[Case study] Driving SaaS Success: A TimelinesAI 4x Revenue Growth via CRM Integrations

Introducing a CRM integration can be a growth lever for SaaS businesses. At TimelinesAI, we launched a Pipedrive CRM integration for our WhatsApp Shared Inbox to tap into a new market and drive growth.

Through careful planning and execution, we achieved 70% subscription growth, 2x revenue increase within six months, and doubled that result the next year by introducing new integrations.

Goal and Idea

Business Need: Provide a streamlined solution to demonstrate the value of TimelinesAI (quick WhatsApp connection and message sync).

Customer Need: Address the blind spot in CRM reporting by syncing business-related WhatsApp messages.

Solution: Develop an integration to help businesses using WhatsApp for sales and customer relations track, measure, and scale their operations seamlessly.

User Interviews

To validate the idea, I conducted over 30 interviews with CRM users. Recruitment involved:

• Setting up a landing page.
• Posting on CRM forums (e.g., Pipedrive, HubSpot).
• Launching targeted ads.

Key Insight: Confirmed the demand. Businesses lacked control over WhatsApp messaging —a vital sales channel— and implementing default solutions like WhatsApp Business API meant losing valuable historical data.

Market research

We chose Pipedrive CRM for integration due to:

• Strong overlap with our SMB target audience.
• High WhatsApp penetration in key markets like LATAM and Europe which overlapped with Pipedrive audience.
• Marketplace availability & low third-party competition

Competition: Only one competitor (Pipechat) existed, and our fully automated solution offered unique advantages over manual synchronization, especially in cases involving onboarding large teams, reporting, and measuring the success of the outreach campaigns.

Ideation & Prototyping

Requirements & scope definition

I wrote a product requirements document (PRD) for an MVP (pilot project) to validate our assumptions. To keep the development costs low, the MVP focused only on essential functionality that was reinforced by interviews and research:

• Sync WhatsApp messages automatically
• Support automatic attachment synchronization from chats
• Allow connecting multiple WhatsApp accounts in one workspace

Success Metrics:

• User activation: 40%+
• Trial-to-customer conversion: 15%
• Retention (30-day): 60%
• Customer lifetime value (CLTV): 1.5x increase

Pre-launch

Go-to-Market Strategy

I designed a comprehensive strategy:

1. Pre-Launch:
   • Landing page and ads for early access.
   • CRM forums and marketplace posts for visibility
   • Partnered with the Pipedrive marketplace team to get featured in the newsletter
2. Content Creation:
   • Marketplace placement
   • Onboarding videos and knowledge base articles.
   • Interactive guides tailored to Pipedrive users.

Note: Interactive guides worked especially well, since we tracked the installs from the marketplace. For Pipedrive users specifically, we displayed the dedicated step-by-step checklist designed with their use case in mind. The key to success was that we highlighted the advantages that users mentioned during the interviews.

Onboarding & launch content preparation

Development

I participated in different stages of development: provided mockups and chart flows, clarified the requirements, proposed UX improvements, clarified the edge cases, and ensured that result corresponded to the acceptance criteria.

Note: the "Test integration" button was crucial for user activation. Once pressed, it would generate the Whatsapp message that we would send to the new user's connected Whatsapp number(s). It ensured that users experienced the benefits of the integration in the first minute and reinforced trust.

Pricing model pivot

Pricing models — before (top) and after (below)

Thanks to extensive competitors and market research, it became evident that the current pricing model (selling seats in a package) doesn’t match the expectations of the users with the CRM integration use case.

There were several issues:

• The overall price was too low, but the plan included too much for a single CRM integration user
• CRM customers are used to the seat-based pricing
• The plans were difficult to scale and adjust depending on the team size

Based on the competitor`s research, I suggested a new Pricing model based on seats. It was specifically designed to solve all of these issues, and introduced several benefits:

• Price is calculated based on a seat, so the average cheque for the team of 5 has significantly increased
• Seat-based pricing model fits well with the CRM customers
• Added the basic “cheap” plan to improve the conversion for smaller teams
• Plans are built around specific use cases (Pipedrive integration, Shared Inbox, Mass Messaging) to activate up-sales

Results and Impact

The integration achieved significant results:

• Growth: 15% MoM MRR increase, 70% subscription growth, 2x the revenue
• Adoption: Seamless onboarding drove high user activation.
• Market Fit: Enabled us to capture a new customer segment and reduce churn.

Post-Launch Iteration

We validated and iterated on the main advantages of TimelinesAI — Whatsapp Pipedrive integration:

• completely removes the overhead of making sure the business-relevant messaging and files are synchronized into CRM
• enables the teams to focus on their work with customers instead of micromanaging the synchronization
• Introduces company-wide insight and control over business communication on Whatsapp
• makes measuring performance and scaling the sales and support operations via Whatsapp as easy as inviting a team member and asking to scan a QR code

Insights & Learnings

We learned that CRM integrations can serve as a powerful growth strategy. By addressing the core needs of CRM users and aligning our product with their workflow, we unlocked a scalable revenue stream.

By delivering immediate value through intuitive one-click integrations, we achieved high user engagement and adoption rates during the trial period. This laid the foundation for sustained customer retention over time.

This success prompted TimelinesAI to pivot into a Whatsapp integrations service, leveraging this approach to drive a 4x revenue increase and establish a sustainable growth model.

As Pipedrive integration worked well, TimelinesAI expanded on the offer and now features an extensive list of Whatsapp integrations via webhooks, Zapier, Hubspot, Zoho, Salesforce, Monday.com and so on.