Aha!’s bootstrapped journey to $100M+ in ARR

Danny Archer - Aha!’s employee #4 - on PLG and PLS

Today, we’re all inspired by bootstrappers—folks who’ve built enduring software businesses with little or no outside capital. In Growth Unhinged, I’ve had a chance to feature impressive bootstrapped PLG stories from the likes of Hotjar (scaled to $50M+ ARR) and Uscreen (scaled to $20M+ ARR). 

My next guest has a story that’s perhaps even more impressive.

GTM Leader Danny Archer has scaled teams across all customer org functions including sales, success, and support. He recently wrapped up a 7+ year stint at Aha!, maker of the world’s #1 product development software. Some fast facts about Aha!:

• Surpassed $100 million in ARR as of March 2022

• Self-funded, profitable, and 100% remote

• Adopted by over 700,000 users

• Makes three core products (Roadmap, Ideas, and Develop) along with two paid education programs (Aha! Certification and Aha! PM Certification)

Keep reading for Danny’s 🔥 insights into building an inbound free trial machine, monetizing enterprise customers, and pairing PLG with sales-assist. 

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Back in 2014 I joined Aha! as employee #4, working out of the CEO’s house alongside the CTO for the first two years.

We were just shy of $1 million ARR at the time. By the time I left, we had scaled to 110 employees and more than $100 million ARR. We remained bootstrapped the entire time, never raising outside capital and instead growing organically from our own revenue and profitability. 

The company concurrently had between 4,000 to 5,000 free-trial accounts active at any given time and only 40 employees working in customer-facing functions (sales, support, and customer success). Growth came entirely from inbound demand.

In the early days, I ran everything customer-facing from landing Fortune 100 logos and seven-figure accounts to answering support tickets on the weekend. Our growth motion was non-traditional, to say the least. Here I’ll walk through our journey and the lessons learned along the way 👇

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Marketing: Building an inbound free-trial machine

Marketing’s job was straightforward: drive trials. 

We did this with hyper-focus on a specific customer profile, software product managers. Aha! created a content engine all around that customer profile. Through our focus, we were able to build a super efficient inbound trial machine. While many early stage companies get in trouble by chasing new personas or market segments, we stuck with our core strategy which paid dividends long-term in our ability to grow efficiently with limited resources.

Our primary website CTA was always Free trial. This was front and center whenever someone landed on our website. Over time, we A/B tested many things including the placement of the CTA, color, and more. But the objective always remained the same: get prospects into a trial.

We did have a secondary Join a demo CTA. This did result in inbound requests, but of significantly lower quality compared to those who signed up for a trial. 

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Product growth: Nudging free-trial users towards activation