SaaS Founder Success Story ~ Zero to $600K in 9 Months

TRANSCRIPTION of VIDEO INTERVIEW

Well, hello  everybody, this is Yoon Cannon, and I’m here with Max Woo.

Very exciting startup story, success story, in the SaaS founder world. Max is the co-founder of Lava Reach, and I just really am excited to dive into the conversation.

because he’s been able to go from zero to 600k ARR in just under nine months. So that’s really exciting.

Congratulations on that, Max.

Max Woo (lavareach.com)

Yeah, thank you so much for that, you. It’s been quite a journey.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com)

It’s been a grind. grind, but, you know, I can imagine it, I wanna hear the story of what that grind looked like, but on the other side of the coin, I gotta congratulate you.

I mean, wow, there’s a lot of founders who have been struggling with, you know, their SaaS product for a number of years to be able to just get it off the ground.

You know, they might be getting stuck in development or they’re just stuck in marketing. You know, they get stuck in sales.

So anyway, but for you to be able to, you know, really be able to prove out the demand for it and go from zero to 600k in nine months, that’s, that’s really to be applauded.

Oh, congratulations. Thank you. So you know, we want to make this conversation valuable for other SaaS founders who are just starting out in their journey, or founders who are looking to diversify their offerings and just launch a new product.

So what I love about your story is that you really have an everyday background. So there’s not this, know, people have sort of limiting beliefs of, oh, you know, I need to have graduated, you know, with an MBA, or I need to have had X amount of experience already, you know, 15 years experience, 20 years experience in enterprise sales or whatever the talk is, right?

So I just, I love that your story is you’re an everyday, ordinary guy, not to take away from, I’m sure you’re extremely hard-working and intelligent and all that, but it’s, but I think that just gives people the encouragement.

and the hope that, hey, you know what, they can learn how to do this. So first of all, tell us a 60 second on Lava Reach.

I love what your product does.

Max Woo (lavareach.com)

Sure, yeah, so the high level problem that we solve is our customers really fall in the two camps. One are the ones that are spending a lot of time manually researching accounts and prospects, so that’s the first camp.

camp are customers, they’re spending a lot of time thinking about how to reach out to their customers, how to personalize outbound, and really just standing out from the crowd.

So what we build here at Lava Reach to solve that problem is with a proprietary web browsing AI technology for sales teams to be able to research hundreds of different companies, prospects, and any websites in under one minute and feed that same data into AI to personalize outbound at scale.

So it’s really about increasing outbound volume without sacrificing conversion, empowering BDR teams to do their jobs much more effectively.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com)

Wow, this is huge, because I know when I work with… my clients and you know founder led sellers I work with as well as companies who do have sales teams that’s that’s a huge frustration you know where they feel like they just can’t quite get hit the ground running and actually start selling because they’re just just knee deep and all this research so I love that and that in your stories you got that idea just from your experience as an AE MBDR yes I came in the background of selling data fabrics to enterprise DIO CTOs so obviously you know selling to enterprises it’s a long-sale cycle you need to do a ton of research before reaching out because you have to do a lot of account based selling right multi-threading and all that you really have to understand a person’s business before reaching out I used to comb through and report 10k’s on a day-to-day basis you know just control Fing to find you know certain keywords like data modernization initiatives cloud migration you know data complexity and all that

Max Woo (lavareach.com):

That also took a long time. It took at least, you know, 10 minutes, 30 minutes sometimes just to find deeper research about certain companies to reach out to. So that’s kind of where the idea was born. And obviously, AI just came out with ChatGPT and all that. So we were thinking about applications to that. How do I apply new technologies to the problems I’m facing on a day-to-day basis?

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):

That’s really awesome. Do you have a technical background? Does your co-founder have a technical background, or did you have to bring in someone to play that role?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):

No. So I have two co-founders. One is Daniel, our CEO and co-founder. He came from a background of finance, actually, finance and ops. I’ve been friends with him ever since college. We’ve been friends for like 10 years. We’ve tried multiple different businesses together, from selling hemp-infused dog treats to knocking on people’s doors, asking if they wanted their fences painted. And then, in September, we met our technical co-founder, our CTO, Eaming, who was previously a team leader at Snapchat. So, yeah, we brought the team together, and we’ve been grinding on this business ever since.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):

It’s been a journey. Wow. So did you have the idea first and then decided, “Hey, I’ve got two good friends here, let’s pull together our talents?”

Max Woo (lavareach.com):

Yeah, that’s right. Messaging took a long time. We started with CIMR, AutoCIMR CRM updates, so that people don’t have to review a call and then put in the meeting summary to the CRM. We started with that, but it didn’t work—we weren’t booking any meetings. So we pivoted into doing LinkedIn auto-personalization. We got some traction there, but number one, the price was too low to justify that sales level of market motion. The second problem we faced was that we were selling to bigger teams, which is where we saw value because the level of personalization was too generic. And that’s how we pivoted into Lava Reach. Our core belief now is that AI doesn’t do a good job of personalizing unless it has our customers’ unique research data. So our AI technology mimics how sales teams typically do research and then feeds that same data into AI to personalize. It took some time to get the messaging right.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):

Yeah. So when you went from zero to $600K in nine months, was that when you finally nailed all the iterations? Tell us about that time period when you were working through the iterations of messaging and refining the product.

Max Woo (lavareach.com):

Yeah, for sure. We really settled down on Lava Reach’s messaging in September. It took about three months before that to experiment with CRM updates and LinkedIn auto-personalization. In fact, our first customer—we closed them on a slide deck. The next three, we closed on a spreadsheet. So we got to $100K pretty much selling no product. People don’t care how you do it as long as they get results. That’s all that matters. So we were just delivering spreadsheets for the first four months of the company, from September to December.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
Oh, wow. Okay. So then, what was your sales motion? Was it all three of you out there selling, or was it mainly on you?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
It was mainly on me to generate the top of the funnel—making cold calls, writing cold emails, messages to try to get people onto a call with us. Once we got them on a call, all three founders were present because I think it’s very important for the entire team to understand exactly what our customers’ biggest problems are, what their workflow looks like, and to figure out pricing and all that as well.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
That’s awesome. Very cool. So you were really doing the heavy lifting of lead gen and business development. That was your whole play—cold outreach, right?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
That’s right. Absolutely no marketing support or anything like that. I came from a background of selling data fabric, so it’s honestly much easier to sell to CROs and VPs of sales than to sell to enterprise CIOs and CTOs.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
So you had no inbound traffic, no lead funnels, no content, no SEO, none of that?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
All we did was cold outreach. That’s right. I really have the fundamental belief that you only need two things to start a business: a list of contacts and an autodialer to make five calls at a time. This entire business was built on those two things, and obviously my team and the idea. But honestly, all you need is to get a list of contacts, upload that into an autodialer, make 100 calls in an hour, and test the messaging—see if it resonates. If you aren’t booking any meetings, you know it’s time to pivot to a different idea. That’s how I believe we found our messaging-market fit.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
So you’re the main one doing the cold calling, dialing about 100 calls an hour. What was the average number of people who would pick up?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
Conversion rate was about 10% picking up, which is industry standard. I’d probably book five out of those 10. So, my calendar was packed. My BDRs have been amazing—we currently have two BDRs. Together, they’re booking around 30 meetings. Honestly, parallel dialers changed my life. Instead of clicking one by one, it makes five calls at a time, and when someone picks up, the other four calls get dropped. It’s much more efficient that way, and it costs only about $300 a month. The ROI is off the charts.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
That’s some pretty awesome numbers. So for listeners who are just starting their journey and concerned about budgeting, wanting to bootstrap like you did, what were your total overhead expenses between zero and the first nine months at $600K?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
Yeah, sure. So obviously, when we were at zero, we didn’t have any costs. It was just related to the database. In fact, I was using my old company’s database, and we got sued for it. So we literally didn’t put any money into the business at zero. When we had a little bit of revenue coming in, that’s when we bought ZoomInfo and an autodialer. We didn’t hire any BDRs until April of this year, so it’s only been three months since we hired BDRs. We didn’t hire early on because we needed to figure out the messaging first—who we were going to sell to and whether we could convert them on sales calls. We needed the LTV to CAC to stay steady for a while before we could say, “Let’s add heads,” because we had to make sure the LTV to CAC was good. Even now, our CAC is zero. We hire co-op BDRs, meaning they’re still finishing their degree in university, and since we’re a Canadian company, the Canadian government gives out grants to hire co-ops essentially for free. From a capital perspective, we pay the BDRs upfront, but we recoup that money either at the end of the fiscal year or at the end of someone’s quarter term. So right now, it’s still close to zero costs for us. If you’re talking about tools, we’re spending around $3,000 to $4,000 a year right now.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
That’s going to give people a lot of hope that they can do this on a budget. I’m impressed that you gave confidence to a college student who’s looking for a co-op to be in that BDR role, whereas I think a lot of founders would be hesitant to bring on someone so green. Kudos to you for finding those folks and having the confidence that they can get results. So, going back to generating your first set of customers, did you first use ZoomInfo and then build your product and use Lava Reach to find and develop your lead list?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
Exactly. We have two parts to the business or two parts of the value proposition: research and personalization. Now, obviously, personalization depends on whether they already have great conversions on emails and LinkedIn. If they’re getting a 10% to 20% response rate, rest assured we’re going to connect that to our volume without sacrificing conversion because we’re mimicking how they would typically personalize, research, and all that. But really, the place where we’re adding the most value is the research. That’s something different companies can’t do right now that we can do. So, our best-retaining customers are the ones doing a ton of research. It took a couple of months for us to figure that out. Now we’re doubling down on using our own tool to find companies that have enterprise AEs and enterprise BDRs because if they’re selling into enterprises, they have to do a ton of research on a day-to-day basis. We also feed a lot of data into our outreach, such as headcount growth rate, hiring for BDRs and AEs, or companies recently getting funded—that’s a trigger for us to do outreach. If there’s a CRO that recently changed jobs, we’ll reach out to them with that as an observation and a hook.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
So, when you’re talking about figuring out your own target market, did you hone in on any verticals, or is it generally enterprise companies with BDRs and AEs?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
When we first started, I tried so many different verticals and job titles—all the way from staffing and recruitment to software companies in terms of industries. In terms of titles, I tried VP of Business Development to sales enablement and sales ops. We found our sweet spot to be VP of Business Development and CROs, with some VP of Sales here and there. I’d say we really honed in on the target market about four or five months ago, before we hired the BDRs. It’s all experimentation. Different personas face different problems, and their day-to-day is also very different. It definitely takes time to understand who you should be selling to and what you should be saying to get them onto demos. The key question is: What is the real problem we’re trying to solve here, and who are we trying to solve it for?

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
Right. So, going back to the feature set of Lava Reach, you mentioned one of the triggers is companies recently being funded. Can you give us examples of other triggers that Lava Reach can pick up?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
For sure. The biggest one would be a hiring trigger, for example. We basically scrape in real-time from different job boards, like Indeed, LinkedIn, and so on, to find companies that are hiring for very specific roles. For instance, if you’re a marketing agency, we can grab companies hiring for a director of marketing or marketing coordinators. If you’re a company selling enterprise AI implementation, we look for enterprise companies hiring AI engineers. In our case, what’s been working out well is finding companies hiring for BDRs because we empower BDRs to make their jobs easier by sourcing research and personalizing LinkedIn and email outreach for them, so they can focus on making cold calls.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
Awesome. So, outside of those two triggers, does Lava Reach offer any other trigger options, just out of curiosity?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
Yeah, absolutely. We have job changes as another trigger, as well as expansion triggers. And you can also upload a list and filter it down to target specific people. For example, let’s say you’re a company that helps set up manufacturing facilities in Mexico. Obviously, you don’t want to reach out to companies that already have a facility in Mexico. You’d upload a list, and we’ll research at scale to see if they already have one. We filter out the ones that do, and you only target the companies that currently don’t have a facility in Mexico. That’s just one example.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
That’s awesome. The other piece I was really impressed with, when I was looking at some of your features and videos for Lava Reach, is that the personalization is so much faster.

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
We’ve tested a number of other AI-driven tools for outreach, and while they say it personalizes, what they spit out sounds robotic and inauthentic. That was the exact problem we faced when we were in the LinkedIn personalization space because the only data we were pulling was from a person’s LinkedIn profile—their accomplishments, job experiences, how long they’ve been in their role, and so on. That’s why we built a general-purpose AI technology that can research 10Ks, PR releases, news articles—pretty much whatever you want. For example, if someone attended any webinars, we’re able to identify that. What sets us apart from other AI SDRs is that we combine human-written text with AI, meaning we give our customers the flexibility to put in their unique messaging that they know works, instead of boxing them into predefined categories. So, the personalization comes off as much more genuine when the prospect sees it.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
Yeah. Well, I’m excited to continue exploring the tool because it seems like you’ve nailed a huge frustration point within AI—especially around the low-quality output that a lot of AI-enabled tools produce.

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
To be transparent, time to value is something we’re trying to fix. If we give people flexibility to craft their own problems but they aren’t knowledgeable about how to use AI, it’s hard for them to set up their first personalized email. That’s currently our biggest challenge as a company: how to decrease time to value for our customers. How do we get them to see value, not in an hour but in under three minutes? We’re currently revamping and rethinking the platform from a user experience perspective.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
So, how long does onboarding take now?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
Honestly, most of our customers are on full service, meaning we set everything up for them. We’re really following the Y Combinator methodology of talking to customers, redirecting based on their feedback, and handholding them in the early stages to get feedback by staying close to them. For a self-service user, onboarding takes way too long—around one to two hours to set everything up. That’s something we’re currently working on. For full service, we do a lot of consulting, including discovery into their ICPs, ideal research workflows, and messaging. We even take their sales collateral and upload it into our AI internal knowledge base. There’s a lot of white-glove service involved. But self-service is where we’re really trying to double down by shortening time to value.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
Right. And the other challenge you mentioned was moving away from being a full-service lead gen company. Tell us more about that challenge.

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
Yeah, so we were acting more like a productized service. At the end of the day, to create a self-service SaaS tool, we need a lot of data. Since we’re a bootstrapped company, we don’t have cash reserves to spend on data upfront. That’s why we were running as a full-service type agency—we talked to customers, understood their needs, and tested our hypothesis about whether AI research and personalization would help book meetings. After testing, we realized the product was useful—people saw value, closed deals, and booked meetings. So, the next step is to open it up for self-service, which will lower the barrier to entry for a lot of customers by lowering the price. Building a self-service business is much more scalable than running a full-service lead gen agency. There’s a combination of timeline factors, too. Instead of “build, measure, learn,” we started with “learn, measure, build.” Now we have to go back into the actual “BML” cycle.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
Yeah, that makes sense. I appreciate you being so transparent, Max, sharing both your wins and the current challenges you’re working on solving. You’ve shared a lot of great value bombs, and I love your success journey. I think a lot of our listeners will walk away from this interview saying, “Hey, you know what? They can do this.” They can just take one cold call playbook and do it at scale. I love how you set that benchmark with 500 calls or 500 dials a day. That’s probably the biggest variable, besides messaging, that many founder-led SaaS sellers might not be doing yet. Before we wrap, is there any other piece of information, advice, or value tips you can offer to SaaS founders?

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
The biggest thing is to not be afraid of picking up the phone because that is literally the fastest way to validate whether there’s something people want. If you’re getting your ideal customer on the phone and testing whether there’s something they want, you’re going to get to messaging-market fit much faster. You might not even have to build a product first before selling it. If people believe in your idea and that you can solve their problem, nine out of ten times they’ll want to work with you—even if you have no product—because they believe you can solve their problem.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
And that’s the art of pre-selling, which you did beautifully. So, check out Max and his company, Lava Reach. That’s LavaReach.com, right? Just double-checking that.

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
That’s right. We’re actually doing a website revamp sometime soon as well.

Yoon Cannon (paramountbusinesscoach.com):
So, keep an eye out for that. LavaReach.com. Thanks so much, Max, for sharing your story. I’m excited to continue tracking your growth and watching how you guys continue expanding.

Max Woo (lavareach.com):
Yeah, thank you so much.