The storyHow they got there
Sarah Hum and Andrew Rasmussen built Canny after killing their first product (Product Pains) and rebuilding from scratch. The core insight: SaaS companies were drowning in scattered feedback — spreadsheets, Slack threads, sticky notes — with no system to close the loop with customers who asked.
Their first ten customers came from Sarah personally emailing SaaS founders she found on Product Hunt and Indie Hackers, offering free access in exchange for feedback. Many converted to paid. The first hundred came from doubling down on the Intercom integration listing and targeted comparison content ("Canny vs UserVoice").
At maturity, the channel mix settled into: SEO and organic content (~45%), word-of-mouth and customer referrals (~25%), product-led freemium upgrades (~15%), integration marketplace listings (~10%), and paid (~5%). Cold email was killed after PMF — it didn't scale economically. Integrations and SEO were doubled down on instead.
Unit economics at scale: blended CAC around $200–400, ACV of $1,800–3,000, LTV of $6–10K at 85% gross margin, and net revenue retention above 110%. The integration ecosystem compounded — every new integration (Jira, Linear, Salesforce) became a permanent free distribution channel. Build the integration ecosystem early and it pays dividends for life.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.