Omer Khan [00:00:03]:
Welcome to The SaaS Podcast. I'm your host, Omer Khan. AI has changed the playbook for building and growing SaaS. Every week, I talk to founders who are writing the new one. My guest today is Sarah Ahmad, the co-founder of Stable. They're a virtual mailbox service for businesses that handles the physical mail that still shows up even when your team is 100% remote. Stable currently has over 10,000 customers and they've crossed the $10 million ARR mark. But Sarah's first startup failed.
Omer Khan [00:00:32]:
She offered the product during COVID for free and still couldn't get anyone to sign up. With Stable, they took a completely different approach. They didn't write any code. They just used Google Drive, Zoom calls, and a Stripe link to sell to their first 100 customers. And then the SEO playbook that built the entire business stopped working. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Ahmad [00:00:57]:
Thanks for having me.
Omer Khan [00:00:59]:
So tell us about Stable. What does the product do and who's it for?
Sarah Ahmad [00:01:03]:
Yeah, so we are the leading AI-powered virtual mailbox for businesses. And so this is one of those universal problems every single company has to deal with. You need a business address on file with the IRS, different tax agencies. The byproduct of using that address is there's still a lot of important notices that come in through physical mail. And so we transform all of those paperwork flows into automated systems. And so today we work with over 10,000 companies. So from your earliest stage solopreneurs that are just getting started to large enterprises like DoorDash, Realty Income, and GitLab.
Omer Khan [00:01:38]:
Okay. And so give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, size of team, and so on?
Sarah Ahmad [00:01:43]:
Yeah, so we have a team of 50 to 60 people and we're doing 8 figures in ARR.
Omer Khan [00:01:49]:
Awesome. Uh, so I want to talk about where the idea came from and really it was a series of pivots that led you to where the business is today. So maybe a good place to start would be is why don't you tell me like how you met? Is Colin your co-founder and what was the first version of this startup that you guys built?
Sarah Ahmad [00:02:14]:
Yeah. Yeah. So we go, my co-founder and I go way back. So we've been friends now for over 10 years. We met freshman year of college, lived on the same floor, uh, and in college we were both very entrepreneurial, so we had our own startups then. And we both moved out to San Francisco for our first jobs as well, so working in tech as engineers. And we started just working on different ideas nights and weekends. Um, we went through— even before we quit our jobs, we went through even other ideas too, of just like, how do we make meetings more efficient? Like, what is happening with all the packages getting lost and stolen in SF.
Sarah Ahmad [00:02:49]:
So we went through a lot of those and ultimately we quit our jobs on an earlier idea called— and that company was called Mistro. And basically we're providing benefits internationally for remote teams. So everything from coworking spaces to health insurance, we were helping companies basically provide and operationalize these workflows for like in the future of work.
Omer Khan [00:03:12]:
Cool. And so what happened with that business? How far did you get before you decided to pivot?
Sarah Ahmad [00:03:18]:
Yeah, so we, we signed a few pilot customers and that was really like the indicator of, okay, let's quit our jobs and let's see how far we can take this. Uh, and so we raised like our first like pre-seed round around that. We got into Y Combinator. Uh, this was the winter '20 batch. So definitely a lot of scar tissue around that. We started in person and then going remote. Um, but it was really good opportunity to basically build the product. We we had paying customers.
Sarah Ahmad [00:03:46]:
And so we had some momentum on it. But ultimately, like the interesting thing that happened with the whole world going remote with COVID is that it really pressure tested product market fit. And so while we previously could get people on a demo, at least pretty easily, suddenly we're in a time where you would think we'd be super busy, where companies would be coming to us left and right. It was, Silent. And so we were even looking at giving the product away for free and people still didn't want to use it. So it was just this really good opportunity for us to just learn really fast that, hey, this doesn't have arms and legs. And so we went back to the drawing board. And I mean, at that point, and I come from a design background, so I've always very much valued just like talking to folks and understanding what are their challenges.
Sarah Ahmad [00:04:35]:
So we had done discovery with hundreds of operation managers, founders, and the interesting thing is that for companies without a physical office, it kept coming back to what do I use as the business address? And so in looking at what are the other challenges that companies are facing, it always was just like coming back to this, like, okay, what do I use my address? What do I do about the physical mail? And when you look at a lot of the other incumbents in the space, it's been a very old-fashioned industry. So a lot of these companies have been around since the 2000s. Their software's really clunky. We talked to people using them, no one was really raving about it. And so that really gave us that first insight of there's a really big opportunity to build a number one product in this industry.
Omer Khan [00:05:19]:
And so when, when did that pivot happen? Like, was this like, there was a sort of a second pivot and then Stable was the third iteration. Was that right?
Sarah Ahmad [00:05:31]:
Yeah, I would say in terms of the, what we actually had paying customers around. Um, so yeah, we had Mistro and then we pivoted to Stable. Uh, but we had a lot of other ideas behind the scenes. And I think that's the part that sometimes gets overlooked with founders of just like how many ideas and reps you have to get through. And there's a lot of bad ideas in the midst of it where you think you are onto something. You talk to a few folks in the space and you realize pretty fast that, hey, like no one's going to pay for this. Let's move on to the next idea.
Omer Khan [00:06:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, what was the signal?, when you pivoted to the current idea with Stable that was different from what you had done before that, that told you this one looks like we're actually onto the something real here this time?
Sarah Ahmad [00:06:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. And it's really hard too. There's so much noise in all of that. And, you know, I think the, the mistake that we felt we made with Mistro was that we had built the whole product out and then realized that we don't really have product market fit. So we wanted to do that a bit reverse this time of how do we really validate the market demand before building the software. So we put together a landing page and, you know, luckily because we had gone through Y Combinator and we had thousands of founders at our disposal, that was a really great community to launch it. So we put together like a launch, like bookface is like what they call it.
Sarah Ahmad [00:07:07]:
And Basically, it was just like, hey, we have business address in San Francisco. We'll help you change your address. Here's some things the software does. Uh, we'll open and scan your mail, but really we had nothing. So it was just like a way to test, oh, do people want this? And when people sign up and, you know, we had done the launch in the community for our previous product, had a few people reach out. When we launched for this one, it was immediately clear how much more like market pull there was. We had dozens of founders emailing us, like signing up saying, hey, I need this tomorrow, I'm closing down my office. And so that was really the signal of, okay, there's something here.
Sarah Ahmad [00:07:47]:
Now let's go back and figure out how to actually offer this product and solution. And we were very hacky in the early days. Like we found a mail partner in San Francisco, super awesome, still work with them today. Uh, and so signed with them and then the first version of the product, our MVP was basically just Google Drive. We put their address in a Google Doc. We onboarded them on Zoom, sent them a Stripe checkout link, uh, and it was just like, we'll upload your mail to your Drive when you get anything. And I was like manually, manually sending emails to when something would come in. So it was very hacky at the beginning.
Sarah Ahmad [00:08:23]:
Now we have full software automations, all of that. It's not hacky by any means. Um, but you have to start somewhere. And so it was very much like, hey, we need to capture the time and opportunity. You could wait months to build the software perfectly. Or you could just launch today. And a lot of people, I think we were lucky that like a lot of these companies and early customers were willing to basically, you know, take that risk alongside with us with like the vision of what this could be.
Omer Khan [00:08:47]:
So what would you say to a founder who is maybe stuck in a place where they know that they could probably do what you just described, set up Google Drive, a Google Doc, Stripe link, and yet they're reluctant to do that because, well, people won't, what will people pay for this? This isn't software. Like, what am I doing? And this is just real reluctance to put that in front of people because they might just laugh you out of the room. And so what would you say to a founder who's maybe sort of stuck in that place right now?
Sarah Ahmad [00:09:26]:
Yeah, I mean, I will say the first version of Sable was embarrassing, you know, like it, it wasn't like we put that out and we were very proud of it and it's like, oh, this is amazing, it's gonna change the world. And you know, I think one of the things that is interesting to me too is that like part of our compliance requirements is like we have to have IDs of an officer like on file. And in those early days when there was no portal, they were sending us IDs via email. And so, you know, you just think about just like what people are willing to go through because like they have this really deep pain point that you're able to solve. And so if you're solving something that is a worthwhile problem to be solved, people, like there are people out there that will be okay with it not being provided in just like the best polished product. And I think the way you compensate for that in the early days is the customer experience. And so, you know, I mentioned that we got on Zoom with every single one of our first customers. Like we had a conversation, either myself or my co-founder, We were the ones that were replying in support every day.
Sarah Ahmad [00:10:28]:
And we really just went above and beyond for them and used it as an opportunity to learn about not just even like what our core product is and what we want to build there, but what are other verticals that we could eventually help to solve for them as well. And so there's a way to compensate for that. I think especially in this age of AI, it's like so much easier to build something that, you know, I think you could make it a little more polished than even what we had. But it really is like people will be forgiving if you're solving a real problem for them.
Omer Khan [00:10:55]:
Yeah, it's great, great perspective. The one thing that hits me is that, you know, what you do with Stable today, obviously it's, it's a lot more evolved than what you started out with, with, with Google Drive. But even back then, there was a lot of, I guess, legacy players, people offering registered agent services, and some of them doing something like they'll forward the mail to you, or they'll, some of them might even scan it. Um, what was it about what you were offering that, that resonated with, with people? Like, were you hearing like, how is this different to whatever? Or, or was, was there something that you were focusing on as a pain that you knew that really was a frustration for, for people using these, these sort of existing companies?
Sarah Ahmad [00:11:49]:
Yeah, I mean, we've always positioned ourselves as the modern layer. So when we first launched, like, what that means and like what we— our hypothesis in looking at what they were offering and or what they weren't offering and we could, it really came down to a lot of the little details. Like, we help from day one with the change of address process. We know there's friction around if you're using previously your home or another office to change your address to Stable. So we help with that process, for example. And then we always have had some layer of automation. So in the early days, I was like a Slack integration, we'll push your to Slack, where a lot of people are doing their work day to day. And today too, it's like, you know, I think AI has unlocked a lot of what is possible.
Sarah Ahmad [00:12:34]:
So the automations that we can provide are way more advanced where it's like you get something, it's automatically open scan, we're routing it to the right person on the team, or we're pushing that information, extracting data into different systems. So that has always been like what, how we see it as like, hey, these other old school players, you know, they're not necessarily best-in-class engineering teams that are building the software behind it to make sure it's powered.
Omer Khan [00:13:00]:
So, um, having access to YC founders, you know, great advantage to get access to, um, you know, early adopters, initial customers, and so on. But I think you got to like at least 1,000 customers before you even hired anybody to do growth on your team. So how big was the team getting to those first 1,000 customers and beyond YC, how did you find and acquire them?
Sarah Ahmad [00:13:31]:
Yeah, I think our team when we got to like a million in ARR was 6 or 7 people. So we were very, very small at the time. And, you know, I do believe and, you know, luckily like too is like YC was a really great catalyst. So like building something that people really needed and wanted, we had a lot of organic traction where people would just like word of mouth would spread. Um, some of the other areas that we started to invest in was of course like the blog. This was back when SEO was a much bigger opportunity. I'd say today everything's changing in that landscape very fast. Um, but we were writing the blog posts ourselves in that time, um, which was crazy to look back on and learning just like what the strategy is around that.
Sarah Ahmad [00:14:15]:
Um, we also invested some in paid ads. Looking back, that's an area that I think we underutilized. I think we could have taken bigger swings knowing what I know now with like now we have a full marketing department and, you know, we were just kind of making sure we were kind of visible. But in that time where it was like so many companies were shutting down their offices and needed a solution, it was like, I wish we took a bigger swing around and actually like looked at bigger amounts of data as opposed to we were optimizing things week over week, but really only spending like a few hundred a week. It was very, very little.
Omer Khan [00:14:50]:
Yeah, there's always this reluctance. I rarely find a founder who says I got paid ads working and I'm really happy with, you know, what, what I'm getting from that. And it's just so easy to sink money into setting up these Google AdWords campaigns or whatever you're doing. What, you know, now, now looking back at it, you can see that and there was an opportunity there. Um, but like going back to the trenches when you were there, what do you feel like, um, like what was, again, what were some of the signs that, that told you that you, you know, maybe you should, you should have done things differently back then?
Sarah Ahmad [00:15:31]:
Yeah, I think knowing now, like what, you know, you have to take just like really big swings to understand if a channel is working and in the early days., you know, we were basically like micro-optimizing and just like not getting enough data or signal of like, is this channel good or not? And I think the thing about marketing too is that a lot of the attribution can be very fuzzy. And so a lot of it is around just like brand awareness and it's just like, do people know who you are? Uh, and I, you know, I fully attest that we could do a better job at this even today and, you know, at the scale that we're operating at, but especially in the early days. Optimizing actually more for getting market share and visibility after you prove product market fit. Like I think there's a certain point on the path to a million that it's okay, this is really working and how can I start to like sink more resources into it? Uh, and smart resources, of course, as well. And so that, I think like understanding that turning point a bit more strategically is like what I wish like looking back at we, we could have.
Omer Khan [00:16:37]:
Taken out. If you could go back, how much would you spend on paid ads in your first 3 months to figure out if it was a channel worth exploring further or not?
Sarah Ahmad [00:16:49]:
I mean, knowing how much we're paying now, I would say at least thousands. Whereas like, you know, going, you know, I think like upping the budget. I mean, it's all things of like, you know, do you have the capital to spend or not as well? But I know we weren't saturating even, like, I think the main thing is like, so for us, very concrete example, people type in virtual business mailbox or something along those lines, right? It's like we should always be basically showing up when someone is searching that, especially in that time where we basically like on organic search, we're not showing up. Like we were just so, so new. And so how do you make sure that people with high intent can find us? And so I would say like whatever the amount is that you kind of like need to saturate that. And then you can optimize, you know, to get the numbers to make sure they make sense for your business. But I think with paid ads too, it's like you can get in this place of, of over-optimizing, but you have to look at it in aggregate of all of your other channels. So all of our other channels were essentially zero, right? Like we weren't really spending anything for them.
Sarah Ahmad [00:17:56]:
And so you could kind of, you know, if we're getting more market share, And that creates more of like that viral loop of word of mouth, then it's worth it to spend a bit more there. So it's a different take. Like I, you know, I, I don't even know if knowing what I know now, my previous self would've, yeah, still wanted to let me do that. But yeah, I, I would've, that's how I would've approached it differently knowing what I know now.
Omer Khan [00:18:21]:
Okay. So you tried paid ads, didn't really get traction there. You've got word of mouth helping to get you some customers, but, you know, getting to 1,000 customers is no easy feat. And so you've got a very small team. Can you just explain a little bit, like, what did week-to-week growth look like? And was it mostly through word of mouth and content that you were acquiring these leads and customers?
Sarah Ahmad [00:18:48]:
Yeah, it was mostly word of mouth and content that we were getting them. I don't know if I remember off the top of my head the actual growth rate. Like I know at that time we were growing about like 2 to 3x year over year. So I think you could kind of like back into that, but it was definitely very, very spiky. Like there were some months because of that, that we like didn't add that much revenue. Like I think our percent growth was probably more in like the 4% or so. So it was, it was definitely like very up and down.
Omer Khan [00:19:21]:
And how far did you, how many customers did you get before you stopped doing like the manual thing? Was that just like for the very early customers or did you try to really push that as far as you could with your, you know, you in the, in the background manually like scanning and uploading stuff?
Sarah Ahmad [00:19:38]:
Yeah, it was the first 100 customers or so that it was very, very manual. Um, so we hadn't written any code., and it was just like, you know, just sending all of these basically photos and PDFs like through email and Slack. Then we started writing the software. So I mean, it was all piecewise, like it was probably another 100 customers until you could start taking action in the dashboard, for example. Uh, and so it wasn't like, okay, we decided to build it and then we released the whole dashboard at once. It was just like, okay, let's one by one start to take pieces of that and what the core functionality, table stakes functionality needs to look like and start putting that into software. And I think the interesting part is that our customers are very familiar with our external software that they're using, but we also had to invest and build our internal software that actually powers the mail operations. And so you can kind of imagine an Amazon warehouse-esque operations, at least like today.
Sarah Ahmad [00:20:40]:
I think at that time it was definitely a lot smaller in scale. But with that, it's how are you keeping track of all the requests that are coming in? If you're open and scanning, forwarding, how are we keeping track of SLAs for each of those and prioritization? So there's a lot that just goes into the actual software part. We have to integrate with all the equipment, like scanning, shipping labels, all of that. So there's a lot that we've had to build in that. And so I think that's a unique challenge of our business where yes, we have the SaaS software side of it, but we also have to invest in the physical operations to keep up with that side.
Omer Khan [00:21:17]:
Yeah, that definitely struck me. Like, you know, most of the founders I talk to are just dealing with software and you're dealing with this physical operational thing. Can you, can you walk through like what's involved in getting a new location up and running? I just want to understand like what you have to do to get there.
Sarah Ahmad [00:21:36]:
Yeah. So we're in over 20 locations today across the US, and it's a mix of— we either partner with local businesses, whether it's coworking space, a courier service, logistics company, and then there are a few locations that are stable-operated. So we have offices that double as a stable address as well. And then on top of that, we have a few processing centers. We process mail in the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas. Dallas is our biggest processing center, over 10,000 square feet. And so that's where all the magic happens. So we store the mail, you know, we have folks there, we have all of our machinery as well to actually automate the mail operation side.
Sarah Ahmad [00:22:17]:
And so for our end customer, it's a very magical experience. We do a fun thing called like we, we send every single customer a welcome letter, which is a tangible letter, but it's like, welcome to Stable. So it's just like gives you the orientation of the product. But you see it come in, you know, we'll scan in the envelope and then for a lot of our customers, we'll automatically open and scan it as well. And then you can forward the mail or deposit. And so you're just clicking buttons or a lot of it's automated for the customer side of it. It's very magical. But yeah, there's a lot of steps and operations that goes in behind the scenes to make sure everything happens without a hitch.
Omer Khan [00:22:56]:
Yeah, that's good. It's like I started thinking about like what was involved in doing it and it made like the software side look like really easy, like when you have to deal with this kind of physical kind of processing of mail and all the other stuff that goes with it. Let's go back to software. Let's talk a little bit about AI. What's the biggest impact that AI has had on your business so far?
Sarah Ahmad [00:23:23]:
I mean, I think there's a few areas that we can talk about, and it's one of those areas that is just like changing so fast. So Every day, every week, you know, we're thinking about this, iterating. I'll start with the actual product itself because I think that's just like very top of mind for a lot of founders that are building of just like, how are you utilizing AI in your actual product and your offering? And for us, you know, it very much is like this natural progression of, okay, we do some of these automations. How can we get even smarter about how we do that? Extracting data that's coming out of it. So like a lot of healthcare and property management companies, it's really the workflow starts with mail. As opposed to ends at mail. And so when they get, say, like an HOA notice or a patient record, how do you take out the important information and put that into different systems? So for us, it's like what's been really cool about AI is just like the democratization of a lot of this technology where previously you really had to build it in-house and make it super tailored to each of these use cases. And now it's like it's very smart.
Sarah Ahmad [00:24:27]:
So it's like, well, you can basically figure out how to provide that logic tree, take something that our customers are doing, and just automate it end to end. So that's been really exciting for just the application. And I think as founders, we have to constantly be thinking about how is this evolving and how does that impact our product and just other— we're starting to compete with a different type of product that's more in document processing, right? On top of just the virtual mailbox side of it. So that's exciting part. I think the parts that are more on the what does this look like is that the B2B marketing playbook definitely flipped it on its head in the last couple of years. And so there used to be this pretty repeatable like plug and play playbook that like people would follow, or especially for us, it's like, yeah, let's, let's rank in Google search. Like let's really invest in SEO and organic. And that's just not the case anymore.
Sarah Ahmad [00:25:27]:
And so what we saw last year with AI overviews in Google Search really like taking over a lot of that is just like a lot of our blog posts, for example, that were performing really well, just like people weren't clicking down even into that. And so that really changes just like how do you think about growth in this next stage where you still have to invest in some of the more like commercial intent pages, but you have to start to shift towards thought leadership, just like other ways to get eyeballs. Like outbound has gotten very noisy as well. Again, I'm sure we all get all the emails, you know, from just like people wanting to sell us things. So how do you stand out, right? How do you really make sure that people know who you are? So that's like an interesting area that affects the marketing side. I'm sure you're probably seeing that in a lot of these conversations that you're having with folks too, of just like also being directly impacted by some of the changes there.
Omer Khan [00:26:22]:
Yeah. So are you still doubling down mostly on content or, um, it sounds like, you know, you're, you're going back to paid ads and spending more money there now than before, but what, what are the channels that are driving most of the growth for you today?
Sarah Ahmad [00:26:38]:
Yeah. Content is a place that we're investing a lot into and content too, like in the early days was, it was just like the blog essentially and diversifying, you know, podcasts of course. Uh, I've been posting more regularly on LinkedIn and so like how do we really utilize myself as a founder, as the voice. And partnerships has been really, really great for us as well. So how do you like leverage other companies in similar spaces or similar types of companies there? And so, yeah, there's— and I think the thing that we've been thinking about, and I think a lot of startups are having to just think more creatively of just like, yeah, like how do you get in front of folks? We've been sending direct mail, which I think is a fun one because it directly applies to what we do as a business. It's just like the reverse of it. So that's like an area too that, you know, we've seen some good results and excited to continue to double down.
Omer Khan [00:27:33]:
What do you think is the biggest threat to your business from AI? What's the thing that keeps you up at night? I mean, every founder has some, some kind of fear about where AI may not go the way they hope it will. So what is it for you? And what do you think is the moat for Stable?
Sarah Ahmad [00:27:52]:
Yeah, I'll start with the moat question because I think that's the easiest side. Where it's like, we do have physical operations, which AI is not that good. And I don't know if it can, you know, it'll be a while, maybe until like robotics or anything can catch up there. But just like having the physical operations, we have the logistics network, I think that lets me like sleep a little more peacefully at night. I do think the scary thing is what does software and the actual workforce start to look like in the next 5 to 10 years. And I think that's a lot of just like what people are talking about and like no one really knows. And so when we're looking at new product lines to bring to market, you know, that's something that we have to think about. And then when we think about the workforce as well, to me, it's really important that everyone on the team understands and is using AI and also staying on top of it, right? I think like, it's like I used to use ChatGPT a ton and I recently moved over to using Claude Opus because it's so good.
Sarah Ahmad [00:28:53]:
And it is just this crazy time in the world where if you're not constantly tinkering yourself, and I think leaders have to be tinkering themselves so that they can speak to how do you get some of the outsized impact on productivity there, but it's like, how do you also make sure that The people on your team are learning that because the skill sets that are required in the new age of work are going to be very different.
Omer Khan [00:29:15]:
The people who understand how to use AI are the ones that are going to win. Exciting and kind of scary times, uh, you know, but, um, I, I think, I mean, for me, it just feels like, um, whenever, whenever this kind of change, I mean, this is probably like, um, you know, We've never sort of gone through something like this before, but there's always opportunities that, you know, new opportunities get created. And it's just really interesting to see how things are playing out. I love vibe coding, but I don't think, you know, everybody is going to be vibe coding everything and waking up and saying, oh, let me, you know, build my own version of Microsoft Word or Google Docs or whatever it is, right? But Um, what, what do you think has, has been the, the hardest part of building this business so far?
Sarah Ahmad [00:30:13]:
Yeah, that's a really good, good question. I mean, like any founder at every stage, there's a new set of challenges that you have to, to overcome. And, you know, there's some that are easier, some that are harder, and it's really just like staying staying positive through all of that and just not giving up, right? Like, I think that some of the best founders, like, we have that grit to just keep going and the confidence that we're gonna figure it out. And even in the times that, like, yeah, it's just, you know, everything's like on fire. You're just like, I don't know how we're gonna get through this next phase, but it's just like, you always do, right? And so that helps to really just validate that confidence and keep going.
Omer Khan [00:30:56]:
What about you as a leader or a CEO? Like, you know, you've gone from being an engineer to very quickly having, relatively quickly having a, you know, 8-figure ARR business and evolving into a role as a CEO. Like, how, what has that transition been like?
Sarah Ahmad [00:31:22]:
I mean, It's a lot of, yeah, new challenges day to day. I mean, it all feels like it's one of those things that like day to day, it doesn't feel like that much changes, but then, you know, in startup land, you look back on 6 months and a year and your team is much bigger. The types of problems get bigger, like especially if they're coming back up to me. I think one of the biggest things was like, you know, and I think a lot of founders speak to this is like, when do you make that leap from going from product building to company building? Because in the early days, it really is just like, okay, how do How do we get this product off the ground? How do we make sure our customers are happy? And you know, you as a founder are very in the weeds on a lot of that. And then you kind of hit this like inflection point. I think for me, like it was probably around like 15 to 20 people on the team, where you need to start going into more of the like company building side of how do you make sure everyone is aligned, knows what the biggest priorities are in the business, we're all like moving towards the same. Goal. And I think like the learning for me too is like people can't read your mind.
Sarah Ahmad [00:32:26]:
So it's really important to say what you think about things, but also say it many times. Like one time is not enough to get through to folks. And so learning that muscle too of just like, you know, I think in the last year, we've made a lot more investments in my own time of like thinking about company communications and how, like what are some of like the structures to help like keep everyone on track and just like investing more time in some of the strategic work. Which I think in the early days is just like, doesn't really matter so much. Like you just need to get to product market fit. But at this stage it becomes a lot more important so that you can empower your team to move fast.
Omer Khan [00:33:04]:
And on that note, we should wrap up. So let's get onto the lightning round. I've got 7 quickfire questions for you.
Sarah Ahmad [00:33:10]:
You ready?
Omer Khan [00:33:11]:
Yeah, let's do it. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Sarah Ahmad [00:33:15]:
It just gets harder. This was in Y Combinator. Every founder that I spoke to us would just say it just gets harder and it's It always stuck with me and it's very true.
Omer Khan [00:33:27]:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Sarah Ahmad [00:33:29]:
Yeah, so one of my favorite books when starting out was Sprint by the Google Venture guys, and it's basically how to rapidly test and iterate on ideas in 5 days. And I feel like going through that process of discovery, very helpful for launching or pivoting in different products.
Omer Khan [00:33:48]:
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Sarah Ahmad [00:33:53]:
So kind of like I said, like it, you're gonna have to have like relentless confidence that you're gonna figure it out even when times get hard, uh, and that you're just gonna find a way out of it. You can really overcome anything and that's the truth there.
Omer Khan [00:34:08]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Sarah Ahmad [00:34:11]:
Get enough sleep. I make sure to get 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night. Uh, what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time? A next generation college. I think the college experience is, is so critical, uh, in development, but the actual skills that you're learning day to day is very antiquated. Like, I don't necessarily believe that professors are best suited to teach those classes. Like, it should just be people in the workforce. Um, so there's some trade schools like this, but I would be interested to see how do you actually make it the default as opposed to what it is today.
Omer Khan [00:34:45]:
That's a cool idea. Uh, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Sarah Ahmad [00:34:51]:
Uh, I spent 2023 being nomadic, so I spent my time between SF and New York, but then a lot of Latin America and Europe as well. And so it was a great time working remote and building Stable.
Omer Khan [00:35:04]:
Nice. And what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Sarah Ahmad [00:35:08]:
Yeah, I recently got into strength training. I'm I'm a small woman, so I can't lift a ton, but I do. It is pretty fun. I use the app called FitBot, which highly recommend to track everything. And it's fun to be able to gamify. And I think just like gets you in a really great headspace for the day and the week ahead.
Omer Khan [00:35:28]:
Awesome. Nice, nice boost of cortisol. Actually, actually, I get that now. Taking my daughter for driving lessons. It's like I come back, I come back pumped. You know, it's like Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure.
Omer Khan [00:35:46]:
Appreciate you making the time and sharing your story and some of the lessons you've learned along the way. If people want to check out Stable, they can go to usestable.com. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Sarah Ahmad [00:36:00]:
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. So I'm Sarah Ahmad on there. So yeah, that's probably the best way to get in touch.
Omer Khan [00:36:09]:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Sarah, and I wish you and the team the best of success. Oh, thank you.
Sarah Ahmad [00:36:14]:
My pleasure. Cheers.
