SaaS Marketplace: 18 Months on Spreadsheets to $1M ARR

Katherine Sears ran a SaaS marketplace on spreadsheets and email for 18 months before writing a single line of code. Booktrope went from manual operations to 900+ users on the platform business and a $1M annual run rate with 10% weekly marketplace growth.

Katherine reveals how she built authority on Twitter without having a product to sell, why her team abandoned a consumer reading platform to focus on the core SaaS marketplace, and how automating their application system unlocked explosive growth after Y Combinator.

Booktrope connects authors with editors, designers, and marketing managers through a profit-sharing model. Everyone works for a percentage of book profits with no upfront fees - a two-sided platform that aligns incentives across the entire publishing workflow.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🎯 Validate your SaaS marketplace manually first: Katherine ran Booktrope on spreadsheets and email for 18 months before building software, proving the team publishing model worked before investing in technology that might have been premature.
• 🤝 Build authority before you have a SaaS marketplace to sell: Katherine spent months on Twitter answering publishing questions and reviewing books, becoming a trusted voice so that when Booktrope launched, early adopters already knew and trusted her.
• 📉 Kill distractions that become separate businesses: Booktrope's consumer reading platform Open Reads required so much technical effort it became its own business. Shutting it down let the team focus on the core SaaS marketplace workflow.
• 🚀 Automate your biggest bottleneck to unlock marketplace growth: The manual application and vetting process was Booktrope's biggest constraint. Automating it unlocked 10% weekly growth by removing the need for human review of every submission.
• 💰 Align incentives through profit-sharing in your platform business: Booktrope's model where everyone works for a percentage of profits created natural quality control and marketing motivation without requiring upfront fees from authors.
• 🧠 Do things that don't scale - deliberately: Katherine learned at YC that unscalable manual work like reading every manuscript informed the logic trees and automation that later replaced it. The manual phase was not waste but research.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Katherine's personal background
• What drives Katherine as an entrepreneur
• Booktrope's target customers and pain points
• How the team publishing process works
• How editors and designers join projects
• Publishing and distribution channels
• The origin story of Booktrope
• Running the SaaS marketplace without software for 18 months
• Biggest early mistake - building a reading platform
• Building the first MVP of TeamTrope
• Transitioning customers to the software product
• Using Twitter hashtags to find customers
• How to engage on social media without selling
• Building authority before having a product
• Attracting early adopters to the platform
• When Booktrope achieved meaningful traction
• Revenue and growth targets
• Y Combinator experience and lessons
• The most valuable YC lesson - do things that don't scale
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/64
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email