In this episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, host Alex Theuma is joined by Warmly Co-founder and CEO, Max Greenwald. 

“To make the transition from founder to CEO, you have to go from solving problems to sharing problems.”

In this can’t miss episode, Max shares candid learnings about his journey as a Co-founder and CEO and insights into how he’s scaling Warmly, including:

  • How Max went from Google PM to building a high-growth SaaS startup.
  • The pivots that shaped Warmly’s product-market fit (and what it meant for fundraising).
  • His approach to blitzscaling Warmly into a billion-dollar company.

PLUS: An exclusive freestyle rap performance–yes, really! 

Watch below or read on for key takeaways:

Listen to the audio:

Finding PMF: Evolving Warmly through several pivots

It took several iterations for Max and his co-founders to bring Warmly to where it is today.

V1: Tinder for founders

Max started the business after leaving Google. The initial product was designed to solve a challenge he faced directly, helping budding co-founders to find each other:

“The first problem we wanted to solve was an app to help people find co-founders. It was Tinder for co-founders. You’d swipe on a person etc.” 

But it wasn’t to be: “It was a terrible idea. It didn’t make any money. No users wanted to use it. It was horrible.”

A focus on connecting people

After the initial idea failed to gain traction, Max and team pivoted based on mentor feedback–and ultimately a need to generate revenue: 

“We got advice from a lot of mentors like, “you got to make money”. And we said, okay, who will pay money to connect to people? And that’s how we stumbled into sales and marketing.”

With sales and marketing the focus, Max and team could start to look at gaps in workflows and find areas that were ripe for innovation: 

“We love sales and marketing people, but they’re really using manual processes, not automating with AI, or maximizing their ability to succeed. What if we brought an engineering mindset into sales and marketing?”

Iterating towards PMF

Even with a more focused strategy, it took further pivots for Warmly to find PMF. Through each iteration, they learned more about what they wanted to build and how to generate revenue. 

These insights helped them reach the current version of Warmly, a revenue orchestration tool that’s growing 10-12% each month.

The funding journey

Max explained that early support from accelerators TechStars and Y Combinator helped provide capital and guidance through the early pivots: 

“The first money that we took was from TechStars and we were crazy enough to get in with our Tinder for co-founders idea. They helped us mould it and shape it and then we pivoted entirely during the batch.”

This approach also helped them navigate the Covid pandemic, taking them through to their initial Series A in October 2023. 

To date, Warmly has raised $20M, including a $17M Series A led by RTP Capital.

The support of investors through further pivots has helped Warmly solidify product-market fit and reach over $3M ARR (and there are no signs of slowing down):

“We’re about 60 people. About 40 on go-to-market, 20 on engineering product and design. We’re about $3-4M in ARR, growing about 10 to 12% per month and are seeing pretty good renewal data with our customers, which is exciting. We have about 300 paying customers and are moving up market.” 

How Warmly’s GTM strategy has evolved

Several pivots taught Max and his co-founders a lot about customer acquisition and go-to-market (GTM): 

“The lovely thing about us being able to have multiple iterations before is we sucked at getting our first 10 customers the first three times around. And then we became total savages at it.”

0-10 customers: Onboarding design partners

To get the first customers onboard, Warmly approached the community it had built through previous products to find and onboard design partners: 

“We had a design partner program. We offered a money back guarantee. Three months to try it and give us feedback. And we were careful to really listen to those customers and build for their happiness.”

By requiring payment upfront, they were able to generate revenue whilst building and refining a product that added real value for their customers.

Building a sales and marketing motion

As the company scaled past $1M, the approach to GTM shifted. Now, they use a targeted approach, using their own tool to help the team prioritise warm leads: 

“For the sales motion, the tactics we were using were cold email, cold LinkedIn messages, and cold calls. But then our product is a lead tool that generates warm leads. We started factoring that in and reaching out to those warm leads, which generated much better and higher results.”

What’s next for Warmly? Blitzscaling in 2025 and beyond

Max has ambitious plans to triple the business in 2025. In order to support this growth he’s focusing on building a resilient team and pushing them to use AI so the company can operate more efficiently: 

“We’re mandating daily use of AI across departments. We’re going to have a speaker series on AI and we’re going have people give talks on what they’re using AI for.”

Navigating the transition from Founder to CEO

Like many, Max’s role has had to change as the company scales and the team grows. He called out two particular challenges that came with this shift: 

  • Letting people go: Learning how to balance exiting people from the business quickly but with empathy and support for their next move.
  • Moving from doer to leader: As a founder, Max was used to solving all of the problems himself. He’s since learned how to share these problems with his team, allowing them to find their own solutions and “feel good about the work they do every day.”

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