Give users 7 extra days of access for booking a call with you

Pat Walls… within 2 months. That's not typical for SaaS, right? SaaS is just usually like slow, long grind and and I was asking you, "What is your secret?" And you told me something that I almost couldn't believe. A lot of people watching this are probably going to roll their eyes when they hear it, but you said it was talking to customers, and you had a crazy stat around the number of customers you talked to. So, tell me about that. What did you guys do?

GauravSo, it's weird that this is kind of atypical advice. I think it must be just because with Claude Code and stuff, you just want to build in isolation, but the biggest driver of how we ended up building Fastlane was literally just talking to as many customers as we possibly could. And obviously, we're very inspired by figures like Paul Graham and the early YC days, who really advocated for this style of building. So, I think since August, my co-founder Jock and I have done around 20 calls a week every week. It was really simple. We just had a button in our UI with a rainbow border that said, "Book a call with the team if you want 7 days of extra access."

GauravAnd so, people incentivized because they wanted extra access, and it gave us a massive leg up because now people are booking calls, and we could interview them and ask them all the questions we had ready. So, we just used Calendly, opened up our calendar, and let users click that button. It took them straight to the calendar, and they just booked a time. So, we've done 2,000 customer calls since we started customer discovery back then. So, we spent all of our time basically sitting in a room just really harassing people with questions that we had.

Pat WallsOkay, cool. Well, I mean, that's an insane amount of calls. Honestly, I'm really impressed. Obviously, you can talk to customers, but in this AI world where anything can be transcribed, you had a really cool system that you had put together where you have all your customer calls, think of it almost like a knowledge web of your customer, which is pretty cool. Would you be able to show me what you built and show me these 2,000 calls that you did?