This week, we’re back with another installment in our Paths to Product-Market Fit series with Owner co-founder and CEO Adam Guild.
The Story Behind Owner’s Pivots to a Billion-Dollar Business
Back in 2017, Adam Guild set out to find customers for his new growth platform for restaurant owners. Except this wasn’t your typical founder-led sales grind.
Guild was a 17-year-old high school dropout with no relevant credentials, aside from a wildly successful Minecraft server that he built when he was 12 and pulled in six figures a year. He was literally knocking on doors of restaurants all over Los Angeles, but his self-described baby face made it hard to be taken seriously.
Guild’s mission was personal. He had the idea to build a digital platform to help small businesses grow after helping his mom find more customers for her newly opened dog grooming salon. He taught himself local SEO and put it to work on his mom’s website. Suddenly, her business went from struggling to thriving. He wanted to do the same for mom-and-pop shops in his native LA.
Out of hundreds of knocked doors and thousands of cold emails, he managed to find a few intrigued restaurant owners to try the product. He bootstrapped the company to six figures in ARR with a steady roster of customers, including P.F. Chang’s.
Then came the pandemic in March 2020, and Owner’s PMF evaporated practically overnight. Guild decided to pivot to online ordering and built the new product in two months.
These are just a few of the inflection points in Owner’s winding path to product-market fit. Flash forward to today, and Owner has nabbed a $1B valuation and over 10,000 customers.
In this exclusive interview, Guild shares some of the lessons he’s picked up on his unconventional journey, including:
- The silver lining of brute-force sales: Guild found cold outbound demoralizing after a while, but looking back, he’s glad he did it. “A sales-led motion forces you to talk to customers extensively at every step of their journey, and it creates a higher perceived value of whatever you're selling,” he says.
- The value of founder-led content: Guild wanted to complement his outbound efforts by drumming up inbound demand. To do it, he began writing contributed articles for top restaurant publications, which built a distribution engine and helped him learn the industry's nuances. “The work I was doing to research these articles improved my ability to communicate with the restaurant community, and gave me a much deeper understanding of the broader landscape,” he says.
- Why he went multi-product sooner than usual: Guild resisted the classic advice to wait until your core solution is working before going multi-product. Within a year after launching the V2 product, Owner rolled out a bundle of additional products. "This was one of the best decisions we ever made because it improved everything. It improved the customer's results. It improved our retention rates. It created a higher perceived value and willingness to pay,” he says.
Guild’s remarkable story is well worth the read for any founders with nontraditional backgrounds.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors