Let's start 2022 with a bang. This week I'm interviewing Will Goto, the co-founder of Rize, an intelligent time-tracking SaaS. They're currently well over $10k/MRR and hope to hit $1M+ ARR by the end of next year.
My name is Will Goto, and I'm the Cofounder and CEO of Rize. I have a background in Materials Engineering but made a career switch to Software Engineering in my early twenties after realizing that software jobs were more in line with how I wanted to live my life. For the past few years, I’ve been primarily focused on my leadership qualities, startup marketing, and design skills.
Rize is my primary project, and I have been working on it for about a year and three months with my cofounder, Macgill Davis. It’s an entirely bootstrapped business and we hope to take it to $1M+ ARR by the end of next year.
The story of Rize begins with failure. Our last startup, Humble Dot, was a VC-backed company where we raised over $3.1 million in funding and were valued above $12 million. Some of Silicon Valley’s top investors were on our cap-table including Susa Ventures (Robinhood). We were on top of the world, our name was starting to get out in VC circles, we had an incredible team of 8, and people were beginning to recognize us.
But we failed. Even with funding, we were unable to find product-market fit over three years. We tried every growth tactic and marketing strategy we could come up with, but nothing allowed us to hit the parabolic growth that VCs demanded. We ultimately shut down the company in the middle of 2020 and returned just over a third of our investment money to our investors.
The idea for Rize began to form as we were shutting down Humble Dot. We wanted to still build something cool together, so we started talking to friends and people we knew about their problems at work. Over time, the time we spent talking to people naturally formed into ideas that got us excited.
We actually started with a landing page instead of a product to test our target audience and our value propositions. Our idea was to create a productivity tracker that represented time in a way where users could derive actionable insights to improve their productivity—a trait that most time management tools lacked. We built a landing page and began to test it with advertisements.
Here's the early version of Rize's first website with the waitlist call-to-action:
After getting lots of attention and high conversion rates on the page, we decided to start building the tool. In terms of resources, we didn't need any outside help, so our iterations were quick. It was a relatively simple process of interviewing users, analyzing feedback, tweaking the product, and repeating. Because we knew who our target market was, we knew which feature requests to prioritize and which to discard.
I think this is a requirement for startups—the need to execute quickly allows startups to compete with incumbents. Without speed, a startup has no competitive edge, in my opinion.
Initially, as we were developing the product, we had a small group of 100-200 beta testers from our waitlist of approximately 1,500 to help us test out the product and give us feedback. With every iteration, the product got better and better, and naturally, we began getting referrals from the users who loved our product the most. We kept this momentum going as we continued to build the product and continued to onboard more waitlisted users.
After about 6 months, we had around 300 people who liked the product where we felt comfortable launching Rize on Product Hunt. It was very strategic to build a small community of passionate users who love your product before launching. I think in the end, that is what allowed us to reach #1 on Product Hunt at the end of the day. In terms of metrics for just that week:
Historically, we saw higher conversion paid conversion rates, but we hypothesized that on Product Hunt we managed to attract a lot of users who simply wanted to try the product without an intent to buy. The following weeks continued to have elevated signups as our page kept getting shared among our trialing users through referrals.
The key contributors to our initial success were:
After our launch, we focused on using content creators to help get the Rize name out. We knew that our brand was something that people were more than willing to share, especially if they liked our product. Combined with our Product Hunt validation, we were able to continue to get a good flow of signups through sponsoring YouTube creators.
Rize is a consumer SaaS, so the business model is a relatively simple subscription model. Overall, I think there were three primary tactics that we used to grow the business:
Referral program - we give both the person giving and receiving the referral a free month of Rize. I think this system has worked exceptionally well with Rize due to its aesthetic and brand. People love sharing cool stuff with their friends and colleagues, and providing a monetary incentive behind it helped.
Content creators - leveraging creators is essentially the same tactic, in principle, as the referral program but on a one-to-many relationship. We either give the creator a lifetime subscription or a sponsorship in exchange for YouTube videos, tweets, and other pieces of content that have the potential to reach our target audience. We also have an Ambassador program for creators with large followings where we share revenue from referred customers.
Lifetime & annual sales - revenue is much more helpful for growing your business when you get it up front. When you're starting, earning $80 in one month is probably 100x more valuable to you than getting $100 over a year. Our cash flow is more than double that of our MRR, and because of that, we can use the money to reinvest in growth initiatives right away.
Our purpose with Rize is to help anyone achieve their productivity goals with actionable insights and data. Those goals can be anything from working fewer hours to improving their ability to focus. At the moment, the product can track and show your data back to you so that you may draw your conclusions, but we want to include our own suggestions and methodologies as well. Our vision for Rize is to tell new users how to achieve their goals with maximal efficiency and minimal effort.
For us personally, we just want to build the best product we can for our users. We’re passionate engineers who like to solve problems with innovative solutions, and we’ll keep doing so while growing the value of Rize organically over time.
I can’t say I would do much differently. Macgill and I have an incredibly short iteration cycle and we’ve been able to learn quickly every week. I think there were a couple of weeks here and there where we made a mistake around a technical decision or marketing one that set us back, but we wouldn’t be as strong as we are today without having made those mistakes. Messing up and screwing things up is pretty normal for us, and we both understand that it’s part of the learning and iteration process. Without mistakes, there are no learnings, and when there are no learnings, there’s no progress.
Find friends who are also building businesses. The journey can be lonely and isolating, but it doesn't have to be that way, especially if you aren't doing well. Being around others who are going through the same thing helps you stay inspired and motivated to continue.
For Rize, simply check out our site at https://rize.io. For startup talk, I'm very active and accessible on Twitter @wrgoto, and I love helping out my peers.
How did you gather feedback early in the process and how much time you invested in that, thanks
Totally worth reading. Thank you both.
Thank you for sharing a screenshot of your early landing page. I am at that crossroads where I have a hypothesis that I'd like to test out and I am trying to figure out if my time would be better suited reaching out to the target audience (with a concept and a sketch) versus building a proof of concept before I open the idea to the world. It is helpful to read about what other companies did in their early days, and see examples. Thank you!
I'm in the same boat @wrgoto. After you setup the initial landing page and 0 subscribers in your waiting list on day 1; what exact steps did you do (and for how long) to figure out that your idea is indeed worth working on; and people will pay money for it?
Super duper curious! Hoping to hear from you.
We tested with ads on Instagram and Reddit. Our conversion rates were pretty high on the landing page so it ended up being somewhere around $0.50 per waitlist signup.
The high conversion rates told us there was interest. We later reached out to our waitlisted users to do user interviews and get a sense of what they would pay for the service.
Very curious to hear about this as well. How did you drive traffic to your initial website?
We tested with ads on Instagram and Reddit. Our conversion rates were pretty high on the landing page so it ended up being somewhere around $0.50 per waitlist signup.
One of the best ways is to create a test that most accurately reproduces customer behavior with the least amount of work. We build a website with a call-to-action to sign up for our waitlist and then paid for advertisements to see what our conversion rates looked like.
This is a good way to test because you're testing your target market and their interest level in your product without actually having built it yet. If your conversion rates to your waitlist are above 10%, you probably have something worth looking inot.
Thank you for the insight!
Would you classify this as a B2B or a B2C SaaS? Sure, it's related to personal productivity, but people seem to be using it for work purposes.
Definitely B2C, we sell to individuals despite them using it for work and can expense it.
Nice interview. I've learned about Rize from AppSumo, have you guys seen any success there?
Also curious to hear this.
I hear AppSumo is hit or miss for a lot of people. For us, it has been working really well. We are heavily discounting our lifetime deal to sell subscriptions upfront. The downside is that it can cannibalize our MRR a bit because people who are paying monthly can switch over.
@wrgoto, are you open to sharing how much revenue you guys made from AppSumo?
I'm working on a database to showcase AS deals revenue, and I've forecasted a little over $41K for you. Is that close?
Great story and compliments! I was wondering, there are a lot of time-tracking platforms. What's your USP that brought users to your service?
All of the existing time tracking options focus on time management as their value proposition, there wasn't one that was focused on making you more productive overall (improving focus, building better habits).
Our other differentiator was that we would provide you with more granular data and analytics.
very interesting! Thank you for the answer
How did you attract your initial users to your landing page during the validation period? Where did they come?
We tested with ads on Instagram and Reddit. Our conversion rates were pretty high on the landing page so it ended up being somewhere around $0.50 per waitlist signup. After we started working on the product, a lot of people can in through referrals.
The learner and continuous improver in me loves this and I'll definitely check it out for personal use. Out of curiosity, for those high performing teams, is B2B a channel you're exploring? As a SaaS COO those roadmap and "what if" scenarios pop in my head frequently. Have you considered gamification? Not just for the obvious direct productivity categories but for things like listening to those take a break notifications and recharging.
B2B is something we're not interested in. Many of our users would become hesitant to use such a powerful tracking app if their company had a hand in it. It could potentially be abused.
In many ways, the app is already gamified, just not explicitly. Rize shows our users their metrics and data who have intrinsic motivation to improve themselves. The data helps them stay motivated and track their progress.
I understand, unfortunately there are still too many micro-managers out there.
Once you get something going. The skills you have are worth millions. I say this, because you can grab smaller projects and take them to a 4X result in a year, rinse and repeat.
Thank you for sharing your story Will! Super inspirational. I was wondering if you could expand upon one point: "because we knew who our target market was, we knew which feature requests to prioritize and which to discard". How did you define your target market? Sounds like it was something that came out of talking to people and your own experience before launching the landing page?