Savvy entrepreneurs tell you not to just “Build It and They Will Come” with your software startup.

But once in a while, very rarely, this product-only strategy actually works.

Word spreads so fast that you don’t need to invest any time or money on sales and marketing. It’s a tech founder’s dream!

Eric Dill was a successful mortgage broker in Sydney, Australia, who struggled with the same painful problem as every other broker: manually checking with multiple banks to validate and price mortgages for homeowners.

Eric and his good friend Angus Keatinge resolved to create a software product to solve this complicated and chronic problem.

Quickli was launched in late 2021, and it immediately gained happy customers and fans without any proactive marketing or sales.

Three years later, more than 10,000 mortgage brokers use Quickli—that’s over 50% market share.

Quickli now has AUD $5 million in ARR with 40 employees.

That’s zero to 50% market share in 3 years without proactive marketing or sales.

This is an amazing story of two product-focused entrepreneurs who solved a wickedly hard problem and grew a successful software company without any outside funding.

Most of their employees are engineers working on the product and customer service. As Eric described it:

“Quickli has very, very much been a story of product-led growth. Our product completely solves the biggest problem that every broker has every day. No other product has solved it.

“Brokers have been telling each other about Quickli, and we have some really big fans. It’s a very tight community of brokers who help each other.

‘How lucky did we get? Because we didn’t do anything. Almost no marketing and no sales. We have a website. To say we have half a marketing person feels like an overstatement because we have a customer service person who also does some marketing on the side for us.”

Eric Dill, co-founder and co-CEO of Quickli

Happy customers who create word-of-mouth referrals are the best marketing for any SaaS product. That’s important for any SaaS business.

And product-led growth is a viable GTM strategy for many SaaS companies.

But product-only growth almost never happens.

It’s possible, apparently if your product is amazing enough to your customer AND conditions are right for the word to spread quickly in your market.

It’s really, really rare when word-of-mouth does all the marketing and selling for you. In this amazing example at Quickli, it worked.

Check out my interview with Angus Keatinge and Eric Dill on the Practical Founders Podcast.