Today on startup foundations we chat with Richard White CEO and co founder of Fathom video a Y Combinator back startup building a video plugin to enable salespeople to record and share highlights from their calls. Richard takes us back to the beginning of a startup journey from working on a calendar with startup with Justin Conway back in 2005. To founding user voice in 2007, he shares useful insights about the importance of collecting structured user feedback when iterating on a product. Here's our conversation. Iris Richard, thanks for joining us on the show. Hey, Greg, great to be here. So tell us what you're working on with Fathom video.
So we're, yeah, I think as most vendors and I'm working on solving a problem that I had myself, which is it's a real pain, but to try to talk to customers, do customer research, do sales calls, you name it, and take notes at the same time. And I can tell you more about kind of like how we started on this. But basically, what that is trying to do is make it so that you don't have to do that when you're on Zoom calls. So we're a free app for zoom, that records in real time transcribed in real time, but critically allows you to basically click a button when you hear something noteworthy, instead of trying to like type out your notes. And then after the call, we give you instant access to a recording, that's highlighted with all the points that you said were noteworthy, and allows you to kind of like time shift, when you note take allows you to critically also just take those segments of the calls that are interesting and get highlight clips from them that you can drop into Slack send to your team push your share, and etc. So yeah, it's free, I presume, and mainly for folks that are power users of zoom founders, salespeople customer success.
Interesting. I mean, I know it was people use Zoom for events, we just ran an event for cafes, customers to connect with startup investors. And it would have been good to record little clips from that event so that we could then share them to the investors, we're reviewing DAX, and couldn't actually make it to the event, just one use case, then I could also see the same thing with our sales team, any product onboarding calls, where it would be super helpful.
It's crazy to me to think about, you know, my last company user voice, I ran our sales team for a minute. And the amount of things we manage by just reading a couple bullet point notes of like what was said on a call, right? It's a very, it's a very common game of telephone. And I remember, I used voice a lot of times, I had to ask my sales team, like, you know, they objected on price. So they're not gonna buy but like, what did they actually say? Like, show me in their words. And it's just such a different experience and reading a few lines of notes on a on a Word doc or a Google Doc.
I've tried some other software that does does note transcription, like fireflies.ai. There's two issues. One, I don't want to read through a full transcript of a meeting. And second, there are hilarious misspellings, and weird grammatical issues. So having the actual full transcript isn't, it's not very readable by a human. I'll give you a hilarious example. I worked on bot detection software. So differentiating between human traffic and bot traffic. Do you know what it was transcribed as boys? Oh, no boy detection software.
It's funny, we've tested a lot of different transcription services, we use a third party. And you know, they're all roughly fine, right? They're not great. It makes some hilarious errors at times. I think that was one of the key things we learned early on, it's like transcription alone is not enough. It's like a helpful mnemonic to you. Like, if I'm the person on the call, giving me the transcript is helpful. So if I go back to portion, the call, I can scan the transcript and be like, Oh, I can't remember the section. But we don't even let you like when we have people share clips out from fathom, rarely, if I'm on a call with a customer, and there's some exciting moment or some piece of product feedback or whatnot. When we share that clip, we don't share the transcript because we want people to actually listen to the audio and watch the video. Because the transcript just does such a bad job of conveying what actually was said. It's also weird. I think we talk in a way that doesn't translate well to written. Right. And so that also doesn't help. But yeah, the transcription alone, I think is just not nearly enough of the solution.
Yeah, the average human conversation is typically composed of run on sentences, right? Random and trajectory phrases, and things that don't have a logical flow.
Yeah, it's weird if I went into, like, if I watch a clip of someone having that competition seems normal, but if I read it, especially when it translates bots into boys, then it falls apart very quickly.
So take us back to the start of your entrepreneurial career. Like how did you decide you wanted to start a startup? How did you find your co founders and figure out what you are working on together?
So originally, I was a computer science grad and programmer from North Carolina. And I actually, you know, I was very fortunate to grow up with Two sets of parents that were both entrepreneurial. And so I think I got that kind of like Altria bug early on, I remember trying to build a business in North Carolina, like in college, but it's really hard to find other people to co founders with just I don't think culturally, it wasn't like an accepted thing. It was kind of like a weird, like, you should go get a job at IBM, right, you should be starting your own company. And I was very fortunate to, because working at a software company one day in North Carolina, and my buddy kind of showed me this TechCrunch article from someone that was building a thing that I had been talking a lot about wanting to build, which at the time was like, basically a Google calendar before Google Calendar, right. And I kind of cold emailed the founders of that company, and said, like your product, like it's technically very impressive, but like design wise, it's a dumpster fire. But I'll help you because I aspire to be a product designer. And thankfully, they kind of they actually picked up read that email. And they responded back and we started like sending sketches and designs back and forth. And then she started working together. And the two people that founded that were Justin Kahn, Emmett shear, that went on to found twitch. And so I had this unique opportunity where I kind of left North Carolina and went up to Boston and worked out of the Y Combinator office. And this was back in like the first batch of Y Combinator back in 2005. And it was like Justin Emmett, and I work in the Cinco Kiko calendar. I know he shared the office with Stephen Alexis that we're starting read at the same time. And so that was kind of a hilarious like, yeah, now looking back, obviously, at the time, it was just a bunch of kids. Yeah, hacking in this cold room in Boston. But that was kind of like how I broke in, I think, to the actual startup scene to build a network. People totally
forget that Y Combinator started out as like an alternative to getting an internship for college students or recent grads. That was the initial model, it wasn't this 350 startups in a cohort, and no one was at the revenue stage. They were all at the idea stage.
I think at some point, it's like it evolved to becoming like this machine that kind of helps startups unionize and collectively bargain for, like fundraising and stuff like this. But yeah, at the beginning, it was just like, I don't know, some people read Paul Graham's writings and really liked him. It's like, Hey, let's go hack in this cold room, right? On some random projects that we have no idea how they're gonna make money, or what's going to happen to them. Funnily enough, I almost was one of the cofounders of Twitch, I think they want me to come on as like their design co founder. But if you remember, the beginning of Twitch was actually Justin TV, which was Justin with a camera on his head. And I remember looking at that problem and saying, like, there's not a design problem in sight here. So I don't know that I'm the right guy to do this. And instead, I went through this company user voice, which was a very different experience than my Fathom experience. And it's interesting that you asked about how do you find co founders, I feel like I beg borrow and steal to find co founders for user voice. I think literally, I thought one of our co founders through a Craigslist post. That's how like, piecemeal that process was.
I remember when I first moved to the Bay Area, and I was just looking for freelance contracting work, just make extra money. I would always see those Craigslist posts like you want a co founder. And I responded to some of them because they seem to be written by like hilariously crazy people. Like they were crazy passionate about the problem they were solving, but I don't think they had any idea of what it takes to actually build a software company. Most of them were very, not likely to succeed bucket. Yeah. But you know, I've always wondered who is writing but who is actually sourcing their co founder through the gigs, the free gigs postings list?
Yeah. So for us it was was inching, actually. So Chico, the product that worked on with Justin, and that kind of imploded? I think the public narrative is that like when Google Calendar came out, and yeah, we didn't have to compete with that. But the real narrative was, I remember asking the car one time, if any of us use the calendar before, and like we were all like 2425 at the time, and no one had it. So I just think like, we weren't the people to understand that face. And Justin had a brilliant idea, which was what sell the company on Ebay. I think there were a few, like Aqua higher offers on the table, but no one really wanted to take them. So we literally listed the assets of the company on eBay. And it went from I think, you know, when this first came out, like TechCrunch, put out an article making fun of us and being like, these losers posting their syrup on eBay. And we had like a 50k reserve, and then it sold for like a quarter million dollars. And then like a widow a week later. TechCrunch is like is this the future of m&a? And we're like, okay, neither one of these takes is like, great. But what was really nice about that is it gave me a lot of visibility. I started doing freelance work, which got me connected a lot of folks. And I also just doing open source projects at the time. So I had a very active approach on the top 10, like Ruby on Rails, open source projects back in the day called active scaffold. And that was a great way for me to meet other engineers, and really have the kind of three other co founders I had for user voice. Two of them came from, you know, just people I worked with either on open source or on freelance gigs. And then the third guy came from the Craigslist post.
How did you decide who's doing what
for user was it was pretty clear. Like I was always playing the role of like the design engineer, but like that was my wheelhouse I can I can do some front end, but I'm doing that On product design, and so the two of the guys were clearly kind of the backend engineers. And then the guy we found on Craigslist, we found with explicit take up, we need someone that is going to be the external face and go hustle and get us our first users and stuff like that. From watching Kiko at YC. With Justin Emmett, one thing that struck me was that, like, build it, and they will come. It's not actually like a great, like, go to market strategy. And we should find someone dedicated to finding, you know, going out and getting users, at least in the early days. Yeah, so made that division of labor very clear and very easy.
What was your original product, the MVP for user voice that you went to market with? And how did it evolve over time,
the MVP was pretty like small. It was literally this webpage where you could submit your feedback, submit ideas, and vote other people's ideas, almost like a Reddit for product feedback. And actually, some of the inspiration came from work in the same room with Reddit guys, they had like a subreddit for product feedback. And it hilariously didn't work. But we kind of knew why it didn't work. And so we could build in some of those things. So we timebox it, we basically said for user voice, it has to be something we can build in a month. And then we can have like two months to test adoption. And we gave ourselves three months. And if it isn't really working in three months, we're gonna go back and find more freelancing gigs. That was kind of the motion we were doing, almost like a, you know, mini kind of like incubator model for the couple of us. And yeah, so we hooked it up to like a side project we had, and it worked really well. And then we think the few friends of ours who had other kind of like, small toy apps, or SAS apps, and they were gracious enough to try it out. And it worked really well for them. And so we very quickly like, okay, cool. Like, even with the small, almost like Toy application, we've provided some utility, let's keep going with it.
At what stage did you decide to incorporate? Did you do it before getting the prototype? Or first MVP product? Or did you do it after you have that initial product validation
didn't really want someone said, I'll write a 25k check for you to keep working on this and then go ship we better like go build an entity that can take this and publish and just drop this to my bank account. And that was probably five months in. So that was we'd already built out the prototype. We had it, you know, working prototype that was connected to a few websites.
Yeah, it's always interesting. Some founders are super risk averse. Other people want to actually divide up the equity up front, and make those decisions before they start working on the project together. That also makes it cleaner in case one of the founders decides to leave because you have a vesting schedule. Typically when a cliff,
yep. And one of the founders actually did leave in the first year, which, you know, it kind of worked out that we did have some of that stuff in place. But yeah, I think there was an unspoken understanding of like how we do equity, but I, if I was to do it again, and obviously, without that, we did it again, like we kind of figured out equity from day one, though, obviously, Fathom is also a little bit unique to and that we think we're much more advanced and obviously, second time around. So we kind of knew from the beginning that like, yeah, we raise money on the day, we kind of incorporated the company sort of thing like we knew, that's how we kind of started.
So question about user voice. How did you end up raising your first check? How did that first 25k come through? How'd you meet the investor? And then what happened with your fundraising from there?
It's interesting. It was, I don't even remember how we met, it was very serendipitous, it was kind of like a friend of a friend. And you just check out this app. And he's like, Oh, I really liked this, I think you should, you know, build this for this market or for my other company. Here's a small check. I do. Remember, it might even been 35k. I do remember thinking like, this is a lot of money at the time, and thinking like, oh, wow, this is great. Like, I've never had anyone invest in us. And then I think very quickly did the math, it was like, Oh, this gives us two and a half months of runway or three months of runway or something. And we raise that amount of money. And then outside of I want to say friends and family. But at that point, it was really just family outside of like some small check from parents. We didn't raise anything for a year, it took us like a year of basically giving the product away for free. And, you know, four of us sleeping in one like house until we actually got to a point where I had enough traction to convince someone to go write us a check. And we got an early stage firm to write us an 800k Check. Right, it was the baseline ventures. Again, it's very different than what we're doing now. Or it's like we know, for our fundraising for fathom, it's we've raised a lot more than that, but we've raised it piecemeal, bit by bit with small checks. But given that was our first time out like obviously, it's much easier, you know, when your network is small just to try to find get 10 connections and hope one of them turns into a million dollar check.
How did you do this fundraising strategy or how did you execute on it? Did you just start with a rolling raise where you're moving the cap up with each batch of investors
you know for user voice we just did a price round is so is a long time ago right where it was like it was possible to rolling raises for fathom, we've done the opposite. Right now you've got safe notes, and so it's easy to do that kind of rolling raise. We've honestly been almost raising money the entire time. We've been doing this company now for a little over a year, but a year and two months. Usually whoever you like three or four months, we hit a milestone. And that kind of triggers us raising money from new folks. And usually some of the each one of these rounds, quote unquote in like this rolling, fundraise as a different goal, right? He's different type of people we're trying to fundraise from, like early on, we just want to get money. So we went to kind of friends and network. And then we went and said, Oh, gosh, Zoom is really important. Let's go secure a lot of funding for people that had connections to zoom. And then we, you know, got to the end of like, Demo Day NYC. And we said, you know, now we're kind of a demo day, we've got some things we've derisk, let's go raise some money. And then we've launched and now raise money again, may we actually from like, a lot of investors and heads of sales and people that are actually Fathom users. So we're doing the rolling rates for fathom that US versus a very different time, right, a very different era where that sort of thing was much harder to pull off.
How did you find the experience doing Y Combinator as a repeat founder, what was the most useful part of doing the accelerator
program? I mean, honestly, the most useful part is having peers that are in the same phase that you're in, right, so like, you know, second time around doing a startup, it does feel like I'm speed running a video game I've played before, one of the biggest challenges the first time around is like, I didn't know what marketing was, or sales were like, now I know enough about all these things to be dangerous and be like, okay, you know, I think about startups almost like an RPG, it's like, okay, like, the shield we need is gonna be in that castle. And the sword we want is gonna be probably in that dungeon, I kind of vaguely remember all the things we need to put together. But one of the challenges is a lot of the tactics change over time, right? Like, I know, what sales marketing is all these things. But, you know, some of like, one of the best tools to use, what are some of the best, like, you know, go to market strategies, strategies evolve and change, or the tactics change a lot over time. And so I think the biggest benefit for me, of going through Y Combinator is one being surrounded by a bunch of other people that are going through the same stuff, where you're all trying to solve certain same problems just for different markets, and different problems, spaces. So you get all kind of like a lot of like, ambient awareness of how other people are solving these problems with modern tools. And frankly, to my network of people, a lot of them have gone on to like now run large companies, or they're now investors themselves. And so I know something about myself, which is I'm pretty competitive. And so I needed to have people that were like peers at the same place that I could kind of learn from, but also compete with. And that's I think, you know, obviously, there's a lot of other stuff in terms of like yc is a great seal of approval, even for repeat founder like myself in terms of building network for fundraising and stuff like that. But I really just have enjoyed almost like the collegial aspect of we're in this like class or cohort together. And we're kind of implicitly competing with one another right, and our friendly kind of way.
Yeah, it's interesting, the program's evolved a bit. And it used to be really very idea stage where most of the companies in your batch at the MVP product stage or were they already generating substantial revenue?
I think that's yeah, probably wouldn't things to change. I mean, there's a big range. There's a few folks in our small section where like, they had just pivoted to a new idea, literally, like a week before the batch started. Right. And so they just barely had an MVP. I think most folks had an MVP, right? I don't think there's many folks that were at the idea stage, unless their idea was one of these like, yeah, maybe it wasn't software that's like really hard to get an MVP up and running in a couple of weeks. Most people had some working MVP, there were a handful of folks that came in with significant traction already. Right. Like, you know, I think there are a few folks that are already doing like a million dollars arr. But you know, that's a bell curve, right? The majority of folks would be post MVP, a little attraction, maybe handful of users? Kind of that's where we were right. I think we had like 50 users throughout most of the batch.
Yeah, I think it runs the gamut. Now, partially, if you're a repeat founder, and you're well connected, you can possibly raise seed money or pre seed money without having to need their seal of approval, and there's a lot more pre seed money available. So there's been a shift and focus, I think, would NYC, where they're often focused on international companies, like they were some of the first investors to invest in FinTech for Latin America or Africa, for example.
Yeah, I mean, I think them going full remote opened up, like a lot of the you know, before it was really onerous, because the requirement was you have to move to Mountain View for three months, right. And so there's a lot of folks that can't or wouldn't do that. I'll tell you just like, I think it's also recognizing, like, there's a lot of opportunities outside the US. And sometimes I feel like a lot of our US based ideas are really like these first world problems, right? And then you hear somebody's pitches, or like people that are solving startups in Nigeria or Latin America, it's like, oh, there's something like real foundational level, like, you know, we don't have a working payment system, or we have a failed banking system or we have like a failed credit system, right? Or like a sub optimal credit system versus like, in the US. I think some of our ideas sometimes are a little like, Ah, I can't find the tweet. So I want to find out like, so it is definitely become a lot more international.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of basic core problems to be solved in the developing world. For example, new bank had such a huge success in Brazil, because all of the banking options were absolutely terrible, right?
Yeah. When I hear so many stories from things, I realized what like, you know, ignorant, sheltered American, and I realize don't realize there's countries it's like, oh, yeah, the power goes off every day at like, 4pm here. And so this app here helps you plan for that. I'm like, What? What do you mean, the power goes off at 4pm? So yeah, it's pretty wild. It's really eye opening.
What were some of the most interesting companies in your batch of yc?
I mean, I think some of the, you know, as someone who spent a career now building virtual widgets, right, like websites and workflows, and software, anytime I see something that's like hardware, or like, there's some like rocketry folks, and like satellite, folks, I'm just like, yeah, it's probably the way my mom works. I like what I do. Like, I'm like, This is magic. I don't even understand this. Right. So there were a few folks doing like, I think there was one albedo that was doing a lot of like, satellite imagery, again, there's an interesting one where like, I don't think they'll launch a rocket for like two or three years, or watch it satellite for two or three years, but already have, like, you know, tons of commits from customers and stuff like that. And then there was a few folks, you know, there's another company out of Toronto that was doing like a home rowing machine that was really like, well built. And I was like, also, my mind was blown. I was like, as a software guy, I just can't wrap my head around the amount of effort work it would take to get the supply chains and the industrial engineering, all that stuff to make that stuff work.
Yeah, it's especially satellites. And launching things into space, your rate of failure is probably the first 10 Things are gonna blow up before they get into
orbit. Yeah, or measures like, you know, it's hard enough to debug a computer. It's like sitting across the room from me, I can't imagine trying to debug a thing that's, you know, up in Leo. And you get like, you know, a modem connection to it.
So, how do you compare Fathom to what other tools salespeople are using for collecting data about their sales meetings?
I mean, I think the biggest thing, we, you know, we did a lot of research, before we started the company, right? So we, you know, this originally was out of a problem I had, right, I did a bunch of calls, and I realized, like, oh, wow, you know, like, I would use this and they talk to our sales team, and they would use this, but I think, you know, we did a lot of research into the top competitors before we got started, because I kind of had this assumption that there's some big like, 800 pound gorilla is like Gong and chorus in this space that are doing very well, right. And one of the things we learned when we looked into is that like they actually do, even though they're deployed for an entire like sales team, it really only used by the manager, the manager is the one that's using it to kind of like feel like they've got a some visibility into what's happening on the sales calls. If you actually talk to the reps, they're still taking notes with pen and paper or a Google Doc or keeping their CRM open or whatnot. And so that's where we saw like a big opportunity where, okay, these people are charging a lot of money for a perceived product, right on a per seat basis. And the seats don't even really use the product or get that much value out of it. That seems like a huge opportunity. And I also think the other opportunity was no one else is doing a freemium model. Right, you know, truly freemium. An individual person can download, install it, they can get individual value out of it, there's a single player experience here, which is really powerful. And then we can break into companies that way. And so kind of that's I think, the big differentiators i It's one part business model and one part of the problem we're solving for whom, then send the beginning, right, individual user, sure, you can get transcription. But transcription doesn't solve this problem. And so I think that's what a lot of folks were missing on the single player side.
What types of other users or use cases do you have for the product outside of sales?
I think what we found is like anyone who has like five zoom meetings a week, mostly external meetings, we found has been more important than internal meetings. But then five external zoom meetings a week, doesn't really matter what your role is, you will get a lot of value out of them, right? Because that just means you have enough meetings where it's like, it's hard to remember, you have a lot of conversations with a lot of humans are video conferencing, you're gonna forget a lot of nuance, important details. You know, sales success is an area where it shifts because there's obviously like, generally, there's books work on teams. And so you can quickly get in with one and then get them to spread it to their colleagues. But we have a ton of great users that are you know, marketing consultants, you know, coaches, you know, even people that are doing like client work, maybe it might be creative client work, right, that or design consultancies and agencies and stuff like that. Investors actually, we have, oh, you know, the most recent round was round, right? Where he kind of ran through the valuation cap came to us because they were invested in they're like, you know, I get a ton of pitches. It's hard for me remember, all pitches kind of blur together. And it's hard for me to like remember them. It's also hard for me to like, share with my team, the really interesting parts of those pitches, and they're using us and they're like, we've tried a lot of products and yours is by far the best we'd love to invest. So investors in Shan founders, obviously founders, you know, in some ways act like salespeople, right, and partnership people and stuff like that. So it really is what role dependent more just, you know, are you on a lot of external zoom calls or not?
Do you see that there may be risks in coupling your product together so closely with only one specific platform. For example, I worked for Navigant, which was a started out as a Facebook advertising optimization platform built on top of FBX is the Facebook Ad Exchange. Yep, I remember that. And then also on top of Facebook ads API, well, we innovated, built a lot of great features and great tools for advertisers. Then subsequently, a lot of those features made their way into the Facebook ad buying interface, along with features from all of the other marketing partners that Facebook had, and we were effectively, there was no reason to continue buying the product. Yep.
Yeah, it's the number one question I would get from investors. Right. It's like platform risk, and how do you think about it? Right. And it's a trade off, you know, it's certainly a risk like hitching your wagon to a single company, in this case, that other company has, at least inside of the initial market, world Gallic, very dominant market share, right? Like, definitely a, you know, like 70 plus percent of the software companies we know and target buyers will be going after. So, one, it's hard to ignore them. But two, I think it's the it's got to weigh the risk reward, is there a risk that, you know, Zoom could go out and build this potentially, but the roared is in the short term, you know, what we now know them well enough to think that they probably won't do that. I think the risk is higher when you're working with consumer platforms, right, and your interest are necessarily aligned. And b2b world building ecosystem is important, more important than its consumer, right? Like Salesforce has largely been able to maintain its market position over the years, because of its ecosystem. And I think a lot of companies, you know, like zoom, get to a certain point, they're like, Okay, in order to create walk in, and for the bedroom, in our business, we need built ecosystem, which means we need to foster our community of things building on us and not compete with them directly. But yeah, it's a trade off. It's at risk. And so far, it's a really great trade off, because, you know, we're one of the top apps in the Zoom App Store. They've driven us close to 100,000 signups, you know, and maybe they'll compete with us in a couple of years. But I think, by that point, yeah, we'll have escape velocity, and zoo as a lot of things. But one of the things they definitely are is a very genuine company. And that kind of comes from their leadership. And we've talked to a ship multiple times. And, yes, if you build a very horizontal thing, like, you know, that could easily be seen as something that's relevant to every single zoom user. I think it could get adopted, but ours is, I think, just niche enough that I don't think it's something they're going to try to build themselves. But who knows? Remind me in two years,
yeah, you don't have a crystal ball to see how roadmaps will change down the road for your partners?
Yeah, I think you get some near term visibility. I think there's some like, analogy about like, something like riding an elephant or like walking next to elephants, right, like, the elephant may step on you without any malice intent, right? It's just like, oh, it just turned a little bit to look to see what are the noise the left, right. And so, you know, didn't even consider you in the calculus. In fact, if it knows about you, it probably wouldn't have stepped on you. But it just did it. Right. And that's probably the things you have to be more careful about than some really intentful. Like Facebook, I think in that is the opposite of that, where there's a very much in intentive, like, Oh, these are a bunch of features we should mainline into our product, because there is an added value to Facebook building ecosystem like there is for zoom or Salesforce or any b2b product, but it's a risk.
Okay, well, it's certainly interesting hearing about how you think about this space, I've been seeing a lot of interesting. People try to figure out a tool for helping sales teams sell better helping presenters present better. So I'm excited to have our sales team and our onboarding specialists check it out and see what they think of it.
Yeah, yeah. Obviously, given my DNA with starting a company that was based around feedback and user voice, I love getting feedback. So yeah, I'd love to have your team try it. Let us know what you think.
So we're almost out of time here. One last question that we always ask on the show is, now you know, you've started a few companies been involved with many startups. What do you wish you'd known when you were first starting out? That you know now, and I know it's hard to pick one thing, so you can pick a few if you'd like.
Yeah, see the same as ours do we have? There's a couple things that come come through. I think one is kind of a for user voice. I thought about basically building a product and then finding a team and then finding a market for that product that we're building. And I think that's actually inverted right now. If that was my thought, first and foremost about what's the market for this. What's its We need to do this. And now let's go build the product. I think the former is a very common, I think challenge for engineering minded folks like myself, right? We want to go build a thing and then figure out who might use it. Right. And so inverting that I think has been super helpful to me and something I wish I knew. The other thing is just the value of saying, Yes, right? Yeah, maybe it's yes. But or Yes. And, but a lot of the best things that happened to me my career have been when I figured out how to, like, fold other people into our cause, or fold myself into someone else's cause. Right. And I think, you know, back to my story about joining Justin Emmett, that was something where like, I pushed to include myself in someone else's moonshot. And you know, the best things about finding co founders for me was the open source program where I was fooling other developers in this open source project. And I think we're, I was at my weakest with these voices, when we would be like, no, no, we don't want to partner with anyone, you know, we can do this ourselves. We have strong opinions about how this should be done. And so you know, with fathom, we have a lot of like partnership with other companies with you know, our users like all that stuff, we look at a lot. So I think just being an include her and being a joiner, I think we're probably Yeah, the other big thing that I wish I had paid more attention to,
what sorts of tests that you do to validate the product idea for fathom, when you're first starting out.
The hacker who is used, like, build something that I myself need and solve my own problem. So like, that's always way easier. I've worked on like a server to where I was trying to solve someone else's problem. And so you know, in the beginning, we did a lot of iterations where like, I was the client, right? Like, I had the problem, I understood what I wanted to do, and, and we iterate through like the first version of fathom, you didn't get the recording until 30 mins after the call, and you had like, walk through the entire recording and like, annotate stuff yourself. And very quickly realize, like, okay, that's not fast enough, and I don't want to go back to the call. So I first start with myself. And then, you know, in some ways, the team that user voice, right, we we, you know, as recipients of some of these clips, right? I remember, we prototype this, and I just, like grabbed some clips from a zoom recording and posted them in an all hands and everyone reacted way more strongly to that than my usual, like research notes, you know, output. And then from there, we like to get to our sales team success team. And then once we kind of, like spun this out, you know, we did a lot of stuff in the beginning just to do, you know, I went to my network, we did a bunch of outbound, you know, I think we, I think we signed up 300 to 500 people. And out of those three or 500 people, we got, like, at some point 50 to 60, consistent steady users of the product. And that's when I knew Okay, cool. We finally I think have reached this level. But it was very difficult, because the Fathom product is one of those things where, you know, using an app, while you're on a zoom call, you don't have a lot of tolerance for things going wrong, right? Like if I'm on a meeting, and I'm trying out this new thing, if it hiccups in any way, or like distracts me in a way or like gets them away, or breaks, I just dump it right. And so we had really high turnover in the beginning, which why we had to like, yeah, we turn through a lot of leads. And yeah, it was a lot of just like hustling and, you know, emailing folks in our YC batch emailing, you know, asking investors to use it, asking investors to interest the people that would use it. It was very lossy in the beginning. But eventually, we found this core group people that did it, and we got the tech to kind of place where it wasn't breaking all the time on you. Then we had a great phase where we could like iterate the product. The whole time. Now I had conviction because it solved the problem for myself, like, I quickly became to rely on it. And I was like, this has changed my life. And I can always test because occasionally I end up on a call where I'd be on like a Google meet or something else that was on Zoom, where I couldn't use our product. And I could feel like, oh gosh, this is way more stressful. Because I like Oh, my if I've missed something, it's gone forever. And I found them backing me up here. And so I had a lot of conviction. Like I think there's a lot of points where I could have probably been disheartened because we did churn through all the users in this first couple months. But I had such strong conviction that No, no, I know that this thing, if you like, you know, give it a chance. This thing changes your day to day like work. And so that helped kind of weather I think a lot of the trough of sorrow type stuff that Paul Graham talks about.
Thanks for the words of wisdom. So if someone wants to check out the product, where should they go? And if they have questions, how should they reach out to
you, I'll show you the product, Fathom dot video slash pod. We have a pretty big waitlist right now. But if you go to that link, you will skip right to the front of the line. So definitely go there, check it out. And I'm on Twitter, but really, I'm most successful on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a message. Let me know what you think the product. Also let me know what you think of the onboarding. I think one of the things that we spend a lot of time on is our onboarding process. We probably spent like a third of our engineering cycles on onboarding. I think it's something that's often gets overlooked and people building products. So we'd love to hear any feedback or thoughts or you on Fathom or user voice. I'm also always happy to give whatever advice I can or whatever, you know, warnings I can share. Thanks for joining us on the show. Thank you Greg.
Thanks for listening to the startup foundations Podcast, the podcast that tells the stories of startup founders and how they built their companies from the ground up. Until next time, keep building and keep innovating.
