Rick Knudtson, Workshop
The Complaint He Ignored for 9 Months Led to His First $10M
Rick Knudtson is the co-founder and CEO of Workshop, an internal communications platform in Omaha, Nebraska, now at eight-figure ARR. Before this he co-founded Flywheel in 2012, a WordPress hosting platform for creative agencies, and sold it to WP Engine in 2019. It did not start well. In late 2020 Rick and his co-founders went all in on internal communications, then picked the wrong product. Nobody loves their intranet, Rick reasoned, so a better-designed one should win. The founding team spent the first nine months of 2021 selling that intranet and earned about three customers. Nobody agreed on what an intranet was even for. About four months in, they started hearing something else. Email is our number one channel and we have no visibility into it. Rick heard it and dismissed it for another five months. Email was not novel, and he had just come off an exit that told him he knew what to build. He calls it ego, plainly. By month nine Workshop had roughly zero traction and more than half of a $3 million raise still in the bank, and Rick was pushing to return the money to investors. His co-founder and COO Derek Homann talked him and Ben Stevinson out of it at a bar in Omaha. Just listen to the damn customers. They rebuilt the platform around email in 30 days and signed 10 customers, against three in nine months. In this interview, Rick explains why an exit made him a worse listener, why he thinks you should be marketing for a year before you sell anything, and how Workshop came to price by audience reached instead of per seat.
