
Sarah Ahmad, Stable
How to Validate a SaaS Idea With Zero Code
Sarah Ahmad and her co-founder Colin met freshman year of college and moved to San Francisco to work as engineers. They quit their jobs to build Mistro, a platform providing benefits for remote teams internationally. They got into Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, raised a pre-seed round, and had paying customers. Then COVID hit. You'd think a remote work tool would thrive when the entire world went remote. Instead, it was silent. They couldn't even give the product away for free. COVID had pressure-tested their product-market fit and exposed the truth - nobody needed what they were building. Sarah went back to basics. She ran discovery conversations with hundreds of operations managers and founders. One problem kept surfacing: companies without physical offices didn't know what to do about their business address and physical mail. The incumbents in the space had been around since the 2000s with clunky software. Nobody was raving about them. Instead of making the same mistake again - building a full product before validating demand - Sarah took a completely different approach to SaaS product validation. She posted a simple landing page in the YC community. The response was immediate. Dozens of founders emailed saying they needed it tomorrow. The first version of Stable was embarrassingly manual. A mail partner in San Francisco, Google Drive for document storage, Zoom for onboarding, and a Stripe link for payment. Sarah was manually emailing customers when mail arrived. They ran it this way for the first 100 customers before writing any code. Today, Stable is the leading AI-powered virtual mailbox for businesses with over 10,000 customers, 8-figure ARR, and a team of 50-60 people. They operate in 20+ locations across the US with processing centers in the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas. Their customers range from solopreneurs to enterprises like DoorDash, Realty Income, and GitLab. In this conversation, Sarah shares how the SEO playbook that built the business stopped working when AI overviews took over Google search results, why physical operations are her moat against AI disruption, and the moment she had to shift from product building to company building.



