Approach to AI: Wait for Customer Demand

Five years to the first million. Zero dollars raised. NFL teams pay the same price as high school teams. Hewitt Tomlin built TeamBuildr into a $10M ARR vertical SaaS company by focusing on one job function and refusing to charge enterprise customers more. Founders will hear why flat pricing drove more growth than premium tiers ever could.

Hewitt shares how a single conversation with a college strength coach pivoted TeamBuildr from a social app to industry-specific SaaS, why founders who plateau at $500K ARR have a product-market fit problem, and how building for a job function instead of a market segment unlocked every customer from high schools to the NFL.

Plus: Hewitt's take on why he won't build AI features until his customers ask for them - even as his biggest competitor bets on replacing coaches with AI entirely.

TeamBuildr has 45 employees, has never raised funding, and still operates on the same co-founder agreement from 2012.

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🔑 Key Lessons

• 🏢 Build vertical SaaS around a job function, not a market segment: TeamBuildr focused on the strength coaching workflow rather than targeting colleges or pro teams separately. This unlocked every segment from high schools to NFL teams with a single product.
• 💰 Flat pricing can drive niche SaaS growth through social proof: Hewitt charges pro teams the same as high schools, trading premium revenue for NFL logos that validate TeamBuildr to the volume market. As a bootstrapped company, this was more pragmatic than building enterprise tiers.
• 🎯 Stalling at $500K ARR signals a product-market fit problem: Hewitt advises that founders putting in full-time effort but plateauing for consecutive years should stop tweaking their go-to-market and reexamine whether their product actually solves what the market needs.
• 🤝 Treat early users as partners, not beta testers: Hewitt didn't send logins and wait for feedback. He showed up at conferences, called coaches personally, and built relationships. His first customer Dr. Steve Smith is still someone he stays in touch with 13 years later.
• 🧠 Listen to what customers want, not what they say they want: Customers describe missing features because they can't articulate the outcome they need. Hewitt's job is to peel back the request and identify the real workflow improvement, then decide what to build independently.
• 🛠️ Don't build AI features for the sake of building them in vertical software: While competitor Volt bets on AI replacing coaches, Hewitt waits for actual customer demand. He uses AI internally for developer productivity but won't ship customer-facing AI without conviction it enhances the profession.
• 🚀 Inbound marketing gets stronger as your niche SaaS customer base grows: Hewitt transitioned from cold calling to inbound by telling customer stories. Following HubSpot's principle that the best inbound originates with customers, a growing base made content and social proof more potent over time.

Chapters

• What TeamBuildr does and who it's for
• How the idea started as a social app in college
• Revenue, team size, and business structure today
• Pivoting from athletes to coaches
• The conversation that changed everything
• Building the MVP and making the first dollar
• Getting free users to actually use the product
• Listening to what customers really want
• Competing with Excel in a market that didn't know SaaS existed
• Five years to the first million in ARR
• How Hewitt knew he had product-market fit
• Outbound vs inbound on the way to $1M
• Why half the customers are high schools
• Charging NFL teams the same as high school teams
• Building vertical SaaS around AI without replacing coaches
• Why customers aren't asking for AI yet
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/476
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email