Cliently
Spencer launched Cliently in late 2016 after working at Pantadoc, a hot Silicon Valley startup. He had raised $100K (actually bootstrapped from savings and prior stock sales) and had 80 customers doing about $7-8K per month in pure SaaS revenue. The core insight was simple: businesses needed help engaging prospects across multiple channels—not just email, but also video messages and phone calls.
The initial product grew steadily to $7-8K MRR over about 10 months. Spencer brought on developers and spent 4-5 months strengthening the core application. However, a client request changed everything: they asked Cliently to actually *make the calls* on their behalf. Spencer tested this service and found explosive demand. "We almost had too much success," he recalled.
The pivot to professional services—what Spencer called "Cliently Calls"—worked spectacularly at first. By early 2018, the company was doing $65-70K MRR. They were sourcing leads using the platform, then executing outreach (email, video, calls) on behalf of clients. But there was a fatal flaw: it was primarily professional services revenue with limited SaaS usage, low margins, and hard to scale. When Spencer's focus shifted away from product development, customers—who believed in the vision but found the application incomplete—began to churn.
What didn't work: pivoting to services to chase short-term revenue. The company reached $65-70K MRR but was completely off-track from its original vision. All $7-8K of original pure SaaS revenue churned because "the application wasn't falling through basically." Spencer raised additional capital—$700K from three different sources including South Carolina state grants and Active Capital (led by Pat Matthews)—bringing total invested to $800K including his own money.
Spencer relaunched the pure SaaS product in early June, focusing 100% on the application. In just 5-6 weeks, he rebuilt the business to 13 customers generating $40K ARR (~$3.3K MRR). Pricing ranges from $79/month (single user) to $349/month (teams up to 10 users). The product now emphasizes engagement workflows—automated emails, video messages, handwritten notes, physical gift cards and postcards, plus a built-in lead database. Spencer's goal: 500 customers and $1M ARR by year-end, just 5-6 months away. His playbook: figure out close rates with the target market, then solve the equation of how many pipeline opportunities the team needs, then scale outreach systematically.
- •Spencer identified a genuine pain point from his own prior startup experience, which gave him credibility and deep understanding of the problem that persisted even after pivoting away from it.
- •The company's initial product-led-growth traction ($7-8K MRR in 10 months) proved market demand existed, but chasing services revenue destroyed this foundation by diverting resources from product development and alienating customers who believed in the SaaS vision.
- •Returning to pure SaaS with a focused product (engagement workflows across multiple channels) and using outbound as the primary acquisition channel allowed rapid customer re-acquisition because the core value proposition was proven and the go-to-market aligned with the product's strengths.
- •The deliberate pricing structure ($79-$349/month tiers) targeting both individual users and teams created multiple entry points that made outbound prospecting more efficient by reducing buyer friction across different customer segments.
- 1.Start by solving a problem you or your team experienced firsthand, validate that customers will pay for it with real early revenue before considering pivots, and measure whether any new direction preserves the core SaaS metrics and customer belief in your original vision.
- 2.After achieving initial product-market fit signals (even modest ones like $7-8K MRR), ruthlessly protect engineering resources for product improvement rather than chasing short-term services revenue, because incomplete products create churn that erases progress.
- 3.Once you return to your core product, immediately adopt outbound as your acquisition channel and build a repeatable playbook: calculate your target customer's close rate, work backwards to determine required pipeline, then scale outreach systematically to hit pipeline targets.
- 4.Structure your pricing with multiple tiers ($79, $199, $349 in this case) that serve different user personas, then use those segments to tailor outbound messaging and increase conversion rates across your addressable market.
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