The SaaSco
Peter Schlitt founded The SaaSco in July 2014 in Germany after a background in politics and poker and e-sports. The company started as a B2B sales agency for technology companies. Its first year brought in about 20,000 euros, by Peter's recollection, and the team then narrowed its focus to appointment setting for B2B tech companies.
The business runs a four-part service. It finds decision makers, contacts them through email campaigns, qualifies whether they have a need for the client's product, and hands over a meeting. The company's pricing combines a flat monthly fee with a success fee. Startups pay 2,800 euros per month plus about 150 euros for each qualified appointment. Larger clients have included Twilio, the German stock exchange, and Microsoft.
The team built a database of about 240 million leads with its own web crawlers and verifies emails with its own tool. Peter said they checked some data with datavalidation.com, and he said they had tried paid data APIs but chose not to subscribe because of price and because they already had enough information.
The company also built Lisa, a sales bot that reads incoming email, understands it, and drafts a reply based on similar past responses. Lisa is free for customers.
The SaaSco used its own process to find customers, which Peter called eating its own food. The company used its lead database and outbound email campaigns to target prospects by geography, profession, company size, technology used, and funding history. It did not report spending on paid acquisition beyond small tests.
By Peter's account, the company reached about 90,000 euros in monthly recurring revenue, with around 20 customers paying an average of about 4,600 euros per month. The company said it bootstrapped until the end of 2015, made about 600,000 in 2016, and planned about 1.8 million for 2017. It raised 500,000 from business angels and received 300,000 euros in EU innovation funding.
The model has a churn problem. Customers typically stayed three to nine months before the target market was exhausted, so the company needed constant new customer acquisition to hold revenue flat. Peter's answer was to grow through adjacent markets and to shift focus to Lisa's SaaS model, which he expected to raise lifetime value.
The company had about 31 employees, 17 of them developers, split between Berlin and Cologne. Lisa was the company's main focus, and Peter's stated goal was to scale through a higher-value software product rather than a services model dependent on constant replacement of customers.
- •Outbound email to a large, self-built lead database let the agency create demand on its own schedule rather than waiting for inbound interest.
- •Combining a flat monthly fee with per-appointment success fees gave the business predictable base revenue while letting it grow with client results.
- •Building a sales bot from its own internal process turned the company's operating know-how into a product that could carry higher lifetime value than a service.
- •Short customer tenure of three to nine months meant the business had to keep acquiring clients, which made its growth depend on an efficient outbound engine.
- 1.Build or buy a verified lead database and filter prospects by geography, role, company size, tech stack, and funding history before outreach.
- 2.Run outbound email campaigns to decision makers, then qualify responses before handing off meetings to the client.
- 3.Price with a flat monthly retainer plus a per-qualified-appointment fee so revenue grows with the value you deliver.
- 4.Use your own service process internally first, then productize the repeatable parts into a tool that customers can use.
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