AJ started Carrd as a vanity project to pay for lattes. Using product-led growth and freemium SaaS pricing at $19/year, he grew to $100K MRR and 4 million sites with just two people.
Learn how AJ built a product-led growth engine using the freemium model, built-in virality through 'Made with Carrd' links, and a product-led growth approach that replaced all marketing spend.
AJ is the founder of Carrd, a freemium SaaS platform. His product-led growth strategy with bootstrapped SaaS economics let him scale to $1M ARR without a marketing budget.
🔑 Key Lessons
- 🚀 Product-led growth virality beats paid marketing at scale: Carrd's 'Made with Carrd' link on every free site created a self-sustaining freemium SaaS growth loop.
- 💰 Keep product-led growth pricing low for maximum revenue: AJ found $19/year with Black Friday discounts drove higher total revenue than raising prices.
- 🛠️ Invest in product for product-led growth instead of marketing: AJ made more code commits in 2021 than any year, treating product improvement as the primary growth strategy.
- 🧠 Raise funding for expertise, not capital: AJ raised $2M while profitable to access AWS engineers for a bootstrapped SaaS infrastructure migration.
- 🎯 Generalize feature requests for your freemium SaaS user base: Virtual sections solved one user's request while unlocking new use cases for everyone.
Chapters
- Introduction and what Carrd does
- Revenue and product-led growth metrics
- Why AJ raised $2M despite being profitable
- What drove freemium SaaS growth in 2020
- Twitter and building in public
- The freemium model and Made with Carrd link
- Product-led growth approach over marketing
- Lessons on building a great product
- Feature requests and product-led growth iteration
- Hiring the first developer
- Choosing the right investors
- Product-led growth pricing and Black Friday conversions
- Tech stack and AWS migration
- Lightning round
Resources
