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

Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/306
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email