Episode Details

Rachel Liaw discovered that roughly half of Fuse Inventory's revenue was coming from the wrong customers. They consumed disproportionate support, requested the wrong features, and were never going to succeed with the product. So she made the painful decision to let those contracts expire - and it transformed the business. Average contract values grew from $1,000 to $3,000-$5,000 per month.

Rachel shares how cold email drove 90% of growth with a 20% response rate, why qualitative signals predict SaaS churn better than traditional metrics like revenue or SKU count, and how she raised $3M as a female founder after a co-founder split that forced her to return investor capital.

Rachel Liaw is the co-founder and CEO of Fuse Inventory, a SaaS inventory planning solution. She used her supply chain expertise to write cold emails that prospects actually responded to because the outreach showed real understanding of their SaaS retention challenges.

Key Lessons

• 🤝 Cold email with domain expertise drives customer acquisition: Rachel achieved a 20% response rate by personalizing every email with supply chain insights specific to each prospect's business.
• 📉 Letting wrong customers churn reduces SaaS churn long-term: Fuse allowed roughly 50% of revenue to churn by not renewing contracts with teams lacking operations staff, freeing resources to build features that mattered.
• 🎯 Qualitative signals predict SaaS churn better than metrics: Revenue, SKU count, and vertical did not predict customer success. The real indicator was whether a company had a dedicated operations team member.
• 💰 Fundraising takes longer for underrepresented founders: Rachel's seed round took a full year as a female founder. A co-founder split forced her to return capital while teaching herself to pitch from scratch.
• 🛠️ High-stakes SaaS needs longer beta periods to reduce churn: Fuse spent a full year in beta because one wrong inventory calculation could cost customers millions in bad purchases.

Chapters

• Introduction
• What drives Rachel as a founder
• What Fuse Inventory does and who it serves
• Rachel's background before founding Fuse
• How the idea for Fuse Inventory started
• Building the MVP and early beta customers
• Why they spent a full year in beta
• Cold email as the primary growth channel
• Why supply chain is the lifeblood of brands
• Cold email driving 90% of growth with 20% response rate
• Discovering the wrong customer segment
• Letting 50% of revenue churn on purpose
• Pricing model and growing contract values
• Co-founder split and returning investor capital
• Fundraising as a female founder for one full year
• Learning to believe in yourself as a founder
• Lightning round
• Where to find Fuse Inventory and Rachel

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/253
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email