.mk Startup of the Month [November, 2024]:
What is HeyReach?
HeyReach is an agency-first LinkedIn outreach tool that allows you to use multiple senders on the same outreach sequence, and a unified inbox to manage everything in one place. It is specially designed for the needs of agencies that require large scaling and effective management of multiple campaigns.With an initial investment of half a million dollars, Howitzer started in 2021 as a student initiative. Three years after pivoting in HeyReach, the Macedonian startup is profiled as one of the few players on the market with its own unique product that generates annual earnings of $2.4 million.
Existing tools often do not meet the specific needs of agencies, such as large scaling and effective management of multiple campaigns. HeyReach solves this through a multi-account principle, by allowing to connect and coordinate multiple LinkedIn profiles to simultaneously manage an unlimited number of campaigns.
Today, HeyReach’s goal is more than clear – to become the most powerful and extensive LinkedIn automation software on the market by the end of 2025, and to be the fist thing that comes to mind to any sales team when it comes to LinkedIn as an outbound channel.
Nikola Velkovski, one of the co-founders of the company and its CEO, reveals that just last year HeyReach was on the verge of bankruptcy, but managed to pull through by changing its focus and approach.
It’s funny to think that last July we were 2 months away from bankruptcy, and today we have a company generating $2.4M ARR, and growing at 30% per month. Things sure look completely different now. I can confidently say that one of the most important things is finding product-market fit. Product-market fit (PMF), in my opinion, is the state in which you have centered the ICP (the user), the feature-set (the product) and the distribution,” explains Nikola.
“Before a company has a PMF,” Nikola adds, “nothing seems to be working, but after you achieve that goal – everything works like a charm.“
“The most important lesson I’ve learned is – to focus on profitability and finding PMF, as fast as you can. Understandably, there is a catch here too. Getting to that PMF means you have to move very quickly, execute swiftly, and learn on the fly. That sense of urgency, and the complete commitment to understanding exactly what you’re dealing with, are key to getting that PMF,” Nikola explains.
Each piece of the puzzle has its own meaning
Asked if he would change anything about Howitzer and HeyReach’s journey so far, Nikola says he wouldn’t change a thing, because all the pieces of the puzzle have had an important role to play.
“Everything was completely new, and I feel like everything was meant to happen the way it did. Whether it happened just to teach us a lesson, or to give us valuable experience – everything had its own impact. But throughout the whole journey, we also made many mistakes. If I were to start from scratch – I would definitely focus on product quality more. With that, I would predict scaling in a much earlier way – in other words, I would work mostly with seniors and focus on the development side from the very beginning,” adds Nikola.
That road has brought them to an annual income of over two million dollars. How did they manage to accomplish that? According to him, it’s all thanks to “persistence, learning from mistakes, iteration, less planning but more concrete strategizing, and most important of all – a sense of urgency.”
“He not busy being born is busy dying,”– Bob Dylan. In general, I have noticed that founders like to delay the execution of strategies. In doing so, they get stuck for a long time in the planning phase. This is quite an interesting psychological effect, because when you constantly think and plan about realizing something, you get these mini dopamine hits, and you’re under the influence of some type of “Schrodinger effect” where you don’t know if the strategy is going to work or not, but you still feel that you are doing something “productive” and you have something that you are looking forward to,” Nikola emphasizes.
As a young entrepreneur, one of the main things he has realized is that Macedonian entrepreneurs often fall into the so-called “comfort zone” trap, from which it is difficult to get out.
“I have noticed that Macedonian startups generally lack a sense of urgency, and they act as if the world is standing still and waiting for the next big thing that’s, coincidentally, them themselves are developing. Also, compared to other startup ecosystems – we are dreaming too small,” he adds.
VC money vs self-funding
The unique angle for HeyReach is that as a company, it has seen both segments of funding – both bootstrapping and equity raising. HeyReach is fully bootstrapped, and they have received no outside capital for it, while Howitzer is backed by venture capital funds.
HeyReach will likely remain a fully bootstrapped product, and we won’t raise capital, but honestly, if it wasn’t for the investment in Howitzer, if the pivot didn’t happen, and if we didn’t make all the mistakes that we did – HeyReach wouldn’t exist. In our case, both the initial investment and the trust from the investors played an equally important role in our entire journey,” says Nikola.
He muses how both sides have their PROs and CONs. “In our case – if we hadn’t taken an investment, there was no way we would have succeeded in making a company at 22 years of age. All the mistakes that we made, helped us learn valuable lessons. Fortunately, we have investors who believed in us from the very beginning; they have never interfered in the decisions of how to run the company. In my opinion – this is the best type of investor, because all you get is advice, support, open doors and plenty of connections,” he says.
Nikola has another valuable piece of advice to share, this time aimed at startups that are hoping to get investments – if you expect investors to “lead you on the right path”, do the hard part of the work for you, or tell you the right decision in any given situation – you’ll be sorely mistaken.
“In general, investors do not have the practical (domain) knowledge that you need, and the best support you can get (from them) is finance, trust, non-interference in business decisions, and connections,” emphasized Nikola.
San Francisco as the world’s largest startup accelerator
Nikola recently spent several months in San Francisco, a city he describes as “the biggest startup accelerator”.
“There are 7-8 startup events a day, everyone is completely open to advice, help, support, the ideas and concepts discussed are light years ahead of anything I’ve seen in Europe – literally ideal for tech startups,” he says.
Personally, he feels that San Francisco has completely changed him – both as a person and as an entrepreneur.
“It feels like in those 2 months have helped me mature by at least 2 or 3 years. When you see what’s possible, how people think, how high they can dream, you’ll understand why the biggest and craziest things come from there. Literally everything that is tech oriented in the last 50 years has come from that 100km2 area,” says Nikola, adding that here (Europe) the advice for every entrepreneur is “go to San Francisco, be among those people, visit those events, and be completely curious and open-minded about all things.”
Last month, HeyReach also won the “Startup of the Year” award. For Nikola this award is also a testimony to all the changes that he himself experienced together with the company.
“I was a more reckless all-in-guerilla type of founder 3 years ago, but now I find myself handling certain situation more maturely. Or, in the words of Iliya: 2-3 years ago we were playing “Don’t Get Angry”, but now we are playing chess.
An additional reason for all the changes is the pressure of rapid growth. When you have a company in a hyper-growth state, you are simply forced to grow quickly and evolve in many segments for which you are not ready at all. Otherwise, the company will outgrow you, and you will become obsolete,” emphasizes Nikola.
“There’s this huge shift from a website design to solving tax structures and IP capitalization (which 5-6 months ago I didn’t even know what it meant). For example – at the beginning of the summer we had a team of 16 people, currently we are 27 people. I haven’t personally met several of the people who work with us,” he says, adding that one of the examples is that the challenges and problems he is currently solving are totally different from those from a few months ago, let alone the once that go back as several years.
