Expandi Is The SaaS Bootstrapper Of The Year 2024 (Tekpon Awards 2024)

This article is different from the kind of content we usually produce here.

That’s because we’re proud to announce that Expandi has become the SaaS bootstrapper of the 2024 year in The Tekpon Awards!

The Tekpon Awards 2024 is the most awaited event for SaaS executives. Full of 500 like-minded professionals gathered in the heart of the SaaS industry.

In this article we’re going to talk about what this mean, how we got here in the first place, what you can learn from our insights of scaling to over $7M ARR, and much more!

Let’s take a minute to celebrate, explain what this means, and what’s next.

What Are Tekpon Awards 2024 And What You Need To Know

The Tekpon Awards 2024 recognize the most innovative and fast-growing SaaS companies globally. The awards is a prestigious networking event offering attendees carefully curated experiences.

It provides a lot of networking opportunities, allowing business owners to connect with like-minded individuals, establish valuable connections, and close more deals.

These awards celebrate companies that have demonstrated exceptional growth, customer satisfaction, and product innovation over the past year. 

The event took place in June 2024 in Romania with some of the biggest names in the SaaS industry.

Tekpon 2024 Participants And More

This year’s Tekpon Awards saw fierce competition, with numerous groundbreaking SaaS companies aiming for the top spot. 

The participants included startups and established companies alike, all showcasing their cutting-edge solutions and impressive growth metrics. 

Here’s what some of the biggest participants in the event had to say:

• Stefan Smulders, co-founder & CSO Expandi.io: What a blast of an event! Exactly what the SaaS community needed. Aside all great winners, kudos to Alexnadru Stan and Cristian Dina for bringing all of us together in their home city Bucharest.
• Alin Dobra, founder & CEO Bunnyshell: “One word: Magic. Magic experience at Tekpon Awards. Hundreds of startups from all over the globe in the same room celebrating and sharing personal stories about what means to build great companies.”
• Sergiu Negut , co-founder FintechOS: Tekpon Awards, an empowering opportunity to celebrate the startup ecosystem, to enhance connections, to bring nice people together. Thank you and congrats, Alexandru Stan and Cristian Dina.
• Mihai DARZAN CEO PROCESIO: What a night! Last evening, the Tekpon Awards brought together the coolest crowd of global tech visionaries. It was a melting pot of innovation, fresh ideas, and new faces, all aimed at one thing: redefining the future.
• Bridget Harris, Founder YouCanBookMe: What a blast! Not just the hashtag#tekponawards crowd but the Romanian SaaS world and the energy in the room tonight!

Expandi’s Journey: From Small Bootstrapping Startup To SaaS Leader And SaaS Of The Year

Expandi started as a humble startup in 2019, with a simple LinkedIn outreach automation SaaS.

Today, we serve over 12,500 businesses, startups, agencies, sales teams, and more.

Here are some of our key milestones since 2019:

• Fully bootstrapped: We launched in 2019 with no external funding, relying solely on our grit and innovative approach. Our first “office” was our friend’s home. My co-worker and I put all of our savings into Expandi. We didn’t even give ourselves salaries.
• Testing our first users: We believed the best way to show how our tool worked was to use it to reach out to people. We started by approaching the audience of our competitors (scraped websites, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, etc.) and got 150 beta testers.
• Initial marketing: At first, we partnered up with micro-influencers. We didn’t sell them anything, we just built relationships and implemented their feedback in our product. We used Facebook groups, LinkedIn, and our own network.
• Rapid growth: Our first prototype was done three months later than we planned. This meant free additional months of no income. It paid off though, as we hit $4M ARR within 14 months. Growing to $7M ARR by 2022, and we’re going over $7M ARR now.

If we talk about our whole lifestory here though, that’s going to take forever.

If you’re interested in that, and our top 5 learnings going from $0 to $7 ARR…

Check out our zero to SaaS hero ebook here!

What’s Next For Expandi

We’ve grown a lot since our humble beginnings.

And our efforts have been recognized by being featured in Nathan Latka’s Top 500 SaaS companies, being the SaaS bootstrapper of the year in Tekpon Awards, and many other publications. 

We went from working from our friend’s home to making over 7-figures annually and having 35 employees.

And moving forward, we have so much more planned to reach new heights

Ready to start generating leads on autopilot?

Claim your free, 7-day Expandi trial here!

Then, you can set up your first automated outreach campaign in under 30 minutes and start seeing results in under 24 hours.

There are no limitations with the free trial. And as long as you close just 1 client in those 7 days, that will more than pay for Expandi.