#128: Solving a Challenging SaaS Growth Puzzle - Scott Desgrosseilliers

7 snips

Jan 24, 2025

Scott Desgrosseilliers, founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, shares insights from his journey in building a bootstrapped SaaS company focused on marketing attribution for SMBs. He discusses the complexities of identifying effective marketing strategies, the importance of high-quality data, and the potential pitfalls of VC funding. Scott emphasizes resilience and strategic decision-making in overcoming challenges like near-failure moments, navigating SaaS financing, and fostering sustainable growth while enhancing customer engagement through data-driven insights.

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ANECDOTE

Spreadsheet Success

Scott Desgrosseilliers's Wicked Reports started with a spreadsheet solution for Infusionsoft clients.
Digital Marketer became their first big customer, leading to significant growth through word-of-mouth marketing.

ANECDOTE

Early Growth and Challenges

Early success with Wicked Reports felt easy due to high demand and live sales at events.
A potential acquisition by Ontraport fell through, followed by personal financial challenges.

ANECDOTE

Near-Death Experience

A budgeting error revealed only 11 days of runway, forcing layoffs and personal loans.
Scott Desgrosseilliers describes this as a low point, requiring significant emotional recovery.

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Scott Desgrosseilliers is the founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, a leading multi-touch marketing attribution software for SMBs who use paid online advertising. Scott is a data and analytics expert who saw the costly limitations of simple performance reports from popular ad platforms.

Wicked Reports was started as a bootstrapped software company in 2016 to serve smaller companies that spend millions on digital ads and other marketing, including email, SEO, and digital events. Determining which marketing activities drive incremental revenue is a tricky puzzle to unravel, but the payback of those insights is huge.

Scott raised a little angel funding and a little SaaS debt and is still going strong with 28 employees and is figuring out their growth and retention puzzle to accelerate growth.

Quote from Scott Desgrosseilliers, founder and CEO of Wicked Reports

"We had offers, and we could have raised VC funding early on, but then the growth rate we would have had to hit was too high, which didn't make sense for our business.

"A competitor of ours took $20 million from a similar VC, and then they had to cut a third of their team. I'm not saying anything against them. They have a nice product and they seem like good guys. They hired a ton of people and didn't hit the growth number, so they had to whack a bunch of them.

"Money isn't always the answer. I'm sure there are cases where it solved all sorts of problems, but most VCs want to invest when you already have growth and net revenue retention at 120% when the efficient growth problem's already solved!"

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