Keeping

Vincent Casar was running a digital books and courses business when customer support became overwhelming. He looked at existing helpdesk platforms like Zendesk and Desk.com but found them overly complex, hard to set up, and dangerous due to lock-in—if he ever wanted to leave, all his customer conversations would be trapped in their system. The insight was simple: his customers were already emailing him. Why force everyone to migrate to a new platform? He decided to bring helpdesk functionality directly into Gmail, where support conversations already lived.

Before building anything, Vincent did something critical: he validated the problem by cold emailing and calling potential customers. He needed to confirm that his frustration wasn't unique—that there was a real market willing to pay for this. The feedback was clear: everyone uses email, but email wasn't designed for team collaboration on customer support. Armed with this validation and early feedback from potential buyers, he built the first version of Keeping.

Vincent's customer acquisition strategy relied on three core tactics, all documented publicly in his "Growth Hacking Experiment." First, he implemented disciplined cold email outreach, using a tool called Right Inbox to set automatic follow-ups. He found that by following up 3-4 times, he could achieve 36-40% response rates (compared to an estimated 10-15% for first emails alone). Second, he discovered Quora as a hidden gem for his market. By answering customer-support-related questions with intelligent, brief responses (5-6 lines), adding a screenshot of Keeping, and including a link, he achieved conversion rates of 30-35% from Quora traffic to free trial signups. The traffic kept flowing even months after he stopped actively answering questions. Third, he leveraged early customer conversations to build a pool of invested potential users who would later send referrals.

Vincent was transparent about failures too. He tried automating Twitter engagement with a bot that would automatically reply to conversations containing growth-hacking hashtags, thinking it would drive targeted traffic. It backfired—people saw it as spam, and he risked getting his account suspended. The lesson: automation kills authenticity; real engagement on social platforms requires genuine interaction.

What worked was consistency and small, repeatable actions. His three core tactics weren't revolutionary, but they were disciplined: follow up persistently on emails, answer niche questions on Quora with value, and talk to customers early. These simple tactics, combined with transparent documentation of results in the "Growth Hacking Experiment," also became a content marketing engine that attracted startups interested in learning to grow—the exact audience likely to need Keeping.

Keeping has grown from zero to a profitable SaaS business with paying customers acquired through his repeatable playbook. Vincent continues to balance growth hacking with personal disciplines—he works standing up, gets out into nature regularly for mental clarity, and believes that resilience is the key attribute of successful entrepreneurs. His most important contribution may be the Growth Hacking Experiment itself: a transparent, replicable framework showing that customer acquisition doesn't require viral moments or massive budgets, just disciplined execution of unsexy but effective tactics.