AMP: Speed and Customer Focus in Building an 8-Figure SaaS

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Patrick Barnes is the co-founder and CEO of AMP, a multi-product SaaS platform that helps e-commerce merchants run their online businesses.

In 2016, Patrick co-founded Advocately, a review management platform for SaaS companies. Growth was painfully slow at first, with the team struggling to convince potential customers of the product's value.

Undeterred, Patrick and his co-founder persevered, scrapping together 2 to 4 new customers each month. Bootstrapping their startup forced them to be resourceful and laser-focused on customer needs.

After nearly three years of hard work, G2 a major player in the software review space acquired Advocately.

This experience from struggle to exit taught Patrick invaluable lessons about finding product-market fit, acquiring customers, and the importance of persistence.

In 2022, he teamed up with his long-time friend Cameron to tackle a growing problem in e-commerce: merchants were overwhelmed by the need to juggle 25 to 40 different SaaS tools just to run their online stores.

To build their initial solution, Patrick and Cameron acquired a small Shopify app with 2,000 customers, which became the foundation of their new venture, AMP.

They quickly applied SaaS best practices, redesigning the onboarding experience and implementing email marketing. The results were impressive. AMP hit its first million in ARR soon after the acquisition.

But success also brought new challenges.

When they launched an Amazon integration, expectations were high. They had 4,000 ideal customers who they were sure would love the new feature. But the launch fell flat, with the email campaign generating only 46 clicks.

As their team grew to 50 employees, maintaining their customer-centric culture became increasingly difficult.

Patrick's solution? Mandating regular customer calls for everyone from engineers to marketers to ensure the entire team stayed deeply connected to user needs.

This relentless focus on customers paid off. Today, AMP serves 20,000 customers, has raised $18.5 million in Series A funding, and generates eight figures in ARR.

This episode is part of our Product-Market Fit series.

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