TrustMarry

Artu Hajo and his team built TrustMarry starting in June 2016, but not as the software product it is today. They began as a video testimonial production agency—helping companies create authentic customer testimonial videos. It was hard work: "when you are doing a project business, we bootstrap that from zero to 2.5 million in euro per year. And it's very like every year you start from zero because you need to sell everything you are you are going to do on that year." The recurring revenue problem drove them to explore software.

Their customers provided the insight. People kept asking: could TrustMarry also provide lighter-weight testimonial solutions beyond expensive video? This became the seed for their software product, launched roughly a year before this interview. Rather than starting from scratch, they bundled the new software with their existing video customers—a smart way to get real usage and feedback without waiting for cold outreach to bear fruit. "we bundled our video testimonial projects with our software as well."

The hybrid sales motion worked. By the time of this interview, they had 208 paying software customers, almost entirely on annual contracts. With about €208,000 in ARR, they were averaging roughly $90–100 per paying customer (though their new monthly plan starts at $390/month). Sales reps were crucial—"the most common way of finding those customers is actually that our sales rep is making a cold call and then finding a meeting and then making a deal."

The team had 10 quota-carrying sales reps, though they'd historically focused on selling video projects. This hybrid model meant their top deals blended both products, with video contracts worth around €5,000. The 20% commission structure worked when those bundled deals were large; at $90/month software, the unit economics were tighter.

Bootstrapping had allowed them to stay profitable from day one and reinvest 100% of earnings into growth. However, they admitted product-market fit was still elusive. "We are in the face of finding the product market fit still. That's our main goal for this year." Early 2020 marketing experiments across the US and Europe had underperformed; they'd scaled back to "narrow our focus" for three months. One bright spot: organic SEO traffic had grown rapidly by ranking for keywords like "NPS," though they weren't running paid ads.

With only two engineers on a team of 30, capacity was the constraint. They were experimenting with leveraging their 1,500 historical customers and their "really high NPS net promoter score" to drive referrals and build viral growth—but acknowledged "that's still experimenting and not any clear solution for how to do it."

The company was sitting at roughly €2.5M in combined revenue (video + software). Artu had just relocated his family to the US to focus on scaling the software product. They'd launched monthly billing only two weeks prior, signaling a shift toward lower-touch, faster customer acquisition. Profitable and bootstrapped, they had "funding for another year," with plans to raise external capital once they found product-market fit and could accelerate growth. The vision was clear: move from a labor-intensive project business to a high-margin, scalable SaaS platform.