First Customers·James Evans, Command AI

Command AI: Mastering Cold Emails to Grow a 7-Figure SaaS

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James Evans is the co-founder and CEO of Command AI (acquired by Amplitude), a user assistance platform that makes your software product easier to use.

In 2019, James and his co-founders were working on an EdTech product to help teachers give coding feedback to students.

They got frustrated with their product's complexity, so they built a search bar tool to help users find features and complete tasks more easily.

And then they realized, the search bar tool was a more interesting product.

Despite having no customers, they got into YC. However, they struggled to get traction as they spent most of their time explaining what their product did.

The breakthrough came when they made a Chrome extension that visually showed their product working in potential customers' own websites.

James made Loom videos for each potential customer, showing Command AI integrated with their app and how it could help. His cold emails had a whopping 30% response rate and helped land their first 10 customers.

But the team kept struggling to explain their unique product and its value.

James realized they were spending over 80% of meetings with potential customers explaining how Command Bar was different from other options and what exact issues it solved.

It made it incredibly difficult for them to grow the business more quickly.

Today, Command AI is a 7-figure ARR SaaS business, with over 20 million end-users across hundreds of customers like Hashicorp, Freshworks, and Hubspot. They've grown to a team of 40 people and raised $24 million.

This episode is part of our First Customers series.

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