9 months building the wrong product. The right one took 30 days

Nine months in. Zero customers. $3M raised. Finding product-market fit meant listening to customers. Rick Knudtson is the co-founder and CEO of Workshop, internal communications software that helps large companies reach their employees across email, SMS, Slack, and Teams. He had already co-founded and sold one company, so he and his co-founders started this one with capital, a network, and a firm opinion about what to build. That opinion is what nearly killed it. Workshop spent its first year building an intranet while prospects on every sales call kept raising the same problem: email. Rick ignored it for nine months, because email was not novel and he was sure he already knew better. By month nine the company had about zero customers and most of its $3M still in the bank, and Rick was arguing to hand the money back to investors. His co-founder and COO Derek Homann talked him into one last test. The rebuilt email product took 30 days and landed 10 customers. Workshop is now at eight-figure ARR with just under 1,000 customers and about 140 employees. Stay for 35:42 where Rick explains why Workshop scrapped per-seat pricing entirely and charges by audience size instead. SPONSORED BY HOBBES Hobbes runs personalized product demos on your website 24/7 and books qualified buyers straight onto your team's calendar. Don't book a demo, take one: https://saasclub.io/hobbes 🔑 KEY LESSONS 🧠 The Ego Was The Filter: Coming off a successful exit, Rick dismissed email as unsexy and kept building the intranet he wanted to build. The signal sat in every sales call for nine months before he acted on it. 🔄 Nine Months Versus Thirty Days: Three customers on the intranet after nine months of selling. Ten customers on the email product after thirty days. The effort gap told them exactly where product-market fit actually lived. 🎯 Keep Asking Why It Is Hard: Prospects said they could not just use MailChimp. Rick kept asking why until he hit the real problem: enterprise security layers, deliverability to 100,000 inboxes, and governance no marketing tool handles. 📣 Market For A Year Before You Sell: Workshop launched a weekly newsletter on day one with zero subscribers, plus ungated resources and monthly webinars. Five people showed up to the first webinar. Five hundred came to a recent one. 💰 Price So Expansion Is Free: Charging per user made customers hesitate to add departments, and every seat conversation triggered a procurement cycle. Workshop moved to audience-based pricing so growing inside an account never needs a new negotiation. 🏢 Write The Values Late: Rick waited twelve months before writing company values, so they described why the team had actually survived instead of what the founders hoped was true. "Listen to learn" came straight out of the failure. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Intro 01:42 What Workshop does and who it is for 03:10 Building and selling Flywheel 04:48 Sponsor: Hobbes 05:27 Where the idea for Workshop came from 10:59 Writing the mission before the product 11:59 Betting on a better intranet 13:50 Why email was a much harder problem than it looked 17:22 Elevating existing channels instead of building a destination 19:16 The first customer and the newsletter that fed the pipeline 21:21 Nine months, three customers. Then 30 days, 10 customers. 22:49 "Listen to learn" becomes a core value 23:51 Inbound, resources, and webinars to the first $1M ARR 27:22 Creating content when you are not the expert 29:44 Why they waited a year to write company values 35:42 Dropping per-seat pricing for audience-based pricing 38:09 Month nine: ready to give the money back 43:09 Lightning round 🎧 Full Show Notes: https://saasclub.io/493 💌 Get weekly 5-minute SaaS insights: https://saasclub.io/email #SaaS #ProductMarketFit #PMF #FounderStory

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