G&T:02 - ScreenshotAPI
ScreenshotAPI.net allows users to automatically and programmatically take screenshots of any website in seconds.
XO Capital, a company that buys and grows profitable SaaS companies, acquired ScreenshotAPI.net and is currently operating the company.
The Farmer
My name is Danny Chu, and I'm based in Allen, TX, a suburb north of Dallas. I'm one of the cofounders at XO Capital. the company that also operates Sheet.best, Colddm.me, WorkClout, and Inlytics.io. Prior, I founded and sold Noteninja, a sales conversation intelligence software. I also have worked at early-stage software companies building revenue and operations.
If you are interested in some of the cool ways ScreenshotAPI.net is used, you can check out the blog for tutorials and resources like this one.
The Pain
Accelerate growth by identifying some new features to upsell existing users and customers from marquee, Enterprise-level companies
ScreenshotAPI.net was the very first acquisition for XO Capital. It was doing $543 in MRR back in December 2020. At the start of 2022, SS was at $1,899 MRR with 82 total customers. Throughout 2022, the business was getting 100-300 new free account sign-ups per month with a free-to-paid average conversion of 5%.
You can see in the back half of 2022, churn, on average, was relatively controlled for a small startup, and NPS was extremely high.
As a developer tool, the really cool thing we saw were some cool companies signing up and using ScreenshotAPI.net. You can see some of the logos of our current and past customers.
With some really large enterprise companies using our solution, I wanted to get a bit more visibility into the use cases.
I started thinking through some specific questions:
- Can we upsell these larger customers?
- What exactly are they using ScreenshotAPI.net for?
- Based on the feedback, are there "Enterprise-y" features that we could upsell?
The Play
Run some PLG campaigns to find marquee Enterprise companies and upsell them on some specific pains.
Here is what I did to engage with larger Enterprise companies every single day and assess any opportunities to upsell:
- Setup a Metabase alert to notify me of new "non-gmail" users everyday. I would be able to see how many screenshots each new user had taken.
- Add users into a HubSpot sequence simply asking for feedback. Each touch in the sequence asked for more specific feedback around use case, feature requests, etc.
- Aggregate the feedback and simply start pitching. We saw 2 big opportunities based on the feedback, and we simply just started offering it to see if anyone would bite.
Grow and Tell
We started running this play in August 2022 (and we are still running it today). Over the next couple months we landed our 2 big whales which currently account for 20% and 16% of our total MRR.
Although we introduce a bit of customer concentration risk with 2 customers accounting for such a large percentage of revenue, we also now have somewhat of a process to continue hunting whales that can quickly and scalably grow our MRR.
You can see how quickly we grew our revenue because of this new play we started running over the later part of 2022.
Seed for Thought
Engaging with customers and understanding how they use the product is so valuable. Tools that provide product usage and activation data are critical; they create clear segments in the overall customer/user base to run targeted plays and experiments.
The most engaged users are hungry for more, so find opportunities to upsell and increase LTV.
