Customer Case Study: How Startup Development House Builds a Strong Customer Base with Woodpecker

Sandra Wilk - Senior Content Creator at Woodpecker
Startup Development House logo

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Agata from Startup Development House. She shared how they use Woodpecker to get new valuable clients with less effort.

If you run a software house, take a peek at their strategy – you might find some useful ideas that will improve the results of your outbound campaigns.

Let’s jump into the interview.

Who is Startup Development House? What do you guys do?

SDH is a custom software and product development company based in Warsaw, Poland.

Since 2015, we are all about supercharging tech-based businesses. Our mission is to deliver all-around support for startups at all stages of development. Our crafted set of services is particularly beneficial for startups at the early stage and for scaleups.

So far, we’ve partnered on more than 70 projects across 5 continents.

We provide end-to-end product development services: ideation, prototyping, UX/ UI design, app & web development, scrum team augmentation, quality assurance, and product management.

How did you start your company?

The story has begun while our founders – Alexander Stasiak, Marek Pałys and Jakub Krajewski, were running their first company.

At that time, they were in high need of finding an external company that will help them with their digital product development.

The problem that has arisen was that the market research showed there is no such company that understands startups’ needs and has a focus on users at the same time.

That is why they decided to start Startup Development House – a company that works in accordance with MVP and Lean Startup methodologies, offers services that allow for validating ideas quickly and testing prototypes with real users, but more importantly, gathers experts who are passionate about what they are doing.

The first clients appeared quickly. They were mostly friends and referred companies who knew that our founders have the knowledge of how to validate the business hypothesis within a limited budget.

The idea turned out to be a great success.

Who are your ideal customers?

We have four ideal groups of customers.

The first two groups consist of startups at an early stage of development. The first one is a startup that has an idea, secured initial funding and needs to validate the concept with real users. At this stage, we offer Product Discovery Workshops.

The second group are startups that have tested their prototype and are ready to develop MVP.

The third group are scale-ups that need an extra boost – here, we offer our product teams.

The last group are big corporations that aim to innovate faster.

What do you use Woodpecker for?

We use Woodpecker for automated campaigns for our prospects, especially for those that require a few consecutive messages. We also find Woodpecker helpful for sending ‘Thank you’ messages after our webinars.

We feel Woodpecker is particularly useful and efficient for campaigns in which we offer Product teams.

And how were you solving this problem before?

We’ve started our adventure with email campaigns with Woodpecker. We have not been using anything similar before.

How do you personalize your emails?

We love the snippet option. Most frequently, we use name, company, and one snippet created by us – for example Job position/platform/event.

How many prospects do you usually have in a single campaign?

Usually, we have around 200 contacts in one campaign.

What value do you see in following up with prospects? What’s your following up strategy?

Sometimes it might be easy to overlook some messages, they can disappear in the mailbox. Our strategy is to do 3-4 follow-ups. Sometimes one communication might not be encouraging, whereas the content in the 3rd message will make the recipient want to contact us immediately.

Do you A/B test? What do you A/B test?

We are not using A/B tests yet.

What results do you get with Woodpecker?

We are very satisfied with the results we are getting with Woodpecker. Our response rate is pretty high.

Our best reply rates are somewhere between 40-50%, and for one campaign it was even over 80%.

What we value the most is the relation of time and effort to results. It is more than satisfying.

Why did you choose our tool?

We decided to use Woodpecker because of the number of available functionalities, the possibility of personalization and the easy-to-use interface.

What have you gained by using Woodpecker?

Precious time. We can focus on other activities when Woodpecker contacts our desired customers.

If you were to pick one thing that you like the most about Woodpecker, what would it be?

Convenience! Woodpecker allows us to schedule when exactly the mail will be sent and remembers to do the follow-ups.