clubs." We were still well in development at that point and weren't ready to come to market yet. I thought, "Maybe this is going to be a winner if people are chasing me down in the grocery store."
[laughter]
We had a great group and some of our beta testers referred other beta testers. We had just over a dozen of those groups. Then we started with just classic SaaS marketing. That's just building the funnel. We started prospecting, looking for contact information for our client group, and then working through the process of nurturing those leads and then eventually selling them on the product.
Our early set of customers were all very intense sales. Everyone probably had hours of phone calls and Zoom meetings to convince them it was a good product. We're just now starting to see the organic growth. We're in fact, half of our business in August came in organically, through people that we haven't spoken with. They've just signed up and become paid customers through our onboarding process.
Interviewer: What I'm hearing is you start with what we call a sales-led approach. Sales-led, you are doing code emailing these people trying to find the right people, showing them the product, and you're like, really, maybe because the product doesn't have everything that's not as mature, you're working harder to convince people to get on board. As the product developed, now it looks like that you are half and half, you have a product-led approach. People get to your website, they sign up by themselves, the product goes out the sale, and you guys don't have to do so much of the sales anymore. Is that correct to say?
Robin: Yes, that's exactly what's happened. Along the way, we're learning, "Hey, this is a step that everybody seems to be getting stuck at. How can we refine the product at that stage to look different so that people can make that step without talking to us or without having to use tech support?" We're definitely trying to move to as much product-led as we can. I think the nature of our business will always remain some percentage of sales-led, just because of how booster clubs operate and the relationship model there. We've also had a big boost recently in our SEO. We've spent a lot of time working on keywords and SEO work, and I think that's starting to pay off as well.
Interviewer: Nice. First, you're doing only outbound, and then now you're doing more of inbound marketing, you're bringing SEO. Do you do any paid too, or you're just taking off SEO and in referrals for the time?
Robin: No, we don't do any paid inbound at the moment. Our organic SEO is ranking pretty high. We're letting that run and see what those results look like. We've done a little bit of social media paid marketing just because our market is there in some of the social media outlets and I see an okay return. It hasn't been a terrific return. Actually, what we're finding is our organic SEO is really producing for us the most right now outside of our sales side.
Interviewer: As your channels at this point, SEO is your strongest channel, even stronger than your outbound mark.
Robin: Outbound's still stronger, but SEO has definitely we can tell how we've contacted people. We're starting to transition to more and more are not in our system we haven't contacted them so they've come through the organic approach.
Interviewer: That's awesome. I think that's an amazing approach for a lot of founders, especially bootstrap founders like yourself. You start sales lead, you start talking to your customers, spend a little bit less money and then you slowly transitioning to product-led, and that helps you to improve the product. Also in the early days, you're trying to build a product that solves the customer problem, like their pain point. If you're spending a lot of time working on their onboarding, you're not actually solving their problem, you're solving your problem, which is to get people in. [laughs]
Robin: All the time I'm like, "If we have to talk to them, we've done something wrong, they should be able to do this on their own." I always have proof these people did it on their own, it can be done. What can we do? We have on our tech support side, if we see an issue three times, then we're like, “Something's wrong with that issue.” Three different people are having it. How can we fix the system so we don't see that issue anymore?
Interviewer: Talk to me about your first hire. Who was your first hire? Of course, you start everything with outside vendors, like DevSquad, but now your product has been the users and everything. Who was your first hire?
Robin: Our first hire, we brought in as our chief technology officer. We had worked with some wonderful vendors and contractors on the development side, which is on the marketing side, I have a lot of experience. On the sales side I have a lot of experience, but on the development side was where it, certainly from leading the company, that was my weak point. We had an opportunity to hire one of our contractors who had built a good portion of our system. It was funny because he came to us and said, “I'd really like to join the organization.”
On the first day, I told him that we couldn't afford him, and then three weeks later I doubled the offer and said, “We can't afford not to hire you at this point.” It was a funny transition in that month because at the beginning of the month, I was looking at things going, “Oh my goodness, how can we do this? How can we pull this off full-time?” Then by the end of the month, I was like, “If we don't do this full-time right now, we're going to be so far behind.” I laugh at that. I tell people every 30 days it looks different. The outlook looks different.
I read something somewhere that said in a SaaS, you need to be trying to hire the people you need six months from now today because it's going to take you that long to get them on board and do that. Now, of course, we have three full-time developers on our tech team and three part-time. We have a team of six over there, and then we have about five of us over on the marketing and sales side. I just laughed that that was exactly right as we needed to be hiring for where we are today. Then in the last 30 days, our demand has been so strong. Our team, we struggled. We were lucky to have everybody we did. We barely made it through this month.
Interviewer: Oh, that's awesome. You are sure that the first hire was the right decision. It looks like you're a little bit worried, but you eventually made the hire. Was it hard to get him to come on board? You say it was a little bit expensive for you. Did you offer equity? What did you do so you could get the person on board?
Robin: Every hire's a little bit different, but in this particular case, our CTO had a lot of passion about the project. I think that was most important. Was very passionate about the project and then wanted to really be a part of what we were building. It was more than just the technical skill. It was, “Hey, I want to be a part of this.” We did include some equity in there and he's now a partner in the company. It's been really probably one of the most significant things that's happened to BoosterHub because we were really able to make our technical side very robust.
I think it's great to work with great contractors, but when you become a technology company, you've got to have a technology team. Our customers work a lot in the evenings and they work a lot on the weekends. Having our team who understands that is really, really helpful because Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings are kind of slow, but Friday nights, holy cow. Last Friday night was high school football, Friday night lights in Texas so Friday night is one of our busiest times.
Interviewer: Any advice out there, it's like, "Hey, if you're going to build a SaaS product from day one, you must have a technical founder." That's not what you did. You start with outside vendors and then you kind of delay bringing that technical founder. Do you think that was okay for you? Do you think this approach that maybe other bootstrap founders should try to follow to delaying bringing that technical founder? What’s your opinion about that?
Robin: I think if you don't have the technical background, there's some level of you don't know what you don't know. It takes some time to learn what you don't know and I think working with all of our vendors, we were able to see the good, we were able to see the bad, we were able to say, this is what we would want on our team. If we'd have made that higher partnership-- In fact, we had the opportunity early on to bring on a technical partner and it wasn't a good fit.
I'm really glad that we waited and we had somebody that not everybody has this opportunity, but we had the opportunity with somebody who had some experience with our project, that had shown a lot of passion about it, and then had the skill. That it's just there's a wide range of technical capabilities out there. Being able to identify things are moving faster, better, when these folks are, is something we wouldn't have known on day one. I think it was certainly the right move for us.
Interviewer: My takeaway from what you say is, look, we knew so little about building software products that I wouldn't be able to pick the right technical founder at the beginning. I had to learn more about it. Bringing different vendors, I learned so much about what do I need and I was more qualified a few months later to make that hire and to bring that person in because now I understand what I'm looking for. I understand a lot of things that allow you to bring the correct person. Is that correct?
Robin: Absolutely. It took us time to learn what we were looking for and not only on the technical side, but somebody that would fit in with the company culture, that's going to fit in with our values and then also help us build a great technical product. I just don't think it was-- It's certainly something we couldn't have done on day one. Working with valued vendors was huge. We couldn't be where we are without DevSquad and some of the other companies that helped us get the boat launched from the dock if you will.
Interviewer: It was a pleasure to work with you in the early days.
Robin: Yes, absolutely.
Interviewer: What is the biggest challenge that you guys had so far?
Robin: If you ask me that question today, it's keeping up with demand. We're at that stage where the curve is starting to turn, and on most days, it takes not only full-time but twice full-time from everybody on the team to get through what we're doing. Just trying to struggle, is it time to bring on new people, and it’s always sort of a guessing game. As I mentioned, you never know what it's going to look like in 30 days. We keep seeing that it looks very different every 30 days, but we're just never quite sure where that dot is going to be. Right now, today it's managing demand. I think early on it was trying to do too much too quickly, for sure.
Interviewer: If you're managing demand, I imagine that right now you know that you have a product that people love. When did you know, "Look, I built something that people really love and they want to use our product?"
Robin: I think the first thing was when somebody chased me down in the grocery store to say, “Hey, I heard you're building this product, we want to use it.” That was the first. This might be interesting, in one of our second beta test demos, a group of our beta testers offered to become investors in the company, and that was another aha moment of, maybe we are building something cool. Now I think it's about customer acquisition and customer retention, and you know what, we have no churn. We are running with zero churn right now, which is really cool.
I expect at some point that'll change, when you have all of your customers re-upping, now we're just coming up on our first year, but so far we have no one planning to leave and more customers coming in and customers referring their other organizations in their school, you start to get a little more confident. It's hard when you first start out and you're talking to six people and one or two of them don't like it, then you're like, "Oh man, did we build something bad?" because these people don't like it.
Then once you get the numbers and you start to get to a point where you've got a pretty large customer base, you can be like, "Well, maybe we just weren't a good fit for that particular client," but in the early days, that's hard to see , it's hard to decipher. We aren't a good fit versus we build a bad product. Now we're pretty comfortable. We know that there's a couple of organizations that we're not a good fit for depending on how they're structured and that type of thing, and so now I think we've got the confidence that we build a pretty good product and support a pretty good product a lot of it along the way is to support.
Interviewer: Yes. That's cool. Differentiating, and I think that's another insight for people that are starting right now. Trying to differentiate, is the problem the product, or is this person not the right fit? Am I talking with my right buyer? Am I giving this to the wrong person? This the person that I want use in my product? Zero churn, that's impressive. That definitely should boost your confidence.
Robin: A year from now, Phil, but right now we're zero churn and we don't have anybody planning on leaving, so we're pretty excited about that but we work hard to maintain that.
Interviewer: That's amazing, and what was some of your biggest fears when you like start this whole journey?
Robin: The first one was that the product wouldn't work. That was a big fear. What if we build something and it doesn't work? That always, even today, that still sits in the back of my head, what if it doesn't work? I think that's from being a non-technical founder, that's the unknown for me. I can sell it all day long. I can support it all day long. I can market it all day long, but on the technical side, I'm always-- Then I think now it's really being sure that we can fund the needs for the company to get it through the growth periods and build the team to support the organization.
Interviewer: Makes sense, because when you start to scaling, trying to manage the cash flow, that's definitely a hard thing. You started this in December, 2020, I think that's when we met. Could you go back and meet Robin from December, 2020 when she was landing here from Texas? She's coming to Utah to do her Sprint Zero and you could meet her. What do you tell her?
Robin: Oh my goodness. What I would tell you is take what you've designed, cut it in half, cut it in half again, and then double how much it's going to cost and how long it's going to take to build it, and you'll about right.
Interviewer: What's your responded ? I should think that.
Robin: It was unacceptable to me in December of 2020 but the truth was you weren't lying, Phil, you weren't.
Interviewer: I think I told you that.
Robin: You didn't say it in those exact words, but your MVP needs to be a quarter of the size that you want it to be. It's going to cost you twice as much as you think and it's going to take twice as long. If you go into it with that, you should be good.
Interviewer: That's awesome, and of course, the way that word the question's, talking to yourself but I think that's great advice for anyone trying to build a product and starting from day one, but it's different when you're like, instead of what would tell someone else. What do you tell yourself? We're getting to the end of our interview. It's been a great conversation. I have just two more questions for you. The first one, what book do you recommend for SaaS founders?
Robin: Oh my goodness, so which one do I recommend? Well right now, I'm currently reading The Lean Startup and that's a good one. It's got a lot of little tidbits in there that are really good. I want to say it was you that you recommended was The Product-Led Growth Strategy, that was really eye-opening. You can get your customers to do it themselves, and if they're not doing them themselves, you need to ask your question, "Why are they not doing it themselves?"
I think that book gave a lot of insight into that. Even today, I look for those pain points, where are they getting stuck? Where are they calling us? Where are they getting on the live chat and how can we make the product support that so that the customer can do the journey by themselves? As you know, it's all about scaling, and if you have to get involved, you can't scale it. I tell that to the team every day. As soon as we have to answer a question or get somebody on the phone or get on a Zoom, that reduces the number of people that we can serve and so we look at that on a daily basis.
Interviewer: Yes, especially as a bootstrap company, you're trying to optimize as much as you can so your software can do the heavy lifting instead of you guys.
Robin: Absolutely.
Interviewer: Those are great books for sure. I have read both of them. Of course. One I recommended for you. My final question is where's this BoosterHub today? What could you share about, how big you guys got and where you are and what are you excited about for the future? Where do you think like you guys going to be a year from now?
Robin: Yes, today we're serving over 5,000 users, individual users on the platform. We're a FinTech solution, so we do payments, we've just crossed the million-dollar mark in per year transactions, so we're processing more than a million dollars a year. I think, again, Friday nights are a big day, and last Friday night we did 3,600 transactions in three hours. I think this time last year it took us three months to do that many transactions, so to give you some idea of how things have scaled, it's pretty crazy.
We're super excited about the potential about serving more non-profits, helping people who volunteer their time to be able to spend more time being with their kids. We've got a lot of new pieces to the product that are in development now. Development never stops, right, Phil? That's what you told me. It never stops and so we're building a peer-to-peer fundraising tool that'll roll out this fall. Then in the spring, we have a ticket solution as well as a merchandise solution coming out.
We're really excited about those products because we're still really working with our MVP. The tools that we built, we've refined a lot of them, but it's basically our MVP suite of tools. We're excited to give the customers what I think are the fireworks of our product, the pieces that can really help them do amazing stuff in their organization, so we're really excited about that.
Interviewer: That's amazing. The big vision that you had, it is getting closer and closer, doing more and more.
Robin: Funny because sometimes it seems like it's further and further away.
Interviewer: It's because the vision keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Robin: You're like, "Oh, look where we are," but, "Look where we got to get to.
Interviewer: Yes. That's how it goes.
Robin: Yes, for sure.
Interviewer: Robin, thank you very much for coming to the show. I like to keep those short and sweet. I think that was a lot of amazing content here for our listeners, and congrats on your success.
Robin: Thanks, Phil.
Interviewer: Thanks again for sharing with us.
Robin: Yes, well thank you for having us, and we appreciate all your support over the years.
Interviewer: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Outro: SaaS Origin Stories is brought to you by DevSquad. To find out more about how we help entrepreneurs launch new products and help larger businesses plug in a ready to go development team, visit devsquad.com. Add us to your rotation by searching for SaaS Origin Stories in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click follow so you don't miss any future episodes. Thanks for listening, and remember, every SaaS hero has an origin story.