From 20k Daily Users to $15k Connected: Paragon's Journey Solving B2B Integration Challenges

As the founder and CEO of Paragon, I've learned firsthand the importance of building products that solve real problems and provide value to customers, whether it's through saving them time or money.

1. Paragon is a developer platform for integrations, helping software companies integrate their products with various SaaS applications like CRMs and messaging software.
2. The company was founded by Brandon and his co-founder Ishmael about five years ago.
3. They've grown revenue by over 4x and connected users by about 17x in the last couple of years.
4. Brandon learned to code through online tutorials and got involved in the hackathon community during college.
5. He met Ishmael at UCLA's LA Hacks, where they started a software development company called Control LA.
6. They built custom software solutions for startups and corporations and gained experience working with various founders.
7. After that, Brandon co-founded Polymail, an email company, around 2015.
8. Despite the large market for email, they struggled to get traction in the B2B space due to a poorly designed product for enterprise use cases.
9. When starting Paragon, Brandon and Ishmael identified a problem: writing code manually to build integrations with various SaaS applications for enterprises.
10. They decided to focus on building a connecting layer for developers to instantly connect their products to hundreds of different SaaS applications.
11. Within two months of launching, Paragon saw strong product-market fit and hockey stick growth in terms of usage retention.
12. Ideal customers are those already spending time, money, and resources trying to solve a specific problem or providing feedback on improvements.
13. Founders should validate their sales process and try to get customers early on, even before building the product.
14. For B2B SaaS, a monthly subscription model is common, and companies should be able to charge at least $50 a month for solving meaningful problems.
15. Pricing is an iterative process that helps founders learn more about their customers and refine their product-market fit.
16. Founders should try to get their first five customers before building the product, using tools like landing pages, ads, or cold emails.
17. Treat the process of acquiring initial customers as a sales process, gathering feedback, and iterating on the problem being solved.
18. If people are not willing to pay for a B2B product, it may indicate that the problem being solved is not significant enough.
19. Charge early and often, testing various price points to gauge customer interest and validate product-market fit.
20. Building integrations with SaaS applications is crucial for B2B businesses, as it saves companies time and money or helps them make more money.
21. Paragon's success comes from identifying an unsolved problem in the market and focusing on a specific use case: customer-facing integrations.
22. Validating sales processes, gathering customer feedback, and iterating on product approaches are key to finding viable solutions for customers.
23. Founders should be open to adjusting their strategies based on customer feedback, as it can lead to discovering tangential or different problems worth solving.
24. By following these principles, founders can build products that people are willing to pay for and capture larger market opportunities.

Source: EO via YouTube

❓ What do you think? What is the most significant challenge you've faced in building a B2B business, and how did you overcome it? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!