Edgar

Laura Roeder wasn't trying to build a software company—she was trying to solve a problem she and her team faced daily. While running their social media marketing courses and consulting business, they'd created an unwieldy spreadsheet to organize social media updates across different categories. The workflow was painful: manually load updates into a scheduling tool, watch them get published, then do it all over again. When teaching this process in her "Social Brilliant" course, Laura realized dozens of other businesses faced the same bottleneck. Instead of accepting the inefficiency, she decided to build software around the solution.

Laura's greatest asset turned out to be her marriage to a Ruby on Rails developer. Rather than hiring out or learning to code herself, she partnered with her husband on Edgar. She invested roughly $100,000 before the first dollar came in—mostly on development and branding—though her husband's initial work wasn't monetized. Critically, Laura understood what many solo developers missed: just building a great product wasn't enough. She brought marketing expertise, positioning clarity, and an understanding of their target customer. She consciously chose not to include a free plan (unlike competitors like Buffer) and priced at $49/month—significantly higher than competitors—to signal that Edgar was a business tool for serious content marketers, not casual social media users.

Laura launched Edgar in mid-2014 with an existing 80,000-person email list from her previous business. She used this list strategically but didn't rely solely on it. She and her team started Edgar's social profiles from scratch on Twitter and Facebook, and spent time engaging directly with influencers in the social media marketing space—people like Kim Garst and Amy Porterfield. She focused on building relationships rather than hard-selling, sharing their content and having genuine conversations. This approach, combined with early blog and content marketing efforts, helped seed the initial customer base.

By January 2016, just 18 months after launch, Edgar had nearly 4,000 paying customers and was generating $2.2M in annual recurring revenue ($180k per month). The biggest growth drivers were Facebook ads ($30k/month spend) and content marketing. Edgar maintained approximately a 95% monthly retention rate—significantly better than competitors like Buffer—because they'd correctly identified and locked in the right customer segment. The key metric for success became activation: getting customers to load their content library into Edgar. This required education since Edgar's workflow (sit down and load an hour of content upfront) was fundamentally different from competitors' one-off posting approach. Once customers experienced the value of evergreen content cycling through automatically, they rarely left. Laura pulled specific data showing that her own use of Edgar—scheduling podcast testimonial screenshots to cycle repeatedly—had driven 3,286 clicks to the podcast over six months from just Twitter updates.

By the time of this interview (January 2016), Edgar had grown from zero to a sustainable, profitable SaaS business entirely bootstrapped. Laura's blog had grown from 3,000 page views/month at the end of 2014 to 15,000/month by the end of 2015—in part by using Edgar to recycle blog posts. The company proved that non-technical marketers could build successful software businesses by partnering with developers and bringing their marketing expertise to the table. Laura's success contradicted the assumption many info-product creators had: that software was too risky or required them to be solo builders. Instead, she showed that marketing expertise paired with technical talent created a powerful founding team dynamic.