He refused to quit his job until $1M ARR—then grew to $5M ARR & closed a $25M Series A. | Pierce Ujjainwalla, Founder of Knak

Pierce launched a consulting business that grew to millions in revenue and dozens of employees. But he noticed his customers kept asking for the same solution. 

So he launched Knak, an email marketing and landing page builder that integrates to Marketo. Unlike most founders, he didn’t go all-in. He kept working on his consulting business full-time until Knak hit $1M in ARR. 

After he transitioned over to Knak, he bootstrapped it to $5M ARR and then raised a $25M Series A. Here’s the story of how Knak found product-market fit. 

Why you should listen

• How to transition from a consulting/services business to a scalable tech startup-- and why it might be more painful than you think. 
• What you need to do to shift from SMB to midmarket and from midmarket to enterprise. 
• How to use enterprise customers to scale to $10M+ without needing thousands of customers
• How to balance urgency and patience to build a successful startup 

Keywords
patience, learning, building a company, failures, product-market fit, consulting business, marketing automation platforms, template product, creation platform, raising funding, urgency

Time Stamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:08:50) The Story of Knak
(00:11:04) Going from Zero to a Million
(00:16:16) Pivoting from SMB to midmarket
(00:19:42) Adding "obvious" features to get closer to PMF
(00:24:07) How to position against incumbents
(00:27:35) Turning Into a Enterprise  Platform
(00:30:30) Finding True Product Market Fit
(00:33:34) Bootstrapping to Series A
(00:40:02) One Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 8:50 The Story of Knak
• 11:04 Going from Zero to a Million
• 16:16 Pivoting from SMB to midmarket
• 19:42 Adding "obvious" features to get closer to PMF
• 24:07 How to position against incumbents
• 27:35 Turning Into a Enterprise Platform
• 30:30 Finding True Product Market Fit
• 33:34 Bootstrapping to Series A
• 40:02 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Pierce Ujjainwalla (00:01) 

Patience is something that I would encourage myself to have more of and and really that like you learn so much on the journey that is building a company even when you fail or when things seem like they're going backwards You are still learning and those things are gonna help you go faster in the future we went from like a hundred dollars a month to like a 5k annual contract and then we quickly raised the prices a lot more from there. 

Pablo Srugo (00:36) 

Did that slow down sales did you find? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (00:38) 

Not at all. It's very uncomfortable for me anyways to lose customers especially even if it's intentional which it was it it goes against everything at my core to lose the customer even if they're not the right customer for you anymore. You have to look at the longer term And this comes from someone who's very impatient. Like you have to look, have a longer time horizon and just know that, you know, when you, if you do go enterprise, there are going to be some major peaks and valleys and lots of time in between. But when you do land those perfect ICP customers at high ASPs, it makes up for a lot in between. 

Pablo Srugo (1:27) 

Welcome to the product market fit show. Brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. Well Pierce. Welcome to the show.

Pierce Ujjainwalla (1:43) 

 Thank you. Great to be here. 

Pablo Srugo (1:45) 

So we'll jump into into Knak, your current company shortly, but maybe to start off because like the story ties into it. You had a different company before this called Revenue Pulse. What's the story there? Like how, did you start that company? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (2:00) 

Yeah. So I was a really early Marketo customer and super active in their like customer community. And eventually people just started messaging me asking if I did consulting, which I conveniently said yes and that's really how Revenue Pulse started.

Pablo Srugo (2:22) 

 tell us a bit more like what is, mean, people know Marketo like by name, but I think like a lot of people don't really know kind of what you actually do with Marketo, like who uses it and how in the same way that like people will know Salesforce much better than let's say a Marketo for the most part. So tell me a bit about like what even is Marketo. who uses it and for what meaning. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (2:40) 

Yeah you mentioned Salesforce, that's really like the sales platform that every company is using. Marketo or marketing automation platforms are essentially the equivalent to Salesforce, but on the marketing side. you know, pretty much every bigger company uses some form of marketing automation now. Like I'd even say SMB mid -market companies use like a HubSpot.

Pablo Srugo (3:09)

What's so hard about it that people would like be asking you to consult for them on Marketo? Like, does it, what does it take to actually get that thing up and running? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (3:16) 

Yeah, again, you know, if you look at Salesforce, like it's a pretty basic platform, but when you start trying to do more sophisticated things with it, it can get complicated, just the same kind of thing. When we started Revenue Pulse, there was just a huge wave companies who were just getting started with it, so we did a ton of implementations. To give you an example, a company might want to do, based on a prospect downloading a specific ebook on my website, want to set up a lead nurture program and then based on their activity in that nurture program. want to set up lead scoring and lead routing based on all of that. So you can imagine if you have thousands  of offers and tens of thousands of emails and very complicated lead scoring and lead routing programs, it can get complex. And if you've never done it before, there's definitely a lot of pitfalls that we helped and still help customers avoid.

Pablo Srugo (4:26) 

got it. And so you're doing this and what are the common things that people are asking for? Because as I understand, like Knak is born out of here, it's born out of you seeing similar trends in these implementations. Like what are some of the, and this is 2013, right? Like, but just maybe take us through like, what are some of the examples of things that people are asking you to do? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (4:44) 

A lot of the work was around implementations and a big part of the implementation would be getting them up and running on their emails and landing pages. So that is externally, really the only thing that a prospect or a customer sees out of a Marketo or a Pardot or an Eloqua. the reality was, especially back in 2013, was unless you knew how to code HTML and CSS, you needed somebody to help you build out those initial templates. And so that's one thing we were doing all the time at Revenue Pulse Helping our customers design and code and build these templates for Marketa. 

Pablo Srugo (5:33) 

So you're helping them build like email templates and landing pages?

Pierce Ujjainwalla (5:37)

Exactly. 

Pablo Srugo (5:38)

Are you not better off just sending like straight up text only emails? Like do people not get to a point, at least for me, this is total personal end of one, but like, I'm like, if the thing is an image, I know it's a blast. And if it's a blast, like I just ignore it, goes straight to junk. Am I off on that? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (5:53)

Yeah, no, I think definitely both email what we recommend and what all the studies show. It's good to do a mix of both. You're going have some people like you who respond better to text -only emails, emails that look like they're coming from a person. And HTML emails, I think, still serve a really important purpose, especially as brand becomes more important in marketing. And it's … Email is still the only place where you control everything about your audience, right? Like if you look at social, you can't get in front of every single person who follows you. If you look at paid advertising, it's the same thing, whereas email, you're in control. If you want to get a message to every single person in your database, you can do that. And it's totally free still.

Pablo Srugo (6:51) 

No, I totally agree. mean, think emails is the one place where you truly own your audience, right? And you do get something delivered to their inbox. You know, now they're starting to filter out as it goes to social, there's a go to main and these sort of things. And then, you know, people actually read it and whatever is a different story. But there's something powerful about owning that email list and having like a communication channel that you own kind of end to end. that I totally get. Going back to the Marketo thing, I have to ask like, maybe this is a stupid question, but like, is that not where like MailChimp plays? Like, is that not the easiest way to just...

get a template going or is that something that like a larger enterprise, you know, that doesn't fit, let's say for larger enterprise. And that's why they need to use Marketo. So I mean, it's a little bit more customizable, little more complex. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (7:31) 

For small companies, I would definitely recommend like a MailChimp or, even a HubSpot as good as you get a little bit bigger. What it really comes down to is when you've invested in a platform like Salesforce for your CRM, you need something that's fully integrated between your marketing automation platform and your CRM because marketing and sales really need to work together, have that full cycle visibility from top of funnel to bottom. And so that's when most companies will graduate into one of these bigger marketing automation platforms. But I will say, I do think HubSpot is making a lot of progress up market. 

Pablo Srugo (8:19) 

So, you know, at least back then, then, and for enterprises, the best way to, guess, a lot of this is probably analytics, right? Like it's following a lead end to end. It's having your data actually make sense in the backend. When you look at what emails are working, what landing pages are working, and then what's actually converting from, you know, an MQL or somebody that's reading content to somebody that's buying, which would maybe live more, more in Salesforce. You're doing this. And I guess tell us the story of how you start to shift from you know, custom bespoke services consulting company to what became Knak.

Pierce Ujjainwalla (8:54) 

Yeah. So, you know, as we got into the company, this was probably like two or three years into the company, you know, as an entrepreneur, I was constantly making product idea lists of like, what, are other companies that I could start? What are, what are products that I could build out? So I probably had a list of 10 to 15 of those that I was tracking over time, just of like, hey, this problem keeps coming up or like, hey, this is a lot harder than I think it should be. And one of those things on that list was creating these email and landing page templates because we were getting a ton of these, like every customer we worked with asked us for these templates. And you know, we were doing them bespoke, we were coding them out, but it was a real headache for both parties. Like it sucked for us because it was like a month of going back and forth and them saying, hey, move this button down here, change this typo or whatever. And to be honest, like it was good money for the agency and lots of agencies are still building these out. But it was not a great customer experience and it still isn't. And I just felt like this could all be done. Like this month long project could probably take five minutes if the customer was in control and they could do more of that. And so that's exactly what we did. We built an MVP where we had three of our most popular templates that we built for customers. And the customer could do everything they couldn't in Marketa. So they could pick a template, they could change to their brand colors, they could add their logo, and they could change their social media icons to point to their URLs. Like literally, that's all it did. And then most of the time was spent injecting the specific Marketo syntax and syncing it into Marketo. And so super basic MVP. It was a credit card payment, $99 a month. And we put that up there. We launched it at the annual Marketo conference and it took off. It was super basic, but we We're up to like 700 customers in the first year and a half.

 Pablo Srugo (11:42) 

Paying a hundred dollars a month each. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (11:44) 

Yeah. 

Pablo Srugo (11:45)

Got it. So you're doing like a, so you went from zero to a million a year in like a year or so.

Pierce Ujjainwalla (11:49) 

 Well, yeah. Like, like it grew super fast and then we kind of plateaued at a million. What we learned was that number one, it was a ton of support to support 700 customers. with like a three person company. And we also learned that, you know, I think our customers built like over 50 ,000 of these marketo templates in a year and a half. And it didn't matter what kind of template we were making. The first thing they wanted to do was change something, right? And because we didn't have that full editor, 

Pablo Srugo (12:34) 

And I have to ask like, cause you're in Ottawa, like the big dog in Ottawa was and is by far Shopify, you know, they're doing templates for, for e -commerce. Was that an inspiration at all when you thought about templates for Marketo? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (12:46) 

Well, listen, I would say that they're a big inspiration for me as an entrepreneur. I had, I worked with somebody who was good friends with some people over there and I remember getting a tour of their office. their first office way back in the day.

Pablo Srugo (13:03) 

 Is that the Byward market one with like with the slide and stuff or was it even earlier? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (13:07) 

Even earlier, like when they had the robot that was like driving around the office for the remote people. And like at that point in my career, I had only heard of Silicon Valley. You know, it felt like something out of a movie, but it made it real. It was like, Hey, you could, you can make a company that you see in the movies. that was definitely an inspiration for me to see it at that point and then hear about it over time, right? It was like, hey, they were just, they were a hundred person company when I saw them and now they're 10 ,000 people. So I would say that was an inspiration and I have met Toby a couple of times and and heard him speak and just hear the story. And so yeah, like when it's close to home, just gives, makes it more real. And it, it, I think psychologically makes it feel like, I could, I could do that too. 

Pablo Srugo (14:05) 

100%. It's crazy how that works. I think, I mean, you know, for people that are in SF or New York city, they're seeing this all the time. But if you're not in one of those like main hubs and you don't have like us, like even a Shopify or something pretty big, like around you, it's really hard to, I guess like fully believe, which is why, at least for me, The moment that that changes, when I went to 500 Starter Accelerator in SF, right? And all of a sudden you're like right there in the middle of it and everybody's talking about a hundred million dollars this, billion dollar that, and it just becomes much more real. I think like finding a way to have that happen to you, whether it's like you go to one of these cities, like a lot of people, especially back then out of Ottawa would go to SF for like a handful of weeks to try and fundraise whatever it was. But I think one of the results, whether they did end up raising or not was just getting in touch with how real this can be. And I think it powers you in a different way. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (14:55) 

Yeah, 100%. I was very fortunate to start my career at Cognos. You know, for those of you who haven't heard of Cognos, like when business intelligence first became a thing, this was like way before Tableau. You know, I joined Cognos when we were like 3 ,000 people. That's another kind of Ottawa startup at one point.

Pablo Srugo (15:20) 

It exited for like what, five billion or something like that?

Pierce Ujjainwalla (15:23) 

 Five billion. It was IBM's biggest acquisition ever. So again, think, yeah, seeing that again, being there when they were 3000 people was unbelievable. Just seeing like how the company was run. We were big enough that we had like ton of resources, but it still felt like a startup and how quickly they were moving and all the innovation they were doing was amazing.

Pablo Srugo (15:50)

I have to ask by the way, like, so as you're going through Knak, you get to a million really quick, probably feel like a hero. And then you start to plateau and you have all these kinds of challenges around servicing. ever regret leaving behind the consulting business? And I ask that because a lot of times product is sexier. It feels scalable. You can raise money. There's something to these consulting business that just profit, profit, profit. And sometimes it's actually easier to land a customer that way. then it might be with a product business. I wonder if that went through your mind during that like year or two. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (16:22) 

A hundred percent. And to be honest, I hadn't left my consulting business when we were doing a million in a year because of exactly that. Like the consulting business was still way more successful than Knak  was. And I hadn't seen enough to be like, you know what? I'm leaving this consulting. Like I need to focus 100 % of my time and effort on that. 

Pablo Srugo (16:49) 

How big was consulting business? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (16:51) 

Uh, At that point in time, we were probably like 20 or 25 people, but it was, you know,a really profitable company. 

Pablo Srugo (17:03) 

So walk me through then what do you do during like, first of all, how long did you plateau for? And what were some of the things that you tried that year to get things turning around again?

Pierce Ujjainwalla (17:12) 

Yeah, like I am a very impatient person. So we did not plateau for long, maybe, maybe like three to five months, we saw that trend and we're like, hey, we got it. We got to do something about this. And, and we took all of our learnings over the first three years, I think, and, and said, okay. If we were going to build a new product,

Pablo Srugo (17:39) 

just to be clear, the first three years, you're including the consulting learnings.

Pierce Ujjainwalla (17:42) 

I  can't remember exactly if it was two or three years or one to two years that we ran like the template product, but in my head there's like a template era and we learned in that time. We learned that our product was not sticky because people would just take the templates and cancel their subscription. We learned that templates are not the solution to the problem we were trying to- 

Pablo Srugo (18:12) 

like once you use the template you could just copy it and keep it within marketa

Pierce Ujjainwalla (18:17) 

 it was yours so you had the code and you're like thanks a lot guys see you later and then the other thing was we made those 50 000 templates and people were still like hey can you send me the code to change the font or do something else or move something around. So we knew that that wasn't the solution either. So that's when we pivoted what Really Knak is today, which is the full creation experience. So it was no longer about templates. It was about building an email from end to end. And what we also realized there is like, it is so much more than just building the email for a big company. It's about setting your brand and making sure the brand can't go off the rails. It's about collaborating, right? You have a lot of people building these assets out. It's about getting approvals. It's about connecting into the other parts of the tech stack that they already use. It's about getting inspiration for your next campaign, about testing. about optimizing.

Pablo Srugo (19:29) 

 What's the concrete example of collaboration and maybe approvals? Like that's, think, pretty clear in terms of what that feature looks like. And those are features that are, you know, part of many different products or workflows. But like, what else? What does that mean? Like when you say you went from just like building templates to like an end to end email, you know, service or whatever, like, what does that really mean? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (19:48) 

Funny you mentioned collaboration, because yeah, you know, I think most people now think of like collaboration and Figma, where you can have multiple people in there, you can drop pins, can tag people. None of that exists in marketing automation platforms. Like none of it. Do you know how they collaborate right now? They send test emails back and forth. That seems so obvious, right? Like to you, you're just like, fake my collaboration. Like we are filling all of those gaps that the marketing automation platforms leave. You think, Oh well, Adobe must have that or Salesforce must have that or Oracle must have that. None of them have that. That is a good example of like, hey, let's build a modern creation platform using current tech. And that's what we did. it's kind of across the whole spectrum. Another example would be, I mentioned all of those email clients and how they all render the code differently. Right now, people are using point solutions to see how that code looks across all their clients. So if you want it to be like, what's my email going to look like on an iPhone 15 in the Gmail app? Well, the current state is like, make your email in one platform, you send it to another platform to see how it's going to look, and then you make the changes in the other platform. It's so broken. I see you laughing. 

Pablo Srugo (21:27) 

Well, it reminds me of when we were building Android apps. We had to like have, I think back, this is like 10 years ago. I'm sure it's fixed now, but like we would have many different phones that we had to buy so that the devs could see like what the Android app looked like on different screens. And I remember at the time I couldn't believe that we had to spend money on like phones that nobody needed to use except to see what the app looked like.

Pierce Ujjainwalla (21:48) 

 Yeah. So I don't know. I'm just, I feel like my job is just bringing common sense to these things that it blows my mind that so many people still work like this today. And at the biggest companies in the world, sometimes they have just the process that they have and the work arounds and the hoops that these marketers have to jump through. It's insane. like we're kind of trying to fill all of those gaps one step at a time. And I think that's kind of how the Knak platform has evolved over these years. 

Pablo Srugo (22:26) 

I think it makes sense. Right. Status quo is a funny thing. It's very sticky. And there's also this concept of like, even as a person, I mean, you can be the top 0 .1 % in one discipline, or you can be like top 10 % across three or four different disciplines. And that becomes like a top 0 .1 % overall, because you're bringing in things from different places. And so like, I think as the founder and CEO, like, you know, if you're deep in marketing, which something like Marketo, you're very deep in marketing and enterprise marketing. But if you can bring in best of from different places, and see where like for whatever reason it hasn't translated over. Those are pretty low risk, of quote unquote obvious vets. Like, know, collaboration works. You know that maybe this company is like best in breed collaboration. If you bring this stuff over, odds are marketers are going to love it too.

Pierce Ujjainwalla (23:07) 

Yeah, a hundred percent. I was thinking a lot about InVision recently. I don't know if you remember InVision, but they were one of the first kind of like new age collaboration platforms. I loved it. I used to use it all the time But when I think back, like what happened to them, right? I think they just stayed as that collaboration platform. They weren't able, if you look at Figma, was the from creation to exporting and had amazing collaboration in between. I think that this like chain link strategy now of going from A to Z, especially as so many you know, things are getting consolidated. People are really looking for that, I think. 

Pablo Srugo (23:54) 

By the way, I have to ask, and I'm sure it's the question you want to got from like, you know, to the extent they started fundraising or talking to VCs, probably from the VC crowd, but like, why wouldn't Marketo do this? I mean, this is core to implementing Marketo properly is having these templates. It's kind of this onboarding lubricant, if you will. How come Marketo wouldn't just at some point add this sort of capability, this sort of functionality? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (24:16) 

Yeah, I- It's a good question. My take on this is a few reasons. One, there wasn't any incremental revenue for them to do this. The way that Marketo always went to market was, we have a full drag and drop, it's super easy, like that's how the salespeople sold it. And people don't really realize it isn't until they start using the platform. And being like, crap, yeah, we're going to need help with this now. I think that's one part of it. think the next part is that, you know, Marketo got acquired a couple of, they went public, they got acquired by Vista, then they got acquired by Adobe. And I think at each of those acquisitions, they lost a lot of talent to the people who, you know, the early engineers and product people who kind of cashed out on their equity and moved on to their next product. think that they had a lack of engineering that really knew how to go in there and make changes, there may have been some fear of breaking parts of the platform. And honestly, I'm just not sure for them that it's the sexiest thing that they could do. They were early in AI content and email, were doing things like account -based marketing, they're doing chat, like dynamic chat, and this is like a core foundational part that I think people just assume they're good at. That is my hypothesis. Now, there is a whole new focus on content generation now with generative AI and I think a lot of them are going back to what we're doing because it's sexy again. Like, Hey, there's generative AI images and, and text, and that fits really nicely into these assets that we create. You know, I'm fully expecting them to go into this again. 

Pablo Srugo (26:26) 

so going back to, to the storyline, you make these kind of, let's say workflow changes, collaboration type of features. I assume that helps you on like retention on churn, cause it's now not just about the templates. What about the other problem you had, which was around like customization and people messaging you to like tweak font. Like how did you address that? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (26:48) 

So we don't have any of that anymore because fully no code, full creation platform. So the support, that huge part of support is completely gone. And I think, yeah, like we're definitely getting a lot of traction on the consolidation play of like, Hey, Knak replaced like three different solutions into one. It's more capital efficient. It's a better experience for the marketers because they don't have to go to three different platforms to get the information they need. We connect better into the Adobe marketing cloud than Adobe does natively. There are lots of integrations that don't exist through products that Adobe all owns that we do. 

Pablo Srugo (27:37) 

And so you're at a million ARR, 700 customers, plateau from maybe three to six months to make these changes. What happens next? Like what does growth look like for the next kind of couple of years? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (27:46) 

Things really happened quickly from there. Like we kind of found that flow very early on because I think we knew the problems so well. So we launched a new product. Totally different, right? Like no more credit card sales, much higher ASP. We went from like a hundred dollars a month to like a 5k annual contract. And then we quickly raised the prices a lot more from there. 

Pablo Srugo (28:18) 

Did that slow down sales? Did you find like raising the prices? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (28:20) 

No.

Pablo Srugo (28:21) 

 Why do think that is? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (28:22) 

Not at all. For the customers we were selling to, these are big companies. 5k is nothing to them, right? The difference between $99 a month and $5 ,000 a year is literally nothing to them. And I think we were solving a real problem, right? I think ultimately we solving a problem that needed  to be solved. For the people we were selling to, that price point was... And I think the big turning point that was like, we got approached by the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, they said Hey, we really like what you guys are doing, but this is not an enterprise platform. We had an amazing champion over there. He was a really visionary guy. And he's like, I want to work with you to help you make this into a real enterprise creation platform. We built like a custom package for them where They funded a lot of the custom development of our enterprise product. From the beginning, we would own all of that IP. And it was just such a great partnership because their vision aligned to ours. It wasn't like we were building a bunch of stuff that would only be for them. It was basically our roadmap anyways. We had also like one of the biggest tech companies in the world around the exact same time. They didn't approach us.But this is like the power of partnerships. Someone I knew introduced me to their field marketing  team. We started working with them. This is Citrix. It was around the same time we were both building the feature set that those two companies really needed. And that formed the foundation for Knak. And then in like a week, we closed three enterprise deals. 

Pablo Srugo (30:19) 

What kind of ACVs?

Pierce Ujjainwalla (20:20) 

All over 100K.

Pablo Srugo (20:23) 

Did that totally change? Cause you went from a thousand a year effectively at a hundred month to like 5 ,000 to 10 ,000. And then you closed $300 ,000 ACV and the power of that is like, I mean, it's a stupid math, but like, you know, you need a hundred customers. Now  it's one customer. Like it's just mind blowing, right? Like did that totally change how you thought about, about Knak and the future of it?

Pierce Ujjainwalla (30:41) 

For sure. That was like the traction that, that I really wanted to see .And like, even at this point, I was still running the agency and Knak was like my side hustle. But when those three contracts came in, I was like, Hey, we have hit on something here. There is traction. This is real. I pretty  much started looking for a CEO of my consulting company, like immediately after that, I would say probably the first time that we really felt that momentum. Like I think every entrepreneur can kind of remember when they found flow and the momentum.

Pablo Srugo (31:24) 

Is that like your product market fit moment? I think so. I think like, I think we had found product market fit with the template product. It was just never going to be a viable business. The pivoted version of Knak, I would agree with you. That was the moment where it's

Pablo Srugo (31:41) 

 And by the way, in simple terms, cause you work with SMB, the Embed Market, the enterprise, and you said you worked with that enterprise customer that, which one was that? Sorry. The, the pharma  one. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (31:49) 

Yeah. So like, I can't say the name.

Pablo Srugo (31:51) 

So one of the big pharma that narrows it down to like three names. You work with them and you said like, they were very involved in the product. Like what are some of key differences between a full like enterprise product and what you had? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (32:03) 

As you can imagine in pharma, it's a very regulated space and you need to be able to really  lock things down. We needed to create a place where a marketer couldn't even sink their asset into a platform that could potentially send it out until it was fully approved. That's one example. Another one was that they have all these warnings that they need to be able to have in an email. So if you're promoting any type of drug, you need to have these warning labels. within those emails. so creating a creation environment that had those included in it. And it's like crazy specific. It's like within the first hundred pixels of an email, the person needs to be able to see this warning label. So that's another example. then of course,

Pablo Srugo (33:01) 

 but it's like high level, it's kind of like security and compliance. Those are the things. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (33:05) 

Yeah. And we were just way too open and flexible, of course, as like a startup solution. It was very open user permissions, controls, brand control, all of that. 

Pablo Srugo (33:20 ) 

you were bootstrapped this whole time, correct? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (33:22) Right up until we raised our Series A. So yeah, we bootstrapped to $5 Million

Pablo Srugo (33:28) 

 And what was that? mean, that Series A was like peak hype time. It was a pretty large Series A, like $25 million. What did that feel like, honestly, to go you know, successful bootstrap company with, 5 million, but I'm sure always a bank balance that was tight to having like tens of millions of dollars in the account overnight. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (33:46) 

Yeah, it was pretty surreal to be honest. I thought we would always be a bootstrap company because it was just working, you know, but we did reach a point where we were like, Hey, you know, if we could add like, and we made a list, we're like, if we could hire like 50 more people. which would never be possible bootstrap. We think that we could grow this thing even faster. And I'll never forget, had a call with our virtual CFO, shout outs to Corey McElishan. We were going through our numbers at the end of the year. And this was, yeah, like right around, this was the end of 2021, which was the craziest time ever, I think, in the VC market. And we were just going through the numbers and he was like There was some expletives and then he said, you guys need to raise right now. Like I want to give Knak the best chance I can to get as big as it can and make the biggest impact it could. But it was a hard decision to be honest, because we were in such a great place. The culture was in such a good place. We were growing, things were happening. We're in that momentum. like, I really...didn't necessarily want to change anything just because things were going well. But we ran a process, we got a ton of term sheets, we ended up picking insight partners because I think the money aside, they had such an amazing portfolio, so many great resources, and I just really got along well with our investor there. yeah, we were Once you get through the diligence and everything, it is an amazing experience. Definitely rode a high for a long time there. You know, it opened up so much. We were able to hire so many people. We were able to build out like a really kick -ass office. And it felt just very surreal. 

Pablo Srugo (35:56) 

Did it work? Like, did that translate into growth?

Pierce Ujjainwalla (36:02)

 No. Well, no. *laughs* No, it definitely did. But we made a lot of mistakes. 

Pablo Srugo (36:07) 

Like not in the way that you assumed that it would, I guess is the answer. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (36:10) 

We continued to grow really fast. And we were able to hire a lot of roles that we wouldn't have been able to. But the thing was, it was like, everyone raised money in 2021. And then 2022 is probably the hardest time ever to hire and the salaries got out of control, there was very slim pickings in terms of who you could bring on board. I really think there's like this easy come easy go mentality that can happen a little bit. Like before when we were bootstrapped, it was like, hey, we had to grind to make all this money and we're gonna be super diligent in who we hire, what we spend it on. And it's really easy to kind of - Okay, now you have 25 million in the bank. 

Pablo Srugo (37:04)

You know, all of a sudden all the expenses that get scrutinized are like a thousand bucks. It's five thousand. It's like it doesn't move the needle. Who gives a shit. Just do it. You know what mean? Like and then that compounds though. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (37:15) 

100%. I went from like the no no no guy to like the yeah sure why not for a while. Now luckily things changed pretty quickly, right? It seemed like you could just go out and raise more money endlessly. But 22 things started getting hard, 23 things definitely were hard. So we, I am so happy with the timing of our race because like we got a bit of a taste of it, but we didn't get  too far ahead of our skis and we're able to, you know, we still have enough bootstrap DNA that we're like, we were able to course correct pretty quickly. But yeah, you know, I can see how it happens for sure. especially if you, you know, we had been bootstrapped for five years. So that was pretty deep in how we ran everything. 

Pablo Srugo (38:07) 

Give me a sense of where you at now, like whatever you can share, number of customers, revenue, employees. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (38:12) 

Yeah. So we, just hit the hundred employee milestone a few weeks ago, which, you know, we're pretty proud of that. Seemed like a big thing to get to that. And yeah. So like, to be honest, I know I mentioned we're at 500 or 700 customers earlier in our template days. I can just share with everyone. We changed our strategy. It's no longer $99 a month credit card, right? We're targeting and we've built the product for some of the biggest companies in the world. So we have fewer customers than we did when we were the template product. I can just share like we're well north of 10 million a year now. 

Pablo Srugo (38:56)

So you 10X, I mean, bottom line is like from that time of 700 customers and a million revenue, you more than 10X revenue. And let's say you halfed or something like that, your customers. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (39:06) 

Exactly. It's not always a one to one ratio. And, I will share, you know, it can, it can feel it's very uncomfortable for me anyways, to lose customers, especially even if it's intentional, which it was, it, it's like goes against everything at my core. to lose the customer, even if they're not the right customer for you anymore. You have to look at the longer term, and this comes from someone who's very impatient. Like you have to look, have a longer time horizon and just know that, you know, when you, if you do go enterprise, there are going to be some major peaks and valleys and lots of time in between. But when you do land, those perfect ICP customers at high ASPs. It makes up for a lot in between. 

Pablo Srugo (40:00) 

Perfect. Well, we'll stop it there. I'll ask, we touched on a problem I could fit earlier. So I'll ask the one question I would typically end with, which is if you could go back to, you know, 2015 days when you were just starting Knak with like one piece of advice for your younger self, what might that be? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (40:17) 

Patience is something that I would encourage myself to have more of. And really that like, you learn so much on the journey that is building a company. Even when you fail or when things seem like they're going backwards, you are still learning and those things are going to help you go faster. 

Pablo Srugo (40:41) 

I have to double click on that just because like, I can't believe I just said double click. I actually hate saying that, but I said anyways, it's funny because you were talking about how impatient you are and I'm thinking about it with my mind like That's such a common trait amongst founders. And I would argue like it's kind of a virtue because impatience is the thing that like doesn't let you accept the pace of whatever, like it just needs to go faster. But now you're saying you would have been more patient, like impatience helps. And what ways does patience actually help as a founder? 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (41:06) 

Well, yeah, think impatience is like, or urgency. I preferred to refer to it as like, you need to move fast, you need to listen to customers and implement, you need to look at your team and make changes quickly, you need to react to the market fast, and in software generally you need to be fast. I think my advice to myself is more like, what seems like waiting a long time for me probably isn't a long time. And so expectations of new employees, like how fast are they going to be able to learn everything, ramp up and be productive, right? Like I need to give people time to get up to speed with where my head is at. And what is very obvious to me, I've learned over time that takes time for people to see that. And I need to do a better job of giving what's in my head to other people. And so I think maybe the patience is more like patience with the people you're working with and expectations of how quickly they're going to be able to run that. 

Pablo Srugo (42:20)

 I like that. I think the other thing too is like short term urgency, long term patience is like, yeah, you got to move really quick in the short term. But at the end of the day, things will always take longer than you hope. And it's always going to have peaks and troughs and valleys and all these sort of pieces. so like accepting that while not accepting that the feature is going to take two months and finding ways to make it take one month, which is tough, right? It's almost as dissonance, but that's, that's the world the founder lives in. think. Well, Pierce, thanks so much for taking the time. It's been awesome. 

Pierce Ujjainwalla (42:48) 

Yeah. Thanks Pablo. This was fun.

Pablo Srugo (42:50) 

 If you listen to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact. But whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to the product market fit show, leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover the show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews. And the reality is if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. So please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing like great podcast ,I love this podcast, whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously the longer, the better, the more detailed, the better, but write anything, leave five stars and you will be helping me. But most importantly, many other founders just like you discover the show. Thank you.