We Love Numbers
Finn Kelly and his wife Sarah spent six years in the wealth management and advisory space, managing hundreds of millions for high-net-worth individuals on business exits and tax structuring. They sold that firm in 2015 for between $1-5 million, but realized a massive gap in the market: entrepreneurs had no trusted source for understanding their own financial numbers.
Launching in March 2015 with "proof of concept," We Love Numbers combined smart bookkeeping with financial advisory services. The tech stack was intentionally lean—they built on Xero, the cloud-based accounting platform they saw as best-in-class. Finn positioned it as "software plus service," not a pure service business, because "everyone else is trying to compete in service-based businesses and they just don't work." The pricing ranged from $395 to $1,695 monthly, with an average customer paying just over $1,000.
Word-of-mouth became their primary growth engine. Within the first year, referrals increased "through the moon," and when they launched a new website asking the membership base for testimonials, they got a 50% response rate. By March 2016—one year in—they had grown to 50 paying customers generating $50,000 MRR.
Early on, churn spiked to 10% per month because they accepted customers who didn't fit their ideal profile. Finn implemented a rigorous internal application process to ensure fit, focusing only on three target markets: food & beverage, post-PMF tech companies, and innovative professional services. This specificity reduced churn and improved lifetime value projections to $40,000 per customer (at 2% target churn). Their target CAC was $1,000, making the unit economics highly attractive for a SaaS raise.
With $50K MRR and a team of 10 spread across Australia, Philippines, America, and South Africa, We Love Numbers was burning ~$20K monthly and preparing to raise $750K on a $6M pre-money valuation. Finn was seeking strategic angel investors—entrepreneurs from EO, YEC, YPO—rather than VC money, positioning the raise as a way to fund the first two years of marketing and team growth to dominate the emerging "entrepreneurial accounting" category.
- •The founders solved a problem they personally experienced in their own business, enabling them to build with genuine conviction and credibility that resonated strongly in word-of-mouth referrals.
- •They positioned the business as 'software plus service' rather than competing in crowded pure-service or pure-software markets, creating a defensible category that attracted customers willing to pay premium subscription prices.
- •By implementing strict customer selection criteria after early churn problems, they optimized for ideal-customer fit rather than growth-at-all-costs, which improved unit economics and generated strong testimonials that fueled viral word-of-mouth.
- •They built on an existing best-in-class platform (Xero) rather than rebuilding core accounting infrastructure, allowing them to focus engineering effort on advisory value-add and reach profitability within one year.
- 1.Identify a genuine pain point from your own professional experience or current business, then validate that other entrepreneurs in similar situations face the same problem before committing to a solution.
- 2.Design your business model as a hybrid of software and service in an underserved category rather than competing directly in saturated markets, and price it at a premium subscription level ($395-$1,695 monthly) that reflects the advisory value you deliver.
- 3.After your first cohort of customers, analyze which segments have the lowest churn and highest lifetime value, then define a narrow ideal customer profile (e.g., three specific industries) and implement a formal application or qualification process to ensure new customers match that profile.
- 4.Build your initial product by integrating with or layering on top of an existing best-in-class platform (like Xero) rather than rebuilding commodity functionality, so you can reach $50K MRR with a small team in under 12 months.
- 5.Actively solicit testimonials and referrals from your early customers by making the ask explicit and easy (as they did with their website redesign), and track word-of-mouth as a conversion metric so you can double down on it as your primary growth channel.
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