In 2016, Ryan Kulp made a SaaS acquisition that changed his career. He bought a tiny Shopify app called Notify with a few hundred customers and turned it into FOMO - a social proof platform used on over 30,000 websites generating seven figures in annual revenue. Six years later, he completed the journey by selling a SaaS business to Relay Commerce.
The playbook was unconventional. Cold emails using fake personas got the first wave of growth. Content marketing, SEO, and newsletter ads all flopped. What actually worked was integration-led growth - building 100+ integrations and using Google Analytics to figure out which ones to build next. You will learn the full SaaS exit story, from SaaS acquisition to a 7-figure sale.
What You Will Learn
- How Ryan grew a small SaaS acquisition to 30,000 active websites through integrations
- Why content marketing, SEO, and newsletter ads all failed for a social proof tool
- How FOMO reduced integration build time from 3,000 lines of code to 60 lines
- The cross-promotion strategy with integration partners that drove organic growth
🔑 Key Lessons
- 🛠️ Integration-led growth beats content for niche SaaS: FOMO tried every channel before discovering that building 104 integrations opened direct access to each platform's customer base.
- ⚡ Reduce integration cost to make selling a SaaS business scalable: FOMO's engineers cut integration code from 3,000 lines to 60 lines, shipping multiple integrations per week.
- 🎯 Use on-site search data to prioritize product decisions: Ryan tracked zero-result searches on the integrations page to build a demand-ranked roadmap.
- 🤝 Build integrations permissionlessly then pitch the partner: Ryan built integrations using public APIs first, then reached out - partners were thrilled and featured FOMO in newsletters.
- 🔄 Know when your mission is complete before selling a SaaS business: After six years and 100M+ consumer interactions, Ryan recognized it was time to exit and sold FOMO to Relay Commerce.
Chapters
- Introduction
- Ryan's favorite quote and motivation
- What FOMO does and who it serves
- Why FOMO serves "honest entrepreneurs"
- The FOMO exit and sale to Relay Commerce
- Life after FOMO in Seoul, Korea
- FOMO revenue and scale at time of sale
- Acquiring Notify and the decision to go wide and deep
- Co-founding with Justin Mears and Kettle and Fire
- Running FOMO as an engineering-led organization
- Cold email strategy with fake personas
- Building email lists with BuiltWith
- Why cold email only lasted a few months
- Trying ads, content marketing, and what failed
- Push vs pull marketing for niche SaaS
- Newsletter ads experiment and results
- How FOMO built 100+ integrations at scale
- First successful integration with WooCommerce
- What integration partners got in return
- Using search analytics to prioritize integrations
- Cross-promotion and permissionless integration strategy
- Mutual case studies as a growth channel
- Companies with unused APIs
- Lightning round
Resources
