Competitors.app

Razvan Gurmacha had already built and sold a SaaS company—a backlink monitoring tool—for $1 million. But success in one venture didn't mean he was ready to become a traditional manager. "I'm not really good manager once the company starts to grow. I get really bored and quite depressing," he admits. Instead of scaling his existing business, Razvan chose to sell and pursue what energized him: going from zero to one. He identified a gap in the market where expensive enterprise solutions dominated competitor intelligence, leaving small and medium businesses without affordable options.

Competitors.app launched in 2018 as a straightforward SaaS product: monitor competitors' marketing channels for $10 per competitor per month. Razvan bootstrapped the venture with €50,000 (roughly $50k USD) from his previous exit, maintaining 100% ownership—a lesson learned painfully from a failed co-founder experience where he spent six months negotiating share recoveries. He assembled a lean, fully remote team of three: himself, a marketer, and a developer spread across the world.

Razvan's acquisition strategy combined old-school hustle with emerging tools. He started in Facebook groups—specifically "SaaS marketing" groups and lifetime deal communities—where he'd comment, engage, and pitch free trials. But his primary lever became LinkedIn. Using Duxsoup (a tool he vetted carefully to avoid account bans), he'd search Sales Navigator with specific filters, then automate connection requests. Once connections accepted, TextExpander—a Chrome extension that expands shortcuts into full messages—would send personalized pitches like "Hey, we just looked at your competitor's data here, so they're getting all their traffic." It was manual, it was grindy, but it worked.

By the time of this interview, Razvan had reached 20 paying customers, averaging $40/month each for a total MRR of $800. No customers had churned yet, partly because he designed yearly plans: competitor monitoring isn't a sprint—something important might take months to happen. He deliberately priced low ($10/competitor) to acquire a broad cohort and build a SEO moat long-term. He'd seen SEO work before, generating $50,000 worth of value monthly at his previous startup, so he was patient. His goal: break even in one year, then scale. What he rejected: lifetime deals (bad for business model and future investors) and committee-based decision-making ("dictators get things done").

Still early, still bootstrapped, still burning modest cash. But Razvan had a clear roadmap: LinkedIn outreach to fuel near-term growth, Facebook ads for remarketing, and SEO as the long-term acquisition engine. He'd already proven he could build and exit. Now he was building again, owning his destiny, and moving deliberately from zero to one.