Expandi’s $10M ARR SaaS Playbook: A Deep Dive into Their Tech Stack by Michel Lieben 🧠

In a recent LinkedIn post, Michel Lieben 🧠 highlights the comprehensive technology stack that powered Expandi’s impressive journey to $10,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), achieved through a bootstrapped approach. Lieben breaks down the essential tools and platforms used across various departments, offering a detailed blueprint for SaaS growth.

Founder-Led Content Strategy Fuels Early Growth

Michel Lieben 🧠 emphasizes the foundational role of content in Expandi’s success, particularly the initial founder-led strategy. He notes the significant personal brand leverage of co-founder Stefan Smulders, who brought a substantial existing following on LinkedIn and Twitter to the company’s efforts. As Lieben 🧠 points out:

Expandi bootstrapped its way to $10,000,000 ARR. They shared the entire stack they use to run their SaaS ↓

To scale this content engine, the team has since expanded their efforts beyond the founders. Lieben 🧠 details the specific tools supporting this strategy:

Content Ideation and Visuals

The content stack includes Scripe for ideation and planning, ensuring a structured approach to content creation. For visual assets, Figma is employed, a common choice for creating professional and engaging graphics.

SEO and Performance Tracking

For search engine optimization and website performance insights, Expandi utilizes Google Search Console. The content management system (CMS) of choice is WordPress. Keyword research and competitive analysis are handled by industry-standard tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, as detailed by Michel Lieben 🧠.

Leveraging Expandi for Outbound Success

Unsurprisingly, Expandi’s own product, a social selling platform, is central to their outbound strategy. Lieben 🧠 explains how the team uses their tool for critical outreach functions.

Their product, Expandi, is a social selling platform, and it is their ‘most-used’ platform for outreach.

These functions include monitoring social media for intent signals, sending connection requests, inviting prospects to events, and managing direct messages (DMs) and InMails. For sophisticated data needs that power this outreach, Clay is utilized for use-cases such as agentic lead search, niche data sourcing, and data enrichment.

Product Development and Funnel Optimization

Michel Lieben 🧠 also sheds light on the tools used for product development and conversion. For prototyping, Expandi employs Lovable for interface experimentation and bolt.new for technical prototypes. Cursor is used to accelerate code shipping.

In terms of production data and insights, BIGQUERY serves as the data warehouse, with Looker Studio used for product analytics. To manage their high volume of monthly signups, Google Analytics and Mixpanel are key for tracking website and product metrics. Conversion strategies highlighted by Lieben 🧠 include leveraging LinkedIn webinars and using the Expandi platform itself to re-engage leads by catching social signals.

Sales, Finance, and Support Stacks

The sales process, which has successfully closed major clients like Siemens and IBM, relies on a robust stack. As Michel Lieben 🧠 outlines, this includes HubSpot as the CRM, Zoom for video conferencing, Calendly for seamless meeting scheduling, and Fireflies.ai for automated meeting notes and recordings.

Financially, the stack comprises Twinfield for accounting, Stripe for payment processing and subscriptions, and ProfitWell by Paddle for subscription analytics.

Customer support operations are managed through Intercom, while internal team communications are handled via Discord, and external collaboration uses Slack. For internal automation, Zapier and n8n are the chosen tools.

Michel Lieben 🧠 concludes by posing a forward-looking question to his audience: “What would you add to this stack to reach $20M ARR?” This invites further discussion on scaling strategies within the SaaS community.