u/Capable_Document3744

My LinkedIn Automation SaaS got stuck at around $600K ARR for a long stretch. I'm not saying that's a bad number by any means, but it was just stuck.

And while i was stuck, a competitor came in and completely disrupted the market. they came in at $3/month per LinkedIn account while I was charging $99. 

and instead of trying to position for everyone (how i did), they went hard after one narrow, loud segment and built their entire positioning around them.

And it worked out crazy well for them.

They scaled to ~$13 mil a year within a couple of years, and I stayed f*cking stuck at $600K the whole time watching it happen. I felt like a loser during that time, and I don't say that lightly.

What eventually helped me make sense of it was a framework I picked up from Alex Hormozi. The idea is that every product business moves through 2 phases.

There's the search phase, where the actual job is figuring out who really wants your product and why. You're talking to customers constantly, figuring out your segment, figuring out your position in the market, and basically trying to understand what people actually want before you try to scale anything. It's supposed to be slow and a little messy.

Then there's the exploitation phase, where you take whatever the search phase proved and scale it hard. marketing, sales, ops, everything.

Once I understood that, i realized what happened. They were already deep into exploitation while i hadn't even finished searching, and i didn't know it back then. 

I was ‘taking a guess’ at my audience while pretending i had it figured out, and expecting exploitation phase level growth.

Now, before jumping to any conclusions i try to answer these 3 questions first:

Who are my actual early adopters?
What position do they hold in the wider market?
Not who could theoretically buy this, but who's already showing me they want it?

I’m still veryyy far from $13 mil ARR, but that’s okay, I know where i stand now.

If you're in the middle of that feeling right now, comparing your numbers to someone else's, I’ll just tell you that I've been there too, and most of what I thought it meant about me turned out to be wrong. 

Slow down and answer those 3 questions, you’ll find clarity there.

Keep going y’all ✌️

P.S. My SaaS is SalesRobot DOT co if you’re curious (now at $1mln ARR)

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because we're in the middle of changing how we price our own product.

For most of SaaS history, the pricing model was pretty simple. You paid for access to the software every month, and what happened after that was mostly your problem which means if you got value from it, great, and if you didn't, you probably churned a few months later.

But I feel like AI is changing that.

For example, if I'm buying an AI SDR tool, I'm not really buying software, I'm buying the outcome I would've hired someone for. The same way if I buy an AI support agent, I don't really care how the conversations happen. I would just want customer questions answered (and correctly).

The software kind of starts disappearing into the background.

That's what got me thinking that AI companies are selling completed work.

And once you look at it that way, charging a monthly subscription starts feeling a little strange.

I’m actually thinking of moving our own pricing in that direction, which means instead of charging purely for access we're moving to a model where a big part of what customers pay depends on the meetings the AI will actually book.

That means if our AI doesn't book meetings, I barely make any money.

It's a much scarier pricing model than subscription-based for a SaaS company. 

Intercom is probably the best example of what I mean. They stopped charging a SaaS subscription for their AI support agent and started charging per resolved conversation instead. 

I kept thinking about that because subscriptions let you get paid whether or not you actually created much value for your customers that month and I think every SaaS company including us, has benefited from that at some point.

If you're charging for the outcomes you bring, then you don't really get that cushion anymore. So if the AI doesn't actually deliver, you don't get paid.

That's the trade I’m choosing to make

I run a SaaS that agencies white-label and resell under their own brand. The idea is they handle their clients and we just handle the product side of things.

But what actually happens is their client asks them something, they don't know the answer, they forward it to us, we answer it, they copy our answer and send it back like they wrote it. so basically we became the support team for companies we've never talked to, for a product with someone else's name on it.

The requests keep getting bigger too. in the weirdest way possible.

Write our FAQ page, just put your brand on ours. copy your whole knowledge base so we can rebrand it. send us your demo script so our sales team can use it.

And here's a funny one, one guy asked if I'd personally hop on a call with his client and pretend I worked for him. that one I said no to (duhh)

(Pretty much everything before it, I said yes)

Looking back there's a pattern I didn't clock while it was happening. Answering a question is support and that's okay. but rebranding our FAQ as yours, copying our knowledge base with your logo on it, that's asking us to disappear from our own product. And the reason I agreed to almost all of it was because each individual request felt small and reasonable on its own.

Still white-labeling though, the revenue's too good to walk away from.

But yeah, I've learned now to actually think about the cost of the ask before checking if I can technically pull it off. 

Cost-benefit analysis as they call it lol.

For most of the 5 years I've been running my SaaS, my brand positioning has basically been "for everyone"

Sales teams, agencies, recruiters, whoever. my idea behind this was that I didn't want to turn anyone away, and that was it.

But agencies make up about 5% of our customer base but 25% of our revenue, and their churn is actually negative, meaning our existing agency customers grow into more seats instead of leaving. by any meaningful measure, they're our best customers. yet our website doesn't even mention them anywhere.

Meanwhile, a couple of competitors have built their entire brand around agencies from day 1. So whenever an agency searches for an outreach tool, their website comes up first. And it's not because their product is better than ours, it’s just that they've made it crystal clear who their product is for. 

(I've been ouch-ing at this for so long... lol.)

And it stings the most because we don't lose those deals in a call or a demo. We lose deals because they never even found out we exist in the first place. But that’s what happens when you build a horizontal brand on top of a vertical market. Our positioning is so broad that prospects don't even consider us.

What I think I got wrong was treating positioning like a neutral, safe choice. I wanted to keep the door open for everyone.

Now I'm trying to fix it (I know how late I am, so pls don't rub it in), and it's a lot harder than I expected.

5 years later, trying to retroactively become the "agency tool" is a much steeper climb than if we'd just started there.

But if you're early and still deciding who to build your brand around, my advice is to pick the segment that's already showing interest in you, just one. Then build everything around them with intention.

You can always expand into more segments as you grow.

Coming from someone who's made this mistake, trust me, going the other direction is brutal.

A few years ago, we built an AI feature into the product that felt genuinely useful for what the other AI models could do at the time. 

You'd put in your website URL, it would figure out your target ICP and industry, suggest a messaging angle, write the messages, and create a campaign for you. 

For when this was built, it was a real step up from doing all of that manually.

Then I got busy with other things.

Over the next year or two, I was deep in building out agency functionality. Bulk campaigns, white label infrastructure, multi-account management, AI personalization features. 

That work was real and it did matter at the time, because agencies were the fastest growing part of our customer base and the features that kept them around required serious engineering work. I don't regret spending my time on it.

But while I was heads down in it, the AI ecosystem was moving at a pace I wasn’t consciously keeping track of.

When we built that original AI feature, tool calling didn't exist. 

There was no Claude Code either. 

And the models available then weren't capable of reasoning continuously across steps, holding context across a long workflow, or actually using external tools to do something end to end. 

A few months ago I ran an event in Bangalore for a group of GTM professionals where we showed them how Claude Code handles outbound strategy work in real time. Like, creating the targeting approach, building the lead list logic, figuring out the messaging angle, all of it. 

What I saw during that session was uncomfortable to actually think about. 

These models were doing the strategic work that my AI feature was supposed to do, and they were doing it at a level of sophistication that mine couldn't match.

I came back from that event and looked at what we'd built with fresh eyes.

It's a chatbot. And that’s about it. 

A reasonably good one for when it was built, but still a 2022 chatbot. It is competitive if today was 2022. But today is not 2022.

The thing is that nobody made a bad decision here. I was focused on solving the right problems for the customers who were actually retaining. 

The AI layer just got outdated, and I only saw it clearly when Claude Code held up a mirror.

That’s what I’m trying to replace.

But there is a bigger concern I do not talk about as much.

It is not that the AI feature I’m building will not be good enough.

It is that someone getting into outbound today might open Codex or Claude Code, build what they need, and never think about paying for a separate tool.

That day isn’t here yet.

But compared to where things were in 2022, it does not feel that far away anymore.

I get sold to by this stuff constantly. 

a new platform shows up, a new title shows up next to it, some manifesto about how marketing is fundamentally changing, buy this to keep up. I used to roll my eyes at it the same way most of you probably do.

then a few weeks back I was talking to my team about exactly this. that the models are good enough now that not adopting this stuff is basically choosing to get disrupted.

and I couldn't really argue with myself on it. because I could already name the companies doing exactly that to people like me.

but here's the thing though. I think we're already 12 months late on it. because, I just kept treating it like a "someday" thing instead of a "this quarter" problem.

I keep thinking about what happened with UPI here in India. Indian banks had this whole payments infrastructure, decades of it, and they basically ignored the shift until it was already everywhere. 

then suddenly every single one of them is scrambling to launch their own version of the thing they spent years pretending wasn't going to matter.

I don't want to be the bank in that story. which is a weird thing to say when you've been running a company for 5 years and have some actual revenue behind you, because that usually means you get to relax a little. 

I don't think I do though. I think the second I start acting like I've already figured it out, that's when someone smaller and faster builds the thing that makes what I built look old.

so the real shift for me isn't hiring someone with "engineer" in their title. it's this that i stopped trying to write content about marketing and just started using the product on itself and publishing whatever happens. 

doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. that's basically the whole strategy now.

I know that sounds like I'm dodging the actual question people are asking, which is whether marketing loses something real when it converts into pipelines and attribution models. 

maybe it does. I don't think I've lost the "having an opinion" part yet, I just think the opinion now has to survive being tested on real numbers instead of just sounding right in a room.

anyway. starting late is better than not starting. that's about where I've landed on it.

I run a SaaS that agencies white-label and resell under their own brand. The idea is they handle their clients and we just handle the product side of things.

But what actually happens is their client asks them something, they don't know the answer, they forward it to us, we answer it, they copy our answer and send it back like they wrote it. so basically we became the support team for companies we've never talked to, for a product with someone else's name on it.

The requests keep getting bigger too.

Write our FAQ page, just put your brand on ours. Copy your whole knowledge base so we can rebrand it. Send us your demo script so our sales team can use it.

And here's a funny one, one guy asked if I'd personally hop on a call with his client and pretend I worked for him. That one I said no to (duhh)

(Pretty much everything before it, I said yes)

Looking back there's a pattern I didn't clock while it was happening. Answering a question is support and that's okay. But rebranding our FAQ as yours, copying our knowledge base with your logo on it, that's asking us to disappear from our own product. And the reason I agreed to almost all of it was because each individual request felt small and reasonable on its own.

Still white-labeling though, the revenue's too good to walk away from.

But yeah, I've learned now to actually think about the cost of the ask before checking if I can technically pull it off. 

Cost-benefit analysis as they call it lol.

Here's the honest version of what’s actually behind that number.

$1M ARR is roughly $83K MRR. 

Our monthly burn is $15K for a team of 30 people covering engineering, marketing, sales, and support. That leaves about $68K on the surface, which sounds like a healthy margin until you start counting what the $15K doesn't include.

Chargebee processing fees, server costs, Unipile API costs for the infrastructure that keeps the product running. 

Then comes tool subscriptions, freelancers, event travel, which for me means flying to San Francisco for SaaStr once a year and showing up at SaaSBoomi in India. By the time all of that comes out, real take-home profit is closer to $30-40K a month.

That number took 5 years to reach, and the path to it looked nothing like the milestone posts you see on social media.

The first two years I didn't pay myself at all. 

The 3rd year I paid myself less than my own developers made. 

Year four was when I started paying myself a reasonable Indian salary. 

And year five is the first year where the business is generating what I'd actually call life-changing money.

But here's the thing nobody in SF understands:

$50K a month in profit in India is not the same thing as $50K a month in profit in San Francisco. 

In San Francisco, that's roughly one engineer's salary before taxes. In India, that's generational wealth being created. My kids will not carry the same financial stress I had when I got fired during the pandemic with zero savings and had to figure out how to build something from nothing.

The same dollar amount means something completely different depending on where you earn it.

This is the real advantage of building from a low-cost country that nobody talks about openly. 

You don't need $10M ARR to have an incredible life. 

You need $1M ARR, a lean team, and an honest cost structure. 

The finish line is genuinely closer than most SF founders realize, and it's closer for Indian founders than they usually give themselves credit for.

P.S. If anybody's curious, this is for my LinkedIn automation SaaS, SalesRobot.

I run a LinkedIn automation SaaS. And for a long stretch of time, the product was seriously broken.

Our LinkedIn automation ran on browser-based cloud infrastructure that was inherently unstable. 

Accounts would disconnect without warning, campaigns would stop mid-sequence, and LinkedIn was flagging accounts in waves. 

Every morning the support queue looked the same, a line of frustrated customers asking the same question: why did my account stop working?

The worst part wasn't even the volume of tickets, it was the loop they created. 

A customer would write in about a banned account, we'd fix it, 3 days later it was banned again. 

They'd write in angrier the second time, we'd fix it again, and by the 4th time they'd just churn.

At the peak of this I was personally replying to support tickets at midnight. Because the product was failing people and I felt like they deserved a response from someone who actually cared about fixing it. 

That's where I was at $40K MRR. 

You're making real money, but every dollar that comes in has a support ticket attached to it on the way out.

We kept throwing more support at it, more people, better docs, more FAQs, and nothing actually changed because the real problem wasn't support at all, it was the product.

We migrated to a new LinkedIn API in March 2025 and the backend became stable (finally). 

Accounts stopped disconnecting on their own and the nature of the tickets changed almost immediately after that. 

That shift told me more about the health of the product than any other metric.

After the product stabilized we rebuilt the support layer around AI. 

First-line tickets go to the AI now, it handles them immediately, and the human support team deals with the small percentage of complex problems that actually need a person. 

Response time dropped from hours to seconds and the team actually enjoys their work now because they don’t have to keep apologizing for the same thing over and over.

I also recently brought on an engineer specifically to make the AI layer more efficient, so it has full context on a customer's account before any person from the support team gets involved.

But the honest thing I took from all of it is that we were trying to support our way out of a problem that only the product could fix.

Back in 2023, we wrote a Skylead alternatives blog, a standard alternatives blog ranking the options and explaining the differences between direct alternatives. 

Over the past month, the blog has ranked at an avg. position of #8.

A few months ago, an agency in Australia had been evaluating their options for LinkedIn outbound. 

They searched for Skylead alternatives, found our blog, read through the comparison, and decided to reach out. They had 80 client accounts they needed to migrate over.

That's the biggest single agency deal we've closed this year ($5k in MRR in a single deal and it gets us past $1 mln ARR)

But here's the thing about agency deals specifically. 

You can't really go and chase them. 

An agency with 80 client accounts on a tool isn't going to switch just because they saw a blog on Google or got a cold email from us. 

They'll only move when they're unhappy enough with their current provider. That decision has its own timeline that it follows, and it has nothing to do with our own sales cycle.

What that means practically is that the only lever we actually have is being discoverable when that moment arrives. 

When someone finally gets fed up and searches for alternatives, we have to have enough presence to be visible.

That's a different mental model from most of the marketing I do. I've spent a lot of time and energy going after channels that give you immediate feedback. 

Outbound gives you feedback within days. LinkedIn content gets impressions and comments which tell you how well your content is performing. Reddit also shows you views, but it’s not the most traceable channel in my opinion. 

SEO doesn't work like that.

You can’t tell for sure when it is going to convert.

So, there's not much that we can do in terms of the agency segment. It's just that when it happens, it happens. 

So we have to just do our job and be present.

A few years ago, we built an AI feature into the product that felt genuinely useful for what the other AI models could do at the time. 

You'd put in your website URL, it would figure out your target ICP and industry, suggest a messaging angle, write the messages, and create a campaign for you. 

For when this was built, it was a real step up from doing all of that manually.

Then I got busy with other things.

Over the next year or two, I was deep in building out agency functionality. Bulk campaigns, white label infrastructure, multi-account management, AI personalization features. 

That work was real and it did matter at the time, because agencies were the fastest growing part of our customer base and the features that kept them around required serious engineering work. I don't regret spending my time on it.

But while I was heads down in it, the AI ecosystem was moving at a pace I wasn’t consciously keeping track of.

When we built that original AI feature, tool calling didn't exist. 

There was no Claude Code either. 

And the models available then weren't capable of reasoning continuously across steps, holding context across a long workflow, or actually using external tools to do something end to end. 

A few months ago I ran an event in Bangalore for a group of GTM professionals where we showed them how Claude Code handles outbound strategy work in real time. Like, creating the targeting approach, building the lead list logic, figuring out the messaging angle, all of it. 

What I saw during that session was uncomfortable to actually think about. 

These models were doing the strategic work that my AI feature was supposed to do, and they were doing it at a level of sophistication that mine couldn't match.

I came back from that event and looked at what we'd built with fresh eyes.

It's a chatbot. And that’s about it. 

A reasonably good one for when it was built, but still a 2022 chatbot. It is competitive if today was 2022. But today is not 2022.

The thing is that nobody made a bad decision here. I was focused on solving the right problems for the customers who were actually retaining. 

The AI layer just got outdated, and I only saw it clearly when Claude Code held up a mirror.

That’s what I’m trying to replace.

But there is a bigger concern I do not talk about as much.

It is not that the AI feature I’m building will not be good enough.

It is that someone getting into outbound today might open Codex or Claude Code, build what they need, and never think about paying for a separate tool.

That day isn’t here yet.

But compared to where things were in 2022, it does not feel that far away anymore.

P.S. The product is salesrobot(.)co, if anybody's curious.

In 2020 I was building a cold email tool. Lemlist was growing fast and the market felt obvious. Warm channel, high intent, clear ICP.

But then I found out Gmail had raised API access fees to $75,000.

That was it. Idea over.

I had almost no savings, no runway, no fallback. I needed something I could actually build.

LinkedIn outreach had the same problem I was trying to solve. Warmer channel and a lower barrier. 

And nobody had built a “reliable” cloud-based tool for it yet. It felt like a backup plan at the time, not a real idea.

So I started building.

The first breakthrough came from a message I sent to a Facebook group for users of Dux-Soup (a LinkedIn automation tool I knew was terrible).

4,000 people were in that group, so I scraped them all with PhantomBuster and sent one message to every single one: "Hey, saw you in the Dux-Soup group. Are you still using it for LinkedIn lead gen?"

At 3 am on a fine night in May 2020, a guy named Connor replied.

He ran a lead gen agency out of Manchester. 80 LinkedIn accounts. A call center in Zimbabwe with two people logging in every morning, one by one, just to check if each client's account was still connected.

He said: "If you can build something reliable in the cloud, I'll move immediately."

He came in with 50 seats, and paid me $4,000 MRR. And this was before the product was worth talking about.

I'm based in India, so before anyone does the math assuming wild numbers, the comparison is against Indian tech salaries, not Western ones. 

But $1.3M ARR bootstrapped with 0 VC money after getting fired with 0 savings still feels surreal to say out loud.

Yes, it did take almost 6 years.

But the $75,000 API fee that made me drop my first idea pushed me to a channel that turned out to have better fundamentals.

I don't want to get all "everything happens for a reason" wishy-washy nonsense on you, but sometimes it does.

So take all the setbacks you face in your startup journey as something that might lead you down a better path.

P.S. If anybody is curious, the SaaS is salesrobot(.)co

A team member, Ashwini, runs outbound for my SaaS.

A few months ago she came to me with a list and a targeting angle I hadn't seen before. It was seriously, f***ing brilliant.

The targeting behind that deal was a vertical we'd never touched before.

319 VC deal sourcing platforms across 22 countries.

Deal sourcing runs on LinkedIn, that's where founders announce rounds, where portfolio companies post updates, where deal flow actually lives.

But none of the deal sourcing platforms these funds use connect to LinkedIn natively (they just behave like a CRM) That gap had been sitting there completely untouched.

What I hadn't appreciated until she explained it is how she actually finds verticals like this.

She starts with Discolike, feeds it a company that looks like an ideal customer, and gets lookalikes back. Half of them make you go "who?" but the AI sees patterns humans don't.

Then she cross-checks on Crunchbase to confirm whether companies are actually alive or just a LinkedIn page with no employees, enriches through Clay to find the right decision-makers, and verifies every email with BetterContact.

The list after all of that is the actual list.

One of the best leads that came through from there was an ex-venture capitalist based out of New Zealand turned founder who was making software for VC firms to source deals.

The P.S. line said: "If this isn't relevant, feel free to send me your favorite 2-word insult."

He replied: "We don't do that, but I am interested."

Two emails in, he booked a call, and we're now helping him set up LinkedIn outreach from scratch.

The reason I am writing this full post is that cold email really works if you have a unique angle and a persona that not enough people reach out to, and a data source that is relatively untouched.

If you use typical database tools like Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you are not going very far because most of the people on those databases get thousands of cold emails every month.

We bring in roughly $8-9K in new revenue every month, and for a long time I focused on that number and felt okay about it. 

What I wasn't looking at closely enough was what happened after.

Month 1: 4% of that revenue is gone. 

Month 2: another 13% is gone. 

By month 12, only 12-13% of whatever came in that month is still paying. 

While a healthy SaaS should be sitting at 90%.

I'd been building a second product to fix this. The thinking behind it was that customers were churning because they were running good automation on bad strategy, and the second product was supposed to be the strategy layer. Like who to reach, when, and with what angle.

I still think that's a real problem. 

What changed is what I found when I actually looked at who were the people inside that 12-13% still paying after month 12.

Almost all of them are agencies who white-label the product. They've embedded it into their service delivery and their clients never see my brand. Canceling means dismantling their entire operation and explaining to every client why their portal looks different next month. They don't churn because they literally can't afford to.

That was the first thing that shifted my thinking. What I’m seeing with churn isn't a strategy issue so much as a customer type issue. I've been selling to people who are structurally likely to leave.

The second thing was simpler. A small team with a limited marketing budget genuinely cannot popularize two brand names at the same time. 

It’s like what happened with Google. They tried to launch Gemini as a standalone brand and it didn’t work until they embedded it as AI Mode inside something billions of people already used every day. 

My SaaS gets 50,000 sessions a month. That's the real distribution I already have. Starting a second brand from scratch and competing with that for the same budget doesn't make sense.

So the agentic capabilities I was building are going to be inside the first product instead. One brand, one audience, one place to find it.

The number I'm trying to improve is that 12% at the end of 12 months

I just don't think a second product gets you there.

My instinct right now is that there's probably more to gain from understanding the customers who are already sticking around than from building another product to address the ones who don't.

I run a LinkedIn outreach automation SaaS.

We bring in roughly $8-9K in new revenue every month, and for a long time I focused on that number and felt okay about it. 

What I wasn't looking at closely enough was what happened after.

Month 1: 4% of that revenue is gone. 

Month 2: another 13% is gone. 

By month 12, only 12-13% of whatever came in that month is still paying. 

While a healthy SaaS should be sitting at 90%.

I'd been building a second product to fix this. The thinking behind it was that customers were churning because they were running good automation on bad strategy, and the second product was supposed to be the strategy layer. Like who to reach, when, and with what angle.

I still think that's a real problem. 

What changed is what I found when I actually looked at who were the people inside that 12-13% still paying after month 12.

Almost all of them are agencies who white-label the product. They've embedded it into their service delivery and their clients never see my brand. Cancelling means dismantling their entire operation and explaining to every client why their portal looks different next month. They don't churn because they literally can't afford to.

That was the first thing that shifted my thinking. What I’m seeing with churn isn't a strategy issue so much as a customer type issue. I've been selling to people who are structurally likely to leave.

The second thing was simpler. A small team with a limited marketing budget genuinely cannot popularize two brand names at the same time. 

It’s like what happened with Google. They tried to launch Gemini as a standalone brand and it didn’t work until they embedded it as AI Mode inside something billions of people already used every day. 

My SaaS gets 50,000 sessions a month. That's the real distribution I already have. Starting a second brand from scratch and competing with that for the same budget doesn't make sense.

So the agentic capabilities I was building are going to be inside the first product instead. One brand, one audience, one place to find it.

The number I'm trying to improve is that 12% at the end of 12 months

I just don't think a second product gets you there.

My instinct right now is that there's probably more to gain from understanding the customers who are already sticking around than from building another product to address the ones who don't.

I’d written off India as a market.

Our pricing starts at $59/month globally (70% of the customers are US though). Every time I tried selling to Indian customers at that number, it just wouldn't work. I convinced myself the market wasn't ready, or that the category just didn't translate here.

So when I paid $1,000 to sponsor a conference, I seriously expected it to go down the drain. I've burned money on Indian events before and saw no ROI.

What actually happened this time was:

After the conference, the organiser ran a private webinar for the attendees. They structured a specific offer: ₹5,000 for a 3 month subscription per LinkedIn account. That works out to roughly $17/month per account.

60 out of 80 people on that webinar bought it.

Many bought multiple times. One person even bought it for his wife's Linkedin account.

We closed ~$4500. Roughly 4X ROI on the $1,000 I had written off.

I've never seen a conversion like that from anything we've run in the US.

There were 2 things that made it work, and none of them were the product.

• The price was right. Indians are discount hunters (not a criticism, just the truth) The US price point creates a trust barrier before the conversation even starts. At ₹5,000 for 3 months, that barrier wasn’t there.
• The offer had a deadline. It wasn't available after the webinar, so that structure forced a decision in the room instead of a "I'll think about it" that never converts.

So it’s not like I’ve “cracked” the Indian market, I've just found the right entry point.

And the market is real. I'm seeing purchases from places I never expected this category to reach. 

It just has to be structured completely differently from how I sell in the US.

The margin is lower (selling at $17/month on a cost base of $6 to $7 per account). But the ROI on the marketing spend is higher than anything else I've tried right now.

But for the first time, I can see a path in India.

I’d written off India as a market.

Our pricing starts at $59/month globally (70% of the customers are US though) . Every time I tried selling to Indian customers at that number, it just wouldn't work. I convinced myself the market wasn't ready, or that the category just didn't translate here.

So when I paid $1,000 to sponsor a conference, I seriously expected it to go down the drain. I've burned money on Indian events before and saw no ROI.

What actually happened this time was:

After the conference, the organiser ran a private webinar for the attendees. They structured a specific offer: ₹5,000 for a 3-month subscription per LinkedIn account. That works out to roughly $17/month per account.

60 out of 80 people on that webinar bought it.

Many bought multiple times. One person even bought it for his wife's Linkedin account.

We closed ~$4500. Roughly 4X ROI on the $1,000 I had written off.

I've never seen a conversion like that from anything we've run in the US.

There were 3 things that made it work, and none of them were the product.

• The price was right. Indians are discount hunters (not a criticism, just the truth) The US price point creates a trust barrier before the conversation even starts. At ₹5,000 for 3 months, that barrier wasn’t there.
• The offer had a deadline. It wasn't available after the webinar, so that structure forced a decision in the room instead of a "I'll think about it" that never converts.

So it’s not like I’ve “cracked” the Indian market, I've just found the right entry point.

And the market is real. I'm seeing purchases from places I never expected this category to reach. 

It just has to be structured completely differently from how I sell in the US.

The margin is lower (selling at $17/month on a cost base of $6-7 per account). But the ROI on the marketing spend is higher than anything else I've tried right now.

But for the first time, I can see a path in India.