How this former consultant makes $15,000 a month in recurring revenue with his SaaS product?
How this former consultant makes $15,000 a month in recurring revenue with his SaaS product. You’ll be learning about what the product is, how he grew this product, and about the founder himself.
So we’ll be covering Block Survey, and it’s a privacy focused survey tool that helps companies run surveys that need data protection and privacy without any ads, trackers or cookies.
They built Block Survey on the foundation of privacy, using security with web three for identity. So this lets companies make informed decisions with confidence in a new era of data ownership and privacy. So the focus of block survey is really to target web3 companies as they have many unique data collection issues such as token gating and collecting web three identities for use cases such as building whitelists, allow lists, airdrops and holder surveys. They’ve served over 500 customers and have facilitated more than 10 million submissions so far.
In terms of the revenue split, 40% of that comes from enterprise cloud clients, with 60% of it coming from individual users and small businesses.
In terms of pricing, there’s both an individual plan and an enterprise plan. For the individual users and small businesses, pricing starts at $29 a month, and for enterprise clients, they offer a done for you service that require SSO, custom integrations and higher security compliance standards. So before we dive into the challenges of building in web3 and the validation of the product, let’s meet the founder.
His name is Wilson Bright, and prior to this he worked with fidelity Investments as a quality assurance engineer and Wells Fargo Securities as a business systems consultant. But he really knew he wanted to build something, and so he had saved up a couple years of Runway and Block Survey got started during a hackathon. This hackathon lasted three days, and on the third day he went and launched it on Product Hunt.
In terms of the tech stack used, Stack’s blockchain was used for identity authentication and storage management, which is anchored to bitcoin providing end to end encryption, and Angular is used on the front end with NodeJs on the backend. And for Serverless they used Cloudflare workers.
Let’s take a look at some of the challenges that Wilson has had building a web3 product.
The first and biggest one is that web3 technology is limited in its acceptance and most people don’t have an understanding of blockchain among non-web3 businesses. Many traditional businesses are hesitant to accept web three solutions due to their perceived complexity and unfamiliarity with the underlying technology.
And to overcome this challenge, the company has really focused on abstraction and focusing on showcasing the tangible value that web three brings to the table, and for customers, they don’t have to even know they are using web three technologies. So Block Survey is really pushing the emphasis on the benefits that can be from using privacy centric solutions.
Another challenge to web3 has been that it’s constantly changing because it is so new. And for their web3, another issue has been the constant churn as many of them are extremely new and have short lifespans. With the web3 product, he was also requesting reviews and case studies to help build social proof. And then from there, about 2 to 3% of users upgraded to the paid plan and once he got to $1K in monthly recurring revenue, he removed the free tier entirely so that he could filter out noise and focus on customers who saw real value in the product.
From there, Wilson focused on product led growth and since surveys have a link sharing capability, there is a natural flywheel already built in as more people share the product links for the surveys, it increases the brand visibility and drives organic traffic to the website. From there, customers are put through a funnel to help get them to convert and that funnel is really going to push them to create their first survey and collect their first 3 responses as the first 20 responses are free and then they’re going to nudge the users to upgrade to a paid plan to continue collecting responses. And this product led.
Our approach now counts for 10 to 15% of traffic and it’s their main channel for growth. In terms of other marketing methods, traditional search engine optimization is used. Wilson has created 1000+ survey templates, all focused on low search volume keywords with zero competition and using LLMs to generate these survey templates at scale.
Newsletter sponsorships are also used and Wilson pays about $100 per issue, focusing on smaller newsletters with audiences of 1,000 to 10,000.
Lastly, cold outreach is used through LinkedIn, Twitter and email. It’s more of a high touch conversion task, but it does have a higher conversion rate and from there prospects are going to book a demo.
So this is going to conclude the post here on an awesome SaaS journey from Wilson and his product Block Survey. We’ve explored the fascinating evolution of this privacy-focused survey tool, from its humble beginnings to its current status as a respected player in the data collection space. Wilson’s story serves as an inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs, highlighting the importance of identifying market needs, persevering through challenges, and continuously iterating based on user feedback.
As Block Survey continues to grow and adapt to the ever-changing landscape of data privacy and security, it stands as a testament to the power of innovative thinking and user-centric design in the SaaS industry. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for Wilson and his team as they continue to push the boundaries of secure, ethical data collection.