Instead of fighting with hostile community members who hated vendors, Spectora's founders consistently responded with helpful, non-promotional answers. This persistent, positive engagement eventually won over the harshest critics, demonstrating their long-term commitment to the industry and turning detractors into allies.
Facing a skeptical, older demographic, Spectora's founders built trust by taking a genuine interest in prospects' businesses and personal lives, actively avoiding product talk. This "anti-sell" strategy created a positive long-term impression, turning skeptics into fans and customers years later.
Co-founder Kevin Wagstaff started a separate blog teaching home inspectors marketing and SEO a full year before Spectora's launch. This built trust, credibility, and an audience, giving them a significant advantage when they eventually introduced their SaaS product.
The informal, high-energy culture that worked for the first 15 employees began to fail as the team grew to 25-30 people. The founders learned they waited too long to formalize processes like KPIs and structured check-ins, leading to misaligned expectations and poor hires.
Instead of just selling software, Spectora offered paid SEO audits and website building. This generated early revenue and built deep relationships with initial customers, with five of the first ten converting from agency clients to SaaS users. This service later became 10% of their revenue.
While interviews yielded feature ideas, observing inspectors in the field ("ride-alongs") revealed the true bottleneck: hours spent writing reports at home. This insight allowed Spectora to ignore superficial requests and focus on the core workflow efficiency problem, which became their key marketing pillar.
A key prospect tested the founder's commitment by requesting a demo at an absurd time. Agreeing without hesitation impressed the prospect, who then championed Spectora within his exclusive mastermind group. This single act of dedication directly led to 50-75 sign-ups from experienced users.
Despite success, founder Kevin Wagstaff felt like an "imposter" as the company scaled beyond $10M ARR. He recognized his strengths were in the early, scrappy "bias to action" phase, not managing a larger organization. He proactively brought in a seasoned CEO better suited for the next stage of growth.