SaaS Club

9 months. Almost zero customers. Then they rebuilt around one feature they'd ignored. Traction in 30 days. 8-figure ARR today.

Rick Knudtson had already built and sold a company before he co-founded Workshop. So he did what many second-time founders do...

He trusted his own read of the market over what his prospects were telling him, and it nearly killed the company.

Nobody loves their intranet, he figured, so a better one should win. His team sold that intranet every day.

On those same sales calls, prospects kept naming a different problem. Email.

They were sending messages to thousands of employees and had no idea who was reading them.

Rick heard it and moved on. Email wasn't interesting, and after selling his last company he was sure he knew what to build.

"I was like, email, this is not that hard. You guys can't actually have this problem."

By month 9, they were still at 3 customers.

More than half of the $3M they had raised was still in the bank, and Rick was the one pushing to give it back to investors and go start something else.

His co-founder Derek Homann talked him out of it at a bar in Omaha. "Just go try this one last thing. Just listen to the damn customers."

So they emailed every prospect who had ever raised the email problem and told them they were building it. A bunch of them said yes.

Rick, Derek and Ben Stevinson rebuilt the platform in 30 days. That rebuild got them 10 customers, after 9 months of selling to get 3. So they killed the intranet and went all in on email.

If the same thing comes up on every sales call and you keep skipping past it, you're not missing information. You just don't like the answer.

2 days ago | [YT] | 0