Stefan Smulders of Expandi: Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue

To prevent users from leaving you, make sure that your users actually know how to use your product. After talking to hundreds of our users, we started creating weekly webinars where we gather to share cool growth hacks and tips that people can do with Expandi.

As a part of my series called “Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stefan Smulders.

Stefan Smulders is a SaaS Entrepreneur. He is the founder of the world’s safest software for LinkedIn automation — Expandi.io, which was bootstrapped to €3M ARR in just 1 year. Stefan is a father and vegan.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Thank you! About 10 years ago I met Glenn, my co-founder. He’s what I like to call the “technical magician’, as he can take an idea and turn it into reality using sheer skill and technical innovation. The first product Glenn and I built was called LeadExpress.

We started the project in 2015 and with the help of a small team, we built a tool that helped users track their website visitors. The users could see from which industries and companies their website visitors came from and which products and services they were most interested in.

Even though LeadExpress was a great product, it never got the traction it needed, as it was a nice-to-have product, not something people needed. It wasn’t a product that actually made people’s lives or jobs easier because the users didn’t know how to utilize the info it provided, they didn’t know how to follow up on website visitors. While it did help people figure out who their website visitors and what they are interested in, it didn’t help them reach out to those website visitors and sell them the products or services they wanted.

To solve the issue, I jumped on LinkedIn and started connecting with relevant people from different companies who visited our website using outreach campaigns. This birthed a small LinkedIn agency and everything seemed to be going in the right direction, except for the fact that I did everything manually. I eventually did find an automation tool that can do the job for me, but it had major flaws such as the need for the computer to run 24/7, new tabs for each campaign, and more.

This led us to think about building our own tool. We wanted to create the perfect tool that the market needed at that moment. We had the knowledge and the experience, we just needed to ensure that that it is the safest tool around so that people using it wouldn’t lose their LinkedIn accounts. On January 14, 2019, Glenn registered Expandi on Github. It was first called LinkedExpress, but we wanted to differentiate ourselves both from our first project and LinkedIn, plus Expandi sounded much cooler.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

When we started testing our product, we got about 150 beta users, most of which were using our previous product, while the others were people using competitors’ products. Even though getting this feedback was very valuable, we mainly focused on those who never used LinkedIn automation before, meaning that our idea would never be validated.

Once we shifted our focus to growth hackers and LinkedIn agencies, we started getting feedback that helped us validate our idea.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

It’s hard to single out just one person that helped Expandi reach where we are today. Everyone — from Glenn, Sharon, to everyone else that contributed to Expandi in one way or another deserves to be mentioned and leaving anyone wouldn’t be fair.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Sure, it’s: “Failure is a lesson learned. Success is a lesson applied”. While we failed with our first SaaS product LeadExpress, it taught us so many lessons which we were able to apply to Expandi.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

Expandi is a cloud platform designed to help you reach out to people on LinkedIn automatically in the safest way possible.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Expandi is the safest cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool available on the market. We use dedicated IP addresses, smart leads, blacklisted contacts, custom variables, and more to ensure that our clients don’t get banned on Linkedin.

When you first started the business, what drove you, what was your primary motivation?

We wanted to build a solution that would help people automate their outreach campaigns on LinkedIn while at the same time ensure that the users wouldn’t lose their LinkedIn accounts, which other competitors couldn’t do.

What drives you now? Is it the same? Did it change? Can you explain what you mean?

We are now focusing on creating new and improving existing features to make the world’s safest software for LinkedIn automation even better.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We’re releasing major updates to our product that will make it an even better fit for our clients. Our team is constantly thinking about new ways to improve Expandi. We’re always listening to our customers and their feedback to make Expandi better.

We’re also planning to release two new products, so make sure that you follow us, as big things are coming this year.

The topic of this series is ‘Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue’. Congratulations! Seven figures is really a huge milestone. In your experience what was the most difficult part of being able to hit your first million-dollars in sales revenue?

To reach that number, we used our own product to generate leads for ourselves. We started by reaching out to competitors’ audiences. We then booked 60 calls per week, which would be impossible if only one person was to handle all those calls. We also started writing articles about our successful growth hack which further helped us generate even more leads. I believe that the hardest thing was ensuring that everything runs smoothly. Generating leads using our own tool and creating and sharing great content to our audience took time and effort, meaning we had to be patient and disciplined.

Could you share the number one sales strategy that you found helpful to help you reach this milestone?

Creating great content and distributing it in all the right places is the number one strategy that helped us reach this milestone. Once our content started getting traction, we would then use Expandi to scrape the people who engaged with our posts and reach out to them with personalized messages.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you or your team made during a sales process? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We reached $40k MRR without a CRM tool in place. Oops! However, once the pandemic happened and everything slowed down, we were able to implement Pipedrive into our sales process. Even though we had success without a CRM, it’s still better to establish actual, tangible processes for your sales efforts.

Does your company have a sales team? If yes, do you have any advice about how companies can create very high performing sales teams?

Culture fit is the most important. If your salespeople don’t believe in your product or service, it’s hard or even impossible for them to have the drive and the passion needed to do the job.

Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue”. Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Create great content

If you have the funds to invest in paid ads — go for it! However, most companies just starting out don’t, which is why they should instead focus on creating content that is informative and valuable to the audience. Make sure that the content you write is action-focused and that it answers the pain points of your audience. We did this and it helped us build the initial traction for Expandi.

2. Focus on content distribution

Writing great will get you nowhere if nobody sees it. Make sure that you post your content everywhere your audience can see it. Social media, your blog, newsletters, communities. Wherever your audience is, make sure that they can find your content. This is exactly what we did and all our content found its home both on our blog and LinkedIn.

3. Build a community

To reach seven figures in revenue, you need to always improve your product. To improve it, you need to talk to your users. However, talking to your users is hard when you reach hundreds of them. Because of this, we built a closed community for our users on Facebook. Our Facebook group helps us break the ice between us and our new clients. It also helps bring us closer together as people can share their feedback and start discussions. Our Facebook group has quickly become the biggest factor in helping us understand the market we are in and find new microtrends.

4. Don’t forget about SEO

We always knew that SEO is a great way to promote our product, but we weren’t ready to fully commit to it at the beginning. We needed quick results and didn’t have the funds. Once we had the needed funds, we went all-in on SEO. With the help of the wonderful team at Quoleady, we started creating even better content. We also started getting great results with link building — which I advise you to do as well.

5. Help users get to know your product

To prevent users from leaving you, make sure that your users actually know how to use your product. After talking to hundreds of our users, we started creating weekly webinars where we gather to share cool growth hacks and tips that people can do with Expandi.

What would you advise to another business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?

Focus on your product and the users. See why you’ve reached a standstill and what you can do to improve your product. If the problem isn’t the product, find what your biggest marketing channel was and focus more on expanding it.

In your specific industry what methods have you found to be most effective in order to find and attract the right customers? Can you share any stories or examples?

Writing great content and posting it on LinkedIn, where most of our audience is, is a great way to find and attract the right customers. Once we post a great piece of content on LinkedIn and start getting traction, we use Expandi to scrape the people who engaged with that post and reach out to them with personalized messages. This helps us to get the best possible leads for our business.

Based on your experience, can you share a few strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

Make sure that you are there for your audience. In the end, you are helping them solve their problems, and you can’t do that if you don’t listen to them and their needs. Once you know what the actual pain points of your audience, will you be able to create a product that will give them the best possible user experience.

As you likely know, this HBR article demonstrates that studies have shown that retaining customers can be far more lucrative than finding new ones. Do you use any specific initiatives to limit customer attrition or customer churn? Can you share some of your advice from your experience about how to limit customer churn?

After talking to hundreds of our users, we figured out that the main reason why people are stopping to use our product isn’t because of the price. It’s because they don’t know how to use the product and how it can benefit them. To stop that from happening, as I previously mentioned, we started organizing webinars where we share excellent tips and growth hacks to help our users. You should consider doing the same.

Wonderful. We are nearly done. Here are the final “meaty” questions of our discussion. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Veganism is something I’m passionate about and if I could inspire a movement, this would be it. :) Switching to a vegan diet did wonders for my energy levels and overall health, and I advise everyone that can, to try it.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I’d love to have breakfast or lunch with Houston Golden from Media. Him and his team do some amazing work on LinkedIn and I’d love to meet him.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!