Aero Leads

Push Car and his team had been building marketing software but realized it wasn't going anywhere. They decided to pivot and build something they themselves needed: a better way to find B2B prospects. Instead of competing with companies like Full Contact (which focused on B2C data), they identified an opportunity to build a specialized tool for B2B business data extraction and lead generation.

Aero Leads launched with a soft launch in April-May 2015 while the team was still working on other products in parallel. The core product was straightforward: use web scraping to crawl social media and other sites, validate data points, and provide companies with qualified prospects with valid email addresses. The pricing model was SaaS-based, starting at $14/month for around 100 qualified prospects, with most customers settling in the $149-150/month range.

Push Car's growth strategy was decidedly lean. "Most of the users are coming to the website. They sign up," he explained. The company focused on organic search—ranking for relevant keywords related to lead generation and B2B prospecting. With virtually zero paid acquisition costs, they achieved a customer acquisition cost of roughly $500 per customer. No Facebook ads, no Google Ads—just SEO and inbound traffic.

By 2017, Aero Leads had grown to roughly 200 paying customers, with a team of 10 in-house and 5-6 working remotely. They were generating approximately $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue, nearly doubling from the $12,000/month they did in December 2016. However, the business model had a critical weakness: churn was extremely high at roughly 30% per month. Customers would sign up, use the software to get leads for about three months, then leave. Push Car acknowledged this was "part of the business" and not unique to their model, but it created a treadmill effect where constant new customer acquisition was required just to maintain flat revenue. When asked about solutions, he was resistant to expiring credits monthly—a tactic competitors used to drive retention—citing customer concerns about losing paid credits.

Push Car was targeting $100,000 per month in revenue by the end of the next year, though he admitted the team had "lost track for a few months" by shifting focus away from development. The founder valued the company at roughly $1 million, based on a 3x multiple of annual revenue. He remained bootstrapped, showing no interest in raising capital despite past experience with outside investors. His vision was to evolve Aero Leads from a pure data play into an all-in-one prospecting tool, adding features like prospect sourcing from Twitter and Instagram. At 33 years old and single with no kids, Push Car reflected that he wished his 20-year-old self had invested more time in learning to code and programming earlier rather than focusing solely on marketing.