Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, an AI platform for customer support that helps companies manage both human and AI agents more efficiently. Today, Assembled is an 8-figure ARR company with about 120 people, serves several hundred customers, and has raised $71 million.

But getting there was brutal. Ryan and his co-founders spent two years building before launching in March 2020—the same day the WHO declared COVID a global pandemic. About 25% of demos didn't show up. It took them 8 months to earn their first dollar of revenue. When they finally got customers on usage-based pricing with no minimums, usage flatlined during the pandemic. They thought it was their fault before realizing it was macro-related. So they stopped chasing growth and focused on the customers getting value, meeting them in person and building what actually mattered.

You'll learn:

• How Ryan knew he had a real business when he discovered that Stripe, Casper, and Grammarly had all built similar color-coded spreadsheets
• What Ryan learned the hard way about usage-based pricing with no minimums and how they fixed it
• How Ryan's team decided which early deals requiring custom work would help them grow versus become distractions
• Why Assembled focused on one Slack community instead of trying to be everywhere at once
• The simple method Ryan used to create a detailed ICP by looking at patterns in the customers he already had

Full show notes → saasclub.io/460

This episode is brought to you by:

🔐 ⁠⁠⁠Sprinto⁠⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and book a demo today⁠

💖 ⁠Gearheart⁠ → ⁠Book a call + get the first 20 hours of development free

📡 ⁠⁠⁠Signal House⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠Learn more and get a demo

🚨 ⁠⁠⁠⁠NordStellar⁠⁠ → ⁠⁠⁠⁠Book a demo and get 20% off with code blackfriday20

Get weekly SaaS lessons and new founder stories → saasclub.io/email