Podcast Summary: The SaaS Podcast – Episode 460

Title: Assembled: From 8 Months Without a Dollar to 8-Figures – with Ryan Wang
Host: Omer Khan
Guest: Ryan Wang, Co-founder & CEO of Assembled
Release Date: November 6, 2025

Overview

This episode features an in-depth interview with Ryan Wang, co-founder and CEO of Assembled—an AI-powered customer support workforce management platform. Ryan shares the challenging journey of building Assembled from an internal Stripe project to an 8-figure ARR SaaS company, highlighting lessons learned about product-market fit, usage-based pricing pitfalls, scaling, building around real customer pain points, and leveraging community for early growth.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origin Story: From Internal Stripe Tool → Assembled

• Early Days at Stripe

  • Ryan’s machine learning background focused on fraud detection, and his early Stripe days emphasized deep customer empathy—even founders did support themselves ([07:41]).
  • An initial attempt to automate support using machine learning led to an unexpected discovery: the core pain wasn’t automation, but workforce management—forecasting, staffing, and operational scheduling for support teams ([09:15]).
  • "It wasn't really that they were looking to automate. ...The head of support told us, 'We actually need a problem with this thing called workforce management.'" – Ryan Wang ([09:37])

• Insight: The problem surfaced organically by noticing fast-growing companies all cobbled together sophisticated, color-coded spreadsheets for managing support teams, a situation that broke down at scale ([14:33]-[17:28]).

2. Early Customers & Product Iteration

• From Stripe to Wider Market
  • Stripe, Casper, Grammarly, and GoFundMe were early adopters, each using near-identical spreadsheet systems for scheduling ([14:33]-[17:00]).
  • Real traction happened by watching, interviewing, and embedding with support leads to truly understand their day-to-day workflow: "We were just following them around... and all four of them, there was a spreadsheet with dates, times, and color-coding." – Ryan Wang ([16:39])
  • Assembled replaced this unreliable spreadsheet, but also started layering on much more value (forecasting, dashboards, planning) ([18:17]-[22:13]).

3. Launch Challenges: The Pandemic Hits

• TechCrunch Launch Day Collides With COVID
  • The team lined up a TechCrunch feature and a Hacker News push for their March 2020 launch—only for the World Health Organization to declare Covid a global pandemic that exact day ([24:18]-[25:24]).
  • Demo requests surged, but many prospects disappeared as companies froze new purchases: "I still have the screenshot: 'World Health Organization declares COVID a global pandemic.' Assembled launches." – Ryan Wang ([25:24])
  • 25% of demo bookings became no-shows; market uncertainty destroyed initial momentum ([26:21]-[26:56]).

4. Surviving the Slow Start: Focus on Seeds, not Harvest

• Long Gap to First Revenue Dollar
  • It took eight months post-launch to earn their first dollar. Nearly gave up on the vision but recommitted by focusing on the few customers actually getting value ([29:16]-[29:46]).
  • "We were too...naive to understand that it was macro related... we only knew usage based...none of us really understood SaaS."—Ryan Wang ([27:38]-[28:19])
  • During this time, the team worked closely with those few happy customers, collecting granular data and insights.
  • Memorable advice from Lattice’s Jack Altman: "Success was not linear. ...You’re going to have to hit your head on the wall for a little bit." ([29:46]-[31:10])

5. Pricing & Product Pitfalls

• Usage-Based Pricing Mistakes
  • Inspired by Stripe’s transaction model, Assembled initially offered only usage-based pricing with no minimums. Customers could “scale usage to zero”—meaning no revenue when they didn’t use it (especially problematic during COVID) ([27:50]-[28:55]).
  • The realization: contracts with minimums are critical in SaaS.

6. The Custom Work Conundrum: To Build or Not to Build?

• Custom Features vs. Scalable Platform

  • The team often debated whether to walk away from large deals that demanded heavy customization ([33:19]-[34:46]).
  • With deals like Robinhood, they documented all custom asks to determine what could be generalized.
  • "It can hamstring your company if it's the wrong one. It can be the blueprint for the next stage if it's the right one." – Ryan Wang ([35:10])

• Example: They said no to an airline deal due to bespoke integration needs (Microsoft CRM + Teams), which would have derailed roadmap focus.

7. Scaling Up: Systems Break, Teams Grow

• From Concierge to Scale
  • “Get on the plane” culture: founders flew to Kyiv, San Diego—personally onboarding and supporting customers. Successful at 10 customers; broke at 50 ([37:58]).
  • Manual onboarding and half-baked features became bottlenecks. A designer helped turn onboarding from weeks to days ([38:10]-[40:10]).
  • A big lesson: features that demo well don't always work in production—real technical debt must be cleaned up as the customer base scales ([40:10]-[40:46]).

8. Community-Driven Growth

• Tapping Into Support Communities
  • Instead of mass marketing, Assembled focused intensely on the Support Driven Slack community—a hub for customer support leaders ([41:40]-[44:55]).
  • Word-of-mouth, genuine participation, and prompting happy customers to share their experiences fueled trust and high conversion.
  • "We had everybody that was looking for software in that audience, in that community, was essentially team Assembled." – Ryan Wang ([43:54])
  • Learning: “Which pond are you fishing in? Get mindshare in one audience before moving to the next."

9. Building an ICP—Data over Guesswork

• Iterative, Data-Driven Ideal Customer Profile
  • Borrowing a playbook from early go-to-market lead Jen Ong Vuong, the team mapped actual customers and stuck sticky notes on groupings by platform, industry, size, and needs ([45:25]-[47:27]).
  • This led to a clear, testable, highly specific ICP: “20–200 support agents, on Zendesk/Intercom, multi-channel, not just 9–5, etc.”
  • “It was as specific as that, but it fell out of...what's going on with simply the customers that we have.” ([47:27])

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Grounded Motivation:

  • “Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you sow.” – Robert Louis Stevenson, cited by Ryan Wang ([04:50])

• On Slow Success:

  • "You’re going to have to hit your head on the wall for a little bit. ...Success was not linear." – Jack Altman via Ryan Wang ([30:14])

• On Custom vs. Scalable Features:

  • “It can hamstring your company if it's the wrong one. It can be the blueprint for the next stage if it's the right one.” – Ryan Wang ([35:10])

• On Community-Led Growth:

  • “We quickly found that we had everybody looking for software in that audience, in that community, was essentially team Assembled.” – Ryan Wang ([43:54])

Important Timestamps

• [04:50] – Favorite quote and mindset: sowing seeds over harvesting.
• [06:05]–[07:06] – What Assembled is, who it’s for, business size.
• [14:33]–[17:28] – Patterns from early customers—everyone hacking spreadsheets.
• [23:08]–[25:24] – TechCrunch launch and pandemic collision.
• [27:38]–[28:55] – Usage-based pricing pitfalls.
• [29:46]–[31:10] – The long, hard path to first revenue and learning from Lattice’s Jack Altman.
• [33:35]–[35:10] – Dealing with early, custom-driven deals.
• [37:58]–[40:46] – Manual onboarding and product debt at scale.
• [41:40]–[44:55] – The importance of the Support Driven community.
• [45:25]–[47:27] – Building a hyper-specific Ideal Customer Profile.

Lightning Round Highlights (Rapid-Fire Q&A – [47:39])

• Best Business Advice: “You’re not Stripe. ...We needed to operate as Assembled.” ([47:44])
• Recommended Book: Steven Berlin Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From for lessons on networking and collective innovation ([48:09])
• Founder Characteristic: Willingness to endure setbacks, referencing a baseball team that went 0–21 ([49:06])
• Productivity Tool: RescueTime for time tracking and work-life balance ([49:49])
• Alternate Business Idea: Lying-down work desk for neck pain ([50:45])
• Personal: Passion for public education as a great equalizer ([51:50])

Conclusion

This episode provides a refreshingly unvarnished picture of SaaS company-building: the grind of winning your first few customers, wrestling with pricing mistakes, figuring out which customer requests set your roadmap, and why community and direct observation trump generic “playbooks.” Ryan Wang’s humility and data-driven approach offer actionable lessons for SaaS founders at any stage.

Connect

• Assembled: assembled.com
• Ryan Wang: LinkedIn – Ryan Wang ([53:11])

For SaaS founders, this episode is a masterclass in the reality of early growth, resilience, and staying obsessively close to customer pain.