Know Your Company

Claire Lu's idea came from her own frustration. At an early-stage e-commerce company outside Chicago, she was a small part of a six-person team doing marketing, sales, operations, and design, and she hated it. She felt she could not give feedback because her CEO did not know his company well. Having studied organizational change in college, she knew the problem of feedback had been studied extensively, yet it still seemed unsolved in the workplace. After quitting, she decided it would be her life's work, even though she had no idea what kind of company to build.

She started by reading everything she could on feedback and forming her own hypotheses, then tested them. Her first real validation came from a consulting case study for a friend's 20-person company, where she interviewed every employee. The company received feedback it had never heard before, and some changes followed. Around the same time, she met Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, who said the problem was his biggest challenge too. Basecamp became her first consulting client, and it had a prototype called Hancho, which later became Know Your Company. Claire also learned Rails and built her own software on the side. She had about 15 people say they wanted to buy but no signed contracts, and her savings were running out.

Just as Claire was running low on money, Basecamp had launched Know Your Company publicly and it had gotten almost 100 customers in less than six months. Jason proposed spinning the product out with Claire as CEO. They split ownership 50/50, with her share rising to 75% after the company hit $1 million in cumulative revenue. In her first month, she held 60 to 80 phone calls with CEOs. She also sold the product herself through 30-minute live demos, doing more than 500 demos over roughly a year and a half. That trust-building process shaped the product and its onboarding. Early growth also came from inbound leads due to the Basecamp connection and from her personal network. Public speaking at CEO conferences then became the main channel for about two years.

Claire says the company passed $1 million in revenue in its first two and a half years, starting from zero, with two people. Growth has been accelerating, and organic traffic has increased significantly. Speaking was useful for building credibility and testing messages. The company later switched to self-serve signup with a two-week free trial and invested in writing. It chose not to run ads, partly because of its price point and because it doubted CEOs would buy a roughly $3,000 product after clicking an ad. It also tried building a sales team but found that customers didn't want much salesperson follow-up, and the product was more self-explanatory than the team had assumed. Claire also admitted she had to fire a head of business development after the numbers didn't come through.

In its fourth year, Know Your Company still runs with two full-time people and a handful of contractors. Most of its customers now come through the knowledge center, workshops, and the Water Cooler, an online community for business leaders launched that fall that has over 500 members. Claire describes the strategy as building trust through education and support rather than paid acquisition.