Go Personas

Connor Lee started Go Personas (originally Hip Lead) back in 2012, tackling a problem that countless B2B companies face: scaling their top-of-funnel outbound sales and marketing efforts. The platform evolved from focusing purely on lead data to becoming a comprehensive system for automating B2B sales and marketing processes. About six months before this interview, the company underwent a rebrand from Hip Lead to Go Personas, reflecting the shift in philosophy—understanding your audience (personas) first, then building custom growth engines around them.

The company bootstrapped its way through growth without raising any equity. To fuel early expansion, Connor used $150K in debt financing from letter capital at 0.5% interest, structured over three years (total cost with interest: $225K). Rather than taking on venture capital, the team focused on building sustainable, profitable growth. By the time of the initial show appearance in July 2018, Hip Lead had 50 customers. The infrastructure was designed with API-first thinking, allowing the team to build modular, plug-and-play functionality rather than custom code for every client.

Growth came through multiple channels, with the company particularly leveraging events—especially the Growth Marketing Conference. However, the most effective channel became dogfooding their own product. The sales team used Go Personas' own tools (email automation, ad campaigns, lookalike audiences, and direct mail) to run outbound campaigns that generated the majority of revenue. This product-led approach meant the best testimonials came from the founders and team using the product themselves.

The company successfully segmented into two distinct business models: self-serve and enterprise. The self-serve product (around $1K/month average) served smaller businesses with standard SaaS access, while the enterprise offering provided custom implementations built on the same core infrastructure. This allowed them to serve both cohorts without the complexity of managing seven different codebases—instead using API-based modules that could be composed and recomposed like Lego blocks.

By the time of this interview in April 2020, Go Personas had roughly 110 customers with a split revenue model: $130K MRR from the self-serve product and $180K MRR from enterprise (6 large SaaS clients). This growth from $1.8M ARR (18 months prior) to $3.6M ARR ($310K MRR) was achieved entirely through bootstrapping—no additional equity raised. The team maintained a healthy 95% net revenue retention, with 12-15% churn on self-serve offset by 10-15% expansion revenue, resulting in approximately 5% overall churn.

By April 2020, the 20-person remote team (5 engineers, 1 quota-carrying sales rep, plus operations staff globally) was profitable and shifting growth tactics due to COVID-19. Events dried up, so the company pivoted to webinars and expanded their own outbound campaigns. Connor was also building covid.gopersonas.com, a resource hub aggregating discounts and resources for SaaS companies impacted by the pandemic, while simultaneously researching government paycheck protection programs for his own company. The combination of strong unit economics, high net revenue retention, and product-led growth positioned Go Personas to continue scaling despite economic headwinds.