Sarah Hum studied graphic design in university before she discovered she loved to help software startups create new products. She moved to Silicon Valley to work at Facebook as a product designer, but a side project helped her find a problem she wanted to solve. So she quit her job and built an initial software product called Canny with her technical cofounder while traveling the world together as nomading entrepreneurs. Within a year, Canny created enough revenue for them to live and travel frugally.

Canny is a customer feedback management software for product managers at SaaS companies to collect useful product feedback inside their products, prioritize requests, and communicate with customers about their requested features. The Canny product has evolved quickly using its own product to engage with customers and make decisions about the next product feature improvements.

Canny is growing steadily with over $3 million in annual recurring revenue and 13 remote employees. They continue to experiment with substantial pricing experiments for different customer segments. Sarah openly blogs about the ups and downs of their startup journey and their unique approaches to hiring, designing and testing new tactics.

Best quote from Sarah:

You can say product management is an art. It’s not like I can look at the numbers and bada boom, bada bing, here’s exactly what we should work on. There’s a balance of different things that you should look at. 

Feedback is one of the big ones for us, but we look at it through the right lens. What are our highest-paying customers saying? What they want might be different from what the customer base as a whole wants.

Also, for us, team happiness is also important. What do we want to work on? We don’t have investors to please; we want to build something great. We want this feature for ourselves or this would be fun to work on. 

In this episode, Sarah explains:

• Why she quit her job working as a product designer for Facebook in Silicon Valley to bootstrap a SaaS startup while nomading around the world
• How they grew profitably to $3M ARR with no outside funding
• How they found a target customer and prioritized customer feedback to improve the product
• Why her team is excited to work at a bootstrapped company
• What’s working and not working with their latest product experiments
• How she thinks about expanding outside the software company vertical to serve other types of businesses

Canny Company Facts

• Founded: 2015
• Description: Canny helps small to large businesses collect, analyze, prioritize and track user feedback to make informed product decisions. Feedback is captured and organized in one place so it’s easy to pull insights.
• Number of Employees: 15
• Funding: Self-funded to “ramen profitable” in less than a year and has been profitably funding growth with revenues since 2016
• Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Links

• Sarah Hum on LinkedIn
• Canny on LinkedIn
• Canny website
• Canny blog posts on getting to $1M ARR and SaaS product pricing