Starting as the only PM and building a second product line to $36M+ ARR.
Pendo sold software to help you with the software you build. I built the one that helps you with the software you buy.
The problem
Every large company buys software nobody knows how to use. You roll out Workday or Salesforce, you spend millions, and then people open it and quietly guess.
Pendo already solved the adjacent problem: if you build software, Pendo helps your users through it. Nobody was solving it for the software you purchase.
The pitch was arithmetic. Pay us roughly $100K, about one one-hundredth of what you already spent on the software, and get real utilization out of the rest.
What I owned
The CEO wanted a second product and hired me to be the energy behind it. On day one I was the only PM, working with a single engineering team.
By the time I left, five PMs were building the product inside a roughly 15-person PM org, and Adopt was the highest average-selling-price product in the company.
That is the answer to the question people ask when they see enterprise logos on a resume. I have started from one PM and one team. It is not a stage I have only read about.
How it actually went
- 01
Nine enterprise logos in year one
Ford, United, UCLA Health, and Ferguson among them. Enterprise buyers, not a self-serve motion, which set the price point and the roadmap for everything after.
- 02
Analyst validation on the first eligible cycle
Named a Leader by Everest Group on the PEAK Matrix, the first evaluation Adopt was eligible for, and a Leader in the Forrester New Wave in Q4 2022.
- 03
Reprioritized the whole roadmap under the AI wave
Shipped Pendo's first AI capabilities in under 90 days, with 33% adoption inside 30 days, the fastest in the company's history. Announced live at Pendomonium 2023 in front of 1,200+ people.
- 04
Then folded it back into the platform
After three years the two products were consolidated into one. I led that consolidation, which is a strange thing to do to the product you built.
What I would do differently
Two products, one buyer. That was the flaw, and it was there from the beginning.
Customers kept asking a reasonable question: I build software and I buy software, so why am I buying two things from you? Sales had to run two motions at one account. The consolidation that fixed it was obvious in hindsight, and I should have seen it coming a year earlier than I did.
The counter-argument is that starting separate is what let it move fast enough to exist at all. I still think that was right. What I would change is treating the merge as a scheduled event from the start rather than a correction we arrived at.
A note on the number
$36M+ in three years, booked, through the first three T2D3 stages. Booked revenue, not pipeline and not a projection off a growth curve. I am specific about it because it is the number I can walk you through line by line.