Ryan Wang went from 8 months without revenue to building Assembled, an AI platform doing tens of millions in ARR. Here is his hard-won SaaS Growth Strategy.

In this episode, Ryan Wang (CEO of Assembled) shares the gritty details of surviving a tough launch and scaling an enterprise platform. Learn the pivotal moment of finding Product Market Fit when he discovered the exact same color-coded scheduling spreadsheet at Stripe, Grammarly, and Casper. He explains the high-stakes risk of Usage Based Pricing with no minimums, how a data-driven ICP exercise unlocked growth from 10 to 50 customers, and the critical lessons on deciding which custom deals actually help versus those that generate unmanageable technical debt.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 💡 Product Market Fit Eureka: The common, messy spreadsheet that revealed a huge pain point.


• 💰 Pricing Risk: Why usage-based pricing with zero minimums nearly killed the company.


• 📈 Scaling Leap: The data-driven ICP exercise that unlocked growth from 10 to 50 customers.


• ✈️ The Custom Deal Filter: How to judge which custom integrations generalize versus those that hamstring the roadmap.


• 🌱 Founder Mindset: How to keep sowing seeds when there is no immediate harvest (surviving 8 months with $0 revenue).

📖 Chapters

• Seeds vs. Harvest: The Founder Mindset


• Founding Story: Stripe Origins & Support Ethos


• The Workforce Management Problem (WFM)


• Landing First Customers & Common Pain


• The Color-Coded Spreadsheet Discovery (PMF)


• Pandemic Launch Challenges & Slow Growth


• Surviving 8 Months Without Revenue


• Custom vs. Configurable: The Judgment on Deals


• Scaling Past 10 to 50 Customers


• Fixing Onboarding & Technical Debt


• Growth Through Communities & Mindshare


• Defining ICP with Data
  

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Resources:

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