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:

David Darmanin @DavidDarmanin I Twitter
Hotjar
Episode 569 I The Life-Changing Decision of When to Sell your Company
How a 7-hour workweek led to Anna Maste’s 7-figure sale I They Got Acquired
Conversion Rate Experts
Delivering Happiness
Selling The Invisible
The Dip
Built to Sell
The Great CEO Within
Let My People Go Surfing
Just Cause

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

Startups For the Rest of Us

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