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.

[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

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 upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher