Adam Nathan built a templates marketplace that was growing fast - tens of thousands of users per month during COVID. Then he killed it. He walked away from traction, laid off team members, and went back to square one to fix Almanac's SaaS positioning.
Learn how Adam navigated the hardest SaaS positioning challenge: a horizontal SaaS product that works for everyone but attracts no one. He spent months testing positioning angles, running ads, and doing interviews before narrowing to "living documentation for remote teams." The 100-customers-in-100-days challenge validated the SaaS repositioning and unlocked Series A funding.
Almanac grew to 7-figure ARR with $45M raised. Adam also shares why he lost all three co-founders, how he rebuilt with startup generalists, and the painful lesson that finding product-market fit requires killing products with traction.
Key Lessons
- šÆ SaaS positioning beats feature breadth for horizontal products: Almanac attracted no one until the team narrowed positioning to "living documentation for remote teams" and hit 100 customers in under 100 days.
- š Killing traction is sometimes the right SaaS positioning move: Adam shut down a marketplace with tens of thousands of monthly users because it represented only 5-10% of the value chain.
- š Splitting resources between two products kills early-stage startups: Marketing scaled the templates gallery while engineering built the collaboration platform - effectively two companies with early-stage resources.
- š§ Project stability while navigating SaaS positioning uncertainty: Adam compared his search to wandering through fog - internally terrified but externally calm to keep his team of 20 confident.
- š¤ Hire startup generalists over functional specialists early: After losing all three co-founders, Adam realized the people who stayed thrived in uncertainty - the defining characteristic of startup life.
Chapters
- Introduction
- What Almanac does and the size of the business
- Origin story - from product manager to founder
- Spending a year validating ideas before building
- Quitting his job to search for the right idea
- Why "hell yes or no" matters for idea validation
- Building the templates gallery as a minimum ideal product
- The decision to build a platform instead of a plugin
- Recruiting contributors without paying them
- How cold outreach built the supply side
- Getting the first thousand customers through content marketing
- COVID as a growth accelerator for templates
- Choosing to abandon a thriving marketplace
- The challenges of building a horizontal SaaS product
- Navigating the fog - searching for new SaaS positioning
- The 100 customers in 100 days goal
- How focus on remote teams unlocked growth
- Losing all three co-founders
- Lightning round
Resources
