Nine months building the wrong product while customers named the right one

The Mistake

You take the calls. You take the notes. And a problem keeps coming up that isn't the one you're building for, so you file it under noise.

Rick Knudtson and his co-founders started Workshop in January 2021 to build a better intranet. Nobody loves their intranet, he reasoned, so a better-designed one should win. But on call after call, prospects told him something else. Email is our number one channel, and we have no visibility into how any of it performs.

Four months in, he knew email was the bigger problem. They kept selling the intranet for another five months anyway.

Nine months of daily selling earned about three customers. Workshop had raised roughly $3 million out of the gates, and by month nine Rick was the one arguing to give it back.

Why Founders Make It

Two things were going on, and Rick names both.

The first is that the problem was boring. "Email's not sexy," he says. He wanted to build something novel in a new market. He'd already solved his own version of the email problem at Flywheel with a duct-taped mix of MailChimp, HubSpot and Slack, right up until his CMO caught him borrowing the marketing team's HubSpot account and kicked him out of it.

The second is that he'd just won. Rick sold Flywheel to WP Engine in 2019 with 30,000 customers and 200 employees. He calls what came next ego, with no hedging: "I would argue that we had a little bit of an ego coming off of a successful exit."

Winning once teaches you that your judgment is good. That's a bad lesson to carry into a market you've never worked in.

How Rick Nearly Gave $3M Back to His Investors

The timeline, in his words.

January 2021. Workshop starts. The mission gets written before the product: create more happy Mondays for employees everywhere.

Month four. After a ton of prospect calls, it's clear that email is the real problem in big companies. The team keeps building the intranet.

Month nine. About zero customers, more than half the raise still in the bank. Rick pushes to return the money, keep the investor relationships intact, and go start something else.

September 2021. Derek Homann, his co-founder and COO, talks him and Ben out of it at a bar in Omaha. "Guys, 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 said they were going to build it. Hands went up. Rick and his co-founder rebuilt the platform in 30 days.

Nine months on the intranet: 3 customers. Thirty days on the email product: 10 customers. Workshop is now five years old, just under 1,000 customers, eight-figure ARR.

The Fix (If You're Making It Now)

1. Write down the problem you keep hearing and are not building for. If you can't name it in one sentence, you're not taking notes on your calls.
2. Email everyone who raised it. Tell them you're building it, ask if they want it, and count the replies. Workshop's version of this was one email, and the hands went up immediately.
3. Give yourself 30 days to get something crude in front of those people. Rick and his co-founder did the rebuild in a month, which tells you they cut the scope on purpose.

Being wrong costs you a month. Being right means you stop guessing.

The Signal to Watch

Tally it every week. How many calls raised the problem you're not solving? Then put that number next to how many customers you closed on the thing you are solving.

Rick ran nine months of that tally against three customers before he acted on it. He'd tell you not to wait that long.