Scout

Jordan Crawford had spent years working at tech startups, including as the first non-founder hire at Zinc.io where he helped grow the company to hundreds of thousands per month. Around 2014-2015, he and designer-engineer Zach started building consumer apps together—Sightings, Pushpin, and later Cursive. While these products showed traction (Sightings got 100+ organic downloads per day), none could be monetized. Selling to small businesses through in-person visits, cold calls, and emails proved fruitless.

When they wanted to send personalized postcards as part of a marketing campaign for their web development business, they discovered no tool existed to do this. So they built one internally. Realizing other businesses might want the same capability, they spent a few weeks building v1 of Scout Studio and launched it to Product Hunt on January 23rd, 2016. The response was immediate: Scout became the #2 product of the day and closed more revenue in 24 hours than Cursive had generated in an entire year.

After the Product Hunt success, Scout's early growth came from multiple channels. Marketing consultants began recommending Scout when clients asked about postcard campaigns, and referrals came through marketing Slack communities. Jordan also implemented a sophisticated cold email strategy with 22% reply rates—he would send highly personalized emails containing company-specific information and financial calculations based on data he had gathered.

The biggest success driver proved to be SEO and organic discovery. Jordan invested heavily in programmatic SEO, creating glossary pages, postcard example collections with ratings and breakdowns, and pages targeting specific industries. A glossary launched a few weeks before the interview was already accounting for 4% of traffic. He also built pages around solar installer companies by converting public spreadsheets into ranked content. By April 2020, Scout was closing $54k in deals in a single month with solid margins. The model evolved from a self-serve drag-and-drop tool to a hybrid agency-plus-software business, where Scout runs 100% of campaigns for most clients while opening up the tool for self-serve users. Jordan noted that challenges included the "candy everywhere" problem—broad SEO traffic meant customers came from diverse industries, making it harder to develop deep vertical expertise. He also learned to collect payment upfront before running campaigns after earlier cash flow issues.