Case Study · H1 2026

Turning pipeline into paying clients: QED Labs' first six months to market

How a content + paid social + outbound engine moved QED Labs from a cold pipeline to a growing base of live, paying property-management clients.

Thomas Collins

COO, QED Labs (by L1 Property)

£208k

Pipeline built from scratch

111%

Pilot launches vs. target

-50%

Cost per acquisition

4.9x

ARR growth in July

Meet the client

Thomas Collins, QED Labs

COO

QED Labs, by L1 Property, builds property-management software. Thomas needed a go-to-market engine that could build a pipeline from scratch and convert it into paying clients within months, not years.

🌐 qedlabs.co.uk ↗

Pipeline conversion

111%

More prospects converted into live pilots than forecast

Against a steady target of roughly 1.7 new pilot launches a month, the programme delivered 13 pilot launches over the first seven months, well ahead of the ~11.7 forecast. Leads converted to pilots at close to 35%, nearly double the rate implied by the original targets.

That's a strong signal that the demo experience and qualification process were doing their job: the people getting in front of a demo were consistently ready to commit to a trial.

Closing the deal

First 4 deals ever

Trials converted into signed contracts on schedule

Every pilot the programme forecast turning into a signed contract, did, 4 contracts closed against a target of 4 through July. Target was only one a month to find the bottle necks and show the pipeline could move faster than previously thought.

Audience and reach compounded fast

A consistent content cadence and a shift from a personal profile to the company page paid off quickly across every reach metric tracked.

9.2x

LinkedIn followers, Jan → Jun

14 → 129

7.8x

Post impressions, Jan → Jun

5,000 → 39,163

+64%

Website visits, Feb → Jun

1,400 → 2,300

35%

Lead → pilot conversion

vs. ~18% planned

Efficiency

−33% / −50%

Acquisition got sharply cheaper as the engine matured

Cost per lead fell from £491 to £330 (−33%), and cost per acquisition fell from £1,061 to £525 (−50%), as targeting, messaging and channel mix were refined.

That improvement compounds: every pound spent now returns roughly twice the qualified pipeline it did in March.

Revenue momentum

4.9x

Annualised revenue is beginning to scale

As pilots convert into paid contracts, ARR nearly quintupled month-on-month in July.

It's early days for revenue, but the shape of the curve, flat, then a step change as the first cohort of pilots closed, is exactly what a pipeline maturing into paid customers looks like.

Ben and his team just got on with it. Within a couple of months we had a real pipeline, our first paying clients and for the first time a sales engine we could start to forecast against.

Thomas Collins, COO · QED Labs

Connect on LinkedIn

⭐ The playbook