Sanity Desk

Sam Krohlin, a former US Army officer and Russian ministry teacher turned entrepreneur, identified a critical pain point: experts, coaches, and consultants were overwhelmed by the fragmented landscape of online business tools. The tech monster, as he calls it, stopped many from ever getting started—especially in the COVID era when in-person networking became impossible and a solid tech foundation became essential. Rather than building from scratch, Sam leveraged an existing asset: a marketing agency called Story Matters Academy that he'd built up with 100,000 people on its list.

Sanity Desk officially launched on October 31st, 2019. The company wasn't built in isolation; it evolved from a concierge agency model into a productized SaaS offering. Sam had a tech team based in Poland and Ukraine, and by the time of this interview, had grown to 14 team members including 5 engineers. The product's centerpiece was the enterprise plan at $299/month, which included "smart page technology" allowing customers to create thousands of variations of pages based on user data, plus a dedicated tech support rep. A lower-tier $99/month plan was also offered but represented a smaller portion of the customer base.

Sam's first paying customer came via an existing relationship: Peter Sage, who had 60,000 followers and had been a user of the old agency version five years prior, signed up for the new SaaS version. This warm intro became the template. Other early customers included bestselling author Mary Lee Williams and film script consultant David Bobilane. The combination of warm leads from the 100,000-person agency list and newly launched Facebook ads drove customer acquisition, with cold traffic through video ads beginning to generate leads as well.

The winning formula centered on Facebook ads and leveraging the legacy agency's audience. By the time of this interview, the company was spending roughly $1,000 to acquire a customer. However, the economics worked: with a $499 upfront onboarding fee plus $299/month subscription, the company achieved a three-month payback period. Sam had one dedicated sales rep on a base of $1,000 plus $150 per inbound lead and $250 per outbound-sourced lead, targeting 20 new customers per month. To accelerate growth without diluting equity, Sam took an innovative approach: he sold two customers' annual revenue ($600/month MRR) to Founder Path in exchange for $6,000 upfront capital, which he immediately reinvested into ad spend—turning it into customer acquisition arbitrage.

One key strategic decision was the concierge onboarding model. Sam prioritized guiding the first 100 customers through a premium experience with dedicated support, ensuring low churn and creating case studies before opening the $99 plan to self-serve. This patience with growth demonstrated a focus on retention and product-market fit over vanity metrics.

By the interview date, Sanity Desk had crossed 50 customers and was generating approximately $12,500 MRR (averaging across the $99 and $299 plans), translating to roughly $150,000 ARR. The company had raised $1.2M in total capital: $725,000 from the legacy agency (transferred as IP and team stake) and $450,000 in outside angel funding since August the prior year (with roughly $400,000 in pure equity and $50,000 in SBA loans). Sam was pursuing an aggressive growth strategy, planning to scale Facebook ad spend to $50,000–$100,000 monthly while maintaining the $1,250 customer acquisition cost. The vision was to expand beyond his core audience (primarily international: UK, Italy, South Africa, Bangladesh) and eventually tap the US market more fully.