Richard White, Founder/CEO of Fathom, shares his strategy for acquiring first customers. He believes in giving away something for free to build trust and create word-of-mouth virality. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on building a sticky product that users love before worrying about monetization.
In this episode of the First Customers podcast, Richard White, CEO of Fathom, shares his insights on customer acquisition strategies, particularly the effectiveness of offering free products to build engagement and trust. He discusses the challenges of starting with a free model, the importance of user retention before monetization, and the significance of reducing friction in user experience. Richard also reflects on his experiences with Y Combinator and how they shaped his approach to building successful SaaS products.
Key Moments
00:00 Introduction and Background
00:22 Acquiring First Customers by Giving Away Something for Free
06:22 Reducing Friction and Investing in Onboarding
06:31 The Challenges of Staying Alive as a Free Product
Takeaways
- Giving away value can lead to customer acquisition.
- Building a product people use daily is crucial for success.
- Engagement metrics are more important than revenue in early stages.
- Onboarding should focus on making the product sticky.
- Reducing friction in user experience is key to retention.
- Investing in user feedback can guide product improvements.
- A strong product can attract funding even without revenue.
- The core product must be exceptional before scaling.
- Free products can create a loyal user base.
- Personal experiences shape entrepreneurial strategies.
Richard White Quotes
“Give away something for free.” – Richard White
“The biggest challenge is finding the next customers.” – Richard White
“We had a completely free product for the first year.” – Richard White
Links & Mentions
- Richard White’s current company: Fathom (https://fathom.video/)
- Richard White’s past company: User Voice (https://www.uservoice.com/)
- Richard White on LinkedIn
Transcript of First Customers e60 with Richard White
Paris Vega (00:01.223)
Welcome to the First Customers podcast. Today we have Richard White with us. He is the CEO of Fathom, which is the number one app on the HubSpot and Zoom marketplaces. And Richard’s previous company, UserVoice, reached 10 million in revenue over 10 years. Richard, thank you so much for making time for us. Welcome to the show.
Richard White (00:20.078)
Thanks for having me.
Paris Vega (00:22.343)
So you’ve got great experience starting and growing companies. How’d you get those very first customers?
Richard White (00:30.862)
you know, whether it’s been with user voice or fathom, or even when I was like a freelancer before, I think I’ve used the same strategy for all three, which is I give away something for free. And usually I give away a lot of something for free. I remember when I was doing, I used to be a product designer and I would come in and do a free hour with anyone and like, you know, show me something you want to have designed. I’ll give you some mock -ups. I’ll give you some feedback on something.
And so it was just a bit, I think in sales, they call this like give get, right? Like you got to give something to get something, right? user voice, you know, we had a completely free product for the first year. It was a product that would kind of like take all the feedback that came from your customers and organize it. So you can understand what voices were most prominent. And we were very adamant of a product should be completely free and same thing with Fathom today, even to this day, it’s completely free. And we actually committed that we will always make the core part of Fathom free.
And then we’ve got add -ons that we charge on top of that. And I, that’s just my, my, my thing. I think it’s so hard to get people to adopt new tools and products, especially in software. There’s so many that, you know, asking them both to adopt something new and also pay me something immediately for it. I think it’s a really high bar, especially for things where they’ve never paid for something like it before. Right. Fathom is something that like,
joins all your zoom meetings, your Google Meet meetings, records them, transcribes them, writes all the notes for you. It’s super cool, but how many people have ever used a product like that before? Almost zero because you really couldn’t build this product before last year, right? And so, you know, if I’m asking someone to pay for something where it’s like, you know, here’s a better hamburger, great, I should charge you money for it, but I’m asking you to pay for something you’ve never bought before. I find it’s actually a lot easier to just give you a taste of it for free, right? Give you a good free version.
and then have an idea over time of how I’ll add on other things into that, that I can upsell you onto. And I’ve just found that works really well, because I think actually the biggest challenge is not just finding your first customers, but finding the next ones. And if you give away something for free that’s really good, it enables this really good word of mouth virality that you just don’t get when it’s a paid product.
Paris Vega (02:43.207)
Right. I think that’s really interesting what you’re saying about you’re offering something that’s new and so it’s kind of a new category. And you mean when you said that it wasn’t even possible a year ago, is that because of the AI side of it, the interpretation of the calls and that kind of thing? Maybe explain a little bit about what Fathom does.
Richard White (03:03.854)
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, in the last year you’ve had such great strides in like what you can do with AI that we can now give you, you know, the meeting notes we can give you are probably as good as, or maybe I’ve gotten people tell me they’re better than the notes they would have written themselves, right? A lot better usually. Right. And so that’s only been possible in the last really nine months. so yeah, that’s, that’s kind of what I mean by that. But Fathom is a, it’s a, it’s a free AI note taker, right? So it’s a
app, you download it, install it on your computer, and then we’ll fathom note, take your old bot, join your Zoom meeting, your Google Meet, your Microsoft Teams meeting. In real time, it’s recording, it’s transcribing, literally about 30 seconds after the call. So we’ve tried to make it really fast. You get these notes and you get the recording. And so like, you don’t just get notes, you also get notes of like, you know, you can click on any line in those notes. It’ll take you back to that part of that meeting. So it’s really powerful if you want to share with someone on your team, Hey, I just had a conversation with Paris.
Here’s what he said, check this out. Right. And so we’ve just find that it’s completely changed. I don’t write any notes anymore. And I try not to take in person meetings because I just try to get on zoom, have a conversation with someone. And then I don’t have to think anymore about it. I go to meet with them again. Two weeks later, I pulled back up that summary and that recording. I’m like, take two minutes, review it. I’m right. It’s like, we just got off the call. Right. So,
Paris Vega (04:25.159)
Yeah, I love it. I use it pretty much every day. You guys, if you just had tweaked a few things, you could have just a podcast production app, kind of like the one we’re using now. But it seems like it’s just a few little steps and you could just produce a podcast from it.
Richard White (04:27.022)
awesome.
Richard White (04:39.534)
Probably. Yeah. There’s probably something said for focusing on meetings or a little bit of the podcast, but you’re right. Technically speaking, like probably just not that far away from it.
Paris Vega (04:48.103)
Yeah. OK. You said that you like to give stuff away. What did you give away with User Voice, your first comp?
Richard White (04:58.35)
I mean, we also had a completely free version to start, where the whole product was free. I didn’t. And I think in both these cases, we started off with not just like y ‘all who have free me, where it’s like free and then there’s some paid plans. We actually went, no, no, this thing is completely free. We’re going to try to charge you, which has some other challenges where people are like, what’s the catch, right? Are you selling my data? There’s like no catch, right? We’re, we’re here to prove out that we can build something people use every day. And if I can, I’ve always thought that.
Paris Vega (05:01.543)
Okay.
Paris Vega (05:20.679)
Right?
Richard White (05:27.534)
If I can build a product you use every day, I can eventually sell you something on top of that, that you will pay for. Right. Like the hard part is becoming part of someone’s habit. so with user voice, we, we gave away a free version and then over time in that case, we, we actually found that like, we started going up market. We started selling to companies like Netflix and meta at Amazon. And then we discontinued the free version at some point because it’s hard to sell something for, you know,
five, six figures and also give away part of it free, right? Sometimes it’s tough to have both, right? At least for that product it was. But yeah, full first year it was free. Yeah, it became more of a BDP enterprise product, right? So we started off, in that product we started off on the low end of the market and worked our way up and eventually just set deciding, this is actually a really good fit for enterprise. Let’s just focus exclusively on enterprise. Yeah.
Paris Vega (06:03.591)
So it became more of a B2B enterprise product at that point? OK.
Paris Vega (06:22.791)
So talk about the challenges of like, how do you stay alive? You know, when you’re starting out as a free product, you know, there’s just that from the entrepreneur perspective, you gotta have some kind of funding in place. And there’s that other side of kind of sales where you’re selling investors or some, you know, some kind of deal making has to happen just to get that free thing made.
Richard White (06:31.47)
Yeah.
Richard White (06:48.014)
Yeah, this is why I think it’s also differentiated because not everyone’s willing to do it. Right. It’s like a big ask to go, you’re going to forgo revenue for a period of time. two different answers to that, right? User voice was like the first real company I did. And, you know, this was 15 years ago. I was much younger, man. I had much lower quality of life. And so it was literally just, you know, I think at the time we, we had raised a little bit of money, but mostly it was, we just kept our burn super low. Like all the.
All the folks on the team lived in the same building at one point, right? That was just a classic, like, we’re just gonna grind it out and we’re gonna give away this thing for free and we’ll make money at some point, but our burn is so low, that’s how we get around it. With Fathom, it’s like, okay, I’ve done a startup before, it’s a little easier to raise money this time around, and so I can kind of just do it like, okay, we’re gonna fund our way over the gap between free and monetization. But I think there’s a lot of benefits to it, so.
You know, it requires funding or requires kind of like grit and being able to like keep your burn low to be able to do it and not have to charge, which is why most people charge upfront. I do think though, like if you, from a funding perspective, if you have a product, even if it doesn’t have monetization, if you have a product that has really good engagement, you can generally find funding for it. Right. The trick is I don’t think people, most people know what good engagement is. They think like, I’ve got a few people I’ve got 20, you know, I’ve got 500 users. It’s like,
But are they using it every day? Right. Like that’s the thing people get. It’s like, I got 500 people signed up for my product. They use it every day. Like, and so I think if you have really good engagement metrics, I mean, before Fathom launched publicly, I think I had probably recruited like 800 people to sign up for the product. And it wasn’t until the end where we got 50 people that use it day in day out. Like I went through multiple cohorts of signups. And at the end of that beta period, I had like 50 people that use it day in day out. And that’s when I was like, okay, we have enough down to like launch this thing.
Right. We’ve proven that like, but like we burned through probably 800 of my like closest network connections, tried it out at work or it’s buggy or whatnot. Right. So if you even have a product that’s like really good, that just people, you know, a small group of people, it could be 50, it could be a couple hundred that just use it every single day. You can probably find some pre seed or seed funding for it. you know, as long as you also have a story for like how this gave a big one day.
Paris Vega (08:53.831)
Yeah.
Richard White (09:11.502)
But yeah, so I think that’s the trick, right? You’ve got to find a way to like, how do I, how do I build a business where I don’t make any money for a year or two? Right. but I think if you can build that, it’s super, super powerful. It also allows you to really focus, right? Like it, it was really clarifying to the Fathom team that I’d say, Hey guys, we’re not going to try to monetize for a couple of years. We’re going to stay really focused first on free user attention. Like make sure people love, you know, use this product day in, day out. Once we get them into it, once we prove that we’re going to get really good at.
onboarding new folks, making the signup process really easy. Once we do that, we’re going to focus a lot on how do we get people to like refer the product to other people. We’re going to build this kind of like growth engine, right? And then once we have all those things working, then we’ll come back and like think about how to monetize it. Cause it turns out like all of these disciplines, making a product’s got good retention, making a product that has, is easy to sign up for and use, figuring out monetization. These are all hard problems. And the mistake I often see is like, when you try to do all of these at the same time,
You’re going to do a mediocre job at all of them. And to do a good startup, you have to be great at all those things. Right. And so it’s hard to be great at four things at once. You’re much better to try to do it in sequence. Great. Let’s get really great retention. Great. Let’s get really great at onboarding. Great. Let’s get really great at this. And then, like I said, I think monetization in a lot of companies is honestly the easiest part. The hard part is finding, finding a thing that people love or refer to their friends. We’ll use day in day out. That’s the hard part.
Once you do that, there’s, you know, this was the concern about Facebook many years ago. I remember if you go back 15 years, people were like, they don’t charge, they don’t make, they don’t charge any money. It’s free. Right. And then they rolled out their first ads and like early 20 teens were like, they’re not making that much money. I don’t, I bet, I don’t know, but I bet Mark Zuckerberg was never worried that they would be able to figure out how to make money. Right. Now they make, now when they focus on it, they make gobs of money. Right. Because they have the key ingredients, they have product.
Paris Vega (11:00.775)
Yeah. Bye.
Richard White (11:05.742)
products people love and are in every single day. And so I think, you know, I know there’s a lot of folks, there’s a, there’s a big strain of like, sort of advice. It’s like, you know, you gotta charge money early. So you know that people want the thing, right? So you get that validation and that might be true again, if you’re building something where you’re replacing something else that I’m already paying money for, right? But if you’re trying to get someone to do something new that they’ve never done before, like use a social media app or use an AI note taking tool.
Just the fact that they’re using it is indication day in day out is currency in some ways. In fact, I think it’s even more powerful than they’d be willing to pay for it.
Paris Vega (11:43.175)
So during the time that you’re focusing, you said like that first phase is totally, I guess it’s like user experience, engagement. What, how can we make it super useful and addictive for the person, for the potential users? What is the onboarding strategy there during that time period? Like how do you get people to use it so that you can make sure that it is engaging other than just your team using it yourselves? Talk about, look at that strategy. So that totally relates to it.
Richard White (12:08.942)
Yep.
Paris Vega (12:11.911)
the first customer aspect.
Richard White (12:13.71)
Yeah. So I think having really good signup process is important, but it’s only important once you built the core product that like works well and people want to be in every day. So in the beginning, we focused everything on our onboarding is terrible. It’s kind of crappy. I probably, maybe I have to pull some levers in the app to make it work. Right. But I will hand hold people through it, but I’ll focus everything on once you’ve got, once you are signed up, does it work? And by work, I mean, is it a really exciting product that you want to be in?
on a regular basis. And I think what a regular basis is going to depend on what your product is, right? For us, we’re relevant when you’re in meetings. You’re probably in meetings every day. Maybe you’re making a product that’s relevant for financial planning. Well, how often do you financial planning? Maybe not every day. So maybe your metric is like, someone should be on our app once a month because that’s how often they do financial planning. Right. So the cadence that you want kind of depends upon like the use case you’re solving. But I focus on that first. And then you’re right, which is.
how do I get folks to sign up for that is really messy, right? This is the like, do unscalable things. One of the things I really like doing that we did for Fathom is there’s some sites where you can, one’s called like userinterviews .com. There’s a few of them out there where you can actually say, hey, I’ll pay $50 for 30 minutes for me to like, you know, show you a product and get your feedback on it, do user research. And so I really liked doing that. I have some ideas of like who I think an ideal user would be. I go to.
It’s a salesperson or it’s a customer stress person. Great. I’m going to go set up a campaign. I want to talk to 50 salespeople and really I’m just paying them to take a product demo with me. Right. I’m, I’m, I’m kind of using the veil of research. It is research on some level, but really what I’m doing is like, rather than try to set up sweet form and convince people to sign up for leads. And I’m saying I’ll pay you money to take a demo and tell me what you think of this. And then afterwards, I’m going to part of the call will be me explaining the product. See if you like it. If you do like it.
I’m going to set it up for you on the call and then see if you use it afterwards. Right. And I’m actually, you know, a big fan of using incentives like that to get to folks, right? Like we did a lot of things early on in Fathom where first time you use the product, we send you an email and say, we’ll pay 25 bucks if you jump on a call and tell us about your first experience of the product. And people love that stuff, right? Like, there’s a, you know,
Richard White (14:34.798)
When you just ask me, Hey, give me feedback on it. People like them. But would you say I’ll pay you $25? It tells two things. One is that you value that feedback. Most companies don’t. And so that people don’t want to give it. Cause like, why would I give it? You probably don’t care. and you actually get to me out of it. So again, it’s kind of paradoxical, right? I’m prescribing a thing where like you don’t charge any money and you actually spend money to get people to sign up. But I think it’s worked pretty well. The other thing we’ve done or I’ve done is the classic like.
You know, I just go on LinkedIn. I go to all my connections and I’m just in all my friends inboxes and be like, Hey, can I demo you my new product? I do the same thing. So if I’m not paying them 50 bucks, right. And then I do the thing at the end and I do this for the research calls too. If they liked it, Hey, do you have two or three other people that you know, that you think would really benefit from this? And again, this works because it’s free. If I was charging 50 bucks, no, they don’t want to recommend. They’re not gonna like, I’m not gonna.
rat out my three friends to pay you 50 bucks, but if it’s free, it’s a gift. What I’m saying is like, do you have three friends that would also like this free gift? Yeah, okay, yeah, right? And so that’s the other way I’ve done it historically.
Paris Vega (15:45.319)
So let’s look at the logistics of that earlier moment where you’re having to pay people. Is this after you’ve gotten investment or are you just building up personal savings from your past career and you’re saying, hey, here’s my little war chest to spend on this instead of ads? And then how would you, if you haven’t gotten investors yet, if you already had investors, how’d you sell it before, you know, having enough users to have the data? Talk a little bit about that kind of timing logistics around that.
Richard White (16:15.31)
Yeah, I think it as it is something like in lieu of ad spend, right? Like, you know, I, I think, I think it’s really easy to burn a lot of money quickly on ad spend and get very mediocre results. I would almost bet for most is an ad spend is a thing where maybe 10 years ago there were some Northwest passages where you could find some keywords that weren’t there underutilized. It’s pretty saturated. Right? So like, I’m almost certain if you really know who you’re going after and you have a specific criteria.
What’s in you need to talk to 25 people like that’s 25 people is a lot actually, right? Like 25 people paying $25 a month, right? Like, or for, for a call, right? I’m pretty sure that’s cheaper than actually trying to buy ads to get to 25 people because you’ll get to the wrong people. There’s a lot of section bias sort of thing. So it does require you to have capital, right? It does require you to have some money to like, yeah, I have like a personal or chest or you’ve got to raise old money.
But I don’t think any investor would push back on it, right? Because I do think like it’s a pretty savvy way. Again, I’m a B2B product, right? And I think, you know, maybe if you’re doing some consumer thing, maybe an ad thing’s the best play, but early days you’d be surprised by how much Intel you can get from just like 25 good conversations.
Paris Vega (17:33.287)
That lines up with, I feel like I say this sentence just about every podcast, but it lines up with what we’re hearing from lots of different entrepreneurs of how critical it is to talk to your customers or talk to prospects, your target audience.
Richard White (17:43.854)
That’s the other thing, right? Like, yeah, you could buy a bunch of ads and they sign up, but now you have two problems, right? One is they’re going to silently fail. You’re not actually talking to them so you don’t get to see what worked or not. And two, for that to work, you actually have the good signup process. And I just said, like, I don’t know if I want to invest in a signup process that’s really good until I’ve got a product that’s really good to onboard you into, right? So it’s an on -ramp onto a freeway. Well, if the freeway’s got gaps in it, let’s work on the freeway. So.
That’s why I think you skip directly the part you care about, which is like, get me in front of 20 people that look like the person I think is gonna love this product. Let me get on the phone with them and see if they actually love the product, right?
Paris Vega (18:21.383)
Yeah, that’s a great insight on projects I’ve been on or companies started. Sometimes we’ll look at, and maybe other people are like this too, especially on the software side where sometimes you’ll build it in the same flow of like how the user experience is like, okay, we’re going to start with the sign up and login. And then what’s the next screen they see, let’s build that. And you’re kind of going through the user experience step by step. So that’s interesting how you’re optimizing on the sticky part first.
you know, making the product good before the other stuff.
Richard White (18:52.334)
That’s for two reasons, right? Yeah. Cause like one, that’s the part you’re going to differentiate on. You’re not, people aren’t going to, you’re not going to win on your signup process. Your signup process is just an accelerant. But the other thing is I don’t know what my signup process should be until I figure out how you’re going to use the thing. Right. And so it’s actually kind of nice is if I manually sign you up, if I manually walk you through the setup steps and I do it myself, I started to get really, I started to really understand what’s important in the signup process and what’s not. I think the biggest mistake people make is they put too many things in their signup process. Right.
we’re probably still doing that, right? Where it’s like, does this absolutely need to be in the design process for the person to get started? Or can they learn about it later sort of thing, right? And if you think about, sometimes if you start from that, like, we’re going to build from the top of the funnel down, you start to go, well, they need this, this, this, all these things. Like, meh. Turns out actually the key aha moment happens when you get to this feature and you only need these two things set up to get to that feature, right? So.
Paris Vega (19:49.959)
I should say probably most software products just need an email address.
Richard White (19:54.67)
Yeah, I think a lot of, yeah. Us, we need, we need access to your calendar. We need to know what meetings you’re in, right? And for us, you have to do the installing a desktop app. So like we’re a little heavier weight than most, but yeah, there’s a lot of products that just ask you way too many things and want me to do, but they make me think a lot about things I don’t know, right? Like, do you want this, this and this? Like, I don’t know, man. Like, you know, so, right. I think there’s a lot of, once you have a sticky product,
Paris Vega (19:59.911)
Okay.
Paris Vega (20:14.823)
Yeah, because until you’ve used it, yeah.
Richard White (20:21.902)
Onboarding can be in differentiator, especially if you’re space where like there’s a couple of good products, right? Like I think that was our early differentiator for us. There were other people that had products similar ours, but their onboarding process was way harder. Part of it being harder was they had pricing plans. You had to pick your pricing. We didn’t make you do that. That’s part of the signup process is, you know, you think about all the cognitive load you make someone do. It’s the more settings you ask them to configure, the more things you ask them to connect, the more decisions you ask them to make. That’s actually what you’re trying to eliminate in signup process. So.
Once you have a good sticky product, then yeah, I think it’s a great investment to invest in having a really good onboarding process, but it doesn’t buy you anything until then.
Paris Vega (20:59.687)
So it seems like there’s a theme with your kind of overall strategy and at each phase, it’s all about reducing friction at every step, whether it’s getting people on board, you’re saying, hey, we’re going to give you money to sign up. There’s no reason not to do this other than if you want to take the time or not.
Richard White (21:07.406)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Richard White (21:18.926)
Yep. Yeah. Then we’re gonna get the truest signal on like, is this useful? Not, well, it is useful, but it’s not worth that much money. That’s their problem, right? Like pricing is hard. And so you might get pricing wrong in, and you’re probably most likely wrong in the like, you’re going to charge too much direction. And therefore then there’s a lot of people that would use this product, but you priced them out or they didn’t know it was worth the whatnot. Right? So like you’re trying to reduce friction. What I’m also trying to do is reduce the number of variables.
So that I’m really just testing one variable, which is, is this the core of this thing? Say I think that is this part actually useful? What’s trying to like control out like, yeah, or is it the onboard process is bad or the marketing is bad or the pricing is wrong. I want to get rid of all that and just simplify it down to, I’m going to talk to 30 people. And if I can get 15 of them to, if I hand hold them through all the other stuff, I answer all their questions, whatnot. Does the core product work? Right. Core product works. Let’s go, let’s go fix all those other things.
Core product doesn’t work. You didn’t waste any time on that stuff at least. Right. I think a lot of first time folks spend 80 % of their time on all the crap that doesn’t matter. Figure out pricing, figure out on -board. And then the core of the product is kind of an afterthought, right? yeah. And it does this there because they’re so already convinced that the core product is good. I think the common mistake for especially for first time, like, especially startup entrepreneurs is like, is self -dilution about how good your product is. It’s like, well,
I had this idea for this thing I could do. I use it, but I use it because it’s my baby. It’s technically able to do these things, but it’s not amazing at it. You wouldn’t run and tell your friends about it, but it’s good enough. I’m going to go down, build the rest of it. It’s not good enough until it’s amazing. Your product, I wouldn’t even bother building onboard and the rest of the stuff until it’s like every person you talk to or maybe not everyone, but like two of those people talk to you like, this is awesome. Like we had people, we knew we were doing something right. People were like, I want to pay you for this. I feel bad that I’m not paying you for this.
Paris Vega (22:56.519)
Right.
Richard White (23:16.206)
This is so good, I should be paying you. That’s what you want, right? So, sorry, there’s my soapbox.
Paris Vega (23:21.383)
Yeah. So then it kind of puts the power in your hands where you can kind of scale at will, like at whatever speed you want.
Richard White (23:27.374)
Right. Right. Right. The other fun trick about this is it’s a great way to like hack investors.
Paris Vega (23:38.535)
Okay.
Richard White (23:41.102)
When it comes to raising investment, you want in order either really good numbers, no numbers, any other numbers. And that could be engagement metrics. It could be revenue metrics. You’re much better having, you’re much better fundraising on. We’ve got really great engagement metrics and no revenue. Then we’ve got okay engagement metrics and we have okay revenue. Eh, not interesting, right? The other fun thing, right?
And the other fun thing is so like, again, going back to doing one thing well, it’s like, I can say like, yeah, like, you know, we don’t have a ton of users, but our, our retention is great. I can raise on that. Okay. Our attention is great. And we have, you know, phenomenal number of users growth, but I’ve got no revenue. I can raise on that. And then when you actually do turn on the revenue later on, it’s this like hack because most people, most graphs they see people rep like monetize from the beginning. And so there’s just a slow steady ramp from the beginning.
You’re going to turn this on and the graph is going to go directly straight up because you’re going to be able to monetize. We’ve got an existing thousand users and now we’re going to sell them this ad on. And we already pretty, pretty confident 50 % of them are going to buy it. Right. Boom. And so now you’ve got this graph at least gets you the meeting may not close the round, but always get you the meeting because they’re like, something’s happening here. They went from zero to a million revenue and three to six months because, you know, and again, it’s because.
Paris Vega (24:41.447)
Right.
Richard White (25:05.006)
you focused on it and it’s because you’re building on top of this platform of I’ve already got a bunch of users, right? Which is why they’re used to seeing. So that’s how I kind of think about it. It actually helps you with the fundraising stuff, paradoxically.
Paris Vega (25:11.527)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (25:20.327)
That’s really cool. I mean, already we’re 20 something minutes in here and you’ve you’ve shared a lot of really good insights. Were there other roles or smaller companies or things that you started to kind of discover this kind of methodology or this strategy of going about the way that you are? Because it’s not necessarily intuitive. I mean, I guess it is once you take a step back and.
you know, see what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. But how did you get to this insight, to this strategy, to this way of doing business or building a SaaS product?
Richard White (25:57.102)
That’s a good question. I think, like I said, before I was doing SaaS products, I was doing some consulting and I just had that mindset too. I think I’ve always had this like, I always want to provide value before I ask for value type of thing. That always was kind of like a personal ethos of mine. I also think I was very fortunate to be surrounded by, a small little trivia part of my career is I actually worked in a company that was in the first batch of Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a really big incubator seed fund organization. They’ve done things like Dropbox and Airbnb.
And I kind of lucked my way into working with, you know, 15 years ago, the founders of Reddit and the people that went on to be the founders of Twitch and whatnot. And I’m surrounded by all those folks and every one of those folks were doing free, right? Twitch in the beginning, free, Reddit, free, Dropbox, free. And so it just seemed kind of natural. I think we were all kind of, everyone kind of coalesced around, yeah, this is, and I don’t know why we all coalesced around that. I think that was just kind of like,
It’s easy to make software where, you know, it doesn’t cost as much. We just want people to use it. And I think there’s a personal thing, right? I get excited in the morning about people using my product. I get excited about getting emails with people saying, I love this product. I get somewhat excited about the revenue, but I actually don’t get as excited about the revenue as I do about people of this product. and so it’s a little bit of personal intros. I think it was a little bit of like being surrounded by like people that were thinking about that were also realizing the strategy works really well. it’s a little bit of both.
Paris Vega (27:26.119)
So yeah, being exposed to Y Combinator and all those epic companies, I mean, there’s been so many iterations and fails and successes to where they’ve really honed kind of what actually works on the ground. Does that make sense? Okay. Would you recommend any books to other entrepreneurs or anything, any kind of way of self -education or things that they might want to check out?
Richard White (27:38.158)
Yeah. Yeah.
Richard White (27:51.47)
Yeah. So my, my favorite book, my gosh, I’m blanking on the name of it. yeah. Obvious. So my, my favorite business book is kind of a curve ball. It’s about positioning. which is, it feels like a very niche marketing thing to worry about. it’s by this woman, April Dunford. It’s called obviously awesome. I think it’s a re like you’re thinking about how to build.
any sort of product, I think it’s actually a really fundamental thing. Cause I think it’s really important to figure out what are you actually selling to people and how do you explain it to them? And that’s what this book is all about. And how do you, how do you think about you versus competition? How do you get in the minds of your users and understand how they’re going to look at it? so that’s my like, inside baseball kind of like, you know, there’s obviously there’s all the core ones. Like I love the Bill Walsh book, the score takes care of itself, which is all about like,
Don’t worry about the big metrics. Don’t worry. He doesn’t care about the football score. He cares about doing all the little things right. Like that’s like kind of like my management ethos. obviously there’s all the zero to ones and all these other short books, but when you probably won’t hear other people reference, I think it’s fantastic is obviously awesome by April done.
Paris Vega (29:02.439)
Okay, cool. We’ll put that in the show notes for sure. Richard, this has been great. I really needed to hear several of the things you said. It’s a really interesting perspective and I think it clarifies with the reasoning you gave for the way you go about your strategy. It really clarifies a path for SaaS entrepreneurs especially of how they need to approach things and gives them something to think about.
So again, thank you so much for being here with us. Where would you like people to connect with you or check out what you’re up to?
Richard White (29:39.086)
Yeah, I only have one functioning social media and that’s LinkedIn. So if you’d like to connect, yeah, you can message me there. I’m sometimes a little backed up on my messages, but I try to get everyone within a week. Yeah, and please try out Fathom and let me know what you think. Always love product feedback. It could always be better. So if you have any ideas how it’d be better, I’d love to hear them. And who knows, maybe I’ll send you a $25 gift card for it because we pay people for great feedback too. So.
Paris Vega (29:42.631)
Okay.
Richard White (30:06.646)
yeah, just look at Richard white on LinkedIn, look for Fathom, AI meeting assistant. You’ll, you’ll find me at that a little, you’ll find me with old blue avatar. So that’s me. Cool.
Paris Vega (30:16.487)
All right, everybody, we’ll see you on the next episode of the First Customers Podcast.
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