Waalaxy turns seasonality into a growth lever – Interview with Gaël Pons, Lead Ops

With over 400,000 users worldwide and €10 million in ARR, Waalaxy has made its mark in the LinkedIn prospecting automation space. Despite its rapid growth, the company faces a challenge familiar to many SaaS providers: highly variable churn rates linked to product seasonality.

How can you turn this structural imbalance into a performance driver?

We spoke with Gaël Pons, Lead Operations at Waalaxy, to learn how the team managed to smooth out seasonal effects, structure international expansion, and strengthen its freemium model through better data usage — with strategic support from Fincome.

From startup to scale-up : Waalaxy's success story 

Waalaxy’s story began in 2019. Their promise: to enable freelancers, salespeople, and recruiters to automate their LinkedIn campaigns, personalize their messages with AI, and manage their leads all in one place. Their Product-Led Growth (PLG) model, combined with a viral freemium offer, quickly drove adoption.

Key figures:

• ARR: €10M
• Users: 400,000+ including 15,000 paying customers
• Model: PLG with three offers (Business, Advanced, Pro)
• Team: 60 employees
• Geographies: France (main market), USA, Canada, India, South America
• ARR/employee: €167k (tier-1 level for a PLG SaaS)

However, this growth also revealed a blind spot: a strong seasonality which was poorly understood, blurred KPIs, and complicated operational management.

The challenges of a hypergrowth scale-up 

While Waalaxy experienced rapid growth, the company also faced several challenges: users with diverse behaviors, activity subject to seasonality, and international development obstacles.

Understanding and anticipating usage seasonality

One of the first challenges Waalaxy encountered was decoding a phenomenon typical of sales prospecting solutions: seasonality. Product usage varies significantly depending on the time of year (summer, end of year) and user profiles (freelancers, sales teams, recruiters).

“Many companies go through prospecting phases, then shift focus towards customer retention. […] There’s a recurring subscription and unsubscription effect, but these customers return periodically,” explains Gaël.

This cyclicality directly impacts KPIs. For example, churn rates rise sharply during the summer or holiday seasons. To counter this, Waalaxy’s team implemented targeted actions:

• Analyzing usage behavior to detect activity drops
• Setting up a “health score” based on usage frequency
• Automated or personalized re-engagement based on user profiles (freelancer, sales team, etc.)

Some reactivation campaigns have achieved significant success rates, especially seasonal operations like Black Friday, which recorded up to 50% re-subscription rates.

Structuring the PLG model

With over 400,000 users, Waalaxy had to scale its management practices. Their highly effective PLG (Product-Led Growth) model for acquisition demanded a more refined understanding of activation, conversion, and upsell processes.

As the user base grew, the challenges evolved to:

1. Precisely tracking freemium-to-paid conversion rates
2. Identifying high-value users (sales teams, recruiters, agencies, etc.)
3. Adapting plans and pricing to actual observed usage
4. Better supporting high-potential customers (via customer success initiatives)

Beyond conversion rates, the team also needed to understand which user types generated the most value, which plans were underutilized, and how to structure support for high-potential customers.

Maintaining clear vision despite international complexity

Waalaxy quickly expanded into several international markets: USA, Canada, India, and South America (with over 1,000 paying users). However, this brought specific challenges around billing (multi-currency), differentiated pricing, and analyzing user behavior by region.

“We try to adapt with different currencies and slightly reduced pricing there, just to be more attractive,” explains Gaël.

To maintain clear and actionable visibility, the team needed a tool that could automatically consolidate indicators while allowing detailed breakdowns by country, currency, or user type. Management had to remain smooth and fast, without relying on time-consuming manual analyses across multiple tools.

The Fincome solution: a co-pilot for hypergrowth 

To tackle the challenges of rapid growth, strong seasonality, and multi-market expansion, Waalaxy relies on Fincome as a management backbone at the intersection of product, finance, and operations. The goal: turn growing complexity into a performance lever through unified, contextualized, and actionable data insights.

Managing seasonality proactively

“If the average delay between two subscriptions is three months, in between we implement a mailing and re-engagement strategy tailored to each user profile,” explains Gaël Pons.

Fincome enables Waalaxy to detect early signs of disengagement - reduced usage frequency, prolonged inactivity, subscription suspension - and trigger targeted actions. Re-engagement campaigns are personalized based on user profiles: freelancers, sales teams, agencies, etc.

Result: up to 50% re-subscription rates during seasonal campaigns like Black Friday.

Optimizing the PLG model’s impact

In a PLG environment, every product interaction generates a signal — but it must be interpreted correctly. Fincome allows Waalaxy to analyze usage at a granular level to activate the right levers at the right time.

“Data tells us that large clients, with big teams, need more information, longer trial periods, and prospecting advice,” notes Gaël.

By cross-referencing usage data, customer segments, and journeys, the team can:

1. Detect high-potential accounts early (agencies, SDR teams, recruiters)
2. Adapt messaging, offers, and triggers based on real usage rather than declared intentions
3. Track upsell in terms of license numbers — a key marker of collective adoption within accounts

This approach not only maximizes LTV/CAC but also improves freemium conversion. Under-activated users are identified and re-engaged through automated workflows connected to behavioral signals.

Boosting operational efficiency

With such a large user base, centralized and clear visibility of ARR and derived KPIs is essential. Waalaxy needed a unified management infrastructure capable of breaking down each metric to an operational level that feeds decision-making:

• By country, currency, and product,
• By customer segment,
• By pricing plan or subscription period.

“We’re always looking at the same numbers, using the same reference points. […] I can easily break down the data: MRR by country, by product, churn rate by subscription type… everything is very visual and instantaneous,” Gaël points out.

This transparency fosters strong alignment between Product, Growth, and Finance teams, speeding up strategic decision-making.

Results: controlled metrics, consolidated growth

By structuring its data and making it real-time actionable, Waalaxy has regained control over key metrics critical to its expansion.

Decision-making is faster, campaigns are better targeted, and the Product, Finance, and Growth teams are fully aligned around performance.

Observed Results:

• Reduction of seasonal churn through better anticipation
• Up to 50% reactivation on targeted campaigns
• +18% of paying accounts now purchase multiple licenses
• Improved LTV/CAC ratio thanks to behavioral segmentation

Today, Waalaxy approaches its next stages of development with more structured management and, above all, an increased ability to turn raw data into concrete, actionable insights.

Conclusion

Waalaxy’s example shows how structured management, based on actionable data tailored to real-world specificities (seasonality, freemium models, internationalization), can turn operational complexity into a competitive advantage.

By providing a unified and dynamic view of key indicators, Fincome has helped Waalaxy orchestrate its management more precisely while empowering Product, Finance, and Ops teams.

The key lies in turning data into concrete actions, enabling personalized customer relationships at scale, and continually innovating to meet users’ evolving needs.

For growing SaaS providers, the lesson is clear: seasonality is not a fatality — it’s an opportunity to differentiate and build stronger relationships with customers. By transforming fuzzy signals into clear levers, sustainable growth can be achieved.