The SaaS Podcast Episode 452 Summary

Title: Proof: SaaS Growth Lessons from $0 to $100M ARR – with Pat Kinsel
Host: Omer Khan
Guest: Pat Kinsel, Founder & CEO of Proof
Date: September 11, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode features Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Proof (formerly Notarize), who takes listeners through his company's gritty journey—starting as an online notary service and evolving into a transaction security platform nearing $100M ARR. Pat shares candid lessons about validation, regulation, endurance through early losses, explosive (and perilous) COVID growth, painful layoffs, and the importance of expanding beyond a single product. He also discusses fighting a “sea of red tape” and turning it into a moat, the transition from B2C to enterprise SaaS, and why resilience and finishing what you start matter.

Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of Proof/Notarize

• Origin Story: Pat’s frustration with a notary mistake nearly jeopardizing his Twitter acquisition payout inspired the concept.
  • “Everyone has a story of driving around in the middle of the night to find a notary or not being able to find a notary or an error in a document.” (Pat Kinsel, 08:14)
• Initial Validation: Pat tested demand with a “horrible” landing page and Google Ads, without writing any code.
  • “I set up the ugliest landing page you’ve ever seen in your life. I bought Google Ads and just see if people clicked it...” (Pat Kinsel, 13:50)

2. Early Business Challenges

• Losing Money on Every Transaction:
  • Started as a $25 B2C app with virtually instant online notaries—yet the costs were outsized:
    • “I was paying for these notaries to be online all the time... we also had negative 110% gross margins.” (Pat Kinsel, 24:04)
• Navigating Regulatory Hurdles:
  • Spent years lobbying state-by-state to legalize online notarization.
    • “We’ve now changed, I think 47 state laws, all these federal policies. I kept raising money to lobby.” (Pat Kinsel, 24:49)

3. Product Development Approach

• Focusing on Business Risk:
  • Pat chose to solve for business adoption first (“will people do this?”), then acceptance, and later enterprise usability.
    • “My first startup went from technology into business. I wanted to start with the business risk and to head that off as fast as possible.” (Pat Kinsel, 17:42)
• Iterative, Spec-Driven Product Management:
  • Drew on Microsoft PM training: wrote 30 specs for various ideas, defined hypotheses, and validated step by step.
  • Emphasized the importance of “just doing the work.”

4. Go-To-Market Tactics

• Acquisition Channels:
  • Google Ads, SEO (form and use-case level), and strong channel partnerships (e.g., FedEx, Staples).
    • “A lot of the consumer volume was just through Google Ads and SEO at the page or form level. FedEx, Staples—partners send you to our site.” (Pat Kinsel, 22:44)
• Flywheel Effect:
  • Notarized consumers often become B2B advocates, leading to enterprise relationships.

5. Painful Slow Growth, Break-Even, and COVID Explosion

• Slow grind: Almost three years to reach $1M ARR, barely breaking even by 2019.
• Pandemic impact:
  • Overnight, demand surged 100-fold; the business wasn’t ready.
  • Wait times ballooned to 6–10 hours.
  • Quickly pivoted from employed notaries to a network/on-demand model.
  • “COVID hits like order volumes go up like 100x. We end up having 6, 8, 10 hour wait times...” (Pat Kinsel, 26:08)

6. COVID-Driven Enterprise Shift and New Challenges

• Enterprise Adoption:
  • Suddenly signed 40+ enterprise financial institutions during COVID—a goal that seemed wildly ambitious pre-pandemic.
    • “In 2020, we run like 40 of them. I had a 26-year-old BDR sign this major financial services company...” (Pat Kinsel, 27:46)
• Quality vs. Quantity:
  • Most COVID customers bought as a backup, not core adoption—many never even activated the product.
    • “Take a step back nine months, 12 months later...some of these customers aren’t actually strategic...” (Pat Kinsel, 29:14)
  • Led to layoffs and a renewed focus on account management, use case repeatability, and dollar-based net expansion.

7. Strategic Expansion & Rebranding to Proof

• Beyond Notarization:
  • Realized enterprises prefer platforms over point solutions.
    • “People don’t buy point solutions, they buy platforms. Especially at the enterprise level, if they’re going to make the investment of bringing you in as a vendor...” (Pat Kinsel, 34:26)
  • Shifted towards broader transaction security—e-signatures, account authorization, fraud monitoring.
• Platformization and Product Modularization:
  • “If we take this platform, what we provide people is transaction fraud monitoring into all these analog business processes...” (Pat Kinsel, 34:52)
• Vision:
  • Aim to make Proof essential for every business type, tackling new problems like AI-driven fraud and deepfakes.
    • “Everyone is having this problem...I need certainty that this is my employee or my customer.” (Pat Kinsel, 35:42)

8. Engineering & Scaling the Moat

• Complexity managed through abstraction and compliance-as-code.
  • “If you have a good engineering team and approach, you figure out how to abstract that out...and build scalable, configurable systems.” (Pat Kinsel, 37:37)
• Compliance, speed, and reliability as defensible moats.

Memorable Quotes by Timestamp

• On Outworking the Competition:

  • “I'm not the smartest guy, but I can outwork you. It's the one thing I can control and I really like that.”
    — Pat Kinsel (Michael Bloomberg quote), 04:46

• On Regulatory Barriers:

  • “It's a sea of red tape. And ultimately on the other side, it's a moat of red tape.”
    — Pat Kinsel, 09:43

• On Startups Pivoting During Unprecedented Events:

  • “Covid really destroyed a lot of companies for that reason. People lost sales discipline...I’m really proud that we dug out of that and it could have killed [us]...there's a thousand things that can kill a startup, right? I've tested many of them.”
    — Pat Kinsel, 31:24

• On Startup Pain & Persistence:

  • “2019 was the first year where it got real...We also had negative 110% gross margins...We very proudly exited 19 at 1% gross margins.”
    — Pat Kinsel, 24:04

Important Timestamps for Key Segments

• [04:46] Pat’s favorite quote and work ethic
• [07:54] Pat recounts the origin of Notarize proof-of-concept
• [13:19–15:51] Landing page validation and zero-code testing
• [19:26] Early challenges with notaries and educating consumers
• [22:44] Go-to-market channels: Google Ads, SEO, channel partnerships
• [24:04] The “hard years” burning investor cash for minimal gains
• [26:08] The COVID demand explosion and business model overhaul
• [29:14–31:24] The consequences of unfocused COVID growth, layoffs, and strategic re-orientation
• [34:26–36:15] Pivot to transaction security, product modularization, and addressing deepfakes/fraud

Quickfire / Lightning Round Highlights

• Trait of Successful Founders: “Resilience...and empathy.” (41:19)
• Best Productivity Habit: “I read basically every Confluence post, JIRA ticket, Figma file...and I comment on almost all of it.” (41:43)
• Favorite Book Recommendation: Electronic Value Exchange (40:05)
• Interesting Fact: Did not graduate college, eighth-generation Californian (43:16)
• Life Balance: “I work and I have family...that’s my life and I love it.” (43:36)

Closing & Contact

• Learn more: proof.com
• Contact Pat: LinkedIn or pat@proof.com

Key Takeaways

• Validate demand before writing code.
• Regulatory complexity can become a competitive moat.
• Long-term resilience and willingness to “just do the work” matter immensely.
• Hypergrowth without true adoption is risky; focus on real product-market fit.
• Transformation from point solution to platform expands opportunity and stickiness.
• Fraud and transaction security is a growing need—Proof aims to be the essential B2B SaaS provider in this arena.