Product-Market Fit Lost and Found After a 100x Spike

Product-Market Fit Lost and Found After a 100x Spike

Author: Omer Khan September 11, 2025 Duration: 46:34
Negative 110% gross margins. Then COVID demand spiked 100x overnight - and nearly killed the company anyway. Pat Kinsel spent years chasing product-market fit while losing money on every transaction. When the pandemic brought 100x growth, most of those customers were urgency buyers who churned when COVID ended. Pat reveals the product-market fit journey behind Proof's rise to nearly $100M ARR - how he used a $0 landing page for market validation before writing code, why 10 years of lobbying across 47 states became a moat competitors cannot replicate, and how losing PMF after COVID forced a complete rebuild around enterprise. You will learn why product-market alignment sometimes has to be found more than once. Pat previously sold his startup to Twitter and spent time in venture capital. Proof (formerly Notarize) has raised $260M and now serves thousands of enterprise customers across identity verification and transaction security. 🔑 Key Lessons 🎯 Validate product-market fit before writing code: Pat built a $0 Unbounce landing page and ran Google Ads to prove people searched for online notary services - measuring acquisition costs and conversion rates first. 📉 Fix unit economics before scale arrives: Proof had negative 110% gross margins, losing money on every transaction. They reached 1% margins just before COVID spiked demand 100x. 🏛️ Turn regulatory complexity into a durable moat: Pat lobbied for 10 years to change laws in 47 states. This red tape became a barrier competitors cannot replicate. ⚠️ Urgency buyers do not equal product-market fit: COVID brought 100x demand, but many customers signed for business continuity, not strategy. When the pandemic ended, they churned. 🚀 Expand TAM by evolving from point solution to platform: Rebranding from Notarize to Proof opened identity verification, fraud prevention, and e-signatures - finding product-market fit again in enterprise transaction security. Chapters Introduction and favorite quote What Proof does and the business of certainty Revenue, team size, and funding ($260M raised) Origin story: The notary error that sparked the idea Validating demand with a landing page and Google Ads The first MVP: A mobile app for online notary Slow early growth: 3 years to product-market fit at $1M ARR Negative 110% gross margins and fixing unit economics COVID hits: 100x demand spike overnight Post-COVID reality: Customers churned when urgency faded Rebranding from Notarize to Proof Lightning round Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/452 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email

For anyone building a software company, the journey from an idea to a sustainable business is filled with specific, often daunting, questions. The SaaS Podcast-AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders exists to answer those with concrete stories, not abstract advice. Each week, host Omer Khan sits down with founders who have actually done it-they discuss the messy reality of securing those first few customers, the difficult adjustments needed to find true product-market fit, and the tactical decisions behind scaling to and beyond a million dollars in annual revenue. Conversations delve into the nitty-gritty of pricing models, sales processes, reducing churn, and the practical application of AI in a SaaS context. Omer’s perspective is shaped by having personally coached over a hundred and fifty founders past critical revenue milestones and conducting interviews with more than five hundred others. This depth of experience means every episode cuts straight to actionable insights, whether you’re painstakingly bootstrapping toward ten thousand in monthly recurring revenue or managing the complexities of rapid growth. The focus is relentlessly on proven strategies that have worked in the real world. Tuning into this podcast feels like gaining access to a private mastermind, a resource where thousands of other founders gather weekly to learn from the honest successes and setbacks of their peers.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS
Podcast Episodes
SaaS Distribution Channel: Partner Deals to $100M ARR [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:24
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Duration: 49:44
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Duration: 51:00
Vineet Jain arrived in the US with $100 and built Egnyte to over $300M in enterprise sales revenue - without freemium. While Box and Dropbox gave products away and raised billions, Vineet charged from day one. His first…
Product-Market Fit: From Vitamin to $100M Painkiller [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:01:51
Adam Markowitz spent seven years selling a nice-to-have in edtech. Then he built Drata and found product-market fit so strong that prospects called to complain his sales team was too aggressive. He signed 100 customers i…
SaaS Product-Market Fit Lost at $9M ARR Then Rebuilt [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:20
Livestorm went from $2M to $9M ARR in one year during COVID - then lost SaaS product-market fit. Gilles Bertaux expanded into meetings and sales demos, turning Livestorm into a smaller Zoom. After a failed Series C, he r…
AI SaaS to $5.3M ARR by Solving What Others Faked [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:42
Every wireframing tool claimed to use AI - but they were faking it. Adam Fard tested the competition, found they were swapping templates, and built an AI SaaS that actually generates wireframes from scratch. UX Pilot wen…
B2B Product-Market Fit After 2 Years of Nothing [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:03
Two Uber product designers raised $3 million, built a scheduling tool, and watched it fail for two years. Then Tito Goldstein threw it out, rebuilt with composable Legos, and outsold the previous two years in the first m…
First Customers: He Lived in His Customer's Basement [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:13
He wore a Stanford sweatshirt to a conference. Five minutes later, he had his first customer. Nate Baker found his first customers through network selling, not cold outreach - then lived in that customer's basement for a…
B2B SaaS Sales: A Cold Text That Landed McDonald's [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:06
A cold text to a stranger's phone number. Nine months just to close the POC paperwork. Yosef Peterseil landed McDonald's as his first B2B SaaS sales customer while bootstrapping with zero revenue. The lesson: charging ev…
Enterprise Sales: How to Close Deals in 9 Days [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:32
Most founders think enterprise sales takes 6-12 months. Bassem Hamdy closes deals in 9 days. After scaling Procore from $10M to $100M, Bassem built Briq - an AI workforce platform now doing 8 figures in revenue. His ente…