This is a post about growing slowly. Not because we wanted to — because that's what actually happened. I'm writing it because most content about SaaS growth in Russia either pretends it's easy or focuses on the extreme outliers. This is neither.
The product
clickfraud.ru is a service that detects and filters invalid clicks on contextual advertising. The problem is real: advertisers in Russia lose 10–30% of their advertising budget to bots, competitor clicks, and click farms. Our product integrates with advertising accounts and identifies which clicks are fraudulent.
We started building it because we saw the problem from the inside — managing advertising budgets for e-commerce businesses and noticing consistent patterns of invalid traffic that no one was accounting for.
Months 1–6: almost nothing
Revenue in the first six months was close to zero. Not because the product didn't work — it did — but because we had no idea how to talk to potential customers about it. We were engineers explaining click fraud to marketing managers who had never heard the term.
What changed: we stopped explaining the technology and started showing the money. "You're losing X rubles per month to this. Here's the number." That's a conversation marketing managers can have with their CFOs.
What actually moved the needle
- Publishing on Habr — not marketing content, but honest technical explanations of how click fraud works. Several clients came directly from these articles.
- Direct outreach to e-commerce companies in our network who were already spending significant budgets on contextual advertising.
- A state grant from the Foundation for Innovation Assistance (8M RUB), which gave us runway to build features without pressure to grow at all costs.
The plateau problem
Around 200K RUB/month we hit a plateau that lasted nearly a year. The product was good, retention was reasonable, but new client acquisition had stalled. We tried paid channels briefly — they didn't work for a product that requires explaining a problem most buyers don't know they have.
We eventually broke through by building integrations with advertising platforms that our target clients were already using. This made the onboarding conversation shorter: instead of explaining click fraud abstractly, we could say "connect your Yandex.Direct account, we'll show you what's happening."
What we don't do
We don't run paid advertising. We don't use aggressive email sequences. We don't have a sales team. The entire GTM is content, organic search, and referrals. This is slow. It's also sustainable — our cost of customer acquisition is very low, and clients who find us through organic search or referrals churn significantly less than clients who come through any paid channel we've tried.
Slow growth is not failure. Burning cash to grow fast and then having no margin to fix the product is failure.
— notes from the monthly review, 2022
The honest numbers
Peak monthly revenue: 430K RUB. At our current MRR, the business is profitable without venture capital. The growth chart is not a hockey stick — it's a staircase with long flat sections between the steps. That's what real bootstrapped SaaS looks like.
