Boomtime
Bill Bice is a serial entrepreneur who had built and invested in over 25 companies before founding Boomtime. Across all these ventures, he kept encountering the same fundamental marketing problem: businesses lacked the resources and expertise to execute effective go-to-market strategies consistently. As a programmer at heart, Bill believed this was a technology problem that could be solved systematically rather than through traditional agency consulting alone.
Boomtime launched in 2014 as a content-oriented marketing automation platform. Bill started on the technology side because he wanted to solve the problem purely through software. However, he quickly realized that technology alone couldn't address the core issue—the vast majority of SMBs simply didn't have the resources and expertise to execute marketing well day-to-day. This insight led him to build a hybrid model combining both technology and service delivery. The platform manages the entire workflow of content creation, from ideation to distribution, leveraging a network of 300 subject matter expert writers rather than building content creation internally.
Boomtime's customer acquisition strategy mirrors the advice it gives clients. The company uses LinkedIn connection campaigns to find exactly the right B2B prospects, converting those connections to email nurture sequences. This approach has been remarkably efficient—new customers onboard at $2,000/month, and the company maintains a 5-month payback period on customer acquisition costs. With only three full-time sales representatives on a team of 35, Boomtime relies on strong lead inflow from its own marketing efforts rather than pure outbound sales.
The biggest lesson Bill learned was the danger of trying to do everything for everyone. Early on, Boomtime served both B2C and B2B customers, which hurt churn metrics and diluted the product-market fit. By focusing exclusively on B2B, where the platform's strengths shine, churn dropped dramatically. Bill also emphasized the importance of building the foundation right before hitting the gas on growth. Rather than chase rapid growth at all costs like many VC-backed companies, Boomtime took time to perfect its platform and process over three years, which positioned it for sustainable, profitable growth.
As of the interview, Boomtime serves 300 paying customers (plus 3,000 total users of the technology piece alone) and generates $250,000 in MRR, with $250k coming from the hybrid SaaS/service model. The company is profitable with a 5-month customer payback period and has raised $8 million in venture funding. Despite "slow growth in the teens" over the previous 12 months, Bill predicted acceleration in 2020 as the platform and go-to-market strategy matured. The team of 35 includes six to seven engineers and a lean sales organization, with the majority of headcount dedicated to delivering the service component that makes Boomtime's hybrid model work.
- •Bill's experience across 25+ companies gave him credibility and deep pattern recognition to identify a widespread, unsolved problem that affected his own ventures, making the founding motivation authentic and validated by repeated observation.
- •The hybrid SaaS-plus-service model solved the fundamental bottleneck that pure software couldn't address: SMBs lacked not just tools but the ongoing expertise and resources to execute marketing consistently, creating a defensible competitive moat.
- •By dogfooding their own LinkedIn connection campaign strategy for customer acquisition, Boomtime demonstrated product-market fit while simultaneously proving their platform's efficacy, creating a virtuous cycle of credibility and efficient growth.
- •Ruthlessly narrowing focus from B2B+B2C to B2B-only dramatically improved unit economics and retention metrics, showing that strategic focus on a well-defined segment outperforms broader market coverage in SaaS.
- 1.Identify a repeating pain point across multiple companies you've worked in or invested in, then validate that the problem is structural (affecting many businesses) rather than circumstantial (specific to one organization).
- 2.Build a hybrid delivery model that combines technology with human expertise by establishing a network of subject matter experts or service providers who scale your platform's capabilities without requiring internal headcount growth.
- 3.Use your own product as your primary customer acquisition channel by implementing the exact solution you sell to prospects, then track and optimize the conversion metrics (e.g., connection-to-nurture-to-customer) obsessively.
- 4.Run a segment analysis experiment where you measure churn and unit economics separately for different customer types, then commit fully to the segment with the best retention and lowest CAC payback period, even if it means abandoning other segments.
Similar Companies
247.ai
$25.0M/mo247.ai, founded by PV Cannon in 2000, is an AI-powered customer service automation platform serving over 150 enterprise customers with $300M+ in ARR. The company raised only $20M from Sequoia (2003) and bootstrap, achieving 10% net profit margins while maintaining a 12-month CAC payback period and 100% net revenue retention. Despite a security breach setback around 2018, 247.ai has recovered and recently achieved 20% new revenue booking growth in their best quarter.
iCIMS
$13.3M/moiCIMS is a bootstrapped SaaS provider founded in 1999 that dominates the talent acquisition software market as the #2 player, serving 3,500 enterprise customers with an average monthly spend of $4,000. The company exited 2017 with $160M ARR and is targeting 25%+ annual growth while maintaining profitability, recently acquiring Text Recruit to expand into candidate messaging and recruitment advertising.
Zoom
$12.0M/moZoom is a freemium SaaS video conferencing platform founded by Eric Yuan in July 2011 after he left Cisco to build a next-generation collaboration solution. The company has grown to 850,000+ paying customers across individual, SMB, and enterprise segments, generating over $12M in monthly recurring revenue with approximately 100% year-over-year growth. Rather than focusing on customer stickiness or aggressive growth targets, Zoom emphasizes customer happiness and organic word-of-mouth acquisition, which has proven highly effective in driving viral adoption.
Madwire
$10.0M/moMadwire is a comprehensive SaaS platform for small businesses (1-100 employees) that combines CRM, payments, invoicing, billing, e-commerce, and multi-channel marketing tools in a single platform. Founded in 2009, the company has grown to $120M ARR serving 20,000 customers with an average revenue per user of $500/month, while maintaining strong unit economics ($3,000-$4,000 CAC with 3-month payback) and recently turning profitable with a focus on reaching 15-20% EBITDA margins. The company is exploring an IPO within 12-18 months without having raised substantial capital beyond an initial $7.5M.
SwiftPage
$7.0M/moSwiftPage is a CRM and marketing automation platform founded in 2001 that targets small businesses. Under CEO John Oshel's leadership since 2012, the company scaled from 60,000 customers with $26.2M revenue in 2015 to 84,000 customers today with an estimated ARR of $36M+, maintaining 1.5% monthly logo churn and a 6-7 month payback period with a sub-$500 CAC.