Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, an AI platform for customer support that helps companies manage both human and AI agents more efficiently. Today, Assembled is an 8-figure ARR company with about 120 people, serves several hundred customers, and has raised $71 million.
But getting there was brutal. Ryan and his co-founders spent two years building before launching in March 2020—the same day the WHO declared COVID a global pandemic. About 25% of demos didn't show up. It took them 8 months to earn their first dollar of revenue. When they finally got customers on usage-based pricing with no minimums, usage flatlined during the pandemic. They thought it was their fault before realizing it was macro-related. So they stopped chasing growth and focused on the customers getting value, meeting them in person and building what actually mattered.
You'll learn:
- How Ryan knew he had a real business when he discovered that Stripe, Casper, and Grammarly had all built similar color-coded spreadsheets
- What Ryan learned the hard way about usage-based pricing with no minimums and how they fixed it
- How Ryan's team decided which early deals requiring custom work would help them grow versus become distractions
- Why Assembled focused on one Slack community instead of trying to be everywhere at once
- The simple method Ryan used to create a detailed ICP by looking at patterns in the customers he already had
Full show notes → saasclub.io/460
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