Episode Details

850 meetings. Sleeping in his car. Flying from Spain to knock on doors without appointments. Oscar Rubio's founder selling journey proves that extreme persistence can validate demand that digital outreach completely misses. Founders will hear how Lodgerin grew from zero to 1.2 million euros in annual revenue through startup sales grit.

Oscar reveals why 8 years of manual service delivery was the best validation for his SaaS product, how his first customer came back asking for something completely different than what he pitched, and the founder-led sales approach that turned university referrals into a compounding growth engine. His early-stage sales lessons show why physically showing up beats cold email every time.

Lodgerin is a bootstrapped SaaS platform helping universities and corporations manage student and employee housing. Oscar grew it to 1.2M euros with 14% EBITDA margins before raising 400K euros after 955 investor meetings.

This episode is brought to you by:

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🔑 Key Lessons

• 🤝 Founder selling can unlock markets cold email never will: Oscar held 850 in-person meetings across Spain and the US, showing up without appointments and sleeping in motels to prove demand that digital outreach failed to surface.
• 🛠️ Launch your MVP knowing it will break: Lodgerin's first product lacked an availability calendar, causing thousands of cancelled bookings in one quarter. That missing feature would never have surfaced without real users.
• 🎯 Your first customer may want something different: Oscar pitched housing to Comillas University, but they returned months later asking for incident management. Listening to that unexpected request opened Lodgerin's first real contract.
• 🔄 Manual service delivery builds unbeatable product knowledge: Eight years of running relocation services gave Oscar firsthand knowledge of every pain point, making his founder selling pitch far more credible than any startup built from scratch.
• 💰 Bootstrap to positive unit economics before approaching investors: Oscar grew to 1.2M euros with 14% EBITDA margins before raising 400K euros. Real revenue and profitability attracted aligned investors after 955 meetings.

Chapters

• Introduction
• What Lodgerin does
• Starting as a relocation services company in 2013
• COVID hits and revenue vanishes overnight
• Digitizing 8 years of processes on office walls
• Revenue growth: 171K to 420K to 1.2M euros
• Building software as a non-technical founder
• The first MVP and the availability calendar mistake
• 850 founder selling meetings and knocking on doors
• What kept Oscar going through 850 rejections
• Landing the first customer at Comillas University
• Raising 400K euros after 955 investor meetings
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/436
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email