Stefan Smulders
Co-founder & CSO, Expandi. On 1 show, 1 appearance, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@SmuldersStefan ↗LinkedIn ↗expandi.io ↗
Stefan Smulders is a Dutch entrepreneur who bootstrapped the LinkedIn automation platform Expandi to over $10 million in ARR without external funding. He previously co-founded website visitor tracking tool LeadExpress.
Everything Stefan Smulders said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Expandi artificially boosted its content reach by self-upvoting articles using VPNs
“And we used different VPNs to access it through different IPs and upvote all these articles to get a much more reach.”
Expandi operates at roughly a 70% profit margin across its total revenue
“No, we are very profitable.
We have an
I think from all the revenue of 70, 70% is profit.”
Bootstrapped Expandi hit $3.1M ARR in year one and $7M recently
“Our run rate. We hit in our Stripe account mid-November, 2019 at zero dollars. Within one year, we closed at somewhere around 3.1 million. Last year we hit six million in annual run rate, and recently we reached a seven million.”
Scraping competitor Facebook groups yielded a 72% LinkedIn connection acceptance rate
“We scraped these Facebook groups. I think at that time point we used Phantombuster to gather these emails and convert them into LinkedIn profiles. And then we uploaded that CSV file into Expondi. These are results of that specific campaign. And with a more tha…”
Expandi reached $1M ARR relying solely on manual content distribution, ignoring SEO
“We invested a lot in manual content distribution, and up towards the one million in annual run rate, we did not even optimize any article in terms of a SEO.”
Targeting LinkedIn post engagers yields a 70% to 75% connection acceptance rate
“And on average if you decide to use it and want to follow up people on LinkedIn with this strategy it still achieves Kind of a 70, 75% acceptance rate.”
Smulders built Expandi entirely bootstrapped without raising outside venture capital
“No, it's all bootstrapped.”
Expandi generates $300K monthly from direct subscriptions and $150K from white-labels
“We have 300 K revenue at the moment per month from people who are paying straight with their card on the website. And somewhere around 150 K. Coming from agencies and white labels.”
Expandi sees $35,000 to $40,000 in monthly churn and account downgrades
“So the, I think it's somewhere around the turns and downgrades, 35 K a month, 40 K a month.”
Expandi added $68,000 in net new monthly recurring revenue last month
“Yeah, for example, last month, in total, we wrote with 68,000 dollars monthly recurring, and so maybe we go with 110, and then 40 was downgrazed in terms, and then 70 was the goal.”
Expandi is investing profits into new products to reduce its LinkedIn dependency
“Apart in the company bank account, we invested a lot of things in the beginning with our own money, so we took that back as well, and we investing at the moment a lot in in new products, so we hired some additional developers who are focusing on developing new…”
Expandi hit $1M in revenue within six months of its 2019 launch
“We did a lot of things in distribution, so I tried to wrap up a couple of practical strategies we used, which drove us very easy to run a million in revenue within six months.”
Expandi funded its public launch by pre-selling $50K to 60 beta users
“From there on we thought maybe it's a good idea to approach all these 160 Better users we had to do them an offer, an annual offer, and with our agency experiences, we could help them with designing kind of a sequences, so that they could get results, and 60 o…”
Expandi reached 50,000 to 60,000 unique monthly website visitors within one year
“At a certain point, we reached about 50, 60 K unique website visitors per month, and I think that was After a year. Something like that.”
Smulders claims 90% of Expandi's revenue is generated from inbound leads
“I think 90% of all our revenue came from inbound.”
Expandi pivoted to target only LinkedIn agencies before its 2019 launch
“So after, and I think it was September, we decided before we launched it globally, mid November, 2019. To focus on the global market and only on LinkedIn agencies”
Expandi reached $445,000 in monthly recurring revenue by April 2021
“Last month we closed on 445 K dollar a monthly recurring revenue.”
Expandi hit a $1 million annual revenue run rate in June 2020
“In June, 2020, we did one million annual.”
Smulders personally ran over 700 product demos for agencies in five months
“So in the beginning, I ran more than 700 demos in five months with only agencies myself to understand Why are they making a decision to pick Expondi and not one of our competitors to have a better understanding about how we can position Expondi.”
Expandi drives approximately 300 trial signups per week through its website
“We have somewhere around 300 signups per week on our website. They are not, they start trialing with the seven days trial, and then we hope to convert as many as we can, and the other revenue stream is that we provide white labels, and they are exclusively for…”
Smulders: Expandi manages over 10,000 active LinkedIn accounts
“We managing more than 10,000 active accounts in the expand the software along all the user ways, so including the white list.”
Expandi has 155 white-label partner agencies and roughly 2,000 direct subscribers
“We have 155 white labels running, so that are actually the customers, and we have somewhere around 2000, I think 1970 or so people who are paying a subscription on the site, but they can also manage more LinkedIn account, of course.”
Expandi attracts 14,000 to 15,000 weekly unique visitors to its website
“We have more than five, 14, 15,000 unique visitors per week on our website.”
The other half of the tape: Stefan Smulders's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 4 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Theuma 3Nathan Latka 1
Statements about Stefan Smulders, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 8
2023 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Stefan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-founder & CSO, Expandi | 1 +1 | 28 | — | full record on Top Founders → |