How PitchGround used Firstsales.io to grow its Marketplace by 71%
Disclaimer: PitchGround is a brand owned by operated by Little SaaS, Inc. and this case study is about how we used our own software to grow.
PitchGround was founded in 2018 by the Little SaaS team.
Their sole goal was to help online businesses grow using software and an educational approach.
We believe that education and software should be affordable and easily accessible. When you combine the two, there is a wealth of opportunity for everyone.
To really make a difference, the team behind PitchGround has developed an approach we call “Education-First” to educate and help online businesses with affordable software solutions that would have otherwise been very expensive.
And like any business or market, we have our own competitors that we need to stay one step ahead of.
We differentiate ourselves from other marketplaces by offering high quality SaaS rather than focusing on quantity.
Unlike other platforms, we launch only 5-10 SaaS per month.
They conduct a thorough evaluation to filter and maintain the quality standards of the listed SaaS. This is the reason why not every SaaS that applies to PitchGroud is selected as a Featured Deal.
Most of the SaaS intake happens because of cold email outreach ( almost 90% ).
PitchGround has used SaaS like Mailshake, Instantly, Lemlist… all good software in their own right, but according to our outreach scaling strategies, these SaaS were not powerful enough to handle what we wanted to achieve.
Even with multiple accounts on multiple platforms, we weren’t able to achieve the scale and results we were looking for.
Plus, managing 200 accounts across 5 to 7 platforms is a nightmare for any manager.
That’s why we developed FirstSales.io and started using our software to focus on scalability and granular split testing.
Firstsales.io has helped the team at PitchGround to manage their public relations efficiently and, above all, securely.
Prior to FirstSales, we launched 100 SaaS in 5.5 months, averaging 18.1 SaaS per month.
But after leveraging the features of FirstSales, we have now launched 31 SaaS in one month. That’s a 71% increase in SaaS launches 🙂
How did we manage that?
We combined outreaching, A/B split testing and email warming in one place.
To know what worked and what didn’t, we needed A/B testing at a granular level.
Now you may think: WHAT IS THAT?
For example, with another software you can perform an A/B test between 2 subject lines:
All you need to do is create 2 different templates with Subject 1 and Subject 2, keeping the body and signature the same.
And… creating 1 template will take you max 1 minute, right?
OKAY!
What if I ask you to create a combination of 10 subject lines, 10 body blocks, and 10 signatures?
That’s 1000 templates (10X10X10), and it would take you 1000 minutes to complete them.
But with FirstSales it took only 2 minutes to create this kind of combination and we saved 998 minutes 🙂
This allowed us to focus those 998 minutes (16 hours, 37 minutes, and 59 seconds) on finding quality leads instead of creating templates.
By the way, FirstSales is the only SaaS solution that offers A/B testing for signatures to date.
The reason for this type of A/B testing is that we want to find the best possible combination.
Wanna see the results?
We were benching 90% OPENS for every new campaign 🙂
Now we are reaching more people, but to convert more, we need to make the right offer at the right time.
Creating a normal sequence that just introduces the conversation is not helpful for scaling.
The problem we’ve noticed is that people are either just lazy or very busy.
When they see our emails, they like the offer but are so busy (or lazy) that they don’t bother to write 4-5 lines to request more information.
So we solved that with events.
Events help you send an email to the recipient shortly after they open/click the main email (we focused on open).
Here’s what our flow looks like:
And that was literally a turning point!
With every single email/follow-up they opened, we sent them the sign-up instructions directly.
For us, FirstSales has been an advantage in cold calling and a secret weapon in closing. As you can see, by using the events feature in FirstSales a little differently, we were able to increase the number of leads and create several partnerships that will bring PitchGround hundreds of thousands in revenue in just a few days.
Of course, we will continue to experiment and optimize this process, but we are very pleased with the results we have been able to achieve with FirstSales.