How Bilal sold for over 137k in Life Time Deals with Nuelink
In this case study, we learn how Bilal Ararou sold for over $137,000 in Life Time Deals and is now growing his SaaS with 25% month over month, expecting to hit 10k in monthly recurring revenue soon.
Who are you, and what’s the SaaS you’re working on?
I'm Bilal, a Moroccan product designer turned entrepreneur. I started as a freelance product and web designer in 2009, then founded Kreatinc, a web agency, in 2016. We’ve designed and built SaaS products for clients from Australia to the US and in between.
In July 2022, we launched Nuelink, a social media automation and scheduling tool for creators, entrepreneurs, and agencies.
How did you come up with the idea?
Nuelink was born out of an internal challenge we faced.
We were using social media primarily for recruitment, but our job offers on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook weren't attracting quality candidates.
This was due to our lack of a substantial audience and the neglect of our social media presence.
To address this, we started taking social media seriously and sought ways to grow our audience. We tried manual posting, as well as various tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, but none of them proved effective.
We often got too busy and forgot about social media until the next hiring need arose.
In response, we developed Nuelink, a tool designed to not only manage social media but automate it as well, and keep us connected with our audience, especially during times when work and life demands become overwhelming.
How did you validate the product?
We’ve created a very basic landing page for the product with a description of the main features we’re planning to introduce, and a lead form for people to sign up for the waitlist.
Then started sharing it on Reddit, Twitter, and some communities on Facebook.
I got banned from a few of them, obviously, lol.
However, others were very supportive and gave us some feedback even before the launch.
We did this for about 3 months from March to June, while we were building the MVP, and collected about 300+ subscribers like this with zero ads.
Here's the link to a post I shared on Reddit.
How did you launch the product?
In June 2022, we started sending out the beta invitations.
Over 100 people from the list signed up, and we received an overwhelming amount of feedback.
People loved our automation features, which were ironically a secondary feature back then.
As a result, we shifted our focus to adding as many automations as possible.
We also received many feature requests, improvement suggestions, and of course tons of bug reports.
We promptly addressed these issues, and made improvements, while making sure we get the remaining approvals from various social media platforms and integrations.
Shortly after launching our paid plans in July, we received our first payment just a few days later.
During the beta phase, we were approached by the PitchGround team and agreed to launch Nuelink on their platform as a lifetime deal.
Their supportive and efficient team helped us finalize many small details before the launch and recommended that we introduce agency offerings, which proved to be a strategic decision, significantly contributing to our revenue.
In November 2022, we officially launched Nuelink.
Our launch was a success, generating $137k in revenue, including several consecutive days with revenue exceeding $10k.
These results were far beyond my expectations, especially for an unknown first-time founder like myself.
Shoutout to Udit and the entire PitchGround team for their incredible support.
P.S. Most refunds from that 20% we got were actually upgrades (we didn’t have a proper way to manage lifetime upgrades then lol).
Link to the deal:
https://pitchground.com/products/nuelink
What were 3 ways you got the first customers to your product?
Build a landing page and start collecting emails before you build the product unless you are completely sure that there’s already a market for your product, in that case, start collecting emails and promoting your product while you’re building it.
Knowing your ideal customer is key, in our case we shared the product on Reddit, Facebook Groups, Indie Hackers, and other communities. We knew that some of our customers would be there.
Once you get their email, make sure you send regular updates and ask for feedback or feature requests from them, this will ensure that they don’t forget about you when you launch.
Try to launch as fast as possible, don’t try to perfect the product, launch a simple minimum viable product, that addresses one core problem and start getting feedback from real people, not your friends, but people who are actually interested in buying.
P.S. Your MVP should be working, not half-baked.
What is the SaaS doing right now in terms of numbers?
In terms of the numbers, we’ve made $140.8k in revenue in the past 12 months, and growing with 25% month over month, we’re expected to hit 10k monthly recurring revenue in the next few months.
What’s the best growth hack or tactic to get new customers to your SaaS right now?
Right from the get-go, we knew SEO was super important, so we made sure to give it a lot of attention. And it's started to pay off!
Our website's getting more and more organic traffic, and people are starting to notice us.
Besides this, building free tools and partnering with products that complement yours for more exposure is a great growth hack.
What is your biggest lesson learned thus far?
One of the hardest lessons I learned was that you should never go build a SaaS and expect people to come, a SaaS business is a lot more than the tech stack behind it.
You can have a superior product but still fail if you don't know how to package your product, market it right, teach people how to use it, and most importantly, provide top-notch support.
What are the 5 tools you use the most?
ChatGPT obviously.
Loom for giving feedback to our team and collaborating on different stuff async.
Balsamiq for low-fidelity mockups, we used this to design Nuelink and many other products.
Substack is becoming my go-to for keeping up with different newsletters and for writing our own Nuesletter.
Nuelink is a shameless plug, but we use this to automate our social media.
What’s 1 book you’d recommend to fellow founders?
The E-Myth Revisited this book helped me shift my mindset from trying to make all on my own to getting other people involved and building and structuring a real business.
What’s your advice for (aspiring) founders in SaaS?
Prepare your minimum viable product to the best of your ability, and make sure it solves at least one core problem for your customers, don’t launch with a half-baked product, instead try to fully bake a half product.
Start finding customers as soon as possible, preferably before and during the product-building phase.
Once you have customers, you have a business, without them you have nothing.