{"podcast":{"title":"SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders","slug":"saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902","podcast_index_feed_id":46902,"rss_url":"https://nathanlatkathetop.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://getlatka.com","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/a/9/2/c/a92c13a488d25883e5bbc093207a2619/Master_Template.png","author":"Nathan Latka","episode_count":3086,"summary":"What if you knew data behind the fastest growing SaaS companies today? Each morning join Nathan Latka as he spends 15 minutes interviewing SaaS founders. You'll learn how SaaS CEO's launched their startup and grew it into a real SaaS business. SaaS Founders range from bootstrapped to funded, MVP to 10,000 customers, pre revenue to pre IPO.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-04T04:19:10.512238+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902"},"episode":{"title":"He Lost $50/User to Build a $30M ARR AI Empire (Fathom)","slug":"he-lost-50-user-to-build-a-30m-arr-ai-empire-fathom","published_at":"2026-05-21T20:10:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902/he-lost-50-user-to-build-a-30m-arr-ai-empire-fathom","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902","url":"https://nathanlatkathetop.libsyn.com/he-lost-50user-to-build-a-30m-arr-ai-empire-fathom","audio_url":"https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/nathanlatkathetop/Episode_28_-_Fathom.mp3?dest-id=284781","summary":"How do you go from 0 to $30 million in ARR in just 3 years while purposely losing money on every single free user? Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom, a free AI meeting assistant used by hundreds of thousands of professionals daily. After running UserVoice for nearly two decades, Richard entered the hyper-competitive AI transcription war against giants like Zoom, Otter, and Firefly. Instead of playing the traditional VC game, he gave the product away, lost $50 per user, and built an absolute rocket ship that dominates through bottom-up distribution. You'll learn: — Why purposely losing $50 per user per month was the ultimate growth hack. — The 5-step framework to sequence risk (Retention -> Onboarding -> Acquisition -> Referral -> Monetization). — How to hit $100k MRR in your first 30 days of monetization. — Why Richard hired three enterprise salespeople before writing a single line of code for the premium product. — The exact strategy to gamify fundraising by reserving 15% of your Series A for your users. — Why open data, MCP servers, and local agents are replacing walled-garden SaaS models. — How to scale to $30M ARR by pricing bottom-up teams at $25 per seat. — The reality of stepping down as CEO from a $10M ARR company after 18 years. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UavacWr2jbQ Connect with Richard: https://fathom.ai/ Connect with Nathan: https://founderpath.com/","meta_description":"How do you go from 0 to $30 million in ARR in just 3 years while purposely losing money on every single free user? Richard White is the founder and CEO of…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1484,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902/episodes/he-lost-50-user-to-build-a-30m-arr-ai-empire-fathom/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902/he-lost-50-user-to-build-a-30m-arr-ai-empire-fathom.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}