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:

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.

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Episode 603 | Bootstrapping HotJar to $40M ARR Using D2C Marketing 44:07 Share

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