Popton

Gal and Tomer were childhood friends who'd known each other since gifted class in high school. By university, they were already building together—living in the same apartment with their girlfriends (who would later become their wives) while starting a digital agency called ECPM. The agency grew steadily to $30,000 per month in revenue with just two full-time employees plus freelancers. But from day one, their real ambition was to build a SaaS product, not stay stuck in agency work.

The spark came from their own customers. "Many of our customers really wanted to put an emphasis on conversion rate," they explained. They started building custom pop-up solutions manually for each client—and it worked. "We did it manually. We build it for each site. And then we said, okay, if we build it manually and it works, why shouldn't we build a product that can do it like as a product, as a service?"

They started building Popton about a year before the interview, while still running ECPM. Once they had enough agency revenue, they hired a full-time developer and shifted their focus. They spent roughly 90-95% of their time on the agency, but increasingly on Popton. They kept their own salaries minimal—just $3,000 per month each, allowing them to reinvest profits back into the product. Living in Tel Aviv with young families (Gal had just had twins nine days before this interview), they kept personal expenses tight at ~$2,500 per month per person.

They didn't do a traditional Product Hunt launch or cold outreach. Instead, they leveraged their network strategically. Starting about a year before official launch, they created a content strategy—writing blog posts and sharing insights on Facebook groups and Twitter. They built a community and grew a mailing list to around 1,000 people. "When we launched Popton, we had already like a mailing list and people knew how many on the mailing list. Something like 1000, I think."

They then reached out to agencies in their Israeli network: "We contacted them and say, okay, you should try Popton. They did. They loved it. They tried paying us." Their mailing list converted well into beta users, and when paid plans launched, many became customers immediately.

Content marketing and community-building worked exceptionally well. They had early proof that their approach resonated—people were engaging with their content and ready to pay once pricing went live.

Paid advertising (Google AdWords and Facebook ads) was still new at the time of this interview. They'd just started testing with ~$500 in the first two weeks, acquiring users for ~$3 each. Early indicators suggested a customer acquisition cost of around $200 per paying customer, which was profitable given their $31 average monthly subscription price and 4% monthly churn (meaning a 25-month customer lifetime value of ~$750).

They avoided raising capital despite having a pitch deck ready. "We have the money. 700,000 bucks. So then we got a nine-ton and thought like, we have the money to still running by ourselves. So let's give it a try." They'd considered a $700k seed round on a $3M valuation, but bootstrapping via agency profits felt smarter.

Just two months after official launch (early 2017), they had grown to 72 paying customers and $2,300 in MRR. They were tracking key metrics heavily: which acquisition channels produced paying customers, how many users actually installed their code, and churn rates (4% monthly churn, 4.5% MRR churn).

Their goal for the end of 2017 was aggressive: $8,000-$10,000 MRR. They planned to scale paid acquisition once they proved the unit economics further. The combination of a profitable agency funding the product, a built-in network of potential customers, and a content-first customer acquisition strategy positioned them well for the next phase of growth.