Running An Employee Experience SaaS Platform [Raised $10M In Series A]
My name is Jonathan Fields, I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Assembly. I started Assembly for two reasons: 1) I experienced a great culture in my career and I experienced a terrible culture in my career and having a great culture makes the world of difference in an employees day to day life and 2) Building something from scratch is so fun!
Assembly currently has raised over $14M in venture capital, we have north of 4K customers on the platform and we are growing aggressively every single month!
Assembly is an employee experience intranet. We aim to accomplish the following inside an organization
- Allow leadership to share information with their team
- Allow employees to find information seamlessly
- Create an engaged team (building a sense of community across an asynchronous organization)
When employees are more engaged, they tend to be happier. When they are well-informed, they can make better decisions. And when they can use their time more efficiently, their productivity increases. Each of these factors not only boosts individual performance but also contributes to the growth of an organization's top and bottom lines.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Starting out as an early employee at ZipRecruiter, I witnessed a profound shift from my previous experiences in investment banking. This rapidly growing tech company offered an incredible work environment with kombucha on tap, nutritious snacks, nap pods, ample growth opportunities, and a strong emphasis on company culture.
However, as the company exponentially expanded its headcount, we inevitably faced changes in dynamics and tooling.
Silos began to form, stirring in me a desire to create a tool that could dismantle these barriers and maintain a vibrant culture, even as a team scales. The journey to cultivating a great culture is demanding, and many companies, despite their intent, lack the resources to achieve this goal.
That's why Josh, Muthu, Vijay, and I set out on a mission to simplify the process of building a great culture, leveraging the power of technology!
It takes a lot of fine-tuning, a lot of listening to customers, and the ability to solve high-level problems within a company. That's what makes a B2B SaaS company like ours truly successful.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
Assembly was envisioned as a comprehensive employee engagement platform. However, with the founders juggling full-time jobs at its inception, we couldn't immediately build the complete suite.
Instead, we started with a recognition and rewards platform, one component of the comprehensive offering. From the get-go, we launched an MVP, which was profitable from day one. It was targeted at companies under 500 employees with desktop workers who cared deeply about their employee base and wanted to automate the recognition at their organization. The early tech stack was built on AWS, MongoDB, React, and Java. The use cases and ICP have of course evolved heavily over time but it was an intentional journey to move our ICP.
We launched Assembly as a B2B SaaS platform that allowed employees to recognize, celebrate, and reward each other, all through a simple interface. The platform allowed co-workers to recognize peer to peer, top down, and bottoms up, the platform allowed for co workers to give recognition in Slack and ms teams. The platform also automated recognition of employees ’ birthdays and work anniversaries. Sitting behind this engagement program was a rewards catalog filled with hundreds of gift cards, swag, charities folks can donate to as well as “Culture rewards” which could be items like: taking a day off to volunteer, lunch with the CEO, put the CEO’s hairstyle in a mullet wig for the next all hands, etc.
Despite the challenging early days, with no brand recognition and a limited feature set, we succeeded in garnering an active user base and high levels of participation within organizations. It turns out that people want to be appreciated for their hard work, and if you incentivize co-workers to recognize each other, they will do it. Gamification works, people will do what they are incentivized to do.
Due to word of mouth, we started getting introductions to other similarly profiled companies from existing customers. We also were cold calling and cold emailing back then as we didn’t have budget to advertise on SEM. We truly brute forced our marketing efforts until we had the budget to spend on growing the business!
As soon as we felt comfortable delivering our first product, we began to tackle more complex problems, like creating structured internal communication, and announcements and improving feedback channels.
This process is never-ending - no company can ever be rich enough in features. However, the more you grow, the more the product develops, and the more the story around the product is enhanced, and selling gets easier and easier.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Our launch was nothing short of exciting. We had managed to get a handful of tech companies, all local to Los Angeles, on board even before we went live. Sure, our site had its quirks and glitches, but thankfully, our early adopters were patient, giving us the much-needed space to learn and fix things.
At the end of the day our first product worked, employees were recognizing and rewarding each other and management saw incredibly high levels of participation (which was our success metric).
And learn we did, in no time at all! We tested with pricing (which was $3 per head when we launched), we tested landers, and we tested UI inside of the software. We interviewed customers who liked us, and didn’t like us and we asked HR (our buyer) what software they wanted to purchase that was tangential to the product we have built. We began to understand what employees were looking for, what HR—the folks buying our program—needed, and what features we had to prioritize on our roadmap. Grasping these company requirements was key as we moved into our next phase.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Here's the thing about building an ideal customer profile (ICP) - it makes it so much easier to draw that person in. Our first ICP was an HR leader of a company with less than 500 employees, who was primarily desktop based and utilized an internal comms tool like Slack or Teams.
The key here is to stay laser-focused. You've got to understand not just their wants and needs, but also those little things they might not even say out loud.
When you can deliver a product that addresses all of this, you're not just getting customers in the door - you're making them want to stick around.
When we first started out with Assembly, we zeroed in on one specific market vertical (primarily technology companies to start). We very quickly expanded into retail, manufacturing, sciences, and healthcare.
The list went on and on and our corpus of clientele was very diverse. We also never had any revenue concentration of over 3% so we never felt like we were going to fail if one company left us.
We also learned quickly that we can convert a qualified lead who demoed our product to a paying customer at a consistent rate. With that knowledge, we knew we simply needed to double or even triple the size of our funnel, and we would instantly have more growth. If you think of the product as the bones of a company, then marketing is the muscle.
Speaking of marketing, to get our lead generation going, we put some serious spending into SEM, especially on Google. We also invested a lot in our blog and other content - it's a long game, sure, but it pays off. We were internally writing articles for a while until we had enough capital to work with thought leaders in the space. Being omnipresent is critical for success.
And let's not forget affiliate marketing. It's often overlooked and not talked about enough, but it has such a high ROI. A good affiliate partnership can make a huge difference. Most people look up the top 10 xxx in the xxx space and take that article as truth.
It’s a funny farse, most listicles are paid (I didn’t know this before starting to work at Assembly). If you can be in the top 3 results, you are going to get a lot of traffic. The way to break into affiliate marketing is simply to find the articles that are ranking and simply reach out (but be prepared, they are very expensive and for the good lists, they likely have a bidding system just like what you’d find on Google).
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Well, we're all about growth and adding to our product and value drivers. Since we've managed to raise a solid $10M in our series A, we’ve been effectively deploying that capital, mostly geared towards product development. We are not profitable yet (but getting close) but here's the thing about true SaaS businesses like Assembly - we're growing at a pretty impressive pace and with gross margins of over 94%.
Our main focus? The user. We're all about creating features that make people want to stay on our platform. And it's working - we've seen participation in our platform multiply by 6x per company, and the time people spend on Assembly has more than tripled.
On top of that, we've significantly boosted our average contract value in the past six months, and we've managed to cut down on the customer acquisition cost. To clarify, we started as a recognition and rewards company and are currently an AI backed intranet that helps companies deliver important information, help employees find important information, and help engage their staff. We went from what your CFO would call a nice-to-have category (even though we never believed recognition was nice to have) to a must-have category of data storage and information delivery! Of course, with the increase in importance in the priority tech stack for buyers plus with the advancements and additions of AI into our platform, the PEPM (per employee per month) cost went up significantly.
Our team? It's mostly engineers and product folks. Even though we're bringing in revenue through a sales motion, we're still a pretty lean sales organization. You know the saying, 'If you build it, they will come?' Well, it's not entirely true. But if you build the right thing, market it well, and show people the real value, the revenue will follow.
That's the whole idea of product-market fit, and believe me, it's the holy grail. It takes a lot of fine-tuning, a lot of listening to customers, and the ability to solve high-level problems within a company. That's what makes a B2B SaaS company like ours truly successful.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Let's get real here - the toughest part about building a company is staying focused. I mean, think about it. You're juggling marketing, user functionality, feedback, issues with growth and scaling, new customer acquisition, finance, operations, and fundraising... The list could go on and on.
But here's one thing you do have control over deciding who your business is trying to attract. My advice? Don't cast your net too wide at the start. Be specific, identify a problem and an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), then go after it with everything you've got.
If I could hit the rewind button and start again, I'd pin down that ICP straight away. Then I'd put all my energy into getting that exact person through the door!
If there's something you're passionate about, go ahead and give it your best shot. Because at the end of the day, anyone can have an idea but it's the doers who change the world.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
So, what's Assembly's favorite tool, you ask? Well, it's Assembly! No, seriously, we use our platform for pretty much everything - internal announcements, AI Q&A against our internal documentation, launching new products, weekly updates, recognition and rewards, 1:1s, internal surveys, and even external surveys. It's a major go-to for us internally.
But hey, we do have a few other tools in our toolkit. We're big on Slack for instant communication, Figma for design, and Webflow for building our website. HubSpot is our sales CRM of choice, and we use Jira and Confluence for task management and storage (both of which integrate into Assembly). And of course, we can't forget good old Google for email and our operating system.
I won't lie though, tool fatigue is a real thing, and we're always on the lookout for ways to cut down on the number of tools we use!
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
So, you're wondering about the books, podcasts, and other resources that have shaped my thinking, right? Let's dive in!
In terms of books, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' is an oldie but a goodie. It might have been around for a while, but the insights it offers are timeless. 'Good to Great' is another one I swear by - it's all about what separates the good companies from the truly great ones. And let's not forget 'Zero to One' - it gets you thinking about how to create something completely new and unique.
When it comes to podcasts, 'How I Built This' is a fantastic source of inspiration. It gives you a behind-the-scenes look at some successful businesses. And I also enjoy tuning into 'The All In Podcast' for catching up on news.
And for staying in the loop with what's happening in the tech scene, I'm still a big fan of TechCrunch. Product Hunt is another favorite - it's a great way to see what's fresh in the tech world.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Here's my golden nugget for you: stop just talking about doing that thing you're dreaming of and do it. Yep, it's that simple.
See, the trickiest part about building a business is taking that first step. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff, getting ready to dive into the unknown. A good 99% of folks are so scared of flopping that they never take the plunge. But here's the deal - you're going to be prouder of yourself for trying and failing, than you would be if you never tried at all.
I mean, think about it. If you don't give it a shot, you'll always wonder what could have been. But if you go for it, even if you trip up, at least you'll know you gave it your all. And hey, you'll learn a thing or two along the way.
But the real kicker? What if you pull it off? What if you take that leap, launch that business, and succeed? Now, wouldn't that be something? So, let me tell you, if there's something you're passionate about, go ahead and give it your best shot. Because at the end of the day, it's the doers who change the world.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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