At Curious, we focus on acquiring promising SaaS businesses in the $1-5 million ARR range with untapped growth potential. Rather than looking for exits, we take a long-term approach, implementing strategic transformations that drive sustainable growth.
In this post I'd like to share how we think about growth post-acquisition through the lens of one of our portfolio companies: Buildfire. If you're not familiar, Buildfire is a no-code mobile app builder that we acquired last year. You can read more about the original announcement here.
With any acquisition there’s always an original hypothesis of where we think we as the buyer can unlock value. When looking at Buildfire, what we saw was a strategic opportunity to transform their sales-led go-to-market motion to a self-serve approach.
The thesis is pretty straightforward—can Buildfire become the "Squarespace of mobile apps"
We believe this is possible by trying to:
Executing this vision requires an overhaul of Buildfire's entire growth engine, starting with a deep understanding of their customer base.
Our first step has been to do a thorough analysis of Buildfire’s existing customer base to identify the most valuable segments.
The audit consists of:
Digging into the numbers was eye opening and highlighted a number of high-potential ICPs. For example, a couple things that jumped out was the ARPU for white label customers was up to 6x higher than normal customers and employee engagement apps for businesses had 3x higher engagement rates than some of the other verticals were being targeted.
Considering segments like these are experiencing much higher engagement and retention rates leading to higher LTV’s than any of the others it’s where we decided to focus a lot of our energy in the short term.
Once we identified our target segments, we need to understand how users in each are experiencing the product.
We're working to create comprehensive visualizations of:
When starting to map these out it became clear that Buildfire had virtually no visibility into down-funnel metrics or user behaviour post sign up. The overwhelming majority of revenue came from sales-led efforts, with implementation services to ensure customers were successful.
Self-serve acquisition was practically non-existent—users simply couldn't achieve success without significant hand-holding from sales and customer success teams. The business was operating with a lot of blind spots around conversion paths, activation triggers, and retention indicators.
When buying the business we were thinking about it from the perspective of putting a bigger focus into the self-serve path not necessarily building it out from scratch.
This lack of tracking infrastructure isn't uncommon when acquiring businesses in the range that we do but it does require us to rethink the original acquisition thesis and if it's still a viable one.
After realizing we struggled to be able to accurately map user journeys we decided it was best to deep dive into the data hygiene and event tracking before trying to scale any acquisition efforts, we need to make sure our tracking and reporting foundation is solid.
When doing a deep dive we found:
We're still in the process of implementing a comprehensive tracking plan using Segment and migrating to a modern tech stack to create a unified data layer, which will make sure we have consistent tracking across:
This foundation, once fully deployed, should allow us to accurately measure CAC:LTV ratios by channel and segment.
Historically, Buildfire’s primary two acquisition channels have been SEO & Paid acquisition.
After diving deep into both their organic and paid efforts, we decided that focusing on paid channels would allow us to drive demand for the sales team while we focus on product improvements to move to fully self-serve later this year.
Our approach to scaling Buildfire with paid is ongoing but follows a methodical process:
Started with a comprehensive audit of Buildfire’s existing paid efforts, evaluating:
At first glance, the overall spend to customer numbers didn’t look terrible. Primarily focused on Meta and Google to drive demand for the sales team. Topline averages across channels were:
My expectation was that we’d find a CAC:LTV ratio somewhere like 1:1. I didn’t have high expectations but there were 800 active customers with a $10k LTV. Meaning there was room to spend to acquire customers.
Then we started digging in deeper. Of the 800 paying customers when we acquired the business we couldn’t find any active customers attributed directly to paid acquisition. As we continued digging we realised there was a large data accuracy issue in the CRM so we estimate that there were a few that we just weren’t able to account for but it was obvious that paid was wildly unprofitable.
In the ad channels themselves a few things jumped out immediately: overly broad targeting resulting in wasted spend, limited use of landing pages & poor conversion tracking/reporting leading to inaccurate assumptions.
But a big positive is they did have a solid foundation and good account structure. Our hypothesis is that a lot of the issues with paid were due to overselling which is causing churn issues. Re-enforcing our belief that there's an opportunity to be the Squarespace of mobile apps.
To support quick learning and optimizations, we're implementing a multi-layered reporting system:
The foundation is using Segment as a CDP, migrating to HubSpot for our CRM and Amplitude/GA4 for reporting. The plan with this system is to create a common language between company/head office leadership and the growth/sales teams for analysing and discussing growth investments.
When looking into our conversion funnels, we stumbled upon a number that shocked us: an average free-to-paid conversion rate of 0.11%. Yup, you read that right—barely one in a thousand free users were converting to paying customers.
This sparked what anyone in the SaaS industry knows is an age-old debate: should we require a credit card upfront for trials? It's the classic trade-off between volume and quality that founders and growth teams have wrestled with for years.
Given our conversion numbers, we decided there was no downside in taking the plunge.
As expected, our trial numbers have taken a significant hit since implementing the credit card requirement. But there's a silver lining—we're now able to roll up our sleeves and properly focus our attention on the users who demonstrate genuine buying intent.
We're still early in this experiment, and our next challenge involves fine-tuning the sign-up flow to improve conversion rates. But the early data we have suggests that it was the right decision. Our free to paid conversion rate is now hovering around 2-3% and improving every week.
It's a delicate balancing act, but one that the numbers suggest is worth pursuing. With this foundation in place, we can redesign the entire acquisition journey:
Rather than going after growth at all costs, we're taking a measured approach to scaling:
This more disciplined approach allows us to spend confidently whilst maintaining efficiency metrics.
Rather than launching across all channels simultaneously, we're implementing a tiered approach:
This phased approach should allow us to validate unit economics before scaling, ensuring efficient spend.
While we're still early in our journey with Buildfire:
Key areas we're focusing on are:
Buildfire’s transformation from sales-led to self-serve represents a significant opportunity. We believe that sustainable growth in SaaS businesses comes not from growth hacks, but from systematic optimisation of the entire customer journey. We're applying a systematic growth strategy, deeply understanding our customer segments, optimising conversion paths, and continuously evaluating channels. This is an ongoing process but based on early positive signals we’re confident that we will get there.
Curious is a long-term holding company that buys and grows software companies with empathy.
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