mobile.io

Jacob Vickstrom and his co-founder started mobile.io three years ago with a simple observation: businesses were spending countless manual hours updating their information across Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Apple Maps. They didn't set out to build a SaaS company—they started by offering this as a manual service, helping restaurants, car dealerships, and retail chains keep their listings current. It worked. Within a couple years, they'd grown the service business to nearly $1M in annual revenue with 15 full-time employees.

But running a service business meant they hit a ceiling. Jacob and his co-founder built an internal tool to automate their own listing updates and work more efficiently. Then something interesting happened: their customers asked to use it themselves. This was the inflection point. They decided to pivot from services to SaaS, transitioning their existing customer base onto the software platform. Two early angel investors—successful founders themselves—came in with $10-30k checks each, investing roughly 10% of the company each. They didn't just bring capital; they brought network and operational expertise.

The transition from service to SaaS happened organically. Existing service customers became their first SaaS customers. Rather than trying to build self-serve or scale acquisition immediately, Jacob chose to stay hands-on. "We're really trying to listen to the customers as good as possible," he explained. "When you're early, doing that manually in the beginning works." Today, the sales team consists of five people: SDRs (quota: 20 meetings per month) and AEs (quota: $1-4K MRR per month). Jacob prefers this model because it lets them continuously validate the product and understand customer pain points deeply.

The numbers tell the story. One year before the interview, mobile.io was doing roughly $35-40K MRR. By the time of this interview, they'd hit $120K MRR—a 200% year-over-year growth rate. They closed a seed round of $2M on a $10M post-money valuation (roughly 15-20% dilution, typical for seed rounds). Their average customer pays $5,000 per year, and they have over 300 customers. Net dollar retention sits at 100%, meaning no churn and flat expansion.

What's working: direct sales with high-touch demos. What's not yet optimized: they could scrape listing sites and reach out to thousands of potential customers, but Jacob deliberately chose not to scale that way. "We still have a lot to figure out with the product and how we maximize customer value," he said. He wants to understand the customer base deeply first.

At 31 years old, Jacob runs a 31-person company growing at 200% YoY with a $1.5M ARR run rate. He's not planning to raise again immediately—instead, he's focused on building the foundational systems needed to scale efficiently with capital. The vision is bigger: he believes listing sites are becoming "the new version of the website," and mobile.io is positioning itself at the center of that shift. With strong unit economics, zero churn, and disciplined capital deployment, they're building the machinery to move from 300 customers to scale.