#370 – How Richard White built infrastructure to bully competitors out of business

A story about choosing technical battles that create unbeatable unit economics—while competitors bleed money.

This episode is for SaaS founders tired of chasing short-term monetization—and wondering if there's a smarter way to build something customers actually fight to keep.

Most SaaS companies fail because they take technical shortcuts.

They outsource infrastructure to move fast, then discover they can't compete on price.

Richard White, CEO of Fathom, took a different path. He's the inventor of the feedback tab and builder of UserVoice before founding Fathom in 2020. White spent two years building infrastructure that competitors shortcut with expensive third-party services—creating an economic moat that lets him "bully competitors" out of the market.

And this inspired me to invite Richard to my podcast. We explore how building instead of buying infrastructure creates economic warfare advantages. Richard shares insights about choosing technical battles that matter, why he'd rather have angry customers than apathetic ones, and his "external validation addiction" that drives breakthrough products. You'll discover how owning your full stack lets you set pricing rules that competitors can't match.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They don't create customers—they create fans – They focus on the essence

Richard's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Richard's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"We're the only people that run all of our own infrastructure outside of the LLMs, and that allows us a huge advantage economically, because our costs are so much lower than everyone else, which allows us to basically bully all the other competitors by setting the bar for what you can do on free."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why building infrastructure beats buying third-party services
• What choosing technical battles strategically actually requires
• When lower unit economics become competitive weapons
• Why economic moats trump feature moats every time

Guest Info

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Richard White, CEO of Fathom

Website: https://fathom.video