The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 11

Luke Thomas, Friday

From Side Project to $10K MRR: How Friday Got Early Traction

Luke Thomas is the founder of Friday, a SaaS product that helps distributed teams share regular updates and communication at work. The product started as a simple idea: if his former manager had just asked a few regular check-in questions, Luke would never have quit that job. Luke spent nearly three years thinking about the idea before launching a Ruby on Rails app in late 2015. He shipped the product in January 2016, and it took three months to land his first customer by emailing everyone he knew. That first customer paid $45 a month. With no plan and limited time, Luke tried everything to build early traction. He wrote 30 to 40 long-form blog posts targeting keywords like "weekly check-ins" and "one-on-ones" for managers. He left comments on Harvard Business Review articles - so many that he got banned and had to use a VPN. Both channels delivered measurable signups because he asked every new user how they found Friday. Luke started with freemium but switched to a three-week trial when he realized free users were not converting predictably and he was spending his own money to keep the product running. The switch immediately generated three to five new paying customers. A pivotal moment came when a team leader at a 150-person company wanted to roll out Friday company-wide. The expansion required months of work on roles, permissions, and multi-team features. Then came a devastating bug: a single line of code caused one company's check-in data to be emailed to employees at a different company. Luke calls it his worst day as a founder. Luke also pivoted toward HR tools when enterprise interest pulled him in that direction, but realized after a year it was wrong and pivoted back. He spent months talking to investors but failed to raise money because he could not explain why he was not working full-time. The early traction he had built gave him options, though. In 2019, three years after launch, Luke finally quit his job to work on Friday full-time at $10K MRR, raised a small round, rebuilt the product, and launched on Product Hunt a week before COVID sent everyone remote.

Jaleh Rezaei, Mutiny

How Mutiny Got First SaaS Customers With a 2-Week MVP

Jaleh Rezaei is the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, a SaaS product that helps B2B companies personalize their website for each visitor in order to close more sales. As a product marketer at VMware, Jaleh got to work with a lot of salespeople and soon realized one thing that made the difference between great salespeople and average ones. The best salespeople knew how to adapt and personalize the conversation for each customer. And so they were more successful at closing deals, which typically were worth over $100,000. In 2011, she joined Gusto when they only had around 10 employees. With an average deal size of just $500, Jaleh had to quickly become really good at online customer acquisition. She wondered if she could create a more personalized experience for people who visited their website. But quickly realized how hard that was with the tools available to her at the time. So when she eventually had the chance to solve that problem, she jumped at it. Jaleh and her co-founder were accepted into YC and built their MVP in just 2 weeks. It was a simple API and a pitch deck. They didn't even have a demo to show people. It's hard getting prospective customers to use your product - even if you don't charge for it. They have to learn how to use the product, which requires a time commitment. And since you're just starting out, they don't even know if your product will actually help them or not. So the founders decided to get really hands-on with their first SaaS customers. They worked as an extension to their teams to create content, help them launch and measure the results. It wasn't scalable but turned out to be a great way to learn about their first SaaS customers and find product-market fit. To date, the founders have raised over $3 million. There are some good lessons in this interview. For example, you may have a big idea, but you don't have to take months or years to launch an MVP. Think big, but start small.