Concur
Concur was founded in 1993 by Mike Hilton, Steve Singh, and Raj Singh as a Windows shrink-wrap software product to automate expense reporting, initially selling for $69 directly to consumers. After a breakthrough Wall Street Journal review by Walt Mossberg that drove 2,000 sales in two days, the company pivoted from B2C to B2B, evolved through multiple technology platforms (client-server, intranet, SaaS), and despite nearly collapsing during the dot-com crash (stock price falling from $60 to $0.28), successfully transformed into a pure SaaS business that achieved 25%+ annual growth and was acquired by SAP for $8.3 billion in 2014.
Key Takeaways
- •Used word of mouth as primary growth channel
- •Got first customer via Walt Mossberg Wall Street Journal review and feature article leading to retail distribution through channels like Egghead Software
- •Most effective channel: product-hunt-launch
- •Monetizes with subscription pricing
Revenue
Traction
Tech
Why They Built It
The founders identified that expense reporting was a major pain point for salespeople and travelers. They saw an opportunity to automate an extraordinarily manual and painful paper process that affected travelers, managers, and companies.
Similar Companies
Active Campaign
$4.2M/moActive Campaign started in 2003 as an on-premise email marketing solution built by Jason Vanderboom to fund his fine arts degree. After 10 years and 8 employees generating a couple million in revenue, he transitioned to a SaaS model starting at $9/month. The company now has over 60,000 customers generating over $50 million annually and employs 330 people, growing primarily through organic adoption, partnerships, and focus on the SMB market despite pressure to move upmarket.
Ahrefs
$3.3M/moAhrefs is a bootstrapped SaaS company providing SEO and backlink analysis tools, currently generating over $40M ARR with 45 employees. After joining in 2015, Tim Solo transformed the blog from 15,000 to 250,000+ monthly Google visitors by shifting from publishing what they wanted to write about to targeting keywords people actually search for, creating high-quality content with direct product integration, and continuously updating articles to accumulate backlinks. The company breaks conventional marketing wisdom by not using customer personas, growth hacks, or detailed analytics—instead focusing entirely on product quality and audience education through blog content.
RenewTrack
$500k/moRenewTrack is a SaaS platform that manages contract renewals for global tech companies like VMware, Lenovo, HP, and Cisco. Matthew Cagney joined as CEO in 2020 to rescue a 6-year-old startup with only 2 customers, high churn, and a fragmented product with 6 different codebases. By consolidating the product, over-investing in customer service, focusing sales efforts on high-value enterprise deals, and pivoting to a subscription model, RenewTrack grew to $6M ARR with 16-18 customers in roughly 3-4 years.
Proposify
$375k/moProposify is a SaaS platform that streamlines the proposal creation and sales process for agencies and businesses. Founded in 2014 by Kyle Racky and Kevin after they ran a design agency, the product struggled initially at $800 MRR for 17 months before hitting product-market fit in late 2014 through improved templates and onboarding. Today the company generates $4.5M ARR, driven primarily by organic search and content marketing.
Rezi
$288k/moRezi is an AI-based resume builder founded in 2015 that helps users create resumes optimized for applicant tracking systems. The company generates approximately $287,921 in monthly recurring revenue and serves about 1M new users annually, with an enterprise product supporting over 300 organizations including Fortune 500 companies.