Cledara: A First Time Founder's Guide to Finding Product Market Fit
Cristina Vila is the co-founder and CEO of Cledara, a product that helps companies simplify the way they discover, buy, manage and cancel subscription software.
In 2018, Cristina quit her job to start her SaaS business. She was a first-time founder, who didn't know how to code and didn't have any sales experience.
But she was driven by a life-long dream to one day start her own business.
After raising a pre-seed round, she hired a software development company to build the product which she launched at SaaStock in Dublin three months later.
But when she tried to sell her product, she got a lot of objections.
Some people said that they didn't have a problem managing software subscriptions, others felt they already had a good solution in place (even if it was just a spreadsheet), and a lot of other people just weren't interested at that time.
So for a while, things weren't looking good for Cristina.
And even worse, she didn't charge for her product for 18 months. In fact, there wasn't even a way for customers to pay for her product – which many would say was a rookie mistake.
Despite those challenges, Cristina and her co-founder Brad, have grown Cledara to $2.4M in ARR so far with over 700 customers. And they've raised $7M and built a team of nearly 50 people.
In this episode, Cristina shares the lessons she's learned as a first-time founder and how she was able to overcome so many challenges to find product-market fit.
I hope you enjoy it.