Lessons on Perseverance from a SaaS Startup That Almost Failed

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Panos Siozos is the co-founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, a white-label SaaS platform that lets you create your own, personally-branded online school.

This is a story of three guys in Greece who built an e-learning software product while doing research for their PhDs. At the time, they had no intention to start a business.

But some years later, after seeing how most learning management systems missed the mark, they teamed up and set out to build a better product.

Two of the founders kept their day jobs and paid the salary of the third founder, so he could quit his job and work on the product full-time.

It took them two years to ship the product. And then to their dismay, they realized that while people seemed excited about their product, no one seemed ready to buy.

It took them another year to find their first few customers – that's three years after they started.

And during those three years, there were times when they thought about quitting. But they'd invested so much time and money that it was hard for them to walk away

They kept telling themselves – let's just get in front of people, let's listen to the feedback and keep improving the product. And maybe one day this will all pay off.

Today, they have customers in 70 countries, a team of 40 people, and have built a multi-million dollar SaaS company.

It's a great story and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

This episode is part of our PLG & Growth series.

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