Example of a B2B acquisition strategy: Folk

Folk, a startup in the CRM market, managed to reach their first million in ARR in 4 years.

Currently, Folk has over 100,000 users, including 2,000 paying customers, and records 5x revenue growth year-over-year. They went from 200k ARR to 1M.

The Launch of Folk

Folk's Go-To-Market started with the CEO, who gathered 10,000 sign-ups before the product was even developed. They created a landing page with the value proposition: "Get the most out of your network." This value proposition was the result of over 600 interviews conducted by Simo Lemhandez, Folk's founder.

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Then to drive traffic to this landing page, they used the Efounders network by making LinkedIn posts and communicating through a newsletter.

They faced a huge and very competitive market, but with this personal CRM approach dedicated to professional networks, and very competitive pricing, they managed to stand out.

Development and Product Hunt Launch

Folk spent 12 months launching an MVP, on which they manually onboarded a few hundred users on a closed version.

This allowed them to show signs of traction and move forward with a 3.3 Million funding round in September 2021. They then refined their MVP for 6 months before starting to open it as freemium on their website. A long development time, but one that allowed them to anticipate the Go-To-Market.

The first Product Hunt launch was a huge success, estimated to have brought them between 2k and 5k users.
They received over 172 reviews, mainly from the efounders network but also from their first beta testers.
With over 2600 upvotes, Folk was elected product of the month in April 2022, ensuring visibility on Product Hunt's homepage for 1 month. Product Hunt is a site that gets 3 million monthly visitors.

Pricing and Continuous Experimentation

Evolving Pricing

Folk adjusted its prices by doubling them every six months to find the right balance between accessibility and revenue maximization. The basic positioning is personal CRM, but Folk's ambition is to compete with CRMs like Hubspot. As product improvements and requested features were added, prices evolved for everyone (without charging clients feature by feature).

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In 2020, Folk offered pricing 4 times lower than the current pricing.

This price increase was possible because:

• CRMs have the ability to "lock in" customers, making it a real challenge for a company to change.

• The product's first customers are satisfied with the evolution and direction of the product and are therefore willing to pay more for a more complete product. (the price remaining significantly lower compared to Hubspot).

The freemium still represents 98% of Folk's users (2,000 paying customers out of 100,000 users).

Onboarding Optimization

Folk started with manual onboarding. An onboarding that systematically includes a sales demo before accessing the product, maximizing closing rates early in the journey. This also allowed them to continuously learn about their target customer while explaining the product's value before first use.

They then pivoted to self-serve because with a low average basket size, sales needed to focus on closing larger deals.

Folk's Main Acquisition Channels

LinkedIn: A Primary Channel

Today, 70% of Folk's acquisition comes from LinkedIn. The company uses the platform to promote its product through posts sponsored by well-followed influencers. This strategy allows them to effectively reach a targeted professional audience.

Folk invests between 30,000k and 70,000k per month in LinkedIn influence.

SEO, SEA, and Affiliation

In addition to LinkedIn, 30% of Folk's acquisition comes from other channels, notably SEO, SEA, and an affiliate program. Although these channels are used, they play a complementary role to the main LinkedIn-based strategy.

Development of Their Own Lead Attribution Algorithm

Folk, while multiplying its marketing channels, has also developed its own internal algorithm to more precisely track incoming lead acquisition sources.

International Acquisition

Folk is a French startup but only 20% of their users are in France. 60% of their clients are in the United States, as the CRM market is larger there, making it easier to establish a market presence.

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An Agile Team to Support Growth

Team Organization

Folk's team consists of 22 people, with a balanced distribution between commercial and technical functions, essential for viable startup scaling. Folk has 13 commercial employees and 9 technical profiles.

Demos and Targeting Service SMEs

Folk conducts 200 demos per week, primarily targeting small and medium-sized service businesses, which are their ideal customer profile (ICP). These demos not only serve to improve customer knowledge but also to close larger contracts. Their main challenge being to convert freemium users to paying users, they prioritize these demos based on the size of companies registered on their platform. This allows them to maximize the MRR