Blaze Year 1: "Hell of a pivot"
A year and a half ago, I was the CEO of a failing business. Today, that same company is one of the fastest growing AI tools on the market, and on track to break $10M in annual recurring revenue just 15 months after our launch.
Blaze's first year in business is a story of incredible product execution and growth tactics— but it's even more remarkable because it came after years of struggling to break through.
Here's how it all really went down, through my eyes at the bow of the ship.
The Decision
It was June 19, 2023. I called my cofounder Eddie. My first words to him after weeks of not talking were "we need to pivot."
It took years to get to this moment: we'd been working on our first product, Almanac, since 2019.
Almanac was an async collaboration tool for distributed teams, modeled off how Github enables engineers to collaborate across time zones and geographies.
We had raised $50m to build it, crafted a cutting-edge product with a real-time document editor, version control, and reviews and approvals, and convinced on some of the world's best remote teams, like Todoist and Andela, to become our anchor customers.
But we had a big problem: our market.