In this interview, Jói Sigurdsson, co‑founder of the niche SaaS product Crankwheel, discusses how the company grew to $640K ARR with 73% year‑to‑date growth and less than 1% monthly revenue churn. He explains the initial $700K investment—half personal funds and half a matching R&D grant from Iceland’s Technology Development Fund—and the decision to bootstrap without external venture capital, including minimal founder salaries and a period of team downsizing. Sigurdsson outlines the challenges of finding product‑market fit in a niche market, emphasizing the importance of ultra‑low churn and happy customers as a long‑term asset. For customer acquisition, he highlights the limited effectiveness of generic search ads and instead points to industry‑specific conferences (e.g., SINDA), a consistent weekly newsletter with ~40k subscribers, SEO‑driven content marketing, and a strong presence in the Chrome Web Store (and other browser extensions) as primary growth channels. He stresses that exceptional customer support—provided even to freemium users—drives word‑of‑mouth referrals and positive reviews on platforms like Capterra. The conversation wraps up with reflections on the sustainability of the freemium‑for‑life plan, the role of responsive support in building brand reputation, and ongoing goals to accelerate growth while maintaining profitability.
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So, that was the market you saw, you know, you built it out, and then, you know, now, you know, where you guys are up hitting over, I think, $640K in ARR, which from when I last checked in February, you're almost up 73%, and with less than 1% churn, so high growth, low retention, I mean, that's huge. Can you tell us maybe just a little bit, you know, the cost? So I think that's important because you have the experience, you guys are a small team, if I imagine, where were you investing in the initial stages to build that out? And, you know, we're talking about that balance, how much were you investing to actually get, you know, product-market fit, or at least enough to, you know, have a, you know, start getting some sales?
Yeah, absolutely. So we probably invested in total about $700,000, something like that. So that was— part of that was our own money. So mine and also my co-founders. Part of that was a research and development grant that we received from the Technology Development Fund here in Iceland that helped a ton.
Yeah.
They do kind of a matching type of a grant if they feel that it's, you know, R&D worthy, kind of. So that helps a ton. So that's probably around the figure we invested over the first couple of years. And, you know, after that, we had sort of decided we wouldn't be, you know, it would have to be profitable, the business. And it did turn out that there was a point in time where we needed to scale back a little bit on the team. Or actually significantly, and it hurt a lot. But that was years ago now. We've grown again since, and our teammates who we had to let go at that point, they landed in great roles afterwards, you know, so I'm happy for them. But, you know, that's one of the things that can happen. You're running a business, you are spending faster than you're making money, and you're projecting, you know, some level of growth. And it doesn't turn out quite the way you wanted, and you know, you can't really bridge the gap, and then there's really only one way, one thing to do. In the end, it turned out well for everybody, I think, and we've really grown a lot since as a company, and in terms of our revenues, so we're in good shape today.
Nice. So just to clarify, you guys were bootstrapped, that $700K was just entirely between you and your co-founder that invested in it? That wasn't from actual revenue?
No, about half of that, yeah, yeah, no, we invested more in the product itself from revenue, definitely, but about half of the initial investment came from myself and my co-founder, and then the other half would have been the grant from the Technology Development Fund.
Right, so I mean, bootstrap, there's a lot of challenges, right, when running that way, especially with, you know, that type of cost, you have to grow, you have to stay alive in the early stages, trying to find out your niche, find out the product that needs to be marketed, going remote, and then I don't know if you were paying your guys' salaries to stay afloat over that time, or you're just using your own savings, and then also deciding not to raise money. Can you share a little bit more about that bootstrapping experience, and maybe some challenges in that stage as you're going through?
Yeah, we definitely didn't pay ourselves salaries for a big part of that time, and And very minimal salaries for long, long after that. So that is, you know, you— I haven't calculated the numbers, you could definitely consider that an investment. There's definitely a market rate for both of us that was much higher than what we were paying ourselves. So, you know, that you could say that's an investment as well. Today, the company supports us quite comfortably and is still quite profitable. But yeah, it was, you know, it was a very, very long journey. I mean, the reason we always kept at it was that our customers were super happy. We've always had very low churn, you know, so we figured, okay, even if we don't manage to make this grow very, very fast, with this low churn and happy customers, we're still going to end up with something really valuable. It'll just take a little bit longer than we expected. And I think that's what has happened. You know, we have extremely low churn, just about 1% revenue churn every month. Very happy customers. And we've been growing, you know, faster over the last couple of years than we were before.
Mm-hmm.
About 4%, you know, month over month, which we're quite happy with. We'd like to find ways to accelerate that, of course. But still, that leads to the kind of growth you just mentioned about 70% just since February.
Nice. So speaking about that growth, since launch, when marketing, sales, and growth strategies, what would you say has worked best? Like what channel or what strategy have you seen to attract and then also retain customers?
Yeah. For us, that's always been a challenge. Like we are very much a niche product that everyone will, or most people will typically lump in with sort of web conferencing in general, right?
Yeah.
So for that reason, channels like search engine marketing, like buying keyword ads and that kind of thing, have never worked very well for us because typically the keyword that people are searching and the only keywords that there's sort of a bulk of, 95% of those people are expecting to find something different from what Crankwheel is, right?
Right, right. Different intent. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, different intent. So that doesn't really work out very well for us. What we've done that has worked, there are several things. One of the first successes for us, and which we've kept at, although we've not really been able to do that now for the last almost a year due to COVID, is just to go to conferences that are sort of focused on industries where telesales is a big thing. And an example of that is we go to like a Yellow Pages local search conference in Europe called SINDA, S-I-N-D-A. We go to almost every one of their conferences, just as an example, because it's been a great source of leads for us. So there are certain conferences that have worked really well. Other more sort of broad conferences tend not to work very well because it's again the same thing. It's just, you know, very broad audience. You might meet a lot of people. Sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don't. Another thing is content marketing. So we have, I think it's probably 2 years now that we've been blogging every week. Before that it was like every couple of weeks. And so we have a weekly newsletter with about 40,000 subscribers on the topic of sales. So how can you get better at sales in various ways, you know?
Okay.
Last few months, it's been a lot about like, how can you transition to working from home doing sales, you know, that kind of thing. So that has worked quite well for us, helped us with our SEO, and also just, you know, brought up our profile at conferences also that we go to, so sort of cross works. And the other thing that I'm a big believer in, and I think we've done really well, is just to provide the best customer support that we possibly can. And I mean, we really put our heart and soul into doing that, you know, us founders, our customer support lead, other people on the team. It just makes a huge difference. It's a lot easier to ask someone to maybe write a review if they've had a great experience with you in terms of customer support. They're much likelier to recommend, and we do see a lot of word of mouth. Well, word of mouth, I know it's— people always say that's not an answer in terms of what's working for your growth. That's right, because it's hard to replicate, but I think one of the ways to replicate it is to have good product and fantastic customer support. But we see a lot of word of mouth. We see a lot of people moving from one company to another and sort of bringing Crankwheel with them. So that kind of word of mouth. And then we've, over the years, we've really focused on not just our website, but also building our listing in the Chrome Web Store. So Crankwheel has, historically Crankwheel has always been like a Chrome extension. Nowadays, it's Chrome extension, Microsoft Edge extension, works on tons of other browsers with an extension, and also most other modern— well, every other modern browser on a desktop as just a web application. You don't, you don't need an extension these days. But we get a ton of traffic from our Chrome Web Store listing. And that's pretty much, you know, it's free marketing, quote unquote.
Yeah, sure.
But it's not free because we've invested in it, you know, 4 or 5 Years, more than 5, well, almost 5 years since we first listed there.
Exactly. So, I mean, it's an integration kind of channel. Yeah. I mean, so just a little bit to go deeper in that. So, you talked about SEO, obviously that's working well, and then customer experience. So, yeah, you guys are, it sounds so simple, but you're going a little bit over, sounds like you guys are doing more than kind of what the normal is. And people, you're saying word of mouth, but they're actually sharing the story. People get excited of like, hey, I actually got a really good experience. It's very rare these days that you get something above and beyond, and that sounds so simple, but you seem to be, you know, it's quite effective that people tell somebody else that, hey, this company did something above and beyond, so that's great.
Yeah, I mean, we really try to help everybody out. We try to be very, very helpful and responsive also for our freemium users, so, you know, we have a free-for-life plan You know, it's basically a modest amount of usage. And if you never go above that, then you can be free for as long as you want. And even for the freemium users, we try to be as helpful and responsive as we can. You know, a lot of other companies, I think, would just look at that as a burden of some sort or try to minimize, you know, how they do that.
Yeah.
We just try to help everybody out as much as we can. And you'll see it if you go to the Chrome Web Store, you go to Capterra, look at our reviews, you'll see, you know, customer service mentioned in like You know, quite a lot of them.
