The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 9

Ryan Fyfe, Workpuls

Early Traction: He Couldn't Get 10 Customers to Pay

Ryan Fyfe is the co-founder and COO of Workpuls, an employee monitoring and time tracking software. Previously, he founded Humanity, an employee scheduling software product. In 2010, Ryan set out to build better employee scheduling software. Early in his career, he had worked in the service industry and experienced the pains of scheduling shifts both as an employee and manager. He believed there was an opportunity to build an easier solution. He targeted the lower end of the market and quickly built a basic scheduling solution. He didn't do customer interviews or much market research. Instead, he trusted his gut that based on his experience, there was a need for his solution. But getting early traction was disheartening. He went from being excited about how his product was going to help hundreds or maybe even thousands of small businesses to struggling to get even 10 customers. People seemed interested in his product but always seemed to have an excuse for why they couldn't or weren't ready to pay for it. And things got worse when Ryan realized that it wasn't working out with his co-founder and decided to buy him out. Suddenly he became a solo founder of a product that he believed in, but one that was clearly struggling to get traction. And now Ryan had to do everything from product, marketing, and sales on his own. But after a lot of persistence and hard work, he figured out how to sell his product. He went from having a struggling product that nobody wanted to bootstrapping it to $100K ARR. And then after raising VC funding, he went on to grow the business to over $12M ARR, 150 employees, and 40,000 customers including companies such as Nike, CNN, and Lyft. Eventually, Ryan recognized that he was better at building than operating and handed off the CEO role to someone who had grown up within the company. The business was later acquired. Now Ryan is applying every lesson he learned to his current startup, Workpuls - starting with customer segmentation, pricing confidence, and early traction strategies he wishes he'd used the first time.

Suneera Madhani, Fattmerchant

She Was Laughed At - Then Disrupted SaaS Pricing

Suneera Madhani is the co-founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a payment technology company that makes it easy and affordable for businesses of any size to accept modern forms of payment, track data, and stay competitive. In 2012, Suneera was working in sales for a merchant services company. She would drive around from one shopping plaza to another in her VW Beetle selling payment terminals out of the trunk of her car to small businesses. She describes it as the worst job she's ever had. As a self-confessed data nerd, Suneera saw all these transactions being processed through the merchant services company and wondered why they weren't turning that data into analytics that their customers could use to increase their sales. She also realized that their pricing was too complicated and customers couldn't understand what they were being charged. She believed that instead of monetizing the transactions, they should monetize their SaaS platform with a flat-rate unlimited processing subscription. Suneera wanted to solve this problem and did a lot of research. But she had zero desire to build a payment infrastructure network and absolutely no idea where to even start. So she pitched her idea to her bosses - who laughed in her face. They thought it was a ridiculous idea. Shortly after that she left the company and pitched her idea to about 12 different payment processing companies. And she was rejected a dozen times. So she borrowed money from friends and family and gave herself 6 months to get her idea off the ground. If she failed, she could always go back and get another job. In this interview, you'll learn what Suneera did in those first 6 months to prove her idea and find initial customers. And we explore how she's gone on to build a company with over 7,000 customers and more than 130 employees. She's also raised over $20M in VC funding and last year her company was valued at $140M.