SaaS Club

He tried outbound twice. Both failed. So he stopped chasing customers. And grew to $100M in revenue.

The standard response to a channel that isn't working is to push it harder. , co-founder of TabaPay, shut the channel down instead.

One attempt was a real outbound sales force. It didn't work. The other was an expansion into Mexico. His verdict: "Waste of time."

And for 9 years, the only outside money was a single $2.5M seed check. There was no budget to keep funding a channel that wasn't producing.

What replaced it wasn't content marketing or ads. He's never used either.

It was one message, aimed at one market: "We help regulated businesses push and pull money instantly." Get that into your market's heads and "when they have the problem that matches your vision, they're going to give you a call."

But a message doesn't spread itself. Fintechs trust their bank and the card networks, so TabaPay became the processing engine behind roughly 20 banks, and every new fintech it signed brought Visa transaction volume the network had never seen before. The people his market already trusted were the ones carrying his message.

"So we have inbound from the networks, inbound from banks, and that's how we win."

That inbound flow became customers. Those customers now touch a third of US households. And the company runs profitable at about 150 people.

Your market already trusts someone. Your job is to be worth that someone's referral.

4 days ago | [YT] | 1

SaaS Club

9 months. Almost zero customers. Then they rebuilt around one feature they'd ignored. Traction in 30 days. 8-figure ARR today.

Rick Knudtson had already built and sold a company before he co-founded Workshop. So he did what many second-time founders do...

He trusted his own read of the market over what his prospects were telling him, and it nearly killed the company.

Nobody loves their intranet, he figured, so a better one should win. His team sold that intranet every day.

On those same sales calls, prospects kept naming a different problem. Email.

They were sending messages to thousands of employees and had no idea who was reading them.

Rick heard it and moved on. Email wasn't interesting, and after selling his last company he was sure he knew what to build.

"I was like, email, this is not that hard. You guys can't actually have this problem."

By month 9, they were still at 3 customers.

More than half of the $3M they had raised was still in the bank, and Rick was the one pushing to give it back to investors and go start something else.

His co-founder Derek Homann talked him out of it at a bar in Omaha. "Just go try this one last thing. Just listen to the damn customers."

So they emailed every prospect who had ever raised the email problem and told them they were building it. A bunch of them said yes.

Rick, Derek and Ben Stevinson rebuilt the platform in 30 days. That rebuild got them 10 customers, after 9 months of selling to get 3. So they killed the intranet and went all in on email.

If the same thing comes up on every sales call and you keep skipping past it, you're not missing information. You just don't like the answer.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1