He built in stealth with 1 customer for a year—then grew to 1M paid users across 60,000 locations. | Sanish Mondkar, Founder of Legion

Last quarter, Sanish raised a $50M Series D. His company has raised over $130M. They have enterprise customers across 14 countries including Dollar General, Aldo, and CircleK. 

It all started because Sanish was working out of coffee shops. He wasn't looking for a startup idea. But after a few casual conversations with employees, he noticed several problems retail workers and managers faced. He decided to build Legion to solve them.

He partnered with one local coffee chain, worked as a barista for a week, and developed the product with them for a year. He didn't sell to other customers, he stayed heads down until the local chain adopted the product across their entire organization. By the time they went to sell to other enterprises, they knew the product worked.

Why you should listen

• Why listening with an open mind is a common way to identify customer problems.
• Why providing clear and immediate ROI is a must-have for enterprise customers
• How to perfect your product with design partners that are heavily invested 
• How to raise a Series A without meaningful revenue.

Keywords

Legion, workforce management, enterprise software, problem validation, value proposition, scaling, pricing model, ROI

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:35) The Origin Story of Legion
(00:04:53) The Mindset of Most Frontline Workers
(00:11:05) Gathering Data
(00:20:00) Building an MVP
(00:24:30) Insights from Customers Using V1 Products
(00:30:15) Series A
(00:32:13) Legions Core ROI
(00:36:15) Scaling Legion
(00:39:47) Finding Product Market Fit
(00:41:19) One Piece of Advice

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