Expandi Ranked #33 out of Latka’s 187 Fastest-Growing SaaS Companies Of 2023

Good news, everyone!

Expandi has just been ranked #33 out of the top 187 fastest-growing SaaS companies list by Nathan Latka!

Expandi is the strongest and safest sales automation platform for LinkedIn and email.

We launched in 2019, and by now, our efforts have been recognized!

Below, we’re going to cover what this means for Expandi, peel the curtain back on our exact ARR, how we got here, and also cover what’s next for us.

• How Do Nathan Latka’s Rankings Of Top SaaS Companies Work?
• Expandi Business Model Breakdown And How We Grew From $0 As A SaaS Company
• How To Grow With LinkedIn: Insights Scaling To $8M ARR
• What’s Next For Expandi

How Do Nathan Latka’s Rankings Of Top Fastest Growing SaaS Companies Work?

Since we started Expandi in 2019, we have grown faster than we could have ever imagined. 

As “the new kid on the block” we became one of the most popular sales automation platforms globally and built a multi-million dollar company out of it in less than two years.

Now, 12.500+ B2B businesses, startups, and sales and marketing agencies worldwide use Expandi.

We are backed by severe A-list clients in our user base – industry leaders, best-selling authors, top sales teams, and hopefully soon, you.

We’re not your average startup either. We started from the ground up and bootstrapped our way to millions in revenue (in an already over-saturated market). 

We reached $4M ARR in just 14 months with zero paid marketing in the previous year and generated $6.5M in 2021.

And now we’re over $8M in revenue.

We’re also proud to say that Expandi was also ranked 54th out of the world’s 474 fastest-growing bootstrapped SaaS companies published by Latka Magazine in 2022.

And this year we got 33rd place that means that Expandi keep growing and developing! And we are not going to stop!

This awards is like the “Inc500” list, but only for the top bootstrapped SaaS companies.

Nathan Latka and his team spent over 1,342+ hours manually collecting data from founders, verifying via email and phone calls, interviewing founders, and then ranked them in a vast list fastest-growing SaaS companies.

In order to make the Latka Top Bootstrappers list, founders have to have more than $1M in revenue and no outside funding.

With over 30,000+ applicants, This year the final 187 combine to make up to $1B in revenue and employ over 11,00+ people.

Now, you might wonder how his rankings work and how do you measure the fastest growing companies?

The award, defined by Nathan Latka, is based on manual and extended research, detailed data, and slow analysis of many SaaS companies.

With over a decade of experience in the SaaS industry, as the author of a WSJ bestseller book (How To Be A Capitalist Without Any Capital), and the CEO of two companies, Nathan’s opinion carries a great deal of weight.

So, how do the rankings work?

Latka says they source their data directly from the founders and that it’s not available on conventional sites like Crunchbase, Owler, Angelist, etc.

And the complete list of the top SaaS companies includes specific data like revenue, ARPU, age, customer count, churn rate, and funding.

Want to find out more?

• See our specific listing here: https://getlatka.com/companies/expandi

For other SaaS owners, this priceless data can be a great way to benchmark your company against your peers and competitors or simply educate yourself on how other SaaS founders are growing their companies.

Now, let’s explore that data in detail and what it means to be a top-growing SaaS company.

Expandi in 2023

• Expandi hit $85M revenue with around  3.7K customers in 2023.
• The total team size is near 50 employees.
• We achieved an 88.08% growth rate year over year.
• Expandi is entirely bootstrapped with $0 funding. It was founded in 2019 in the Netherlands and is now one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies on Latka’s list.

For a detailed sneak peek into Expandi’s operations, see my full interview with Nathan Latka here: 

PS – We’re constantly growing and are on the lookout for new colleagues and professionals across different departments. Be sure to check out our careers page and let us know if you have any questions on this amazing team of ours!

For some context, let’s back up and go over how Expandi got to where it is now.

Expandi Business Model Breakdown And How We Grew From $0 As A SaaS Company

We created Expandi, the safest LinkedIn automation tool, to help people generate leads and launch outbound campaigns on autopilot.

But we had a bit of a bumpy start…

The beginning: why the world needed Expandi

One of the most significant pain points we identified from our previous projects was reaching out to prospects in a more modern way instead of using the phone.

When I got into LinkedIn in 2016, it was like love at first sight, and I ended up founding a small sales agency.

One big problem: I was doing everything manually. Filtering audiences, writing connection requests, follow-ups, and so on.

A few LinkedIn SaaS companies were browser extensions (not safe) and had some massive flaws (e.g., your computer had to be running for it to work, no web analytics, etc.).

PS – If you’re also an agency owner, check out our guide to using LinkedIn automation for agency owners. In it, I go over some of the most common problems I had at the time (which are still relevant now) and the solutions to overcome them.

At that point, I was stuck and expressed my frustration to my co-founder Glenn.

Though he did not know about LinkedIn himself, he just said: “Let’s just build the thing ourselves“.

And so we did with a SaaS model.

For the full story of building our original team, changing our business model, canceling our old office location, and working from our friend’s house, see how we bootstrapped from $0 to $4M ARR in just 14 months.

The journey to the first 1,000 customers

Before going global, we were testing Expandi in the Netherlands for the product market fit.

But as we found out, people here weren’t as accustomed to using LinkedIn as a sales channel. So, we spent a lot of time and money educating our potential market.

First, we had to educate them on using LinkedIn as an outbound channel. Then, we had to sell them using Expandi.

That’s when we realized the challenge and that our first 300 paying users might not have been our ideal customers after all.

So, to generate money from our customer base, we gave out an annual payment offer, which included LinkedIn messaging templates, strategies, and more.

While this solved our initial challenges and we managed to generate some revenue, we then had to test our idea globally, with a better audience.

After getting feedback from our first 300 customers, we refined our ideal customers and decided to start targeting marketers, agency owners, salespeople, and growth hackers. 

That is to say, people who were using LinkedIn for lead generation.

So, here’s what we did to prepare for our big event:

• We scraped a list of prospects from Facebook groups of our competitors. See the story of that here.
• ‍ We used marketing automation tools like Texau to scrape groups and convert emails into LinkedIn profiles.
• ✍️ We used Expandi to reach those people on LinkedIn.
• ❤️ We asked for feedback, thoughts, criticism, complaints, and more to learn about our target audience.
• We created a comparison page between Expandi and our competitors at the time to get people to “convert”. 

How To Grow With LinkedIn: Insights Scaling To $8M ARR And Above

Using our own tools and strategies is what brought us here.

So, of course, wouldn’t finish this article without sharing some of our biggest needle movers.

In reality, LinkedIn outreach is simple.

It’s all about targeting relevant people with the right offer.

So, here are some of our best strategies for both.

Targeting relevant people:

• Using different scraping options to make our outreach more personalized
• Avoiding the LinkedIn 100 weekly limit.
• Using our LinkedIn Sniper targeting outreach to gain an acceptance rate of over 70%+
• Skyrocketing our reply rate up to 70% with dynamic GIFs.

Coming up with the right offer:

This will depend entirely on your offer.

But in a nutshell, you should make your offer super obvious who it’s for, what makes you different, and how users can give your tool a try with very little to no effort.

For Expandi, before us, many LinkedIn automation tools were browser-based.

Meaning, they were not very safe and users would get their accounts restricted often.

So, we came up with a cloud-based sales tool that mimics human behavior.

But of course, that was not enough to grow. So, we focused on:

• Partnering up with influencers and community leaders.
• Scraping audiences of our competitors to reach them with a no-brainer offer (free trial, safer, more powerful tool).
• Created “alternative-to” comparison pages for people familiar with our competitors.
• Doubled down on product-led content showing people how to use our tool, templates, and the exact steps we followed to gain results.

We didn’t even invest in ads until we hit $1M!

See the full story of our first 1,000 and how we overcame our most significant challenges here.

And finally, if you’d like to start generating leads on autopilot to grow your business, claim your free, 7-day Expandi trial here!