SaaS Product Market Fit: Lessons from Klipfolio’s CEO

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Allan Wille is the co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio, a SaaS application for building and sharing real-time business dashboards on browsers, mobile devices, and TVs. Klipfolio helps you stay in control of your business by giving you visibility into your most important data and metrics, wherever you are.

Klipfolio is based in Ottowa, Canada and was founded in 2001. To date, the company has raised over $16 million. And it has over 8,500 customers including companies such as Jet.com, Zendesk, and Ikea to name a few.

This episode is a story about 2 co-founders who struggled for 3 years to get their first paying customer. To make ends meet during that time, one of the co-founders even had to sell his car to be able to put food on the table.

These guys spent 3 years building a business-to-consumer (B2C) product. And they had almost 300,000 users. But the problem was that they had zero revenue. But they kept telling themselves that they just had to keep going.

Then one day they received a call from someone at Lufthansa, the largest airline in Germany. The company had a number of their employees using the B2C product to track soccer game scores. They wanted to know if the app could also be used to display business data in a dashboard. And that was the day that they co-founders pivoted to a business-to-business (B2B) model.

They built what Lufthansa wanted. And then went out to find their next corporate customer and then the next one. It wasn't easy. It involved a lot of cold-calling in the early days, which both the co-founders hated. But slowly they started to get traction.

And it was really slow growth. After 10 years of being in business, the company had 14 employees. But finally, their persistence paid off and they started to see the elusive 'hockey stick' growth after year 10. The company now has over 90 employees and does over $8 million in annual run rate.

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

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