He refused to quit his job until $1M ARR—then grew to $5M ARR & closed a $25M Series A. | Pierce Ujjainwalla, Founder of Knak

Pierce launched a consulting business that grew to millions in revenue and dozens of employees. But he noticed his customers kept asking for the same solution. 

So he launched Knak, an email marketing and landing page builder that integrates to Marketo. Unlike most founders, he didn’t go all-in. He kept working on his consulting business full-time until Knak hit $1M in ARR. 

After he transitioned over to Knak, he bootstrapped it to $5M ARR and then raised a $25M Series A. Here’s the story of how Knak found product-market fit. 

Why you should listen

• How to transition from a consulting/services business to a scalable tech startup-- and why it might be more painful than you think. 
• What you need to do to shift from SMB to midmarket and from midmarket to enterprise. 
• How to use enterprise customers to scale to $10M+ without needing thousands of customers
• How to balance urgency and patience to build a successful startup 

Keywords
patience, learning, building a company, failures, product-market fit, consulting business, marketing automation platforms, template product, creation platform, raising funding, urgency

Time Stamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:08:50) The Story of Knak
(00:11:04) Going from Zero to a Million
(00:16:16) Pivoting from SMB to midmarket
(00:19:42) Adding "obvious" features to get closer to PMF
(00:24:07) How to position against incumbents
(00:27:35) Turning Into a Enterprise  Platform
(00:30:30) Finding True Product Market Fit
(00:33:34) Bootstrapping to Series A
(00:40:02) One Piece of Advice

Send me a message to let me know what you think!