How HeyReach Achieved $6M ARR in <2 Years

Go-to-market success story based on a laser-focused strategy

Dear GTM Strategist!

Call me a patriot, but I am overjoyed when a company from my region makes waves. Whoever is into outbound/GTM engineering/LinkedIn outreach must have heard of HeyReach - in merely two years, they became an “Instantly for LinkedIn” - a go-to outreach tool for all of us who are doing prospecting and outreach on LinkedIn.

I met the founders 2.5 years ago in North Macedonia when we had a workshop with the Swiss Entrepreneurship Program. They struck me as an extremely technically competent and professional team, ready to win the market. Then I co-hosted a workshop with Vukasin Vukosavljevic when he was leading growth at lemlist (another EU mega success story $150 ARR). When they started to work together - things clicked …

… and the rest is history.

Now they are rocking Clay integrations, narrating how the LinkedIn outreach field is evolving, and creating tons of best practices and helpful playbooks along the way.

In this newsletter, you’ll learn:

• How to reach 2M ARR in < 1 year

• How to reach 6M ARR in < 2 years

using word-of-mouth as a primary channel and a strong focus on ICP when building the product.

This story has everything: dramatic revenue increases, even more dramatic mistakes, strategic pivots, and pure, unadulterated tactical insights.

Let’s hear it from Vuk, CMO at HeyReach ✌️

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Phase 1: Finding Our Key ICP

I knew the co-founders, Nikola and Stefan, before they became industry players. What impressed me most about them was their remarkable entrepreneurial drive at such a young age. Within a year of meeting them, they pivoted from their Reddit tool (Howitzer) to HeyReach, entering the LinkedIn outbound arena with all the confidence in the world.

Somewhere along the way, I started my own agency after leaving the previous startup I was working at. Nick dropped me a message asking if I could help them find their PMF. I didn’t think too much and got to work immediately. When I joined as a consultant, HeyReach was in what I'll diplomatically call "a situation":

• Making $15K in MRR

• Having a tough time retaining existing users and ramping up acquisition channels

• Positioned as "LinkedIn outreach for everyone!"

But they did have one thing of insane value that was also the main reason why I joined. Lean and keen individuals who wanted to work as one and make this thing work. Ultimately, this is a team sport, and everyone contributed massively in figuring this stage out.

We quickly realized a critical business truth: when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing exactly no one – except maybe your mother, who's contractually obligated to support your questionable decisions. But then we noticed something… and by we, I mean 4 people on the business side working full-time (Nick, Stefan, Ilija and Mrki), and me as a part-time consultant:

• Agencies were loving our features the most (e.g. multi-sender account rotation, unified inbox, scale)

• Instantly has already proven that the agency model works. It's one of their key ICPs + the pricing model benefited agencies and gave them another differentiator in the cold email space

• Agencies wanted integrations with tools like Clay that we didn’t have

So we laser-focused on agencies like they were the last slice of pizza at 2 AM. Everything – features, demos, website copy, pricing – all screamed "AGENCIES, WE LOVE YOU." And guess what? They did! In 365 days, we hit $2M ARR.

How We Did It Without Breaking The Bank (Or Our Spirits)

Word of mouth

Turns out, agencies were actively promoting their personal brands on LinkedIn as it was one of their main acquisition and authority-building channels. If our tool delivers and they like using it, this will lead to a lot of referrals. It did! Later, we added an affiliate program, because who doesn't like getting paid twice? All initiatives that fuel WoM were prioritized over everything else. 😇

Webinars

The idea was to integrate HeyReach with key tools agencies were using, like Clay. We considered Clay as a Ferrari, while we were more like a reliable Toyota. All we gotta do is drive in the same direction. When we launched our integration, we did a webinar together, allowing us to tap into the massive market of our customers. We even organized a contest giving people the opportunity to win cool Clay and HeyReach prizes if they use our tools and post about it on LinkedIn. Fueling WoM in the process and reaching thousands of people. And that’s the key thing here - webinars are cool, but distribution is the alpha dog.

After Clay, more GTM integrations followed with RB2B, Trigify, and more. And this was a massive decision because it was where the outbound world was heading. Users no longer needed the best tool from every product category (e.g. prospecting, outreach, etc). They could take any tool they prefer, patch them up together, personalize their approach, and the magic would happen.

Users needed simple ways to leverage AI agents, capture social signals, connect tools without too much fuss, flexible APIs, etc. So we made the conscious decision to be the cool host who lets everyone BYOT (Bring Your Own Tools). Because at the end of the day, we're not in the business of making people adapt to our software - we're in the business of making our software adapt to people and giving them positive ROI from LinkedIn outbound.

Integrations and this "ecosystem" mindset weren't just profitable from a business perspective. Here's the deal: the more users embed our tool into their workflow, the stickier we become. Higher retention, lower churn. Next, users get better results in the process, which is the whole point. The more successful they are, the more they’ll share content featuring us, too. With our partners from Clay, Trigify, and RB2B, we launched various marketing initiatives that went beyond just webinars. We tapped into each other's networks like that neighbor who always seems to have just the right tool when you need it.

Cold and warm outbound

We used our own tool to sell our own tool. It's like Inception, but with more Clay tables and less Leonardo DiCaprio. And guess what, we were hooking up tools too. Mainly Clay, Trigify, and RB2B, and it worked quite well.

Of course, success came with more problems. Our biggest headaches were:

• Customer support apocalypse → Turns out, when lots of people use your product, they expect it to work. We were drowning in tickets, and our response time was GLACIER SLOW. Thankfully, we hired Ebru, who turned our CS from "please hold while I cry" to "we'll solve this before you take a first sip of your coffee."

• Infrastructure meltdown → Our servers were handling the traffic about as well as I handle spicy food – poorly and with lots of unexpected outbursts. It took two quarters to fix, mainly by hiring senior devs and crushing the dreams of cool feature requests. We had to prioritize and make our tool faster. Devs did it, and we love them for it.

We faced tactical challenges, too. Marketing initiatives don't always work as planned. With limited resources, you can't pursue every opportunity immediately and must prioritize strategically. For instance, despite having a Facebook Community with around 2k members, we chose to deprioritize it in favor of content that strengthened our ecosystem strategies and boosted word-of-mouth on LinkedIn. Ultimately, it's more effective to execute 2-3 initiatives excellently than to perform 5-6 initiatives on a ‘meh’ level.

Phase 2: Expansion

By late 2024, we started discussing me joining full-time. The cool thing that happened even before I signed was that we spent Q4 aligning on the product roadmap, aka we were all on the same page about what we wanna do vs. what we definitely won't be doing. Plus, my Growth Consultant position gave me more than enough time to learn everything I needed to know about their business.

Also, more and more salespeople and GTM engineers were choosing to play with HeyReach. So the time was ideal for ICP expansion and repositioning.

January 2025: I officially joined full-time, and we started firing from all cylinders like an octopus with machine guns. We knocked out:

• A website update for our 3 key ICPs (agencies, sales teams, GTM engineers)

• Content initiatives like Outbound Outliers and opening more WoM co-distribution content models

• Motivated the company to become more active on LinkedIn (wrote about it here)

• Established our newsletter as a key communication channel and direct line to our users

• Started actively and consistently engaging with our organic ambassadors on LinkedIn via our company page (btw, the better and faster you do it, the more mentions you will have - I have data to prove it, just check our page)

Then we really got cooking:

• Low-hanging SEO fruits (e.g. comparison page and review articles)... we also started investing in SEO and LLMs in general. This delivers meaningful and consistent results month over month, while we figure out 2025 SEO overall

• We brought an agency to help with scripting and editing YouTube videos. Partnered with creators to create powerful videos together and co-share them too (some of them are our users or partners)

• Swag program sending merchandise people would wear in public, not just use to wash their car. We also did the entire flow right (surprise factor, personalized notes, etc)

• Unlocking inbound-led lead generation (wrote about it here). Basically, we would export all engagers across our posts using Trigify and move all this data into Clay to qualify them. For example, are they a current or former HeyReach user? Are they a LinkedIn connection already? Which segment do they fit into (agency, sales team, GTM, etc.)? Key company info like revenue, ICP match, team size, etc. In general, around 5%-15% of engagers qualify as true leads. Then our sales team gets high-quality warm leads, so it’s no longer cold outbound.

Meanwhile, the revenue team was also swinging:

• We went from 9% to 17% free-trial-to-paid conversion. Primarily thanks to a qualification flow powered by AI Agents. We needed to distinguish between total free trials and qualified free trials - specifically identifying which users were agencies, sales teams, or GTM engineers. This insight allowed us to create targeted approaches with either self-serve or human-led onboarding campaigns. This also marked the beginning of our Customer Success team. To be more specific, say an agency signs up for a free trial needing specific things like multiple workspaces for their clients and a white-label service, there’s a flow for that. Or, there’s a sales team of 3-4 people needing help on the GTM integrations side - there’s a flow for that too.

• Hiring Nadja as our Head of Sales and empowering her to excel at what she does best: converting high ACV deals from inbound efforts and starting to build robust outbound funnels.

From January to June 2025, we went from $2M to $6M ARR. I'd like to say it was all sunshine and roses, but we had challenges that hit harder than reality after college:

• Churn issues in Q4 2024 and early Q1 2025. We solved this by implementing a better cancellation process, offering counter-offers, mitigating involuntary churn, and enabling our Customer Success team to prevent churn proactively. By analyzing churn across different ICP tiers instead of looking at total numbers, we created tailored retention strategies that stabilized our churn rate to single digits.

• Lack of onboarding and product marketing → we honestly sacrificed this area. It still amazes me how we reached $6M ARR without proper onboarding. We only completed the first version at the end of Q2 this year. Our product-led growth motions are still far from where I want them to be, but we're gradually positioning ourselves to deliver improvements. The ultimate goal is to consistently grow from existing users by providing tremendous value from within the product. I love watching that net revenue retention grow, when you exclude acquisition completely.

• Data → our dream is to consolidate information from the very first brand touchpoint to active product usage (or not 😀) in one place. We want custom dashboards that provide clear action points with 100% accuracy and seamless integration with all our GTM and communication tools. We've made significant progress in the past 3 months, with just two more steps remaining before we reach the finish line. Btw, this has been one of the most annoying marathons I've ever run in my life.

Where do we go from here?

Our next target is $10M by the end of 2025. Can we do it? No idea, but let's find out.

We have exciting new features and product improvements on the horizon. I'm particularly thrilled about our upcoming Product Marketing initiatives. Ideally, using HeyReach for LinkedIn outreach will feel like visiting a high-end cocktail bar - either the bartender surprises you with the perfect drink before you decide what you want, or they're already handing you your usual as you sit down. I want to make the experience intuitive and personalized.

This is backed up with important features launches, like Workspaces going live mid-August. It’s a simpler way for agencies to manage clients, campaigns, senders, leads, and permissions - plus a much improved experience for their clients too. One feature down, a few more coming soon...

One of our latest investments: the Partner & Creator program. We're building an ecosystem of benefits and incentives for our partners to collaborate on even more exciting projects. This includes creating and distributing actionable content together, hosting webinars, and organizing events (we've already started co-hosting events in various cities with a very cool response). The program also offers more generous affiliate percentages and exclusive behind-the-scenes access to our tool.

You can see how this worked in practice for our Partner Program launch with the Workspaces plug-in here.

Finally, ads. I've been in marketing for over 10 years. I've consistently helped build strong organic channels and exposure… but I've realized I'm often fashionably late to the paid ads party. Not this time! I'm hunting for a Freelance Paid Ads Expert… I need a SaaS veteran who can deliver ROI and who has creative copywriting skills. I need someone who views traditional content approaches as suggestions rather than rigid rules - someone who can think outside the box. If you are or know one, contact me on LinkedIn.

So that's it – the story continues. But if you made it this far, congratulations! You now know more about HeyReach than most of my family knows about what I actually do for a living.

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If you want to explore more about HeyReach, here are some great resources:

• Outbound playbooks: https://www.heyreach.io/outbound-playbooks

• Clay templates: https://www.heyreach.io/clay-templates

• Make scenarios: https://www.heyreach.io/make-scenarios

• Crash course on prospecting and outbound copywriting tactics for LinkedIn:

Grab free templates (with pre-written messages) for your HeyReach campaigns here.

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