The SaaS Podcast - AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders B2B Product-Market Fit: 3 Years Lost, Then Breakout
Mar 3, 2022
47:55
Khadim Batti spent three years building a product nobody needed. Then he deleted it and started finding product-market fit from zero. The SaaS pivot turned a support tool into a $600M company.
Learn how Khadim achieved B2B product-market fit by sending 500 cold emails, closing before writing code, and narrowing from SMB to enterprise CRM for product validation.
Khadim is the co-founder of Whatfix, valued at $600M+ with $140M raised. His B2B product-market fit journey included a complete SaaS pivot after 3 years of finding product-market fit the wrong way.
🔑 Key Lessons
- 🎯 B2B product-market fit requires killing your darlings: Khadim shut down Search Enabler after 3 years, proving that a SaaS pivot can unlock real growth.
- 📉 Building 15 months without customers wastes B2B product-market fit time: Khadim coded for over a year, then threw away 40% of features after product validation failed.
- 🤝 Sell before building to validate B2B product-market fit: Whatfix signed its first customer before writing production code.
- 💰 Test pricing in person for B2B product-market fit signals: Khadim validated from $10 to $1,000/month by watching prospects' face-to-face reactions.
- 🎯 Narrow your market to accelerate B2B product-market fit: Focusing on enterprise CRM at 1,000+ employee companies made everything converge.
Chapters
- Introduction
- What Whatfix does
- Revenue, employees, and $140M raised
- The Search Enabler story and failed product validation
- How the Fix It button became the SaaS pivot
- Starting over with zero customers
- 500 cold emails and finding B2B product-market fit
- Testing pricing from $10 to $1,000
- Getting the first 10 customers
- Going too horizontal
- Narrowing to enterprise CRM for B2B product-market fit
- Using Dreamforce to accelerate sales
- Hiring salespeople as technical founders
- From $1M to $10M ARR in 9 quarters
- Lightning round
Resources
- Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/310
- Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email