Hip Lead

Connor Lee had previously founded Tel-Fi (in Y Combinator Winter 2011) and worked as a lobbyist and political campaign manager. When he started Hip Lead in 2012, he saw a clear problem: B2B companies struggled to scale their outbound sales effectively. But as the business grew, Connor noticed something deeper—his clients weren't just struggling with lead generation; they were drowning in fragmented people data spread across Salesforce, marketing automation tools, and various data vendors with no unified system to manage it all.

Hip Lead started as a hybrid service and SaaS business, combining lead data delivery with hands-on consulting to help clients run outbound campaigns. This hybrid model proved resilient. By December 2016, Hip Lead had hit $120k MRR with just 30 customers paying ~$4k each, maintaining a healthy 1% churn rate. Connor realized the low churn came from customers who stuck around for the data after the initial service engagement phase ended. Working with nearly 300 different SaaS companies gave Connor deep insights that few competitors could access.

By mid-2018, when he launched Sona (short for "persona"), Connor had codified all these learnings. Sona was positioned as "a CRM built for the modern era"—integration-first, designed so anyone could use it without technical knowledge. It plugged into existing systems (Salesforce, marketing automation, social media platforms) and became a single source of truth for people data management.

Sona launched in beta around May 2018 and immediately found traction. Within two months, it had acquired customers through outbound sales and inbound channels powered by Hip Lead's own product. Three customers had already renewed and upgraded by July 2018. The revenue came quickly: $28k MRR within two months, all while Hip Lead's core business remained flat at roughly $120k MRR (down slightly from the $150k combined when including Sona's contributions).

Connor's hybrid approach—keeping Hip Lead's services business alive—gave Sona an unfair advantage. The services work kept him close to customer problems and gave his product incredible depth. However, it also created tension. Hip Lead's service-heavy model, while profitable, was a distraction from Sona's pure SaaS potential. Connor acknowledged the challenge: "To do that, I think you just have to cut your safety nets. You just have to go for it." He wasn't ready to sell Hip Lead yet, even when offered a potential $500k-$1.5M exit multiple, because the insights it provided were invaluable.

The real win was discovering that data alone wasn't sticky—value came from the human touch and context. Hip Lead succeeded by using "humans in areas where humans are best" with "light touch consulting" rather than high-touch or no-touch models. Sona codified this insight into a self-service product.

By July 2018, Hip Lead had 50+ customers paying ~$3k/month each, generating $115k MRR. Roughly 30 of those customers were paying just for data delivery (~$30-40k MRR). Sona was on a hypergrowth trajectory after just two months, already at $28k MRR with zero churn and multiple renewals. The team had grown to 17 people globally (5 in the US, 12 distributed). Connor remained bootstrapped, having raised only $200k years ago and keeping the company lean. The next challenge was deciding whether to double down on Sona and divest Hip Lead, or continue leveraging both businesses—a decision Connor was still wrestling with.