Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom, the #1 rated AI note-taking app that automatically captures and summarizes meetings. Today, Fathom has over 175,000 active companies using it monthly, but the early days were a struggle to find product-market fit.

In this episode, Richard reveals why he refused to monetize until he solved retention first. He shares the "Session" metric mistake that plagues most analytics tools, how a 100,000-user spike from Zoom nearly broke the company (and why 99% of them were low quality), and the counter-intuitive decision to offer a generous free plan that competitors charged for.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 📉 Retention First: Why Richard refused to charge a dollar until user retention was stable, and why "First 10 Customers" is the wrong goal.


• 🚀 The Zoom Spike: What happened when Zoom sent them 100,000 signups in one month (and why only 100 stuck).


• 💡 Free Forever Strategy: How giving away unlimited recording for free created a viral loop that paid ads couldn't match.


• 🛠️ The "Fake Call" Feature: How adding a bot to simulate a meeting solved their biggest activation problem.


• 🔄 Serial Founder Advantage: How Richard "speed-ran" Fathom by bringing his best engineers from his previous exit (UserVoice).

📖 Chapters

• Welcome and Introduction


• Fathom: The AI Note Taker


• Richard's Background and Early Ventures


• The Journey to UserVoice


• Founding Fathom: From Idea to Execution


• Building and Scaling Fathom


• Challenges and Early User Acquisition


• Zoom Marketplace Launch and Initial Struggles


• Improving Onboarding Processes


• Challenges and Silver Linings


• Monetization and Market Shifts


• Balancing Growth and Monetization


• Launching the Team Plan


• Overcoming Skepticism and Leveraging Virality


• Expanding Beyond Zoom


• Rapid Growth with AI Integration


• Insights and Reflections


• Lightning Round: Business Advice and Personal Insights

This episode is brought to you by:

👉 This episode is sponsored by Mailtrap. Try it at Mailtrap.io — use code THESAASPODCAST for 20% off

Resources:

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