449: Fathom: Why Fixing Retention First Was the Key to Hitting $1M ARR - with Richard White

Summary

Summary of The SaaS Podcast Episode 449: "Fathom: Why Fixing Retention First Was the Key to Hitting $1M ARR" with Richard White

Introduction

In Episode 449 of The SaaS Podcast, host Omar Khan interviews Richard White, the founder and CEO of Fathom, an AI-powered note-taking application designed to automatically capture and summarize meetings. Released on July 10, 2025, this episode delves into Richard’s entrepreneurial journey, the challenges faced while building Fathom, strategic pivots, and the critical focus on user retention that propelled the company to achieve $1M Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

Richard White's Background

Richard White brings a wealth of experience from his decade-long leadership at UserVoice, a customer feedback and support platform. His early fascination with technology and entrepreneurship is evident from his formative years, where he engaged in building websites and software solutions.

[06:13] Richard White: “I was very fortunate that I got into computers at a really young age... I was always a little bummed when my friend's cheat codes website was larger than mine, but I learned a lot from those early projects.”

Founding of Fathom

In 2019, after a decade with UserVoice, Richard identified a common pain point—struggling to take effective notes during meetings. The onset of the pandemic, which shifted many interactions to virtual platforms like Zoom, presented a unique opportunity to address this issue. Recruiting four of his top engineers from UserVoice, Richard launched Fathom with an initial funding boost raised on day one.

[05:02] Richard White: “We have about eight figures, kind of lower mid eight figures. We have about 175,000 companies that use Fathom any given month.”

Initial Product Development and MVP

Fathom’s first iteration was rudimentary, focusing primarily on recording meetings and allowing users to manually highlight sections of transcripts to create summaries. Recognizing the inefficiency of manual highlighting, Richard pushed his engineering team to enhance the speed and automation of the summarization process.

[16:22] Richard White: “The first version all it did was record a meeting. After I could go into the transcript and highlight sections... It shifted from one kind of work to a different kind of work.”

Early User Acquisition and Activation Challenges

Securing the first stable 50 users was a significant milestone, achieved through direct outreach on LinkedIn and leveraging personal networks. However, Richard encountered unexpected challenges when Fathom was launched on the Zoom App Marketplace, resulting in 100,000 signups but only 100 daily active users (DAU). This discrepancy stemmed from the influx of low-quality users, primarily Zoom’s free-tier users who weren’t actively utilizing meetings for business purposes.

[20:14] Richard White: “We only had two features ready and a slide deck showing what was coming. But it worked. We managed to hit $100,000 in ARR in the first month and reached our first million within a year.”

Growth via Zoom Marketplace

The partnership with Zoom was instrumental in Fathom’s rapid user acquisition. Richard’s proactive approach included cold emailing Zoom’s program managers to secure a spot in their marketplace, positioning Fathom alongside established players. This strategic move led to a surge in signups, albeit of varying quality.

[22:13] Richard White: “We saw that people aren't immediately going to bring into their next meeting. They want to test it first before exposing it to their colleagues.”

The Significance of Low-Quality Users in Onboarding

Despite the initial setback of low engagement, the large volume of signups provided a unique testing ground to refine Fathom’s onboarding process. By analyzing user behavior and iteratively improving the activation flow, Richard’s team tripled their activation rate from 25% to 75%.

[28:51] Richard White: “We stapled myself to one of our engineers for three months, and every day we woke up and were like, 'What are the top three things we can do to improve the onboarding process?'”

Fundraising Challenges and Market Shift

As Fathom’s growth escalated in 2022, the venture capital landscape shifted dramatically. Investors began prioritizing revenue over mere user growth, compelling Richard to accelerate Fathom’s monetization strategy earlier than planned.

[31:02] Richard White: “The bottom falls out of the market. It’s very clear, very quickly, you will never fundraise again unless you can prove revenue.”

Pivot to Monetization and Sales Strategy

To meet investor demands and sustain growth, Richard led a swift pivot towards monetization. With the support of an already assembled sales team, Fathom introduced a team plan despite having only two out of twelve planned features developed. This bold move resulted in $100,000 ARR in the first month and propelled the company to $1M ARR within a year.

[35:35] Richard White: “We only built two out of twelve features, but we knew we had to show revenue. Our sales team pitched the roadmap, and it worked. We reached $1M in revenue within 11 months.”

Overcoming Challenges with User Trust and Onboarding

Building trust was paramount, especially with an AI-driven product. To address skepticism, Richard’s team developed a bot that simulates a meeting using prerecorded videos, allowing users to test Fathom’s capabilities in a controlled environment. Additionally, transitioning to a desktop app that automatically prompts users to activate Fathom during meetings significantly improved activation rates.

[22:13] Richard White: “We built out a pretty cool apparatus that allowed you to have a test call, a fake call with a recording... that really helped.”

Competition and Scaling Beyond Zoom

As AI note-taking became mainstream with advancements like GPT-4 and competing solutions from platforms like Zoom, Fathom strategically expanded beyond Zoom to support other meeting platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. This diversification ensured resilience against platform-specific competition.

[45:08] Richard White: “We knew Zoom would get into this game and we would want to spread beyond the Zoom platform. So we started supporting other platforms, which was the number one thing our users wanted us to do.”

AI Integration and Accelerated Growth

The integration of advanced AI capabilities in late 2023 marked a turning point for Fathom. Automated detection of action items and enhanced meeting summaries led to a 20% improvement across key metrics, fueling a 10x revenue growth by the end of 2023.

[45:23] Richard White: “When we dropped that in and we could say we can now automatically detect all your action items accurately... every single metric in the business went up by about 20%. From that point, it was about a 10x increase very quickly.”

Lessons and Founder Insights

Richard emphasizes the importance of focusing on user retention before scaling. By ensuring users found consistent value in Fathom, monetization became a natural extension. Additionally, maintaining a customer-centric approach, leveraging virality, and being adaptable to market shifts were pivotal in Fathom’s success.

[21:56] Richard White: “If you can build a killer experience and users engage day in, day out, you almost always can find a way to monetize it.”

Lightning Round: Quick Insights from Richard White

1. Best Business Advice Received: Richard recalls feedback from an angel investor at UserVoice who challenged his dynamic capabilities as a CEO, pushing him to balance focus with the ability to juggle multiple responsibilities.

2. Recommended Book: The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh. Richard appreciates Walsh’s philosophy of focusing on team excellence, trusting that results (the score) will follow.

3. Attribute of a Successful Founder: A strong need for external validation, driving continuous improvement and product excellence.

4. Favorite Productivity Tool/Habit: Monitoring his sleep and recovery using Whoop, ensuring he remains well-rested and productive.

5. Crazy Business Idea: Building a communal VR experience for friends to share immersive activities, akin to attending a club or listening to music together in a virtual space.

6. Fun Fact: Richard is an avid fan of video games and frequently uses gaming analogies to conceptualize and communicate product strategies.

7. Passion Outside Work: Skiing. He enjoys the balance of minimal effort and high speed, finding it mentally rejuvenating.

[47:30] Richard White: “I love the Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh... If you do all the little things right, the score takes care of itself.”

Conclusion

Richard White’s journey with Fathom illustrates the critical role of user retention in scaling a SaaS business. By prioritizing a stellar user experience, effectively navigating market challenges, and strategically pivoting towards monetization, Fathom achieved substantial growth. Richard’s insights offer valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs aiming to build resilient and user-centric SaaS companies.

For more information about Fathom, visit Fathom Video. To connect with Richard White, reach out via LinkedIn.

Transcript

[Richard White]

Foreign.

[Omar Khan]

Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talked to Richard White, the founder and CEO of Fathom, an AI note taking app that automatically captures and summarizes meetings in 2019. After running UserVoice for over a decade, Richard decided it was time for a change. Like many people, he struggled to take notes while talking in meetings. And so when the pandemic hit, he saw his opportunity. He recruited four of his best engineers from UserVoice and raised funding on day one. But growth was painfully slow. After nearly a year, they only had 50 stable users. It turned out the problem was trust People wouldn't bring an unknown bot into real meetings. They wanted to test it first, but testing it on their own didn't work. So Richard's team built a clever fix. They created a bot that played prerecorded video, giving users a fake meeting to help them build confidence. Then Zoom launched its app marketplace and included Fathom. They exploded to like 100,000 signups in the first month, but they were shocked when they realized that only about 100 people were actually using it daily. It turned out that 99% of the signups had zero meetings on their calendars and Zoom had sent them tons of free users who weren't even using the platform for business. Instead of giving up riches, saw an opportunity. Thousands of low quality signups were actually the perfect testing ground to fix their broken onboarding. And just as growth took off in 2022, the funding market crashed and VCs were suddenly demanding revenue over user growth. Richard gave his team 60 days to monetize and they started selling a team plan before it was built. They only had two features ready and a slide deck showing what was coming. But it worked. They managed to hit $100,000 in ARR in the first month and reached their first million within a year. Today Fathom generates eight figures in ARR with 80 employees and serves around 175. In this episode you'll learn how Richard used those hundred thousand or so low quality signups to triple their activation rate and build their onboarding process. How selling a team plan with just two features and a slide deck helped them hit the first million in ARR in just a year. How building a fake meeting bot with prerecorded video solved their biggest trust and activation problem. We talk about what unconventional strategies helped Fathom become number one on G2 and turn free users into their marketing engine. And why? Richard says building a second startup is like speedrunning a video game you've played before. So I hope you enjoy it. When was the last time you verified your app's emails actually reached users? Someone signs up, expects their welcome email nothing. They try password reset, silence. They assume your product's broken when really those emails are sitting in spam. Mailtrap is an email delivery platform built for product companies that send at scale trusted by teams at Atlassian, Adobe and Calendly get faster delivery, high inboxing rates and industry best analytics. And right now you'll get 20% off all plans with the code THESASSPodcastailtrapIO. That's Mailtrap IO. Hey Richard, welcome to the show.

[Richard White]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Omar Khan]

My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[Richard White]

I have a bunch. I think probably the most worker like work related one is Eisenhower quote about planning. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything, which I think we look kind of, we idolize a lot here at Fathom because we are very much a planning like kind of culture. We try to move pretty nimbly.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. So tell us about Fathom. What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[Richard White]

Yeah, Fathom is the number one rated AI note taker. So it joins your meeting, summarizes them for you. It's really for anyone who's on meetings a lot, which is a pretty big tam know and got started with it because I had this problem myself. Right. I was in a lot of meetings four or five years ago and just struggling to talk to people and take notes at the same time. Clean up those notes after the meeting, look at those notes two weeks later and still not know who was what. And so we, we built Fathom really to solve that problem. And I think one of the key things for us is like we wanted it to be something for everyone. And so one of our big kind of go to market strategies was to make a really good version of Fathom.

[Omar Khan]

That'S completely free and give us a sense of the size of the business, where are you right now in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

[Richard White]

Yeah, it's about an 80% team. We're about eight figures, kind of lower mid eight figures. We have about 175,000 companies that use Fathom any given month.

[Omar Khan]

Okay, great. So the business was founded in as you said, I think 20, 24 or five years ago. And you sort of, you touched on, I guess, where the idea came from. Before we get deeper into that, you have a really interesting background. And, you know, when you and I were talking earlier, I told you that, you know, when I, when I first came across Fathom, I was like, oh, who's the founder of Fathom? I found your LinkedIn profile, started reading that, and then the thing that always stuck with me was the thing at the bottom of the profile, which was a product you'd worked on initially. And you said, like, a crappy piece of software that taught me more than all my college CS classes combined. And then I was like, this is a really interesting guy. Right. It seems very down to earth. It definitely seems like a conversation that we should have. It's taken a long time to get this scheduled and mostly that was my fault, but I'm glad we're finally doing it. So why don't we just get the audience up to speed and just tell us what that product was and then what other things you did before getting started with Fathom.

[Richard White]

Yeah, I was very fortunate that I got into computers at a really young age and my parents pretty much fostered that or tearing apart computers, putting them back together. I remember in high school, I was running a cheat codes website for PlayStation games. It was the number one website for PlayStation cheat codes. My best friend ran the number one website for video game cheat codes, like PC cheat codes. And I was always a little bummed. He was always about 50% larger growth traffic than me. But I remember getting a check in the mail every month for like 400 bucks for ad revenue. And my parents being thoroughly confused. So from a young age, had entrepreneurial parents and got really into big in computers. So was doing websites, was. I think I wrote some software for the TI83 calculator that ended up being some standard software for all the calculus classes. And the. The city I grew up in, in Raleigh, North Carolina. So always kind of had this bug. And yeah, on my LinkedIn, it mentions this company I made in college that was like basically software. If you ever go into a hospital back in the day, they have all these channels that teach you about here's how to deal with diabetes or you have a newborn. And it was, you know, my stepdad had a company that sold software, sold stuff to like technology equipment to hospitals. And. And I learned that what drove all of those TV channels back in the day was like VHS tapes, like racks and ratchet VHS players. And there's all these old servos that were like, click play, click rewind, click play again, type thing. I was like, that's insane. And so I made some software that basically digitized all that. And it was terrible software. I didn't even know what a database was back then. I was like, I skipped the database classes in cs, so I didn't even use the database. I used a flat file. It was terrible. I think it got used by one hospital. But I learned a lot in building it and kind of set me on the path. So I continue this kind of journey of entrepreneurship.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. And then you built. Well, actually, then you started working as a product design lead at Kiko, and that's an interesting story as well about how you landed that role.

[Richard White]

Yeah, so I went to school for computer science. I was very much a. An engineer programmer, but I really wanted to be a product designer more than a. Than an engineer or I want to do both. And I remember this was back. I'm going to really date myself. This is back when Gmail come out. When Gmail comes out, everyone wants to make everything desktop. Let's put it in a web browser, right? And the next obvious thing to build is a calendar. And so I was talking to my coworkers like, oh, I wish. I really want to build kind of Gmail for calendar. And, you know, Google Calendar wasn't even out yet. And one day my colleague came up to me saying, oh, bummer, Someone just built it and showed me a TechCrunch article. These guys had built this really robust kind of web calendar, which didn't really exist at that day and age. And I remember playing around with it, and at first I was really bummed. I was like, oh, someone beat me to it, right? And then I played with it more. I was like, oh, but it's kind of crappy. It's technically really impressive, but the design is terrible and it's doing all these things that are unintuitive. And so I just cold emailed the guys and I was like, hey, saw your product. Super cool. You're doing lots of innovative things. Design is terrible. And. And then I went on like, I want to help you. Like, I'll help you fix the design. I want to be a designer. And like, first of all, huge kudos to them to even opening that email and replying to it, right? But they were probably like, okay, like, tell us that could be better. And so that kind of random cold email ended me quitting my job and working with those guys full time. They were in this whole program called Y Combinator, which I never heard of up in Boston, I was over in North Carolina. And so I was flying up to Boston for half the month, freezing my butt off in the winter, and working out of this office with the founders of Reddit and the founders of some other startups. And it was like, you know, at the time I had no idea what was happening. Right, yeah, this is cool. We're just like hacking on something. Turns out it's like the most formative thing that ever happened to me because it's like, you know, I got into the slipstream of really amazing entrepreneurs. The, the guys that I did Kiko with, the founders were Justin Kahne, Emmett Shear, who went on duty, Twitch, and obviously we know how Reddit turned out and stuff like that. And so that kind of was like my sliding doors moment. That got me from kind of call like the minor leagues of entrepreneurship, where I was in North Carolina hacking on stuff of my own and to, oh, great, now I'm surrounded by some of the, you know, now some of the best entrepreneurs in the world. And that got me from Boston to California and there we go.

[Omar Khan]

That's so cool. And then, and then you kind of worked on a couple of other products and then eventually you launched UserVoice.

[Richard White]

Yeah. And so, like, actually, I think through that experience on Kiko, I wrote down like three or four different ideas around problems we were having running Kiko. And one of them was trying to kind of gather. We were three person team and we had thousands of users and we were trying to gather feedback. And so I was like, oh, Reddit for customer feedback. Like, why don't we get users to basically crowdsource their feedback to us? I don't have to spend all day trying to figure out what's the most important thing. And that instead of going to work on Twitch, which maybe I should have done, I instead went to work and started my own company called User Voice, which is basically that, which is basically like a Reddit for customer feedback. And did that, you know, worked that company, ran that company for about 10, 12 years and really learned a lot because we did everything that business. We started off bottom up plg, you know, by the time I left, it was basically an enterprise company. You know, we'd actually pivoted. We were PM product, we were a customer support product, then we were a PM product again. And so I got to experiment with different markets, different business models. Like it was a kind of like, I call it like my finishing school for entrepreneurship.

[Omar Khan]

Are you still involved with UserVoice?

[Richard White]

Today, I'm still on the board. Yes.

[Omar Khan]

Okay. And so was it an acquisition or is it still kind of a privately held thing?

[Richard White]

Yeah, it's still a profitable, privately held company.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. Okay. And then. All right, so you're doing well with that. It's growing. You're serving enterprises. And so you talked about the pain that you identified with Fathom, but what, what pushed you to say, okay, I'm not going to spend the next five, ten years of my life now building this product?

[Richard White]

I mean, I ask myself every year kind of two questions when I was running User Voice. One, am I uniquely learning from this company? And two, am I uniquely qualified to push this company to the next level? And for the first time in 2019, I said no to both those questions. And I was like, okay, like, I think I know, right? It's time for me to find something new. I felt like I had done all I could do to kind of, you know, put my vision into that company. It was time to put someone else's vision into that company. And so, yeah, and so that's kind of, you know, around the time started thinking about new products and new ideas. And that's kind of, you know, pandemic happens. We're all on zoom, you know. You know, this idea kind of creates a pandemic a little bit, but obviously pandemic happens. Now everyone's on zoom meetings. And the value of building something that can, you know, take notes automatically on Zoom meeting just becomes so obvious.

[Omar Khan]

So how did you get, how did you get started with Fathom? You know, a lot of founders or aspiring founders have these ideas. Some can start building a product. Maybe that's a curse if you stop building a product too soon. Others have their own sort of challenges. But just getting started with it, what were the initial steps you took here?

[Richard White]

So I think Fathom looked very different than the first days of UserVoice. Right. First days of UserVoice. I'm a first time founder. I've never raised money, funding, and I'm like basically falling asleep on my laptop coding day in, day out. And I wrangle a few other people into following that same sort of crazy lifestyle. And I think we got some friends and family money like 100k. That got us a year and a half of Runway sort of thing. Fathom is very different. Fathom. I basically started with four of the best engineers from UserVoice because we actually worked on some stuff at UserVoice and actually spun it out of UserVoice. So I got to take some of my top Engineers. So I kind of started on second base, if you will. Fathom, where I've got four amazing engineers from day one at this point. Now I've raised some money, I've built a multimillion dollar business. I can raise for my network, I can raise from folks. And so we've raised money on day one literally just on the strength of the idea. So very different starting pattern. And I think in general a lot of what Dumbfathom feels like, I call it speed running a video game you've played before. And I use a lot of video game analogies when thinking about startups, but my favorite one is like playing Minecraft. I think when you're doing your first startup, it's like you're getting dropped into Minecraft for the first time and you have no idea what to do. It takes you half an hour to figure out. I got to punch a tree to get some wood. And then it doesn't tell you what the rules are. It doesn't seem to be any rules. It seems to be completely open ended. If you've watched 10,000 hours of Minecraft or played 10,000 hours of Minecraft, it's a very different experience in the first hour. Then the first hour you've got a moat, you've got a castle, all these things. And that's what it feels like I think, doing kind of the second startup right, you kind of know all these things that felt like open ended questions or actually like multiple choice questions when you really boil them down. And so I think that's what was kind of fun with Fathom is we have to kind of start and be like, okay, we know what our go to market model is going to be for this stage. We know like what we're building. We know that that's a big enough market. Like we've done the research sort of thing, but at a high level. It's a product I knew I could use myself. I knew that, you know, it solves the problem. I have, you know, I tested, I talked to, you know, all of our sales team at Uservoice. I talked to the CS team at UserVoice. You know, I just, everywhere I went I found people like, oh my gosh, I'd love to have that. Right. And there were some people in the space. There's a company called Gong that was kind of doing call recording specifically for sales teams. And we looked at that and we interviewed about a hundred different people that use gong managers and ICs and that gave us a really strong conviction of ah, okay, I see where the weakness is in that model, it's a. A very expensive product in a. Because the inputs were. Used to be really transcript. Used to be really expensive transcripts to get really cheap. So you don't really need to charge 150 per seat anymore. In fact, we give away for free. And it's more than just sales. Yeah, sales definitely benefits from this. But again, so can products, so can marketing, so can cs. Everyone in meetings can benefit from this. So we did some market research, got the engineering team, and so really it felt like we really started with a pretty strong plan and sense of conviction around what we were doing and how.

[Omar Khan]

So what did that first version of the MVP look like? What did it do?

[Richard White]

I mean, the first version, actually all it did was it recorded a meeting. And then after I could go into the transcript and I could like highlight sections of it and turn that into kind of like a highlight reel, very quickly it was obvious to me as like the first and only user, like, last thing I want to do after I have a meeting is like, wait a half an hour for the recording and then go back through it and like, do all the, like. It shifted from one kind of work to a different kind of work. And so from that we came up with like, well, we need to make it really fast. The engineering team telling the engineering team it needs to be faster. And they're like, how much faster in terms of getting you the content after the meeting? And I was like, I don't know, just keep making it faster and I'll tell you when it's fast enough. And I think we had about 30 seconds. I was like, okay, this is fine. This feels almost instant. And then we did some work so that instead of me having to highlight things after the meeting, I could do it in the meeting. I click a button and it'd be like, oh, remember, that's an important segment. And we always knew, though, that that was like a kind of a bridge. We basically built this whole company with the assumption of two things. One, the transcription was going to become free, and two, that AI was going to get really good. And the hard part of this business was actually not the AI or the transcription. It was building a reliable recording architecture that sits on top of Zoom and Google Meet Microsoft Teams, because there's no actual APIs for doing that. It's an undocumented kind of API. And so we're going to spend a year just basically building recording infrastructure that's highly scalable, real time, fast. We'll build in some AI features and highlight things, but we're really building this business for the day when AI gets really good and we can drop that as, like a new engine into an old car type of thing.

[Omar Khan]

So initially you focused on doing, just supporting Zoom users. And what were some of the challenges there? I mean, even today at, I mean, in my personal experience, like, trying to use Zoom APIs, and there is, I can see documentation kind of, but it's like, it's like, it's really frustrating.

[Richard White]

I mean, that was the number one thing we saw is we, you know, we saw that there were some people back in 2020 that were building some products in the space, and the reviews on all of them were. It kind of works. It works most of the time, right? Like, and, you know, for a product like this, if you're trying to replace something as consistent, reliable as note taking, whether it's with a Google Doc or pen and paper, has to be reliable, right? It can't be, oh, I'm going to commit to using this tool. And it works 80% of the time. It needs to work 100% of the time. And to your point, the challenging thing is there's probably easily 50 to 100 different scenarios where you might join a Zoom meeting or it might be operating right? It might be, you know, you're the host, you're not the host. You're on, you know, a bad connection, you're on a good connection, you're like. And so, you know, you joined after the start time, you joined ahead of it, you left it. Like, there's all these scenarios and what you realize that, like, you know, working versus not working is like the perception of the user, right? Like, I'm sure all these other products actually were working in the very specific way they were set to build, but felt like it wasn't working. If it shows up late, it feels like it's not working, right? If it leaves early, it feels like it's not working. Like, so there is no definition of what, what's, you know, what working is, except for what the user thinks it is. And so we actually, I think the hardest thing we had in the beginning was there's no like, specific API. The only way we could figure out is this thing working is we literally paid people after the first experience to tell us how it went, right? And we just, like, we built from day one a really good pipeline for if you have a problem on this meeting, tell us and we will go debug, you know, where this connect was between your expectation and what actually happened.

[Omar Khan]

You know, usually at this Point. I'm kind of digging to figure out how you got your first 10 customers. And one of the things that you had said earlier was, you know, our first 10 customers weren't nearly as important as our first 10 stable users. Can you, can you just explain what you mean by that and why that was important?

[Richard White]

I'm a big fan of kind of attack your core metrics in serial. And so like some people try to like, hey, you know, launch a product and you launch a product in your trying to monetize and you're trying to acquire customers and you're trying to retain them. Like you're trying to figure out all three of those metrics at once. And I find that's like really, really challenging and hard to do because they all kind of confound each other. And so I tend to kind of look at as like, what's the riskiest metric? Let's start there and work our way down to the least risky metric. And so for us, the riskiest metric was retention, was user retention. Can we get, can we just build a product, you know, not even a multiplayer version, just single player version that people use day in, day out. And we knew at some point we would monetize and we'd monetize by selling a version to a manager. That's like a different value prop. Right? You want to roll this out to your team. But I had high confidence that if we could get to a point where we had really good retention and then we were really good at acquiring customers and they got really good at referring other folks because they're in a meeting and our product's in the meeting. We built this really good kind of viral flywheel engine and. And then we monetize on top of that. Right. I'd already run kind of a high seven figure SaaS company. I wasn't super interested in doing that again. I only wanted to this company if we could really escape velocity. And so we really just focused first and foremost on let's just prove that we can make a killer experience for folks. Because I've always believed if you can build a killer experience in folks and they use it day in, day out, you almost always can find a way to monetize it. You know, they only use it once a month, maybe more challenging. But if you can find something people use every day, there's not a product I don't know of that doesn't find a way to monetize that. So yeah, so I think the killer thing for us is figuring out how do we get those first 50 stable users.

[Omar Khan]

And what were some of the challenges with getting those users using the product or activating them? I know trust was an issue in the early days, right. Because this was this completely unknown product and AI sort of note takers weren't that common.

[Richard White]

Right? Yeah. So I think most of the people, when we were getting those first 10 users, it was almost all me reaching out to folks on LinkedIn, friends, friends of friends, being like, hey, will you try this product sort of thing. One of the challenges was just making sure it was reliable. Right. And so that feeds back into that, like, you know, having a feedback loop and like I said, a little bit paying people for their feedback. Therefore, we noticed, like, people don't just. They're not immediately going to bring into their next meeting. They were all basically like, oh, yeah, I want to play test this thing first before I expose it to my colleagues, my customers, my prospects. Right. And so we saw that too, in a lot of our feedback was like, oh, how's your first call go? Oh, I just met with myself to try to see how this thing would work. And it actually doesn't work that well when you meet with yourself because they mute themselves. They wouldn't talk to themselves. They were kind of like, what's, you know, it only really works. So we actually noticed this and we, you know, we have a bot that joins a meeting to record. And I went to my engineering teams, like, can we have a bot that goes to the meeting instead of recording, it just like plays a video. So you can kind of like have like a fake meeting with someone and they're like, thought about it like, yeah, I guess so. And so we built out this pretty cool apparatus that allowed you to have like a test call, a fake call with a recording. And we kind of made it fun. Right? You thought you were talking to real humans. I was a person talking and they're like, oh, I'm just recording. Right. When people like kind of like message on their voicemails kind of thing. And so that really helped. Then we saw, oh, great, people now have a way to play with this product and again get the trust they understand how it works before they bring it to a meeting with their colleagues or customers.

[Omar Khan]

It's funny you say that, because I had an identical experience this morning where I was looking at some software, I won't mention which one to use instead of what we're using now to record these interviews. And so I was like, oh, great, I'll just test it. And so I connected to it, started recording and talking to myself and then sort of downloaded the files. And I was like, well, that was a pointless exercise because I don't have anybody else on the other end. I didn't see whether it records two different tracks and how it separates the video and audio between me and the other person. And like, if I had a bot who had come along to that meeting, that would have been something super helpful. So completely understand that. One of the other challenges you mentioned was that people had to remember to bring Fathom along to meetings. Right? What was going on there?

[Richard White]

Yeah. So the way our app worked is like, you had to. Once you joined the meeting, you'd have to go to our app and click a button. Now add Fathom to the meeting. And it seems. Okay, that seems like it work. But then you realize every single person, the way they join a Zoom meeting is they set up their workspace first. They get their docs in place, they got their notes in place. Then they click Start, they join the meeting. And once they join that meeting, they aren't opening anything. Right. Because they're now locked in. And like, hey, you know. And so we're like, oh, crap, we had this huge problem. People were really excited to use Val and they do that test call and they're like, oh, I'm really excited to use this. And then they'd forget, right? They should go just click the Zoom link at the scheduled time. And so we were like, this is a huge problem for activation. And so we actually ended up building a desktop app that would actually one so we could know when you're on a meeting and then be like, hey, so looks like you're about to join the meeting. Do you want to bring Fathom into that meeting? And even better, we could just have them say, like, here, do you want to opt in just to have Fathom join when you join? And that was one of those things that took. It was like a 10x metric improvement. Oh. All of a sudden, we had no one activating to. We had 7. 60% of people activating. And so just a good reminder, it's like, you know, to really understand how people actually operate when they're. When they're using your software.

[Omar Khan]

So beyond those initial 10 users, as you started to scale, the word is getting out. You're getting more and more users here. What was going on? How did the product hold up? What type of people were signing up for Fathom?

[Richard White]

Yeah, so I think it took us about almost a year to get to a first version where we had 50 stable users. Right. That were one core that just continued to use it over and over. And I was like, okay, thank God. And right around the same time we were about to launch and we had actually, I think in startups, the key thing is you got to have good hypotheses that are directionally correct, and then you got to get lucky on the timing of some things. And one of the things we got lucky on was Zoom was launching a marketplace. And so we kind of, you know, kind of like my email to Kiko back in the day, I cold emailed the person running that program and was like, hey, I think you should include us in it. We're this great startup. We're building this cool product. I think it'd be a perfect fit for your Zoom app marketplace. We want to launch exclusively on Zoom, et cetera, et cetera. And so it was like US and like 50 established companies launching on day one of the Zoom Marketplace. And, you know, we quickly got to the number, the top of the list, maybe because it was alphabetically sorted, and we change your app name to AI NoteTaker by Fathom instead of Fathom, maybe, I don't know. But I think we always have the thesis that at scale, you're going to bring Fathom in your meetings, people are going to see it, you have to explain why it's there. And there'll be this kind of natural, kind of word of mouth virality. But the challenge with all this kind of business, like, how do you get the first 10,000 users? And we kind of got gifted, kind of like, here's a simple solution to that, right? You're going to join this new marketplace and Zoom's going to put you in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands people. And that was true. And so we got really excited. We launched. I think we got, you know, I think about 100,000 signups in the first month. And then at the end of the first month, we had 100 DAU. And so. And so we had this real kind of panicked moment of like, what do we get wrong here? And we kind of freak out. Like, you know, at this point it's like, oh, we don't have a business, right? Like, we had a hundred thousand signups and only 100 people were using it. And we went back through the data and we kind of were like, analyzing. One of the things you do to set a fathom is you connect your calendar. That way we know what meeting you're on. And so that's, you know, important to, you know, the system to run. And we just ran this analysis how many of these people actually have, like, you know, I don't know, a normal number of Zoom meetings. And we're like, oh, like 0.1%, 99% of these people had no meetings on their calendar. And then you have to remember this is middle. This is mid-2021. This is, like, deep in the pandemic. Zoom is being used for all sorts of things not business related. And Zoom initially opened up this marketplace to their, like, free users only. And so they basically sent us the worst users they have from, like, a frequency perspective. And so obviously, we learned this. We were a little heartened. Okay, we're not as bad at this as we thought. And in the end, it actually, I think, ended up being a silver lining because it basically gave us a lot. Like, what we also learned is our onboarding process wasn't very good. Even those users are not the best users. Our onboarding process is not very good. And so we spent, you know, I basically stapled myself to one of our engineers for three months, and every day we woke up and we were like, great. What are the top three things we can do to improve the onboarding process? And usually that's a hard thing for Sharp to do because usually you're only getting in the beginning a couple signups. It's hard to get any statistical significance of, like, how good is this process getting? Thankfully, we were getting thousand signups a day. Just so happened they're pretty low, like, low quality, because they're people that aren't very, you know, very good, but they're still earnestly going through the signup process. And so we kind of got fortunate because now we got three months with a lot of users to really hone in this onboarding process. We took it from like a. Yeah, I think it was like 25% success rate to like a 75% success rate. And that really served us going forward. Once we started getting better users, Zoom started opening up the platform to more and more folks. But that was kind of like a real crucible way to go through of figuring out, like, oh, gosh, I thought we're dead to. No, no, no. This is just the quality of the users, and we can get something positive out of this.

[Omar Khan]

So did you have to change anything to get different types of users or reaching different types of users? Or was it just Zoom kind of changed the way they were exposing the App Store?

[Richard White]

We basically kept lobbying Zoom to like, okay, Zoom at this point was very conservative for a bunch of different reasons around security. And so they want to open saps for their best users, but they did over time. And so again, it kind of worked out because in retrospect, if they'd actually sent us 100,000 good users and we had onboarded even a third of them, we would have fallen over. That was the thing we were scared of. We don't know how to load test this thing for from going from 50 users to 50,000 in a month. That would have worked. So it's kind of one of these crazy kind of like the universe gives you just what you need kind of thing situations.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah. It feels at the time, but then you look back and go, oh, that was a good thing.

[Richard White]

Yeah, exactly.

[Omar Khan]

And also sort of around that time, I think somewhere in 2022, you were kind of forced to start monetizing ahead of plan what was going on.

[Richard White]

So I mentioned like, I don't, you know, like to do things in serial and you know, the metric. So we had figured out retention, you know, we'd figure out onboarding kind of activation. And we're really focused now in early 2022 on like how do we kind of ramp up virality, how do we make it easier for people to, you know, share fathom with other folks? And that's when the kind of the bottom dropped out of the market, if you will, on, on funding. And we had had a pretty, honestly probably pretty aggressive fundraising strategy as maybe the hubris of a second time founder that grew up in probably the most bubbly period ever. Right. 2020, 2021. Like, you know, people were raising crazy rounds with very loose metrics at that time. And so our original plan was we're not going to monetize for at least another year. We're going to keep focusing on just on growth. Right. We just want to focus on getting this free product out there, get as many easier as possible. And at some point we'll build out kind of our team product that we sell to managers. That's where we're going to monetize. And part of that is I was fundraising every six to nine months. I don't think we ever had more than 12 months of Runway intentionally. I just had such confidence in what we're doing. And I also know that I only work well under pressure. So I didn't want us to have four years of Runway sort of thing. But then the bottom falls out of the market. And it's very clear, very quickly, you will never fundraise again unless you can prove revenue. Right. Once you can show you can actually monetize this, which is really frustrating because I'M like, look, these people are using this day in, day out, even if we don't monetize these users. TAM is huge, but it doesn't matter. The hive mind of investors has shifted. And now everyone is like, yeah, they would talk about growth. Growth, growth to profitability. Profitability, Profitability, right. And so we had to very quickly pivot and start figuring out how to monetize. And I think the biggest challenge there was just like balancing growth versus monetization.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. Because now suddenly you're in this situation where it was kind of very clear cut, we're focused on great product growth. And then now monetization suddenly, almost overnight has become super important. How did you sort of flip the switch? What happened? And then I'm kind of curious, what did that do to, did it slow down growth?

[Richard White]

Well, and this is the thing I was most afraid of. Like, I, you know, one of the things I saw at User Voice, my previous company, is we were free for the first year as well, completely free. And we saw, we actually similarly had kind of a natural inbuilt virality to the business. And I remember the day at UserVoice, we put up a pricing page and we put up a pricing page. We lost half our signups even though the same free product was still available. Now they're just even showing that there are paid plans. We lost half our signups. And so this time around I was like, okay, I want to learn from that. And so I really struggle with like, you know, how do we monetize this without kind of like, you know, ruining that growth, that growth lever that we had. Thankfully, we always had kind of a plan around this. And the plan was always like, we're not going to try to monetize individuals even if they say they will pay for it. Which we did have a lot of people saying like, oh, I'd be happy to pay for this. Which is, I think a really good sign. We always knew, no, no, we don't want to charge the sales rep or the CS person or the freelancer. We want to charge folks. When it's a founder, an executive that's saying, I want a rolled set for my entire team and I want visibility in what's happening on my team's meetings. And so the good news, the nice thing about that is, like, it's a different value prop. It doesn't, you know, it kind of keeps this clean separation between like your growth engine where you monetize. The downside to that is it's a Whole new product, right? It's a whole new set of features, functionalities. It's not just going back to existing folks and say, oh, by the way, now everything costs 10 bucks a month sort of thing. But I felt it was the right thing to do because I knew if we just started charging money for the free product, it would ruin virality, it would ruin all the growth. So we started basically selling this product. The problem is, you know, I think it was like June, May or June, we realized like, we need bona ties. And I gave the team, like, we have to start selling something in 60 days. Thankfully, one of the things I did with some foresight, was I'd hired already. I already had three really good salespeople on the team. And again, I think it's the benefit of speed running a video game. Before I went back to some of my best salespeople from UserVoice about a year, year and a half before this moment, and I said, hey, I don't have anything to sell today, but at some point in the future, we're going to flip a switch and we're going to start selling this other product. I'd love for you to join now. Basically play the role of customer success, get to know our customers, get to know the product, Come to a product expert. And so when we flip that switch and say, great, it's time to sell something. You'll be ready, we'll hit the ground running. And I remember coming to them like, and be like, okay, it's a little earlier than I planned, but it's time for us to flip that switch. We need to start selling something. And, you know, we did 100% sales process and it was important to have a sales team because we were mostly selling the roadmap. We had about 12 features in this team mission product that we thought people would want to buy. We only built two of those, but we knew we had to show revenue. And so I was like, great, you guys just get on there and pitch to sell them on where we're going with this. And they're going to get in early and lock in good early pricing, et cetera, et cetera. And it kind of worked. We actually got 100k in ARR in the first month and it kind of just grew from there. We got to a million in revenue and 11 months, you know, and, you know, eventually built out that product while we're selling it sort of thing. But yeah, it was a very difficult pivot.

[Omar Khan]

So you had this outbound sales motion kind of kicking in earlier than planned. And then were you still offering, Was there a premium plan at that point where a free user could switch over?

[Richard White]

No. So there's no individual paid plan that came later. There was just basically this team plan. It wasn't really outbound. It was actually like, it's more like farming was basically going to people. We were putting kind of basically ads in the existing app saying, like, hey, we've got this new product, team mission. Sign up for a trial for it. And so, you know, I honestly think most of that first 100k, probably even most of the first half a million we sold, was really to people that were just huge advocates of Fathom. They, like, loved the product. They were big fans. They're like, look, you know, the features probably don't warrant what we're going to pay you for this, but, like, we want to support you, that sort of thing. And so it was all inbound in that existing kind of free user base.

[Omar Khan]

So I remember when I first came across Fathom, and I was like, okay, it says free forever. And I was like, nothing's free forever. I'm digging around, trying to find more information. And one of the things that struck me was how generous the free plan appeared to be. And I was like, there's got to be a catch. You're going to store this stuff forever. And honestly, I couldn't really find anything that raised any alarm bells at the time. So I think it's really interesting that you still. Most people would not have done that. Most people would have said, we've got this user base. The easiest thing in the world would be to offer a paid plan and just convert some of those people. But you went down a different route and you started selling.

[Richard White]

Also.

[Omar Khan]

You were selling the team's plan before you had a team plan, which is Slides, right?

[Richard White]

Yeah, we had a couple of the features, but we didn't have really the full product built out. Right. And that was the thing. It was like we had a SWOT. Here's the 10 features of the team plan. It's like eight of these, say, like, coming soon sort of thing. Right. So it was a little vapor wary, for sure.

[Omar Khan]

So Zoom was kind of like your big acquisition channel, at least for users. What else were you trying? What were you able to get to work? What didn't work?

[Richard White]

I mean, at this point, it was Zoom. And then it was a lot of that virality. And it's funny you mentioned the thing about being skeptical about it being Free Forever. That was actually one of the biggest challenge we had. People would be like, this is too good to be true. This is too generous. We. What are you doing? Are you selling our data? We actually had to put a thing on the homepage. It's like, yes, it's free. Here's how. And like you, it's still on our homepage this day. You can click it and we actually explain, here's how our business model works, right? And it's like, no, no. We know at some point some of our users will convert this team plan. They'll pay money. We're not selling your data. We're not doing anything nefarious. We got really good optimizing cost. So it was crazy that, like, yeah, it was like a. I think 10 years of, you know, software companies put out free plans that are. When they're too good to be true, they really are too good to be true sort of thing. We had to really overcome that. But, yeah, so I think during this era, we were 95% of our traffic was coming in still from that Zoom app marketplace. That was really what got us off the ground. And then it started shifting over time to being driven more by our users bringing Fathom in a meeting and telling other folks about it and raving about it. And again, part of that's why the free play was so important to us, because we knew you only get that kind of rabid kind of fandom and, like, people really spreading the gospel of your thing when you provide them a lot of value, right? By giving them, you know, we're going to give you this really good product and we're going to meet you for free forever. There's no catches to it, right? And still to this day, majority of our users are on free, and we're totally fine with that because the value we get is marketing, right? You're telling your folks about it. So what we saw over time was kind of like, you know, you know, Zoom started like 100% and then slowly as we started replacing our Zoom traffic with our own kind of referral traffic around this time. We also did, like, product hunt early on as well. And that was something that worked really well for us in terms of getting, like, really good early adopter users. And we also, I think, did a lot with like, operationalizing kind of like social proof with, like G2. We really invested a lot. G2, which is like Yelp for software. It's not expensive product to buy, but we wanted people to not have to feel like they had to do a bake off and try three of these products before they bought one. So, like, what's we have a lot of people that love this product. Let's ask them if they'll write reviews for us because if we get a lot of good reviews, we bet that shortens the sales cycle. And so people will just be like, oh, okay, I love this product and looks like a lot of other people do too. Great. Like I don't, you know. And I think that worked pretty well and it turned into like, not only did it help with shorten sales cycle, we got so good at that that it actually became another significant traffic source for us because we became quickly the number one actually app on G2 in terms of user satisfaction. So that's pretty cool.

[Omar Khan]

So I'm guessing when you started there weren't a lot of AI note takers around around by the time you get to a million ARR. The market was probably pretty flooded by that time, I'm guessing.

[Richard White]

Yeah, I mean I think you mentioned our two core hypotheses were transcription's gonna come free and AI is gonna get really good. And our corollary to those two was if you wait till those two things are true, you're like two to three years too late to build this business because it'll be an obvious thing to build and everyone will rush in. And that's exactly what we saw. It was like kind of late 2023 when you get to GPT 4 and that's when in like Claude 2 and that's when AI can now write notes. And so like the highlighting stuff I talk about kind of goes away and it's like, great, now we get to drop in really great meeting summaries written by AI on top of that really reliable recording infrastructure and transcription architecture we've built. But it's also the point at which everyone else looked at that it's like in some ways became like the new hello World app. I think for founders it's like, oh, what can I do with AI? Oh, I can take a transcript and I can make a summary out of it. We're like, yeah, we know. And so, yeah, so we started seeing a lot of startups pop up. Well, we didn't worry about it too much because again we had this strong thesis that like it's a, it's a virality based business and so you're, it's tough to beat a company that's already been building that. Yeah, that five wheel's been spinning for two, three years like ours had.

[Omar Khan]

What about Zoom itself? Because then they, they kind of became a competitor, right. With their own kind of built in Meeting note takers and stuff like that. How did that change things for you?

[Richard White]

Yeah, I mean, so we were exclusive to Zoom for the first two years and part of that was marketing related. Like we wanted to tie ourselves to what we thought was the market leader for the people we were going after. And I think that worked really well. They were a great partner for us. Obviously they got us those first 10, 100,000 users and beyond. I can't say enough good things about them. We also knew at some point two things would be true. They would obviously get into this game and we would obviously want to spread beyond the Zoom platform. The other reason we did Zoom only is because of the. It allowed me to constrain the complexity of the solution. Right. Like as I mentioned, getting this to work on Zoom was the hardest part about this, getting to work reliably. Right. Because of all the different ways you could run a Zoom. Same is true for Google Meet Microsoft Teams. Each one of these things is starting from scratch with like a huge complexity mountain to climb. And so I didn't want our engineering team to try to climb all three of those mountains at once. In the beginning, we're just going to focus on Zoom and then once we get Zoom really dialed in, we'll then move on to Microsoft Teams and meet. And one of the things we knew early on is that we could look at all this aggregated calendar data from our users and see that kind of cross platform usage is really high. Maybe not as much within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. Like if you're in Fortune 500, if you're in enterprise, everything's Microsoft. But for most of us that live in the, what do you call it, the free Internet, where you've got Slack and Salesforce, HubSpot and all these things, we kind of flip between Google Meet and Zoom, the way you flip between kind of Netflix and Hulu type of thing. And so we kind of knew at some point that yes, we know Zoom will get into space, but we also know that Zoom is unlikely to build a solution that works also on their competing platform. And so that was kind of, you know, the same time they were kind of competing with us. We started saying like, okay, great, it's time for us to move on and start supporting other platforms, which is the number one thing our users want us to do.

[Omar Khan]

So the business is doing eight figures in ARR currently. But you had some huge growth like just 2024, right? I think like revenue like 10x in like the last six months.

[Richard White]

Like what, what drove that before we put really AI into the core of this product. We had a really good business. And when we dropped that in and we could say we can now automatically detect all your action items accurately. We can write amazing meeting notes. We saw every single metric we had in the business go up by about 20%. Whether that was activation or that was retention, everything went up. And so that moment happened for us about December of 2023. And from that point I think forward, it was about a 10x increase very quickly. You know, I think it took us about a year to get from 1 to 10 million. And it took us a year to get from 1. Sorry, sorry. It took us a year to get from 0 to 1. It took us another year to get from 1 to 10. And so. And then it just continue to accelerate beyond that. So I think it was one of the things where like, we had a lot of good stuff in there and we took a good product and made it great when we kind of added that functionality in.

[Omar Khan]

We should wrap up. Let's get into the lightning round. I've just got one question for you. It just kind of hit me that you're clearly a product guy and you build a successful business with Uservoice and now with Fathom. But I think a lot of it is just driven by. You just seem to be this guy who just sees problems and is just driven to build a solution. And it's not necessarily kind of driven by, you know, a kind of business or making money. And kind of like we talked about your background or these little. There was a bunch of other things that you'd built that we didn't even talk about. Just what is it? Like, how do you kind of approach things? Because you're probably seeing problems all the time and you're probably feeling like you want to go and solve them. And there's this one thing about being focused on what you're doing, but I think it's really also really healthy to have that kind of mindset where you're always thinking about how to solve problems or build tiny solutions. And I just want to try and get inside your head a little bit because I think that might be helpful for people who are at the super early stages and not really sure about how to kind of get started.

[Richard White]

Yeah, again, I think I was very fortunate that I kind of fell into this group of amazing entrepreneurs, right? Like Reddit, Twitch, Cruise, Dropbox, you name it. All these folks were kind of coming up around the same time I moved out to San Francisco and was part of the Y Combinator kind of Community. And I think to a person, what I noticed is that all of them cared about solving problems and building things in external validation. I always say almost a problematic desire for external validation from users. And I almost never heard anyone talk about revenue cogs, gross margin, whatnot. That stuff all came later. But everyone was just obsessed with building something. It's on the T shirt. Make something people want. It's like the Y Combinator T shirt. I think it's. That's the core ethos, I think, of that whole community that I think is really healthy, that everyone just focused on what's an interesting problem and how can I solve it. Sometimes you get problems that there's only 10 other people that have this. That's the problem of that route. But I think that's a much healthier route. When I see people that come in and say, oh, my goal here is to get this business to a million, it's like, I never thought about getting us to a million. I thought about getting us to how do we get 50% of people to use us week in, week out sort of thing, right? And so I think that's just kind of the. The way I think about it, it's like, I don't know, I get excited about hearing people say, I love using this product, right? And I think that's a. It's a very sustainable, much more sustainable resource than, like, hitting the next revenue milestone.

[Omar Khan]

Love it. All right, let's go into the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[Richard White]

Not really advice, but the first thing that pops to my mind is I had an angel investor early on challenged me when I was at Uservoice, and they said, you're not dynamic enough as a CEO. And what she meant by that, I think, was that I was really focused on one thing and letting other balls kind of fall on the floor. I wasn't juggling all the things you need to as an early stage CEO. And that was 15 years ago and many, many millions of dollars of revenue ago. And it still burns me to my soul that someone said this to me. Like, I'm so competitive. And so I think about that constantly. Am I being dynamic enough today? Am I, like, keeping you on top of all the things I should keep on top of?

[Omar Khan]

It's funny how some of the things just stick, don't they? What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[Richard White]

I love the Score Takes Care of Itself, which is a book by Bill Walsh. Who is the football coach of the 49ers in the 80s? It kind of speaks to what I was just saying. It's like his whole mentality or one of his big mentality is like he doesn't care about the scoreboard and in our case revenue. He cares about the team doing all the little things right. So if you do all the little things right, the score takes care of itself.

[Omar Khan]

What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[Richard White]

I guess I'll refer back to what I said, which is like, I think it's like a need for external validation that kind of borderlines on problematic.

[Omar Khan]

What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit right now?

[Richard White]

It'd be my whoop kind of, I guess maybe not exactly what you think of productivity, but I'm terrible when I'm not well rested. Like I'm like if I'm slightly tired, I'm a shell of myself, productivity wise. So I use it. It's like how you know, what gets measured gets managed. And so like by measuring basically my, my sleep and what they call my recovery every day I get a lot. I'm a lot more productive than I used to be.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, me too. I woke up at like 4:30 yesterday. Never wake up that early. And oh my God, I was just doing the dumbest things throughout the day. It was just like, like I had to take a nap in the afternoon. But yeah, what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[Richard White]

This might be surprising as someone who's only ever done kind of B2B products, but I really want to build a really great VR experience that is communal for you and your friends. I don't think that. I actually think VR is magical and it's kind of surprising that it hasn't really got widespread adoption. But I really want to make kind of like a, you know, imagine alternative to what used to, you know, as a kid, you go to the club together or something, you listen to music together, build something like that that's almost time based where you and your friends get on at the same time and have kind of a shared experience. Even when you've got kids and you're all in different parts of the world sort of thing. Cool.

[Omar Khan]

What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[Richard White]

I guess maybe it's people do know now because I tend to do it a lot. But I love to do analogies to video games. I talk about fathom in terms of like single player mode, multiplayer. Like, yeah, we have a point system in fath. I did my Minecraft analogy. There's, you know, I'm a big video game guy. I actually don't play as many as I used to. I actually watch a lot of video games on YouTube as like a methadone. So I don't feel compelled to play them because I don't have time for it. But I feel like I learn no one does onboarding better than video games. No one does, like user experience better than video games. And I feel like I learned so much from just being a student of how video great video games are crafted.

[Omar Khan]

I once worked with when I was at Microsoft, a PM who came from Xbox. And it was just so amazing to see this guy. We're building this web stuff and he would just bring this gaming mentality to it. Little things like he said, well, how come when you click that it doesn't make some sort of sound just to register that you did that? I was like, but it was those tiny things like that that they do with video games that it just is a completely different immersive experience.

[Richard White]

I mean, your favorite video games you think about like Zelda and stuff like this, especially the more modern ones, they're incredibly complex interfaces. There's so much to them. They're as complex, even more complex than your average piece of software. And yet it doesn't feel complex because of the effort they put into that. And because in Zelda they have the whole tutorial zone where you unlock one basically button at a time. Have you ever heard of software where you unlock one button at a time? No, we're just not that good at it compared to them. They're masters at it.

[Omar Khan]

And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[Richard White]

I am addicted to skiing. I don't know. It's something about putting very little effort and going very, very fast. Just like speaks to my soul.

[Omar Khan]

Love it. Richard, awesome. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. I really love this conversation. I think we covered a lot in a relatively short space of time. So I appreciate you sharing your story and your insights and kind of wisdom along the way. Hopefully it's going to help people listening some founders to go and make a difference in their businesses. So I appreciate you doing that. If people want to check out Fathom, if they haven't already, they can go to Fathom Video. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[Richard White]

Just ping me on LinkedIn.

[Omar Khan]

Awesome. Thanks again and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[Richard White]

Thank you so much.

[Omar Khan]

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