Selling a SaaS Before Building It: $1M ARR in Six Months

About this episode

Julius Körfgen discusses his approach to selling software before building it, achieving $1M ARR in six months with Uplane.

Ten thousand ads, all built by hand. Julius Körfgen left that grind to build Uplane, software that automates it, then sold to his first customers before writing a line of code. Uplane reached a million dollars in ARR in about six months. Julius makes the case for selling before building: the cold outreach that got strangers on calls, the one-week sprint from discovery call to working demo, and why he refuses to run a free pilot. Without a dollar attached, he argues, you cannot tell a real business case from a polite conversation. Plus: why Julius threw out per-seat pricing and now charges a share of ad spend, so Uplane only earns more when the customer's campaigns do better. Uplane runs around twenty people across San Francisco and Berlin. Julius and his two co-founders raised their first funding round close to a year before the product existed, AG1 is a customer, and a project with Deutsche Bahn is underway. This episode is brought to you by: 🤖 Hobbes → Don't book a demo. Take one. 🔑 Key Lessons 🤝 Sell before you build: Julius closed customers before writing a line of code. His discovery calls ended with a promise to return in a week with a solution, which forced both a real…

People in this episode

Host: Omer Khan

Guest: Julius Körfgen

Topics covered

• selling before building
• SaaS growth
• customer acquisition
• cold outreach
• pricing strategy

Keywords

• SaaS
• ARR
• cold outreach
• customer feedback
• ad spend pricing

Sponsors

Hobbes

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Uplane, AG1, Deutsche Bahn

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