Bilal Aijazi built a multi-million dollar SaaS on Slack despite competing features and clunky onboarding. Here is his 7-figure SaaS growth strategy.

In this episode, Bilal Aijazi (Founder of Polly) breaks down how he navigated the treacherous waters of building a business on top of a major platform. You will learn how Polly achieved viral product-market fit with an 80% completion rate on a difficult 5-step installation process. Bilal reveals the evolution of their Freemium Pricing Model, how a fantasy football user led to enterprise HR contracts, and the critical playbook for surviving when platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams launch features that compete directly with you.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🚀 The "Pain Tolerance" Metric: Why 80% of users endured a nightmare install process (and what it proved).


• 💰 Pricing Evolution: Moving from $8/month fantasy football leagues to 5-figure Enterprise deals.


• 💡 Suriving "Sherlocking": How to pivot and thrive when the platform builds your core feature.


• 🔥 Viral Loops: Leveraging "Respondent to Creator" conversion to drive organic growth.


• ⚖️ The Platform Paradox: The risks and massive rewards of building on Slack, Teams, and Zoom.

📖 Chapters:

• The "Punch in the Face" Reality of Startups


• Scaling to Millions of Monthly Active Users


• Leveraging Product Hunt for Viral Growth


• The 5-Step Onboarding Nightmare (That Worked)


• Transitioning from Viral Bot to Real Company


• The Fantasy Football Customer: Early Pricing Experiments


• Freemium Secrets: Converting Free Users to Paid


• Platform Risk: What Happens When Slack Copies You?


• The Mistake of Slack Workflow Builder


• Horizontal vs. Vertical SaaS Strategies


• Advice: Why Technical Founders Must Sell


• The "Just Don't Die" Philosophy
  

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Resources:

🎧 Full Show Notes: saasclub.io/462
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