Ever hear that you need to spend years meticulously coding the perfect SaaS before you dare ask a customer for a dollar? That’s the textbook strategy peddled by countless startup playbooks and self-anointed “growth hackers.” But what if that advice is more likely to drain your bank account than kickstart your success?
Meet Andre Heckle Jr., the entrepreneur who launched a $2 million ARR SaaS, List Kit, in just 87 days—without raising capital, without meticulously tweaking every button color, and without waiting to perfect some bulletproof backend. If that seems like entrepreneurial heresy, good. Because everything about his approach is a direct challenge to the traditional, slow, and often wasteful path most founders take.
Below, we’ll dissect Andre’s playbook in a series of core strategies. Think of this as a frank, unvarnished roadmap: productized services, competitor deconstruction, no free trials, co-founder synergy, cold email, big ad budgets, and a globally distributed team. By the end, you might re-evaluate everything you’ve been told about the “right” way to build your startup.
The first thing to understand is Andre’s obsession with making money before writing a line of code. Most devs want to spin up their own masterpiece, spending months of nights and weekends sifting through Stack Overflow. Then, after they finally launch, they scramble for paying customers—or discover they built the wrong product.
Andre’s tactic? He launched a productized service that masqueraded as a slick, automated SaaS on the surface, but was fulfilled by real humans behind the scenes. Why?
Sure, cynics might say, “That’s not a real SaaS if it’s done manually.” But ask yourself, which is better: a “fake SaaS” that sells and scales, or a “perfectly coded” platform nobody wants? Because only one of those scenarios keeps the lights on.
List Kit operates in a shark tank. Big names like Apollo already supply leads to countless B2B sales teams. Undoubtedly, people told him countless times: "That's already been done."
Andre’s approach: never fear your competition—learn from their flaws. He identified the biggest complaint about Apollo: their leads weren’t verified, leading to bounces and damaged email sender reputations. That was the Achilles’ heel.
So he built List Kit around verified leads. Simple, right? Instead of reinventing the wheel, he took the same wheel, reinforced the rim, and made sure it never went flat. Then he told everyone in the market, “Hey, if you’re sick of unverified leads, come over here.”
This is a massive lesson for any founder who thinks they need a genuinely “original” idea. You don’t. Just like how McDonald's dominates the fast-food industry, there's still plenty of room for successful local burger restaurants. They don't need to reinvent the burger - they just need to identify what McDonald's doesn't do well (maybe better quality meat, personalized service, or unique local flavors) and capitalize on that weakness.
For SaaS founders, free trials have become a kind of religious dogma. Conventional wisdom: “If you don’t offer a free trial, you’ll never get enough early traction.”
Andre calls nonsense. He argues that free trials attract freebie seekers, not serious buyers. Instead, List Kit offers a money-back guarantee. That might sound trivial, but the psychological difference is huge. You’re still lowering risk for the buyer, yet you’re also ensuring they pay right away. If they’re truly dissatisfied, they’ll ask for a refund—but that’s a small fraction compared to the people who convert, pay, and use the product for months.
Yes, free trials can work in certain SaaS categories, particularly if you monetize user activity or rely on large user counts. But for a platform like List Kit, which sells direct ROI in the form of validated leads, you don’t want to waste time with random dabblers vanishing the moment your paywall appears. By filtering for people ready to commit, you build a healthier subscriber base that’s less likely to churn out after “trying it free.”
One of List Kit's biggest secrets to success is having an exceptional co-founder team. While some might view multiple co-founders as complicated, Andre emphasizes it's crucial to have complementary skills, especially in SaaS. Each person brings unique expertise that's vital to the company's growth:
Andre emphasizes that building the right co-founder team starts with honest self-assessment. First, decide if you want to build a massive company or stay small. Then, identify your own skills and the gaps you need to fill. Look for partners in relevant communities - if you need marketing expertise, connect with marketers. While Andre considers himself an introvert, he stresses the importance of networking to find partners whose core values and vision align with yours. The team might have debates and disagreements like any relationship, but having complementary skills in marketing, sales, technology, and leadership has been crucial to List Kit's success.
You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody sees it, you're sunk. List Kit chose to focus deeply on cold email as their primary channel. Instead of spreading themselves thin across multiple tactics, they mastered one approach. Here's how:
No fancy copy, no manipulative tactics. Just a direct offer that instantly showcases the product’s value. It’s the classic freemium approach disguised in a single cold email. Ask yourself: if someone gave you 50 legit leads that might close a big deal for you, would you say no?
After validating their cold email strategy, List Kit scaled up with paid advertising, spending around $300-400 per day—At this scale, its totally a different game.
How does a $2 million ARR company afford 40 staffers without burning cash at an alarming rate? Simple. They recruited internationally:
Notice: This isn’t about exploiting cheap labor. It’s about creating a win-win: pay above-average wages in those regions, secure top talent, and keep your operational costs sustainable. For a B2B SaaS, employing a global team helps you staff more robustly—spreading tasks like customer support and QA testing—while avoiding the monstrous monthly payroll that cripples many early-stage companies.
After hearing about how quickly List Kit soared to seven figures, you might assume it was a lucky break, a special hack, or maybe the perfect alignment of the stars. In reality, it was seven years of Andre grinding through other entrepreneurial ventures, perfecting his cold email strategies, and accumulating the right relationships.
His mantra: When things are going wrong, get even more consistent. When things are going right, you double down. Too many founders sabotage themselves by coasting once they see a little success. Andre’s firm belief is that the moment you see results is the moment you lean in harder, because that’s when you’ve validated your efforts. There’s no time to lounge around and gloat when the market’s momentum is on your side.
So what’s the big takeaway for your own startup dreams? It might look like this:
If that sounds too contrarian or unpolished, remember that “polish” rarely pays the bills. Actually shipping a product that solves a real need, collecting revenue early, and scaling up with unstoppable force—that is what keeps the lights on. So before you invest more cash into a half-baked idea or sit around waiting for your “perfect” MVP, consider a simpler, scrappier route. Just like Andre did.
The path Andre took with List Kit isn’t complicated; it’s just unconventional. He broke some rules, upset a few conventional thinkers, and charged ahead with a method that flipped the script on how SaaS “should” be built. The results speak for themselves: over $2 million in ARR, a global staff of 40, loyal customers who get exactly what they asked for, and a brand that thrives on the fact that it isn’t a “me-too” copy of every other lead-generation service.
If your goal is to build a top-tier SaaS, here’s the question you should ask yourself: Are you clinging to the standard approach because it’s truly best for your business, or because everyone else tells you that’s how it’s always been done? If it’s the latter, maybe it’s time you try something different—something that might just get you to $1 million in 87 days, or at least a lot closer than if you’d never tried at all. Because the biggest risk, especially in software, is playing it safe.
Skip the guesswork and take the fast lane—just like Andre did. At Startino, we help founders build, launch, and scale AI-driven products that attract paying customers from Day One. If you’re ready for an unfair advantage, let’s talk. Reach out now and let’s map out your path to a thriving SaaS.
