Understory Unfiltered: How Instantly Scaled to 35K+ Paying Customers

TLDR: Partnership-driven growth to 35K customers without investors

Felipe Arnguiz, Director of Business Development and Partnerships at Instantly, runs partnerships for a company with 35,000 paying customers and zero investors. The three-year-old email sequencing platform achieved this scale by maintaining a 100:1 developer hiring ratio and obsessing over deliverability above all else.

Listen to this episode to learn how Instantly's partnership-driven growth model scales without traditional sales teams, why their premium warmup pools deliver 200+ leads per week for top agencies, and how bootstrapped SaaS companies can compete against venture-backed competitors through relentless product focus.

Meet the guests: Felipe Arnguiz, Instantly's partnerships director

Felipe is the Director of Business Development and Partnerships at Instantly, a bootstrapped email sequencing platform with 35,000 paying customers. Before joining Instantly, Felipe spent 10 years running his own lead generation agency, making him one of the platform's earliest customers. His agency owner background gives him unique insight into what power users actually need versus what features sound impressive.

Today, Felipe bridges the gap between Instantly's product team and their agency partners, creating the VIP support program and partnership strategy that's driven much of the company's explosive growth.

Chapters

[00:30] From agency owner to Instantly insider: Felipe's journey as an early customer turned team member

[03:28] Building 35K+ paying customers in three years without investors or hype

[09:06] Humble founders who work until 6 AM: creating culture through example

[12:17] The 100:1 hiring ratio: interviewing 100 developers to hire one

[19:34] VIP support as product development: scaling founder-led feedback loops

[25:46] Deliverability obsession: premium warmup pools, ESP matching, and infrastructure first

[29:21] Partnership-led growth: the Swiss army knife approach to scaling without sales teams

[30:14] Bootstrapped vs. venture-backed: why rejecting investors accelerated growth

Key Insights

Deliverability trumps features every time in email sequencing tools.

Most SaaS companies build features customers won't use. Instantly took the opposite approach: obsess over the one thing that determines success or failure. "At the end of the day, if you just wanted to send emails, it's super easy. Like you just take an Excel sheet, you mail merge that and you can do it almost for free," Felipe explains.

Their entire product philosophy centers on one metric: getting more replies for customers. This means premium warmup pools that don't mix with spam domains, ESP matching for email provider-specific delivery optimization, and pre-warmed domains available for purchase. As we discuss in the episode, we've seen clients go from 30-40 leads per week to 200+ leads per week for the same accounts after switching to Instantly. When your core value proposition is measurable revenue impact, everything else becomes secondary.

Bootstrapped SaaS companies can outmaneuver venture-backed competitors through pure product focus.

Instantly deliberately rejected dozens of investor pitches to maintain their product-first culture. "When you raise money, that glory kind of blinds you. And you think you found product market fit or that you're awesome because you have like a few millions. But in reality, until you are really profitable, you haven't found product market fit," Felipe notes.

Without investor reporting requirements or pressure to hit arbitrary milestones, their team can implement customer feedback within days rather than quarters. They've watched competitors raise millions only to stop innovating after reaching initial traction. The bootstrapped advantage isn't just financial control; it's the ability to stay hungry and customer-obsessed while funded competitors get comfortable.

Extreme hiring standards create self-managing teams that scale without traditional management layers.

Instantly maintains a 100:1 interview ratio for developers and similar standards across all roles. Their hiring philosophy: find people who "over deliver without micromanagement" and can treat the company "like it was my own." This creates a workforce where individual contributors take complete ownership over outcomes rather than waiting for direction.

"The business school operates on its own without us or the managers most likely, because people are so committed to just functioning independently," Felipe explains. They avoid hiring managers who can't execute themselves, instead promoting individual contributors who become leaders naturally.

VIP support programs create better feedback loops than standard customer success models.

Most SaaS companies treat all customers equally in support queues. Instantly identified that their agency partners and power users needed different treatment: direct access to people who understand advanced use cases rather than tier-one support asking if they've "tried turning it on and off."

Their VIP support program serves dual purposes: exceptional experience for high-value customers and concentrated feedback from users who actually know what they're doing. "You want to talk to someone who fully understands what your business does and is well aware that you are very experienced in what you do. And if you're reporting a bug, it's because there is a bug," Felipe explains.

Partnership-led growth scales customer acquisition without traditional sales teams.

Rather than building inside sales teams, Instantly focused on partnerships with agencies and consultants who use their platform daily. Felipe's background as a lead generation agency owner before joining Instantly created immediate credibility with potential partners who knew he understood their challenges.

The partnership approach works because agencies become force multipliers: each successful agency partnership can represent dozens of end customers rather than individual deals. Felipe recalls how the Instantly team's responsiveness led to the partnership: "When I met these guys, they started implementing stuff so quickly that then we negotiated something and they were like, hey, why don't you join the team?"

Company culture beats compensation in attracting top talent.

Despite being a three-year-old company, Instantly attracts talent that could work anywhere by creating an environment where people want to work until 4 AM by choice, not obligation. The founders set this precedent: "If I work till 4 a.m., the CTO works till 6 or 7 a.m."

This isn't about burnout culture but about creating conditions where people are genuinely excited about what they're building. Key elements include humble leadership where founders wear $10 or $20 shirts, direct access to decision-makers, and immediate implementation of good ideas. "Everyone works so hard here that it's just contagious," Felipe explains.

Product simplicity wins over feature complexity in competitive SaaS markets.

Instantly describes themselves as "the Apple of sequencers" compared to "Android" competitors, focusing on intuitive design over feature bloat. Their development philosophy: "Don't just overcomplicate it, build products that people are not going to use, stay away from the fluff."

Many competitors add features that sound impressive but don't impact core outcomes. Instantly only builds features after seeing data that proves impact, like ESP matching, which they implemented after seeing Outlook deliverability issues rather than following industry hype.

Data-driven feature development prevents building what customers say they want versus what they actually use.

Instantly separates feedback between standard users and power users, recognizing that requests from inexperienced users can derail product development. "Sometimes those operators might not be the best at lead generation. So they will make feedback requests that I mean, the feature requests that probably are not aligned with what the power users want," Felipe explains.

They focus on features that impact the majority of users and that they would use themselves. Their development team regularly rejects hype-driven features unless they have data proving impact.

Want more insight on scaling bootstrapped SaaS companies through partnership strategies? Listen to the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to Understory's podcast for more insights on bootstrapped SaaS growth and partnership strategies.

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