Bilal Aijazi built a multi-million dollar SaaS on Slack despite competing features and clunky onboarding. Here is his 7-figure SaaS growth strategy.

In this episode, Bilal Aijazi (Founder of Polly) breaks down how he navigated the treacherous waters of building a business on top of a major platform. You will learn how Polly achieved viral product-market fit with an 80% completion rate on a difficult 5-step installation process. Bilal reveals the evolution of their Freemium Pricing Model, how a fantasy football user led to enterprise HR contracts, and the critical playbook for surviving when platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams launch features that compete directly with you.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🚀 The "Pain Tolerance" Metric: Why 80% of users endured a nightmare install process (and what it proved).
• 💰 Pricing Evolution: Moving from $8/month fantasy football leagues to 5-figure Enterprise deals.
• 💡 Suriving "Sherlocking": How to pivot and thrive when the platform builds your core feature.
• 🔥 Viral Loops: Leveraging "Respondent to Creator" conversion to drive organic growth.
• ⚖️ The Platform Paradox: The risks and massive rewards of building on Slack, Teams, and Zoom.

📖 Chapters:

• The "Punch in the Face" Reality of Startups
• Scaling to Millions of Monthly Active Users
• Leveraging Product Hunt for Viral Growth
• The 5-Step Onboarding Nightmare (That Worked)
• Transitioning from Viral Bot to Real Company
• The Fantasy Football Customer: Early Pricing Experiments
• Freemium Secrets: Converting Free Users to Paid
• Platform Risk: What Happens When Slack Copies You?
• The Mistake of Slack Workflow Builder
• Horizontal vs. Vertical SaaS Strategies
• Advice: Why Technical Founders Must Sell
• The "Just Don't Die" Philosophy

This episode is brought to you by:

💖 ⁠Gearheart⁠ → Book a call + get the first 20 hours of development free

🚨 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠NordStellar⁠⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Book a demo and get 20% off with code blackfriday20

📡 ⁠⁠⁠Signal House⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and get a demo

Resources:

🎧 Full Show Notes: saasclub.io/462 🎤 Subscribe to the Podcast: saasclub.io/subscribe 💌 Get weekly 5-minute SaaS insights: saasclub.io/email 💡 Join the SaaS Club founder community: saasclub.co/plus