WhatConverts

Michael Cooney was running a digital marketing agency when the lightbulb moment hit. He had just doubled leads for a major client in a campaign, walking into their office excited to share the news. The client's response was immediate and deflating: "Were they good leads? Can you show them to me?" Pulling together 100 of 500 leads to prove quality would take three hours of manual work. Frustrated, Michael knew there had to be a better way. He mentioned the pain to Jeremy, a web developer who had worked for him for seven years and recently returned from a corporate job. Jeremy immediately saw the opportunity: "If we can track all phone calls and forms being filled in and chat, back to the marketing responsible, store all that and report it, I think we can build a really strong company."

Michael and Jeremy discussed the structure over a round of golf—they'd make it 50/50, with Jeremy handling product development and Michael handling sales and marketing. They decided to bootstrap rather than raise funding, a decision Michael reflects on as crucial: "We wanted to avoid the risk. We wanted to build it in our own time and make sure we got traction." Jeremy spent just one week on the core technical challenge: how to track every form on any website across the world without requiring clients to change their forms. The solution worked. The pair continued running their agencies (combined revenue around $1.5M annually) while building WhatConverts, using the agency cash to fund the product and providing real dogfooding with actual client problems.

Their entry strategy was simple: land one agency client with call tracking at a low price point ($30/month), then expand. Michael and Jeremy's land-and-expand strategy proved powerful. Because they had lived the problem for 20 years running agencies, they understood exactly what agencies needed. Their first-year messaging was crisp and their targeting was precise. In year one starting March 2015, they grew to nearly $100k revenue. Within that first year, they achieved what seemed remarkable to outsiders: 70% of free trial signups converted to paying customers—a conversion rate that astounded competitors and investors alike. This wasn't luck; it was the combination of technical onboarding, Jeremy's insistence on best-in-class support (responding to tickets within 15 minutes), and a genuinely better product.

Two strategies became their growth engines. First, Google Ads worked brilliantly in year one, giving them 64% impression share on high-intent keywords like "call tracking." But in year two, well-funded competitors jacked up the cost per click from $8 to $120 to buy market share—an unsustainable model for a $30/month product. So they pivoted to Google organic and content marketing, which proved durable. By 2021-2022, Google organic had become their top traffic source, and content from five years prior still drove signups. This hedge against funding allowed them to compete: with 10 organic spots available, even if competitors owned positions one or two, WhatConverts captured positions three through ten.

Their product strategy hinged on the "100 year test"—would the core value proposition matter a century ago and a century hence? Call tracking wouldn't (it's already becoming a commodity), but marketing attribution would. This framework kept them from chasing shiny objects and feature requests. It also drove a powerful upsell: customers came for call tracking at $30/month but discovered the full lead tracking and reporting platform, naturally expanding their usage. With usage-based pricing, customers started at $30 but spent four to five times that on average, with some paying thousands monthly.

Their secret weapon was customer support. Jeremy demanded technically competent support responding within 15 minutes—not a support team, but "solution providers" who understood what customers ultimately wanted to achieve. This became a major growth lever and competitive advantage, with G2 reviews consistently highlighting support quality alongside product excellence.

By the time Michael gave this talk, WhatConverts had reached $3.6M ARR after roughly 6-7 years, with only a small team and no venture funding. Their software was installed on 40,000 company websites, serving tens of thousands of paid customers through their agency-focused model. A competitor had approached them with a $15-20M acquisition offer (7X multiple on their $2.1M ARR at the time), but Michael and Jeremy declined. "We like the game," Michael explained. "Being bootstrapped, growing and being profitable is a heck of a lot of fun."

Their next goal: $10M ARR. At a 70% year-over-year growth rate (which was conservative given recent trajectory), they projected hitting $5.9M within one year and $10M within two. The growth remained profitable and sustainable—no debt, no dilution, complete control. Their challenges at this stage were organizational: with a growing team, they realized they had lost mission clarity, articulating 16 different benefits instead of one cohesive value proposition. They set out to sharpen messaging and become more mission-driven as they scaled, but the core playbook that built a $3.6M ARR SaaS company from a personal problem remained unchanged: solve a real problem you've lived, build a better product, support customers exceptionally, and let content and organic growth compound over years.