How Featurebase Grew from 0 to $4K MRR in a Competitive Niche

I was browsing our SaaS database to find interesting companies to analyze, and when I came across Featurebase’s growth, I knew I had to research it and write a case study.

In a crowded space, Bruno Hiis and his co-founder Robi bootstrapped their user feedback tool, Featurebase, from 0 to a bit over $4,000 MRR at this point.

While it took a few years to get traction, it appears that they’ve finally gained product-market fit and figured out their approach to growth, which I’ll break down in this post.

The Growth Timeline

Featurebase was launched at the very start of the year in 2021 in communities like Reddit and IndieHackers. It allows users to add a feedback board or roadmap to their site (among other features).

While they got traffic, it didn’t convert, because the people in those communities (mostly makers) are more likely to build their own feedback tool than buy one for the most part.

But cold email outreach did produce some success.

By specifically emailing companies (with personalized pitches) that they thought could use this type of tool, they were able to get a handful of signups and get some feedback.

From my research, it doesn’t look like they are still using cold email as a major marketing channel, although I do think it could work well (especially since they can identify users of competing products since they are public facing tools).

The graph below shows the main branch search volume (i.e. for “Featurebase”) over time, along with a projection of MRR based on a few public posts where Bruno shared how the SaaS was doing (1, 2).

While that’s not exactly the most robust MRR model, they are hopefully on pace to hit the $10,000 MRR mark in the middle of 2025.

Note: There was a significant homepage redesign around May 2022 that also came with improvements to the product. You can see that search growth really started to speed up around that point.

How Featurebase Gets Customers

This is the most interesting part to me - how does a SaaS get users in a fairly competitive niche?

We already saw that community marketing wasn’t likely to work.

The founders are fairly active on Twitter, but it appears that it doesn’t work that well considering it’s not their main focus.

Instead, the big 3 channels that Featurebase targets are:

• Referral

• Organic search traffic

• Paid search traffic

In particular, they focus on bottom-of-the-funnel search traffic (i.e. ready to buy/use a product), which is what I’ll go into more detail on.

Referral Traffic

Most SaaS companies can’t get such a high portion of their traffic from referral traffic, but this kind of product is different.

Because Featurebase lets users create a public feedback board and/or roadmap, it gives the opportunity to add a link back to Featurebase (e.g. “Powered by Featurebase”).

So existing customers like nextui.org, and magicui.design, that have other SaaS companies as users, will essentially advertise Featurebase to their own users.

I think the founders noticed this, because they launched an affiliate program in March 2023 offering 35% commission for a year to encourage any other referrals.

The important note though is that this only works once you have users. It should continue to refer more and more new customers to Featurebase, which lets them focus more on the product at this point.

Organic Search Traffic

Featurebase got the vast majority of its customers from organic search traffic.

While it’s not exactly a huge amount, their search traffic is growing steadily according to SEMRush (which is probably underestimating by 3-4x here).

There are 3 main tactics that the team at Featurebase has employed so far to get this valuable bottom of the funnel organic traffic.

1. Being the alternative

Acquiring a user that is unhappy with their current option (or top prospect) is one of the easiest times to sell to someone (see my post on SaaS alternatives keywords for more).

In the first reports published by Bruno, he emphasized how important keywords like “Canny.io alternative” were for getting customers.

If you scroll to the bottom of the Featurebase website, you’ll see links to a customized page targeting “(competitor) alternative” for several big SaaS companies.

They rank on page 1 for most of these on Google, some at the bottom, and some near the top.

It was less competitive for these terms a few years ago, so I suspect they used to rank even better.

I really do think they could combine this approach with personalized cold outreach by identifying users of Canny (just search for “powered by Canny”) for example, and then linking to their customized page.

One big takeaway is that they focus on their advantage on their alternative pages. For example, they are much more affordable than Canny, which has continually shifted upstream to target enterprise customers.

2. Ranking for (Brand) Pricing pages

There’s one other type of search term that I can see that Featurebase has focused on.

When someone searches for “(Brand) pricing”, they're somewhere in the process of deciding to buy that product or not. It’s a great time to present your competing product, emphasizing its strengths.

Featurebase has a page for all their competitors. For example: Canny pricing.

They rank only behind the company itself. These are usually pretty easy terms to rank for. The usually top competition are review sites like G2, which are authoritative, but have weak content when it comes to these search terms.

While it doesn’t apply here, this tactic is especially effective if you’re in an industry where there’s no public pricing page and you have to contact for details

3. Finding keywords that competitors haven’t targeted

Outside of those 2 specific tactics, Featurebase also ranks well for long-tail terms like:

• “feature voting best practices” - 1,900 monthly searches

• “feature request management tool” - 140 monthly searches

It’s not always easy to find long tail terms with decent volume and low competition, but sometimes you can find a few which are really important for an early stage SaS.

Sometimes you can find specific keywords that competitors don’t feel are worth their time. 

In the latter search above, which is a great bottom of the funnel keyword with commercial intent, Canny is the only competitor that even bothered to make a specific page for this keyword, giving Featurebase the chance to rank high.

One way to find these keywords is to plug all your competitors into Ahrefs or SEMRush and look for terms that are low difficulty that only 1 of your competitors is targeting.

Paid Search Traffic

Featurebase has also been conducting paid search ads on Google for the last year or so.

All their keywords are relatively low volume, and cost a decent amount to bid on, but likely convert really well. It’s important to optimize your conversion rate before doing too many paid ad experiments.

They are focusing on a few types of terms.

First, they are targeting “(brand) alternative” terms, just like they are with organic:

In addition, some of their competitors that are smaller brands likely don’t have much experience with paid advertising and aren’t bidding on their own brand names.

This gives Featurebase the opportunity to show their ad on top of brand searches for some competitors:

These types of ads convert better than most would think.

What You Can Learn From Featurebase

After all that, there are 2 big takeaways that you may be able to apply to your SaaS.

Start With Bottom of the Funnel

Any middle or top of the funnel marketing takes a long time to produce results. In some cases, it can take several months or years to go from problem awareness to being ready to buy.

So max out your bottom of funnel traffic first.

If your SaaS has low authority (in terms of SEO), then focus on keywords that are relatively low competition. We’ve gone over a few common types that can work in most niches:

• (competitor) alternative

• (competitor) pricing

Get Your Customers to Be Your Best Affiliates

If your product can be seen by your customer’s users, you have a great opportunity to get referral traffic.

Here are some examples of products that can use this tactic:

1. Email Marketing Services: "Sent with ConvertKit"

2. Website Builders: "Created with Wix"

3. Survey Tools: "Powered by SurveyMonkey"

4. Payment Processors: "Payments by Stripe"

5. Video Conferencing Tools: "Hosted on Zoom"

6. E-commerce Platforms: "Powered by Shopify"

7. CRM Software: "Managed by Salesforce"

8. Social Media Sharing Tools: "Shared via Buffer"

9. Content Management Systems: "Powered by WordPress"

You obviously need some users first to leverage this channel, but knowing that it’s an option down the line means that your first users don’t have to be particularly profitable, which gives you more options (e.g. paid advertising).