First Customers·Jonathan Fields, Assembly

Assembly: Going from Nice to Have to Must Have SaaS Product

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Jonathan Fields is the co-founder and CEO of Assembly, an employee engagement platform modernizing company intranets.

In 2013, Jonathan got a job at ZipRecruiter, and over several years he watched it grow from 15 to 1,500 employees. He noticed the company invested heavily in culture and wondered if technology could help other companies with fewer resources do the same.

So in 2016, he and three co-founders decided to do something about it.

But they weren't ready to quit their jobs just yet. So they bootstrapped and worked on their company at night and on weekends for over three years.

They initially launched with a simple peer recognition and rewards product.

But finding the first customer (let alone their first 10 customers) turned out to be extremely difficult, e.g., they didn't know what an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) was back then, so they wrongly assumed anyone could be a potential customer.

Eventually, through a lot of persistence, finding people to talk to through their network, and learning from mistakes, they finally got a customer.

Today Assembly is a multi-million dollar ARR business, serving over 4,000 customers, and has raised $14.5 million.

This episode is part of our First Customers series.

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by Dale Carnegie

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