Episode 603 | Bootstrapping HotJar to $40M ARR Using D2C Marketing

In episode 603, Rob Walling chats with David Darmanin, one of the founders of Hotjar. Hotjar was bootstrapped to $40 million ARR with a fully distributed team of 170 employees. David and his cofounders sold the company for a 9-figure exit in 2021.

From their incredible launch story and their unique DTC approach to sales and marketing in a B2B SaaS business to David’s mental models and the thought process behind selling the business, there is no shortage of key insights in this episode.

Topics we cover: 

[5:07] How David initially financed building Hotjar 

[8:11] The biggest difference between Hotjar and its competitors  

[12:03] The unique approach that David took when launching Hotjar 

[12:44] Lessons learned from a failed product launch prior to Hotjar 

[15:01] How they built their initial launch list to 60,000 subscribers 

[19:32] How to know how much to spend on paid ads

[24:53] Why David said it was easy to work 60-80 hour workweeks for the first 6-9 months of Hotjar 

[27:22] The two key ingredients needed if you want to sell a low-priced SaaS product 

[30:31] How they tripled their growth from $1M - $3M in the first year 

[33:26] How their initial launch strategy gave them a major competitive advantage when they started doing content marketing later on 

[34:03] What led him to sell Hotjar 

[40:39] How long the exit process took

Links from the Show:

David Darmanin @DavidDarmanin I Twitter

Hotjar

Episode 569 I The Life-Changing Decision of When to Sell your Company

How a 7-hour workweek led to Anna Maste’s 7-figure sale I They Got Acquired

Conversion Rate Experts

Delivering Happiness 

Selling The Invisible 

The Dip

Built to Sell

The Great CEO Within 

Let My People Go Surfing

Just Cause

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an