Postaga

Andy Cabasso and his co-founder Sam had already tasted entrepreneurial success. As college roommates, they built a digital agency together, but learned an important lesson: one-off project work was revenue suicide. Every month without new clients meant zero cash flow. So they made every client commitment recurring—retainers for support, hosting, or marketing services like SEO and paid search. This bet on recurring revenue made their agency valuable enough to sell in 2016. Andy stayed on through an earnout, which gave them runway to build something new.

By 2019, they started building Postaga—a tool to solve a problem they knew intimately from agency days. Link building and cold outreach were tedious, manual processes. They wanted to create one platform that could find relevant prospects (bloggers, podcasters, websites), pull contact info, verify emails, and send personalized outreach sequences. It was ambitious: combining the functionality of several point solutions into one.

They went into beta in January 2020, right before COVID changed everything. Rather than sitting in a bunker coding, Andy did something most developers avoid: he used the half-built product to prospect. He wrote a broad search to find marketing agencies worldwide, pulled their contact info (using Postaga itself), and cold-emailed them: "We're in beta. This tool helps build links. Want to try it free and give us feedback?"

It worked. Early users flooded in—all unpaying, but invaluable. The feedback was brutal and honest. The onboarding was "cumbersome." Connecting email via SMTP or DNS records was a barrier to entry. So Andy and Sam redesigned it. They also interviewed users extensively, discovering something crucial: larger agencies, even if using inefficient manual processes, wouldn't switch due to organizational inertia. This shaped their positioning.

But there was a wrinkle. Sam realized that if they crushed Product Hunt, their infrastructure would collapse. So while Andy interviewed users, Sam spent months fortifying the platform for scale. What looked like a delay was actually strategic.

By May 2020, they launched on Product Hunt. This wasn't accidental. Andy studied the top products, reverse-engineered their approach, and cold-reached out to successful launchers for advice. He learned the mechanics: launch at midnight Pacific, drive upvotes in the critical first hours, use eye-catching GIFs and tight copy, include a sub-minute explainer video, and annotate screenshots so people instantly understand the value.

It paid off: 1,279 upvotes, #1 product of the day, #2 of the week. Hundreds of signups. Zero revenue—they didn't have billing yet. Andy wished he'd rushed payment processing; instead, they spent three months (May to August) building Stripe integration and pricing tiers while momentum cooled. By the time they launched paid plans in August, the initial enthusiasm had faded. Conversions were "OK, but definitely less than I was hoping for."

But the Product Hunt launch did something emotional work needed: it proved the market existed. People cared. Investors reached out. That validation kept them going when doubt crept in.

The beta period (January–May) worked brilliantly. The five-month slog before launch wasn't methodical planning; it was Sam fixing infrastructure while Andy gathered feedback. But that forced discipline paid dividends. They didn't launch half-baked.

Product Hunt worked—but not alone. The free plan became a lead magnet and, unexpectedly, a viral loop. When users sent outreach emails through Postaga, a signature footer said "PS sent with Postaga." Recipients clicked, signed up, sent their own emails, and the cycle repeated. It was organic, accidental growth.

What didn't work: sitting on momentum. By August, when they finally could charge, the Product Hunt wave had crested. Andy now says they should have had billing ready before launch, even if it meant delaying by a few weeks.

Andy also discovered they were leaving money on the table. Some users, mostly solo founders, said: "I love Postaga but I don't have time to use it. Can you do outreach for us?" Instead of building a feature, they built a service. They ran a pilot with one company seeking press coverage, documented the playbook in SOPs, and launched a "Done For You" offering. It brought higher-value customers and gave them real-world data on what worked in campaigns. They still don't heavily advertise it—people ask for it—but it became a meaningful revenue lever.

As of spring 2021 (when this interview aired), Postaga had six full-time employees, a growing free user base, paid tiers at $99 and $299/month, and a productized service business. Recent growth—particularly last month before the interview—came not from a single tactic but from joining TinySeed and ruthlessly optimizing levers: pricing, churn, and customer acquisition. They'd cut pricing based on mentor feedback, tightened their onboarding UX, improved email sequences, and A/B tested trial structures.

Andy credits the TinySeed mentor network. Instead of guessing which experiments to run, he could ask someone who'd done them before. It collapsed the learning curve.

What's striking is how Postaga mirrors their agency journey. They learned recurring revenue wins. They learned that free plans work if support costs are low, value emerges fast, and there's a viral loop. They learned that overnight success takes months of unseen work. And they learned that building a product doesn't mean abandoning the service layer—sometimes they coexist and reinforce each other.