How Expandi Hit $10M ARR Without Funding: Complete Tech Stack

How Expandi Hit $10M ARR Without Funding: Complete Tech Stack

Expandi bootstrapped its way to $10,000,000 ARR without raising a single dollar of venture capital.

As a social selling platform that helps businesses automate LinkedIn outreach, Expandi practices what they preach. Their growth came from the exact strategies their product enables: founder-led content, signal-based outbound, and systematic lead conversion.

Stefan Smulders and his co-founders shared their entire GTM tech stack with us. What stands out is how lean it is. Roughly 25 tools power a business that competes with well-funded alternatives and closes enterprise logos like Siemens and IBM.

Here's the complete breakdown of every tool behind their $10M ARR engine.

1. Content: Founder-Led Distribution

Expandi's content strategy started with what every bootstrapped company has available: the founders themselves.

Stefan Smulders built an audience of 24,000+ LinkedIn followers and 37,000+ Twitter followers before scaling the content playbook to the broader team. This founder-led approach meant zero paid distribution costs in the early days while building genuine credibility in the social selling space.

Today, their team posts consistently to multiply that reach.

Scripe handles their content ideation and planning. The platform helps generate ideas based on what's resonating in their space and organizes their publishing calendar so content goes out consistently rather than sporadically.

Figma powers their visual asset creation. LinkedIn posts with custom graphics consistently outperform text-only content, and Figma gives their team the flexibility to create carousels, infographics, and branded visuals without requiring a dedicated designer for every piece.

Want to see how your LinkedIn posts will look before publishing? Try our post previewer:

LinkedIn Post Previewer Tool

SEO Stack

Google Search Console provides insights around their website's performance. They use it to identify which queries drive traffic, spot indexing issues, and understand how Google sees their content.

WordPress serves as their content management system. It's the foundation for their blog and resource pages, giving them full control over their SEO without the limitations of closed platforms.

Semrush and Ahrefs handle their keyword research. These tools show which terms their audience searches for, what competitors rank for, and where opportunities exist to capture organic traffic.

2. Outbound: Eating Their Own Cooking

Expandi's outbound motion runs on their own product. This is the ultimate credibility signal: they use Expandi as their most-used platform for outreach.

Their outbound workflows include:

-Monitoring intent signals on social media

-Sending connection requests to target prospects

-Event invitations for webinars and demos

-Direct messages and InMails to warm leads

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When someone engages with their content, views their profile, or shows buying signals, Expandi surfaces that activity so the team can follow up with context.

Data & Enrichment

Clay serves as their data operations center. They use it for:

1. Agentic lead search to find prospects matching specific criteria

2. Niche data sourcing for hard-to-find contact information

3. Waterfall enrichment that checks multiple data providers to maximize coverage

Clay's flexibility lets them build custom data workflows that standard platforms can't handle. When one data provider comes up empty, the waterfall automatically checks the next source.

Clay acts as a centralised platform to gather contact data at scale (among a lot of other things).

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Looking for direct phone numbers to enable multi-channel outreach?

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3. Product: Rapid Prototyping Stack

Expandi's product team moves fast by using AI-powered development tools for experimentation before committing resources to full builds.

Lovable handles interface and app experimentations. When the team wants to test a new feature concept or user flow, they can quickly generate working prototypes to validate ideas before investing engineering time.

bolt.new builds technical prototypes rapidly. This lets them test backend functionality and integrations without pulling developers off production work.

Cursor accelerates their code shipping. The AI-powered editor helps developers write, review, and debug code faster, reducing the time from concept to deployed features.

BigQuery serves as their data warehouse. All product usage data, customer information, and business metrics flow into BigQuery for analysis and reporting.

Looker Studio transforms that data into product insights. The team builds dashboards that show user behavior patterns, feature adoption, and conversion metrics across the customer journey.

4. Funnel: Converting Thousands of Monthly Signups

Expandi drives thousands of monthly signups to their platform. Converting that volume into paying customers requires precise tracking and strategic re-engagement.

Google Analytics tracks their website metrics, showing traffic sources, page performance, and visitor behavior patterns.

Mixpanel provides deeper product analytics. They use it to understand how users move through onboarding, which features drive retention, and where prospects drop off before converting.

LinkedIn webinars serve as a primary conversion mechanism. These live sessions demonstrate the platform's capabilities while building trust with prospects who want to see the product in action before committing.

Expandi itself catches social signals and re-engages LinkedIn leads. When someone attends a webinar but doesn't convert, watches a demo but goes quiet, or engages with content without booking a call, the platform triggers follow-up sequences to bring them back into the funnel.

This creates a closed loop: content generates leads, analytics identify high-intent prospects, and outbound re-engages those who don't convert immediately.                       

This creates a closed loop: content generates leads, analytics identify high-intent prospects, and outbound re-engages those who don't convert immediately.

Curious which companies are showing buying signals for solutions like yours?

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 5. Sales: Closing Enterprise Logos

Expandi's sales team has closed major enterprise accounts including Siemens and IBM. Landing these logos as a bootstrapped company validates both their product and their sales process.

‍HubSpot manages their CRM. All prospect data, deal stages, and customer interactions live in HubSpot, giving the sales team a single source of truth for pipeline management.

Zoom handles video conferencing for demos and sales calls. Enterprise deals require multiple stakeholders to evaluate the platform, and Zoom makes it easy to host group demos and discovery calls.

Calendly eliminates the back-and-forth of meeting scheduling. Prospects book directly into available slots, reducing friction in the sales process.

‍Fireflies.ai records meetings and generates notes automatically. Sales reps can focus on the conversation rather than taking notes, and transcripts become searchable records for deal reviews and coaching sessions.

Trying to identify the right decision-makers at your target accounts? Try our People Finder tool below:

People Finder

6. Finance: Subscription Business Infrastructure

Running a $10M ARR SaaS requires robust financial infrastructure to handle payments, track metrics, and manage accounting at scale.

Twinfield handles their accounting. As a European company, they need accounting software that handles multi-currency transactions and EU compliance requirements.

Stripe processes payments and manages subscriptions. The platform handles everything from initial charges to recurring billing, failed payment recovery, and subscription changes.

ProfitWell by Paddle provides subscription analytics. They use it to track MRR growth, churn rates, expansion revenue, and other SaaS metrics that inform strategic decisions. ProfitWell's benchmarking data also shows how their metrics compare to similar companies.

7. Customer Support

Scaling customer support and internal operations requires tools that keep the team aligned while handling growing volume efficiently.

‍Intercom manages all customer support queries. The platform combines live chat, help documentation, and automated responses to handle support volume without scaling headcount linearly with customer growth.

Slack connects the team with partners and external collaborators. They use it for quick decisions, project updates, and coordination that doesn't require formal meetings.

Discord handles internal communications within the core team. The platform's channel structure lets them organize conversations by function while maintaining the informal culture that bootstrapped companies often prioritize.

Zapier and n8n power their internal automations. These tools connect their various platforms so data flows automatically between systems. When a deal closes in HubSpot, it can trigger billing setup in Stripe, add the customer to support in Intercom, and update metrics in their data warehouse without manual intervention.

8. The Bootstrapped Advantage

Expandi's stack proves that reaching $10M ARR doesn't require massive tool sprawl or venture-backed budgets.

Their approach works because:

-They practice what they preach → Using their own product for outbound gives them credibility with prospects and ensures they understand the user experience deeply.

-Their founder-led content created initial distribution → Stefan's personal audience became the foundation for all marketing before they had budget for paid channels.

-They chose specialized tools over all-in-one platforms → Each tool in their stack does one thing well rather than trying to do everything adequately.

-AI tools accelerate product development → Lovable, bolt.new, and Cursor let a smaller team ship faster than competitors with larger engineering organizations.

The result is a lean operation that competes with well-funded alternatives while maintaining the margins that bootstrapped companies need to reinvest in growth.

The foundation they've built is solid. Sometimes the best move at $10M ARR is optimizing what's already working rather than adding complexity.

Want to see how your GTM strategy compares to companies scaling past $10M ARR?

GTM Report Tool