Rodion Yeroshek, Poster. How we built a 13000-customers SaaS. Why scratching your itch is not always the best strategy

How we’ve built
a 13 000-customers
SaaS company
Why scratching your itch is not
always the best strategy

Back in 2014...
We were pitching Poster at Lviv IT Arena

Cloud POS software for
cafes and restaurants
made easy
• record sales, print receipts
• manage inventory
• make data-driven decisions
• control your staff

13500
Restaurants
in 100 countries
1M
Orders
processed daily
160
Team
members

How did we get here?
We started by scratching our itch

Maybe scratch someone else’s itch?

How to grow a startup
into a business
Our story

Cloud
Simple UX
Minutes, everyone uses last version
$40/mo, ﬂat prices
Subscription
Sexy & modern
Centralized, remote, free
Online signup, self-onboarding
Dnipro
Infrastructure
Product
Updates
Pricing
Business model
Hardware
Tech support
Sales pipeline
Oﬃce & team (costs)
On-premise
Complicated and custom
You can use outdated version for years
$5000+, complicated pricing model
New sales
Old-fashioned
Decentralized (dealers), on-premise, paid
Local implementation team
Moscow
Poster Others
1. Be different

In our case:
● tablets became widely available
● people started getting used to using services in the cloud
● there were no comparable solutions in Ukraine still
Riding a once in a lifetime opportunity of moving software to
the cloud
2. Timing is crucial

● Product will not sell itself in B2B
● We hired our head of sales after 1.5 years of operations
● Unintended experiment that showed a 4X difference in
conversion without a sales manager
● Split cold sales, inbound sales, implementation into different
roles as you scale
3. Start building sales ASAP

● Every once in a while there is this new “opportunity”
● Follow it carefully, but don’t have high expectations
● In our case partners account for ~5% of sales volume
● In our case most successful partnerships account for
hundreds, not thousands customers. And there were a lot of
failed ones
4. Don’t spend much time pursuing
partnerships — build your sales instead

5. Don’t rely much on paid advertisement —
build organic sales channels instead
● Our sales breakdown: 60% recommendations & account
expansion, 20% organic traﬃc (commercial queries &
content), 10% paid ads, 10% others
● Buying leads is expensive in almost every niche
● SEO, Writing blog, hosting webinars
● Boost referrals by giving bonuses
● Use your existing customers — ask for reviews, case studies

● Talk to your sales managers, support it with data — and
automate onboarding ﬂow
● Combined with other initiatives, better onboarding helped us
to improve conv. rate to sales twice from 15% to 30%
● We revise & change every 1-2 years
6. Optimize onboarding experience & funnel

Faster & cheaper way — Intercom and alternatives

More complicated — onboarding tours inside the product

7. Aim to become a platform
● There always be
customer-speciﬁc features
in B2B and you don’t want to
bloat your codebase
● There’re lots of companies
with complementary
products that could beneﬁt
from an integration

8. Our approach to global growth
● In our niche, product has different requirements in different
countries (hardware, taxation, ﬁscal compliance, local
payments, local tech support)
● US → Anywhere → Developing markets
● Our recipe: grow big enough in your home market → invest in
other markets

How to support the growth
inside organization

0. Deﬁne mission & values & high-level goal
● I thought this was bullshit too
● Gather feedback from your team
→ brainstorm & shape
● Make doing business simple for
entrepreneurs around the world
● Become #1 POS for f&b industry
in the world by number of
businesses

1. Strategic sessions
● Once every quarter, a month before OKRs &
backlog planning
● Preferably offsite
● Work on agenda in advance
● Outcome — list of strategies to pursue for the
next 3-6 months

2. OKRs
● Something big and
important enough
● ~80% is great
● Biquarterly company OKRs
→ quarterly team OKRs
● #pulse every two weeks

3. All-hands meetings
● Reﬂect on last month
performance, spread the
news
● Product update from dev
team
● Monthly recap newsletter

4. One-on-one meetings
● Once every 2 months between teamleader and his teammates
● Once every 3 months with a member of HR team
● Mutual feedback & tracking progress towards OKRs

Rodion Yeroshek
Facebook, Telegram: @yeroshek

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Rodion Yeroshek, Poster. How we built a 13000-customers SaaS. Why scratching your itch is not always the best strategy