Happy Birthday Knak: 10 things I’ll never forget (even if I wanted to)

Ten years ago, on April 12, 2015, Knak launched its first product.

A lot has happened over the last decade – way more than I could ever have imagined.

So today, 10 years wiser, I want to look back at the events and milestones that marked our journey from struggling startup in my basement to one of the fastest growing companies in North America.

1. We almost flubbed our launch – a.k.a. how we got on the roller-coaster

We built our first prototype with the intention of taking it live at the 2015 Marketo Summit in San Francisco.

My then-co-founder and I were in his hotel room doing some last-minute fiddling before going down to the convention floor to do the launch.

By ‘fiddling,’ I mean, the prototype was not quite ready. There’s always something to be improved, right?

I started to get nervous. The tradeshow floor was opening in a matter of minutes. I told him we needed to get going even if the prototype was not perfect.

So he closed his laptop and we dashed off.

Except that in the middle of our dash, he realized he’d forgotten to move the prototype to the production server that would take the prototype live and allow us to show people.

So we had to rush back to the hotel room to do just that.

Luckily everything worked out; we were able to wow people at the Marketo Summit with our first Knak product.

But as we ran back to the hotel room to hit the button that pushed the prototype to production, I remember thinking: “So this is what it’s like to run a start-up! It’s going to be a real roller-coaster ride!”

It sure has been!

2. Our first business model was not the right business model

Not every start-up gets it right on the first try.

So it was with us. After a strong start, our business hit a plateau.

Why?

We started off selling templates. In our early years, we helped our customers build over 50,000 of them.

But as we got deeper into things, we realized that templates didn’t solve the problem we really wanted to address. We wanted marketers to be completely free of the need to code.

That realization was a critical insight and led us to develop a no-code editor. Launched in 2017, it allowed marketers to build exactly the email or landing page they wanted without needing to know HTML or CSS.

That pivot was critically important and it set us on a new path.

3. Getting enterprise customers told me we were going somewhere

We got our first customer within a week of launching our product in 2015. It wasn’t even someone we knew! But they saw what Knak could do for them and they signed up for our service – with their credit card!

Realizing we had an actual customer seemed magical. And we got many more pretty quickly.

But in retrospect, while those first customers were absolutely critical for us and got us started, and I will be forever grateful, they were not the customers we ultimately needed.

To really grow, we needed enterprise contracts, and we didn’t get any until after we pivoted the product.

Getting that first enterprise contract was a very big deal, and it changed my outlook completely.

Yes, the first iteration of Knak had about 700 customers. But after we got three enterprise contracts in quick succession, that is when I realized Knak was really going places.

4. I needed to go all-in

When I launched Knak, I was still running my first company, a revenue operations consultancy called Revenue Pulse.

I realized at one point that if I wanted to take Knak to the next level, I would have to let something go.

So I hired an amazing CEO for Revenue Pulse (Joe Peters) and let him manage its day-to-day so I could focus my attention on Knak.

It worked.

By going all-in, I could focus my energies on growing Knak.

It was around that time that we hit a real milestone: $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

It felt like such a huge amount of money! I thought we could take on the world and do anything!

5. Covid changed us

Before the pandemic hit, we were building a lot of momentum.

Then Covid came along and took the wind out of our sails.

In fact, it changed our whole dynamic.

Before Covid, we were a closely-knit team of a half-dozen people quite literally working out of a small room in my basement.

Working in such close proximity to one another was great. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing. We all helped each other, and we built strong bonds.

The pandemic forced us out of my basement and into our own homes.

Being separated like that was hard; we missed the closeness and the intensity.

But ultimately, the pandemic was good for Knak as companies shifted their marketing from physical to digital.

And later on during the pandemic we got our first office.

That was another milestone; it felt like we were coming into our own.

The real story behind our decision to get an office was a little more down-to-earth.

A lot of us had small children at home; it was just easier to work from an office.

Still, having an office felt pretty cool!

6. VC funding also changed us – in ways we didn’t expect

In 2021 we raised $25 million from the venture capital firm Insight Partners.

We were lucky in our timing; 2021 was arguably the best time ever for founders to be raising money from venture capitalists.

When we did that deal, I was on Cloud 9!

Of course over the next few months, I came to realize that getting the funding was forcing some significant changes on how I operated. For example, I went from nixing spending requests to approving them… all of them.

But sometimes I said yes just because it felt like we needed to spend the pot of cash we had access to. Which sometimes had consequences…

7. We made a few mistakes

In 2022, and with access to venture capital financing, we went on a hiring spree.

It wasn’t the best time to be hiring; workers were in short supply and it was a super competitive job market.

And we made mistakes.

Basically, the messaging and the metrics we were using to attract employees did not always bring in people who were a good fit.

As a result, our employee satisfaction (eNPS) score fell from 100 to somewhere around 40, and we went through a good amount of internal turmoil.

It took us a couple of years to sort that all out.

I blame myself for those mistakes, since I had taken myself out of the hiring process and focused on a KPI that led us to hire really quickly.

It was a pretty big learning moment for me.

Despite all of that, we reached the next milestone pretty quickly: $10 million in annual recurring revenue. I was pretty proud of that achievement; not many SaaS companies get there!

But though that milestone happened quickly, it felt like we’d gone through a lifetime of challenges to get there.

It all came down to our leadership team pulling together and learning from its mistakes.

8. We also hit several speed bumps

Every company encounters problems and challenges, and we faced our share of them.

An early (and important) speed bump was the loss of our biggest customer.

At the time, it felt like the world had caved in.

I had the same sinking feeling when our first really important employee left the company, and again when our whole application crashed while our biggest customer was doing training.

And about a year after our launch, I was hit with a lawsuit – my first!

Knak didn’t have any reserves of cash, and here I was being sued; there was a real possibility the business could crash.

But we had a bit of luck: I have an uncle who is an amazing employment lawyer, and he helped me navigate what was, at the time, a very challenging situation.

We also encountered a few unexpected financial headaches; for example, $1 million was stolen from Knak’s bank account. We had a lot of our treasury in a Silicon Valley bank when a bank run happened. But thankfully, we were able to recover the money in both situations.

The lesson: Setbacks are inevitable. You just need to keep going, though having a bit of luck helps.

9. My ultimate goal is to put Knak out of business

This is going to sound weird, but my ultimate goal is to put Knak out of business.

How? Through AI.

The arrival of AI two years ago was as disruptive to Knak as the pandemic in 2020.

AI is forcing us to rethink a lot of things.

Naturally, we were a little scared of it at first; but then we decided to go All In on AI and build it into our product from the ground up.

And if we succeed, we will be the first company that does campaign creation from start to finish using AI.

Which is kind of exciting in its own way!

10. Three things I’d like to tell my 2015 self

Oh, there are so many things I wish I’d known 10 years ago! Here are the top three.

Surround yourself with good people.

It’s not easy to transition from being the co-founder of a start-up to the CEO of a relatively big business; you go from sweating every detail to setting the overall direction without being involved in the day-to-day.

To make that transition successfully, you need help.

The most important thing I’ve learned over the last 10 years is the tremendous importance of the people around you. You are as good as your leadership team. You also don’t have to teach yourself to be a CEO; there are coaches and ex-CEO’s who will assist you. Seek them out.

True success takes time.

The other thing I’d tell my younger self is that building something truly great takes time. So keep at it. Ten years is probably only just the beginning. I actually feel like we’re just getting started.

Enjoy the ride.

I’m really excited right now because we’re about to launch two new products.

The launch process takes me back to the excitement I felt in Knak’s early days, when we were just starting out in my basement.

I wish I had taken the time to savor those moments a bit more.

But the reality was that I was too focused on what was coming next to truly enjoy Knak’s first 10 years.

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As the company enters its second decade, I hope I can take time to appreciate things a little more.