Todd Olson went from two failed startups to building Pendo, a SaaS platform now generating $200M ARR with 880 employees and nearly $500M raised. In this episode, early-stage B2B SaaS founders will learn how an obsession with product-market fit turned past failures into a unicorn.

Todd reveals why he refused to hire salespeople until he validated the sales motion himself (at $500k ARR), how he used manual outreach instead of inbound to create a new category, and the controversial pricing decision—raising the minimum from $99 to $1,000 overnight—that changed the company's trajectory forever.

In this episode, Todd also explains how building "Auto-Track" gave them an unfair advantage over competitors like Segment, why "Product-Led Growth" failed them early on, and the specific metrics he used to validate fit before scaling.

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🔑 Key Lessons

• 💡 Finding Product-Market Fit: Why Todd refused to scale until he had undeniable fit, unlike his first two startups.


• 💰 The 10x Price Hike: How raising the minimum price from $99/mo to $1,000/mo filtered out bad customers and accelerated growth.


• 🤝 Founder-Led Sales: Why Todd personally sold the first $500k in ARR before hiring a single salesperson.


• 🏗️ Building the MVP: How Pendo launched with critical features (Auto-Track) that competitors like Segment ignored for years.


• 🚀 Category Creation: The challenge of selling a product nobody was searching for and why "Product-Led Growth" didn't work early on.

📖 Chapters

• Introduction & Favorite Quote


• What is Pendo? Product Overview


• Company Metrics


• Todd’s Early Coding Career


• First Startup Failure & Lessons


• Missing Product-Market Fit


• Inspiration for Pendo


• Building the First Product


• Landing First Customers


• First Paying Customer


• Pricing Evolution


• Hardest Challenges Scaling


• Lightning Round

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Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/451
  


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