Lessons Learned as Second Time Founders | Paragon Co-founders, Brandon Foo, Ishmael Samuel | EO

Email naturally is a very large market, billions of people.

Almost everybody in the world uses email.

Everybody uses email, but no one's very happy with it.

There's a lot of opportunity for us to build a much better solution there.

We applied to YC.

We ended up getting into the, uh, summer sixteen batch.

Pretty early on, we hit, I think it was around twenty to thirty thousand daily active users.

While we saw a good strong adoption from individual end users, consumers, and we really saw a big opportunity to go up market and sell to enterprises to build a B2B email solution.

Every company uses email for work.

That was the point that we struggled to get traction in the market.

By building a very general email solution, our products just wasn't really well-designed for a lot of B2B use cases.

We tried over time to take a solution and retrofit it to different problems that we tried to find in the market, as opposed to starting from those problems in the first place and then building the products from that.

So I think going back, if, you know, we had the opportunity today, I would say starting from day one, in parallel with the product, I would also consider building a go-to-market strategy.

When Ishmael and I first started Paragon, we looked back on our experience as developers.

Eventually, you know, what took us back and took me back to the problem that I had faced at Polymail.

And when we were trying to sell to enterprise customers, hearing the same request, "Can you integrate with Salesforce? Can you integrate with HubSpot? Can you integrate with all these different solutions?" And having to write code manually to build all of those integrations and basically reinventing the wheel every time.

In our discovery process, exploring, you know, different ways that we could try and tackle these problems took us back to, you know, the integrations problem and seeing that, um, until Paragon, until then, the only real solution in the market was for developers to write code for every single integration, for every single API, uh, to build these integrations with what are thousands of different applications in the market today.

Through that process, I think we eventually found, you know, really strong conviction on if we could build the Stripe for integrations, if we could build the single connecting layer that developers could just install once and instantly connect their product to the hundreds or thousands of different SaaS applications in the market, that's something that could be useful to almost every software company in the world.

world.And we realized then that, hey, this is really an unsolved problem, but the size of the problem is, is huge.

It's like a multi-billion dollar problem.

No one's doing it, right? Uh, we rebuilt our entire product, uh, from the ground up, focusing on that use case of customer-facing integrations, and, uh, within two months of launching, we saw very strong product market fit, just hockey stick growth in terms of, uh, usage, retention, um, ARR, et cetera.

I think we were able to very concretely define, you know, here is the market that we're trying to build for.

Here's the problem, here's the value that customers derive if we're able to solve this problem for them, and I think that is ultimately what's allowed us to pursue and capture a much bigger market opportunity with Paragon.

Email naturally is a very large market, billions of people.

Almost everybody in the world uses email.

Everybody uses email, but no one's very happy with it.

There's a lot of opportunity for us to build a much better solution there.

We applied to YC.

We ended up getting into the, uh, summer sixteen batch.

Pretty early on, we hit, I think it was around twenty to thirty thousand daily active users.

While we saw a good strong adoption from individual end users, consumers, and we really saw a big opportunity to go up market and sell to enterprises to build a B2B email solution.

Every company uses email for work.

That was the point that we struggled to get traction in the market.

By building a very general email solution, our products just wasn't really well-designed for a lot of B2B use cases.

We tried over time to take a solution and retrofit it to different problems that we tried to find in the market, as opposed to starting from those problems in the first place and then building the products from that.

So I think going back, if, you know, we had the opportunity today, I would say starting from day one, in parallel with the product, I would also consider building a go-to-market strategy.

When Ishmael and I first started Paragon, we looked back on our experience as developers.

Eventually, you know, what took us back and took me back to the problem that I had faced at Polymail.

And when we were trying to sell to enterprise customers, hearing the same request, "Can you integrate with Salesforce? Can you integrate with HubSpot? Can you integrate with all these different solutions?" And having to write code manually to build all of those integrations and basically reinventing the wheel every time.

In our discovery process, exploring, you know, different ways that we could try and tackle these problems took us back to, you know, the integrations problem and seeing that, um, until Paragon, until then, the only real solution in the market was for developers to write code for every single integration, for every single API, uh, to build these integrations with what are thousands of different applications in the market today.

Through that process, I think we eventually found, you know, really strong conviction on if we could build the Stripe for integrations, if we could build the single connecting layer that developers could just install once and instantly connect their product to the hundreds or thousands of different SaaS applications in the market, that's something that could be useful to almost every software company in the world.

world.And we realized then that, hey, this is really an unsolved problem, but the size of the problem is, is huge.

It's like a multi-billion dollar problem.

No one's doing it, right? Uh, we rebuilt our entire product, uh, from the ground up, focusing on that use case of customer-facing integrations, and, uh, within two months of launching, we saw very strong product market fit, just hockey stick growth in terms of, uh, usage, retention, um, ARR, et cetera.

I think we were able to very concretely define, you know, here is the market that we're trying to build for.

Here's the problem, here's the value that customers derive if we're able to solve this problem for them, and I think that is ultimately what's allowed us to pursue and capture a much bigger market opportunity with Paragon.