signNow · e-signature app
Buy a small product, rebuild it, and push it with your own marketing
Grew from ~$3M to ~$35M a year; took a while
Workedexit-maportfoliofeature-development
What they did
With the first outside money (2015), pdfFiller bought signNow when it was doing about $3M a year, rebuilt the entire product and applied ('weaponized') its marketing machine to it. pdfFiller's cash funded it.
What happened
signNow went from ~$3M to ~$35M a year; company reached ~$50M after the rebuild.
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Top Founders with Nathan Latka · This Ugly Website Does $106M/Year (866,000 Pay For It)“We bought it. It was doing about $3 million a year. Uh now it's about 35. So, it didn't really I mean, we had to rebuild the entire product, and we had to, you know, weaponize the marketing stuff. So, it took a while.”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- pdfFiller: Publish millions of search pages, one per form or document people look for4.8B keywords and 35M pages; the main source of a $106M product's traffic
- pdfFiller: Cut back messy search pages to fewer, cleaner ones that AI search can use
- US Legal Forms: Use a library of ready-made forms to send traffic to your main productSmall $6M product that adds a lot of traffic to pdfFiller; guest gives no traffic numbers
- bizdraft: Give away a free AI tool to bring in traffic for your paid productsFounder pleased with early traction; no numbers
- pdfFiller: Raise money as late as you can and fund new products from your cash cowReached ~$18.5M before raising; ~$200M revenue on ~$150M raised
- airSlate: Run each product as its own team, sharing only marketing, payments and devopsFounder says 'so far, so good'; ~120 people per product
- pdfFiller: Use stronger math to out-bid less advanced rivals on search adsFounder credits it for early success; edge fading as everyone uses AI
- airSlate: Only buy products with proven fit, domain expertise and $5-10M+ revenue
- airSlate: Use AI to make one product speak each industry's language
- airSlate: Try to steer which tools ChatGPT recommends in its answersDidn't work; founder calls the guru playbooks 'bullshit'