
Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch
How a Self-Funded SaaS Hit 8 Figures After Nearly Dying
Aaron Fulkerson is the co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, a knowledge management platform that powers help centers and self-service support for companies like PayPal, Docker, Zenefits, Whirlpool, and Remington. Aaron and his co-founder Steve left Microsoft to start MindTouch as an open source project in 2005. Within two years, the project ranked in the top 5 on Sourceforge with over 2,000 downloads a day. They commercialized with support subscriptions and grew to $2.3 million in cash receipts by 2009. But the self-funded SaaS was in trouble. With hundreds of well-funded competitors, no defensible moat, terrible churn, and no venture capital available during the 2008 financial crisis, the business was driving off a cliff. Aaron made the hard call to cut 40% of headcount, deprecate the on-premise product, and rebuild as a cloud-only platform focused exclusively on customer self-service content. The pivot nearly failed. From 2010 to 2013, MindTouch funded the new product using $6.2 million from the legacy business while simultaneously building the cloud platform. By 2012, the new business took off - growing from zero to over $10 million ARR in three years. In 2014, MindTouch outperformed the top SaaS companies by one to two standard deviations across every key metric tracked by Bessemer Venture Partners. Aaron shares what kept him going through the hardest years, the three principles that turned the company around, and why grit matters more than any other trait for entrepreneurs.






















