The SaaS Podcast: Build, Launch & Scale Your SaaS

462: Polly: Lessons on Building a 7-Figure SaaS on Slack's Platform - with Bilal Aijazi

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Bilal Aijazi built one of the first Slack apps ever created. The install process was so clunky it required five manual steps of copying and pasting tokens. Yet 80% of people completed it anyway. That's when he knew Polly was solving something people desperately wanted.

Today, Polly serves millions of monthly active users across Slack, Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Google Slides, and PowerPoint, generating multiple seven figures in ARR with just 20 people. But the journey from that first $8/month fantasy football customer to enterprise deals wasn't obvious—and platform risk nearly derailed everything when Slack launched competing features.

You'll learn:

  • How Bilal discovered that only 12% of Polly users would ever become creators and why that was actually a good thing for the business
  • Why their first paying customer at $8/month for fantasy football led them to HR teams who now pay five-figure deals
  • How adding simple demo booking hooks throughout Polly enabled hundreds of customer conversations that revealed their real monetization path
  • What happened when Slack launched Workflow Builder six months after Polly signed their first five-figure deals and how they survived
  • Why Bilal believes every founder building on platforms must eventually become a platform themselves or risk getting crushed

    • Full show notes → saasclub.io/462


    This episode is brought to you by:

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    📡 ⁠⁠⁠Signal House⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and get a demo


    Get weekly SaaS lessons and new founder stories → saasclub.io/email

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    The SaaS Podcast: Build, Launch & Scale Your SaaSBy Omer Khan
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