Everyone thought it was surveillance software. There was no revenue. Sam Naficy stepped in as CEO of Prodoscore months before the pandemic and faced the challenge of finding product-market fit in a category nobody asked for. In this episode, founders will learn how to overcome market stigma, narrow an overwhelming TAM, and discover your true ICP through customer feedback.
Sam shares how Prodoscore's product-market fit breakthrough came from three unexpected shifts: making the product employee-centric, narrowing to 100+ seat enterprises, and discovering staffing as their #1 vertical.
Before Prodoscore, Sam built DTT (later DTIQ) from zero to $55M ARR over 20 years. Today Prodoscore is a high 7-figure ARR business with 150 logos and 135,000 employees on the platform.
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๐ Key Lessons
- ๐ข New category creation demands patience and capital: Sam spent 20 years building his first SaaS to $55M ARR. New categories require educating the market before anyone will buy.
- ๐ฏ Finding product-market fit means narrowing your TAM: Prodoscore went from "anyone with Salesforce" to 100+ seat enterprises, then discovered staffing as their #1 ICP.
- ๐ ๏ธ Build for employee empowerment, not surveillance: Personal dashboards with AI-driven recommendations flipped the narrative from "Big Brother" to "this helps me work smarter."
- ๐ Outsized press without product readiness can backfire: CNBC and WSJ coverage during COVID brought awareness a 4-person company couldn't convert.
- ๐ Let customers drive your product-market fit evolution: Prodoscore's attrition prediction feature came from heavy users asking for it, not from the roadmap.
Chapters
- Introduction and favorite quote
- What Prodoscore does and who it's for
- Building DTT to $55M ARR over 20 years
- How the founder's idea became a company
- Becoming CEO of a pre-revenue startup
- New category creation and education challenges
- Differentiating from surveillance tools
- Finding product-market fit in a new category
- Employee pushback and the Big Brother stigma
- Educating the market on a new category
- Defining and narrowing the ICP
- How staffing became the #1 ICP
- The ongoing journey to product-market fit
- Using AI to predict employee attrition
- Organizational network analysis
- Biggest lesson from 20 years of building SaaS
- Lightning round
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