At SaaStock, we Partner with the SaaS industry’s most innovative companies. Through our events and network, we help them achieve better brand visibility, build their pipeline, and make powerful connections with customers, prospects, peers and partners. In doing so, we also help SaaStock attendees find the right solutions to help them grow their businesses faster.
In this series, we’re showcasing our Partners, the work they do, the value they bring, how they’re growing and changing the face of SaaS as we know it.
First up, it’s end-to-end subscription platform, keylight. Gold Partner at SaaStock Europe 2024, CEO and Founder Marco Sarich joined Alan Gleeson (Contento) to share the story to date, insights on life as a bootstrapped founder, and what’s next as the company scales.
From professional services to subscription platform
Marco started his career in science and mathematics, specifically complex systems, data, and molecular applications. He founded keylight, coming up to ten years ago, as a professional services company though subscription technology quickly became the main focus.
Today, keylight is an end-to-end subscription business platform, featuring fully configurable customer and partner journeys, portals, CPQ, subscription management, billing automation, revenue and accounting automation, and advanced data analytics. Marco explained:
“For many companies these are quite siloed departments and we try to bring more an end-to-end structure to combine them and also to professionalise these things. So there are many companies that still have manual processes, they work with spreadsheets and we try to get rid of this and automate as much as possible so that you have scalable processes.”
Almost ten years in, keylight is now in a “typical growth stage”, with 50+ employees and offices in Berlin, New York, Zurich, Belgrade, and Singapore. Its customer base is truly global, with a strong US presence accounting for 60% of its revenue.
Marco attributes starting out in professional services to this marked success:
“There was a talk today about the benefits of starting as an agency, learning about the products and problems of customers… It is a great journey and I think there’s a lot of companies that have done that because you get really close to the customer, you really understand the challenges. And then part of it is productising almost. So it’s a fantastic way to build.”
Consciously scaling as a bootstrapped founder
This focus on understanding the customer has been crucial to keylight’s success as a bootstrapped business. Marco explained more on this and shared some other tactics that have helped the business’ growth to date:
1. Fostering customer relationships
Keylight’s core customer base has historically been enterprise businesses with complex subscriptions models and challenges when it comes to managing that infrastructure. Marco prioritised product-market fit, really understanding these challenges and building relationships with customers over fast initial growth.
“You don’t just build whatever you want and then afterwards find out that there’s no market fit…We try to grow really organically and try to treat our customers well…have good discussions with them, see how they use the product, get feedback so that we can actually address concerns. It took us a long time to really build out the product well with our customers, take their feedback in and just now in the last two years we really start to scale the company.”
2. Focussing on organic growth
Keylight’s focus on strong customer relationships has meant it’s been able to grow organically, via referrals. Partly from its enterprise customers but also through intentional efforts to build a strong partner network.
This partner-led strategy has been a strong acquisition driver for keylight and the company now has dedicated in-house resources to managing and growing these partnerships.
3. Build the right product
Growing more steadily in the early days has given keylight time to process feedback and invest it back into their product.
“So we see this also with some competitors…they grew very fast but they also locked in. They see later, oh, we didn’t think about that. We should have changed this data model a little bit. Our product should be different [but] they can’t change it anymore because they have too many customers using it…We tried to avoid this by being a bit slower in the beginning, but now we’re growing quite rapidly.”
Having taken time to hone the product, keylight is now entering a new stage of scale with a product that’s ready to serve a broader set of customers.
What’s next for keylight?
Over the next 6-12 months, keylight is looking to serve more mid-market businesses, who too are ready to scale. With a product built for enterprise, keylight is able to work off an “all access licence” model, Marco explained how this works in practice:
“It is tailored to the company revenue that runs through our platform. So we have a natural scalability there. If you have a smaller project, you don’t have so much revenue yet. You can start with the platform at your own pace but you have access to all features already.”
This model works because it’s focused on helping keylight customers be more successful, allowing them to harness the more complex features as they scale.
In Marco’s view, locking features should be done to make a product easier to set up and navigate, rather than for commercial reasons. For example, in the future they might look at feature-flex using templates because of use case or customer segment. Again, as a way of helping customers get more value more quickly, rather than to charge for later on.
Choosing to Partner with SaaStock
“We had good discussions at our booth, also meeting partners, also some prospects, good discussions as well. So we get a lot of feedback. It’s also interesting for us, it’s not only about sales and brand visibility, but we also want to see what are the challenges for SaaS companies.”
Marco and the keylight team joined us as Gold Sponsors at SaaStock Europe. They chose SaaStock because because of its sole focus on SaaS (a core segment for keylight as it moves downmarket) and had some specific goals ahead of the event:
- Increase brand visibility: As keylight looks to target more mid-market businesses, events serve as a great opportunity to get the brand in front of prospects. At SaaStock, they had a branded booth on the show floor and a dedicated meeting room.
- Connect with partners: Some of keylight’s partners were also sponsoring SaaStock, so it presented an opportunity to connect in person. The strong focus on SaaS also meant there were potential partners to have conversations with too.
- Get SaaS industry insights: SaaS isn’t the only use case for keylight. Coming to a SaaS specific event gave them deeper insights into the challenges in SaaS that they might be able to solve with their product.
Another benefit for Marco was the opportunity to have open conversations and find new opportunities in the SaaS community:
“Many people are curious, so everyone’s very open to just have a chat without trying to sell a solution to each other. Because many people are SaaS companies, we’re always potentially interesting to each other…To almost every potential prospect I’m talking to, their solution might be interesting for us too. It’s always something mutual.”
Achieve your goals with SaaStock partnership opportunities
At SaaStock, we’ve spent eight years working with Partners to make sure our events deliver impactful return on investment.
Work closely with our team on a bespoke package that will help you build your pipeline, generate brand awareness, and make the connections that will help transform your business, including:
- Brand awareness across our events from a showfloor booth to fringe event sponsorship.
- Distinct networking experiences that guarantee impactful meetings with the right people.
- Tailored opportunities to engage with a focused audience including boardroom sessions for C-suite operators and workshop opportunities for your ICP.
- A VIP meeting service to pair you with your ideal customer, optimising your time at the event for maximum impact.
Find out more – Get in touch with our team today.
