First Customers·Gary Vanbutsele, Whale

Whale: The Realities and Struggles of Building a SaaS Startup

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Gary Vanbutsele is the co-founder and CEO of Whale, a knowledge transfer and training platform that helps businesses onboard and train employees.

In 2018, a couple of friends in Belgium decided to build a SaaS product to help small business owners monetize courses. Everyone they spoke to told them it was a great idea.

So Gary and Bram spent over a year building their product. They were both excited to show their prospective customers what they had built until they realized that no one was interested in paying for it.

They hadn't validated their idea properly and had spent almost a year and a half building something that nobody wanted.

A few months later, Gary had an idea to build software to help with training and onboarding employees. He had experienced these problems firsthand with the IT company that he owned and knew it was a widespread problem.

This time Gary and Bram did things differently.

They validated their idea and even pre-sold their product idea to a couple of customers before they started building the product.

Things were looking great and everything seemed to be coming together this time. But little did the founders realize that their struggles were just beginning.

This episode is part of our First Customers series.

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by Dale Carnegie

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