Gil Feig and his co-founder talked to 100 companies through SaaS customer discovery before writing a single line of code. Three companies told them to give up. All three eventually became paying customers.
If you want to validate a SaaS idea before building, this episode is a masterclass in SaaS customer discovery and customer validation. Gil shares how network-driven outreach booked 5+ calls per day, why charging from day one gave Merge 10 paying customers at launch, and the automated SEO system he built in one night that now drives a significant share of SaaS go-to-market revenue.
Gil Feig is the co-founder of Merge, a unified API platform with 4,000+ customers and $75M raised. Merge grew revenue 30x in 12 months to reach early traction at multiple seven figures in ARR.
š Key Lessons
- Validate through SaaS customer discovery before building - Gil interviewed 100 companies using warm LinkedIn introductions before writing code, launching with 10 paying customers on day one.
- Use your network to book customer validation calls at scale - Merge found target companies on LinkedIn and asked mutual connections for intros, booking up to five calls per day.
- Let skeptics try building it themselves as a SaaS go-to-market tactic - prospects who insisted on DIY integrations came back after experiencing the maintenance pain firsthand.
- Automate SEO content to scale SaaS customer discovery inbound - Gil built a system in one night that generates landing pages for every new integration, ranking on page one within weeks.
- Earn enterprise trust through compliance and social proof - Merge got SOC2 certified before signing a single customer to remove early traction objections.
Chapters
- Introduction
- Gil's favorite quote and the hard work philosophy
- What Merge does and the unified API concept
- Business size - 65 people, 4000 customers, 30x revenue growth
- Gil's background and the path to entrepreneurship
- How the idea for Merge came from integration pain
- How Merge differs from Zapier
- Deciding to quit jobs and start Merge
- How they ran SaaS customer discovery with 100 companies
- Why they believed they had product-market fit before building
- Starting to build the product during COVID
- Launching and landing the first 10 paying customers
- Security requirements - SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA
- Raising the $4.5M seed round with a prototype
- Overcoming the "we can build it ourselves" objection
- Automated SEO landing pages for every integration
- Series B and the 30x revenue growth story
- Lightning round
Resources
