Interview with Toni Hopponen, CEO of LandingRabbit
Scaling a fast-growing SaaS company requires strategic thinking, execution, and adaptability. In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Toni Hopponen, a seasoned SaaS entrepreneur, to discuss his journey, challenges, and strategies for SaaS growth. Toni previously built Flockler, a self-serve SaaS platform that scaled to serve brands like Metallica, Harvard University, GoPro, and IKEA before being successfully sold in 2023. Now, he’s onto his next venture, LandingRabbit, tackling one of the biggest pain points in SaaS marketing: building high-converting landing pages.
Let’s dive into his insights on growth hacking for SaaS, team management, and the role of AI in SaaS product development.
Interview with Toni Hopponen
Who are you? Please tell us a bit about your personal journey.
I’ve been a SaaS entrepreneur since 2010. My start was everything else but planned. I joined a digital agency run by a very entrepreneurial founder, and we started working on product ideas on the side of the projects.
In some of the projects, I got in touch with media companies that I already knew pretty well through my past experience interviewing media company CEOs and thought leaders for my Master’s Thesis about the business model disruption of newspapers.
Some of the clients were asking me if the digital agency could help them build applications that allow readers to participate in news creation in one way or another. At the same time, mobile phones had improved rapidly, mobile data was available at a decent cost in some of the countries, and phones came with a browser. The initial idea was to help customers upload newsworthy stories, images, and videos from anywhere.
That wasn’t an easy concept to scale as a startup. We were selling something that didn’t exist in the market, and media companies had other priorities.
But that was a starting point for Flockler, which eventually became a self-serve SaaS for brands to collect and show social media feeds on any digital service. Without a sales team and fully relying on SEO, Google Ads, and word-of-mouth, we were able to grow it to a few thousand customers, such as Metallica, Harvard University, GoPro, IKEA, etc., and we sold the business in 2023.
What is your SaaS and its mission?
After 13 years running and then selling my previous SaaS, I felt rather lost, to be honest. Flockler had been such an integral part of my identity and life that it took a few months to realise that I was not involved anymore.
Before starting my new one, LandingRabbit, I listed a lot of challenges and problems I had faced when building Flockler. I wasn’t sure if it was going to lead anywhere, but I thought it was the best way to start my new journey.
One of the main challenges in self-serve SaaS is the constant need for high-quality pages. To grow, you’ll need to expand the product and keep pushing new content out for marketing, sales, and customer success. Landing pages, blog posts, help documents, case studies, etc. – the list is endless.
Because my previous startup relied on Google Ads, there was one especially painful challenge: the ability to create high-converting pages and test different versions was a struggle.
I tested all processes and tools I could find.
Sometimes, I created just a Google document with notes and asked a designer and developer to implement it.
Other times, I tried to create black-and-white wireframes to show my thinking, not just text.
And at times, I wrote, designed, and built the page using WYSIWYG page builders.
No matter what, all those processes were slow, and I never trusted that my page structure and content were right.
I never got enough pages created. In Google Ads, that leads to higher customer acquisition costs.
Now that I’m building LandingRabbit, I’ve realised the core problem is in the planning stage. Being confident about your page structure and content, as well as the ability to visualise page ideas, is far more important than the actual development stage.
We are on a mission to make SaaS marketing and collaboration between a content writer, designer, and developer a lot smoother than it is today. We believe that’s the highest value of AI – helping people bring their skills together instead of tools that try to make every one of us a multi-talent running our solo businesses.
Are you able to share some success metrics?
With LandingRabbit, in its very early stages. We don’t have a ready product yet, but in the past 6 months, we’ve discussed with more than 100 people who have experienced the problem, and we’ve invited a few of them to test our super early version.
The goal for now is to build a group of SaaS founders and marketers who are truly enthusiastic about the product.
With Flockler, I learned that scaling a business isn’t super hard as long as you have identified a group of people who share the same struggle and demographics. But OMG, how difficult it is to get to that stage.
I love the early stage. I really enjoyed perfecting the conversion and churn rates at Flockler when it was growing. But the early stage is very addicting.
How big is your team? What are your hiring and management recommendations? Do you have specific challenges?
We are currently bootstrapping with two developers. It forces us to prioritise and listen to the feedback even more closely. From feedback, we need to constantly find ways to decrease the number of features for the “MVP”, and that can only be a good thing for both us and the first customers.
With AI, we’ve been able to speed up some of the development. For example, it has allowed us to test ideas faster and either approve or reject them before we invest more time.
I believe that’s the future. AI helps team members from business to design and development, test ideas, and be involved in the process. Smaller teams get things done.
In my opinion, it doesn’t mean that company sizes are smaller. But it changes the structure of the company. Perhaps more companies will be following the 37Signals style approach, with a designer and a developer working together on a very specific task, and the management’s role is to run a large number of these autonomous, small teams.
How was the process of finding product-market fit? Did you need pivots?
With Flockler, I learned that the need for pivot might be a symptom of something else.
Almost daily, someone appears in my LinkedIn or X feeds and says startups fail because they haven’t found a hair-burning problem to solve.
I’m sorry to say, but it shows that those people have rarely built tech companies.
You can solve a hair-burning problem successfully but fail catastrophically.
For example, you might solve a problem, but the customer may not be willing to move away from Microsoft’s ecosystem. They might have better career opportunities if they continue using Microsoft products despite the friction.
And I’m not saying Microsoft products are bad. But in every workflow, you have friction points.
If you focus on understanding the whole workflow, you are likely to find multiple friction points, and your pivots become much easier. You already have options if one idea doesn’t work.
With LandingRabbit, we don’t have the product-market fit yet. But I’m fairly confident we’ll find it because we’ve established so many friction points and variations of the challenges that lead to the “hair-burning problem.” The context matters a lot. An enterprise SaaS is very different from a solo entrepreneur – they still might experience the same problem for different reasons.
What was the main challenge you experienced along the way?
Not probably adding value beyond above and below.
What was the aha moment that made you unlock growth?
In all the SaaS I’ve worked with, consistency and choosing a few marketing and sales channels have brought the best results. Not much magic to it. Most marketers don’t show up every day, and they struggle to see long-term results.
The second key component is being customer-centric. A simple blog post example from a SaaS company will tell me whether they really understand the customer and also show that in everything they do. The temptation is high just to use AI (previously ghostwriters) and write SEO-friendly blog posts. But truly successful companies think about the questions customers ask first and then the SEO second.
What were the key parameters to align to achieve growth?
In self-serve SaaS, it’s a combination of many things:
- Your insights on the future.
- The app usage data.
- The subscription data (segmented).
- Customer live chats, emails, and sales calls.
Without data, you can’t trust what people say. Without insights into the future, you won’t be able to turn customer conversations into a great product.
In self-serve SaaS, success starts with Google Ads or any other touchpoint. Sometimes, it can be a chat message from a current customer to a prospect. Often, it’s tens of touchpoints and the customer never chats with you before adding their credit card.
The goal should be to get the whole experience from the first touch point to the cancellation messages right. Make a customer feel more than a tech product that serves a need and solves a problem.
Easier said than done!
What are your main acquisition channels and why those?
SEO and Google Ads (+ word-of-mouth) were my only acquisition channels with Flockler. I love those two because they are brutally honest.
If there’s no search volume, you will need to educate the market, and that ain’t going to be easy. Google Ads and SEO clearly tell if people are interested in the topic, and they show the maximum market size for those who are thinking about the topic right now.
For the past ~6 months, I’ve been testing LinkedIn’s organic content, and I must say I’m positively surprised. Instead of creating promotional content, I’ve focused on writing posts that attract SaaS founders and marketers, and the discussions that have followed helped me find the first beta-testing user group. I don’t think there would have been more efficient ways of doing it.
What are your current challenges? What keeps you awake at night?
The current challenge is to keep calm and patient. Every startup founder would love to go faster and get a lot of paying customers straight away. Skip corners. Especially because we are bootstrapped, we feel the pressure constantly. Funding might bring the same problems eventually, haha.
For now, we just need to focus on finding the ideal customer profiles because they influence our product development decisions heavily.
Some founders approach this differently. They try to find as many customers as possible and then listen to the feedback.
My argument against that approach is that the amount of feedback is relatively tiny, and the more variable your early customers are, the more difficult it is to build a truly impactful product.
What do you do to remain ahead of or different from the competition?
I don’t care much about the competition, to be honest. If something, the Flockler experience taught me that you only need to make sure your vision of the future is different.
The closer the vision of a competitor, the more likely it is that you are fighting for the same clients. If you truly listen to customers, there are so many paths forward that it’s unlikely you’ll end up in the same place with competitors. It only happens if your product development strategy is based on reactively following competitors.
At the same time, following competitors or any other SaaS companies can be inspirational. Sometimes, you can apply the same strategies and tactics even if the context is slightly different.
What advice do you have for other SaaS leaders to grow their platforms?
Discuss with customers as much as you can and avoid the temptation to outsource that to partners or AI (today).
Final Thoughts: Key Takeaways for SaaS Founders and Marketers
Toni Hopponen’s journey from Flockler to LandingRabbit is a testament to the power of iteration, customer focus, and strategic marketing. His experience highlights the importance of SEO, Google Ads, and word-of-mouth in growing a SaaS business while emphasizing the critical role of customer conversations in product development.
For SaaS entrepreneurs, Toni’s insights offer a valuable roadmap:
- Prioritize high-quality landing pages for growth.
- Understand the friction points in the customer journey.
- Use AI to enhance collaboration, not replace human expertise.
- Leverage Google Ads and SEO for brutal honesty in market validation.
As LandingRabbit continues to evolve, Toni’s approach to early-stage validation and iteration provides a blueprint for any founder looking to build, scale, and optimize their SaaS platform.
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