He got 100k signups in 30 days. They all churned. 2 years later, he hit $10M ARR. | Rich White, Founder of Fathom

Most SaaS founders would kill for 100,000 signups in their first month. Rich White got exactly that with Fathom, his AI meeting notes startup. Every single one of them churned. Two years later, he hit $10 million ARR by building the opposite of what those early users wanted.

The conventional wisdom says listen to your customers. White's story suggests something more nuanced: listen to the right customers at the right level of the organization. When Fathom first launched, White made the classic mistake of interviewing executives and managers about their meeting software needs. "If we had just only interviewed the execs, we probably wouldn't have started the business because they were really happy with the current solution," White explains. The C-suite loved tools like Gong that gave them visibility into sales calls and team performance.

But White discovered something crucial when he dug deeper. The individual contributors using these tools daily told a completely different story. "When we interviewed the ICs, we learned that they didn't really get any value out of the solution. It was really a tool just for the managers," White says. Sales reps were still frantically scribbling notes during calls because the existing tools were built for oversight, not productivity. This insight became Fathom's entire foundation: build for the person actually in the meeting, not the person managing the person in the meeting.

The technical challenge of serving individual users rather than enterprise buyers forced White into a completely different product philosophy. Existing solutions like Gong could afford to be slow because managers reviewing calls didn't need real-time processing. But individual contributors needed something fundamentally different. "Gong was just taking those transcripts and putting it into their system. So you'd have to wait thirty minutes, sometimes an hour. And we realized, like, oh, if you're trying to replace notes, one of the things that's really nice about it is the immediacy," White explains.

This insight led to Fathom's core technical breakthrough: real-time processing that could deliver notes and insights instantly after a meeting ended. Building this required solving problems that enterprise-focused competitors never had to tackle. "That bot we have to spin up takes like two minutes to spin up in the cloud to be able to join your meeting. If you ask for the bot to join your meeting, you're not gonna wait two minutes. It needs to show up within ten seconds, which means I need a predictive algorithm," White notes. The technical complexity of instant gratification became their moat.

The shift from building for managers to building for users also unlocked something White calls the most naturally viral product he's ever seen. Unlike traditional B2B software that lives behind corporate firewalls, Fathom had to announce itself in every meeting it joined. "I haven't heard of a more naturally viral product. Because you gotta bring it to your meeting. It's visible in the meeting. You're gonna have to explain why it's there," White explains. Every meeting became a product demo, and every satisfied user became a salesperson explaining the tool to colleagues who witnessed it in action.

This viral growth created a paradox that explains both Fathom's early churn and later success. The initial 100,000 signups came from people attracted to the concept but not committed to changing their behavior. Real growth required building something so demonstrably better than manual note-taking that people would actually stick with it. White's team spent months obsessing over the user experience details that enterprise software typically ignores: instantaneous bot joins, perfect transcription accuracy, and seamless integration with existing workflows.

The lesson here isn't that bottom-up adoption always beats top-down sales, or that viral growth trumps enterprise deals. It's that the level of the organization you optimize for fundamentally shapes what you build. Enterprise tools can afford friction because someone else pays for them and mandates their use. Individual productivity tools live or die on whether someone chooses to use them when no one is watching.

For founders deciding which customer voice to follow, White's experience suggests a simple test: identify who actually uses your product daily versus who writes the checks. If those are different people, the daily user's complaints matter more than the buyer's satisfaction. The buyers will be happy as long as they see adoption metrics. The users will churn if the product doesn't solve their real problem.

Watch for this pattern in your own customer interviews. When executives praise your solution but usage metrics stay flat, dig deeper into the individual contributor experience. The gap between what management wants and what workers need is often where the biggest opportunities hide.