Gorgias' $50M ARR growth engine (and 90+ case studies)

Howdy. 

What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years? 

[answer somewhere in this newsletter].

You’ll also find…

• 📑 Massive Shopify Plus partner case study swipe-file

• 👀 UTMs the right way

• 🚀 How Gorgias built their growth engine 

• 🐳 404 ftw

• 🤔 Can I feature you?

AND THEN THERE’S THIS:

• Migrate: Loox’s comparison pages look different.

• Money: Shop Circle launched “Shop Circle Capital” to fund merchants.

• How-to: UTM.

• Answer: The letter ‘M’ (thanks to ChatGPT for this brain teaser).

• On top: Okendo kinda always includes a case study as their #1 item in their newsletters.

• Hi: 89 new apps in the ecosystem since last week.

Does Triple Whale have the best 404 page in the ecosystem? You bet.

How Gorgias built their $50M ARR growth engine

Gorgias recently hit $50 million in ARR. That's massive.

Their success isn’t based on luck, good timing, or some secret connections their founders have.

It’s all based on a data-driven growth engine they’ve built in the early days.

Romain, their co-founder and CEO, shared all of this in a keynote. And I’m going to break it down for you here.

It all starts with defining your (actual) TAM. Blindly going in saying every brand on Shopify is a potential customer won’t work.

Gorgias took a data-driven approach here.

They correlated data they bought through Datanyze with their own dataset of customers they believe are great customers. The result is a qualified merchant. Simple put: every brand on Shopify that matches with Gorgias’ expectation of a dream customer.

But there’s this problem.

“Qualified” doesn’t mean that they’re ready to buy. They might be in a couple of months, but not right now.

If we’re going to visualize it, it will look like this:

So the next step for Gorgias was to find a “ready to buy” signal. Gorgias wanted to find a pattern that answers one simple question: What do all merchants that are likely to convert have in common?

Turns out that signal is “installing a competitor app”. In other cases it could also be leaving a comment in a community, making a new hire, raising money, or anything else.

For those ready to buy brands, Gorgias didn’t do fancy marketing tactics. They just reached out. It’s that simple.

But of course, neither Gorgias nor you can build a massive company by just living in the moment and only investing in ready to buy brands. 

And so they wanted to also find a way to make qualified brands aware of their solution. To achieve this, they spoke to their first few dozen customers to understand where they go to learn about new software and service providers. By doing this, they learned brands go to trade shows and that they work with agency partners.

But the problem with trade shows, however, is that they’re expensive af. You have to understand their ROI. Especially if you’re as obsessed with data as Gorgias is.

So they went to those trade shows, spoke to a few brands and then sent a follow-up email. The trick here is, that Gorgias always bcc’ed an email address that logs this conversation inside their CRM. A few weeks after the trade show, Gorgias could now see their success/failure inside the CRM.

It’s simple:

If they invested $10k into a trade show and their CRM told them they acquired customers worth $40k, they now know that if they go to similar trade shows, they see a 4X investment. 

Since Gorgias was building a (holistic) growth engine, the process can’t stop here.

All those leads that Marketing acquired will now go to Sales. 

Gorgias’ goal was (and is) to have the most customer-aware sales process as possible. They predict the deal size, track current solution (and status), tech stack, and also the lead source.

And with that, Sales is tailoring the closing process. From adapting the pitch based on the current solution to suggestion integrations based on the brand’s tech stack.

This stuff really works.

Gorgias’ close rate went from 15% to 50%.

But it’s not done yet. 

Even the onboarding is personalized. With the information that Gorgias now has, they onboarding inside the product looks different for every merchant. 

Here’s an example:

The result? 95% of Gorgias’ customers activate.

And to have a full circle moment here; the data Gorgias gained (likelihood of closure, activation and product usage) is being sent back to Marketing so they can focus on the low churn marketing channels in the first place, resulting in even better closure and activation rates.

The entire team at Gorgias wins through this holistic approach.

The kicker: the longer you contribute to this approach, the more data you gain, the better the results. The compounding effects are amazing here.

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Big shout-out to SaaStr for sharing the keynote video.

QUESTION FOR YOU

Can I feature you? 

Whether you work in DTC B2B SaaS (gotta love those abbreviations) / in an agency / as a freelancer - I’d love to feature you. That’s why I’m looking for a few guest writers for bucket. Just reply to this newsletter and I’ll shoot over the deets. (Yes, you can soft pitch your offer).

My 2 cents on customer loyalty:

Thanks for reading. Next week, same time?

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