Sandi Lin, Skilljar
How a SaaS Pivot Saved a Startup Nobody Wanted
Sandi Lin is the co-founder and CEO of Skilljar, a customer training platform that helps enterprises like Tableau, Slack, and Asana improve product adoption and customer retention. When Sandi left Amazon, she built a prototype for a Yelp for online learning called Everpath. But within three months, she realized there was not enough value in the online learning aggregation market to build a real business. Instead of starting over from scratch, she decided to interview 50 instructors on the platform to dig for pain. The interviews revealed three pain points: video editing, marketing, and the need for a platform to distribute courses independently. Sandi and her co-founder designed a survey to fail - randomized questions with no leading structure - and were shocked when the learning platform concept won decisively. They built a stripped-down MVP in 60 days, manually processing everything on the backend. That SaaS pivot got them to ramen profitability at $49 per month per customer. But the real breakthrough came when larger companies started approaching them for a customer training solution. Sandi pivoted again to focus on enterprise, eventually building Skilljar into a platform serving mid-sized software companies. Along the way, Sandi struggled to raise a seed round because investors would not take meetings. She also failed multiple times at hiring a sales team before realizing that as a founder, she was the best person to lead sales - even though she did not believe she could sell. Today, Skilljar has raised over $20 million, has a team of about 100 people, and is approaching $10 million in ARR.
