How to embrace AI in your startup, Richard White, Fathom

0:00Welcome to How to Start Up, the podcast that dives into the stories of startups and scale-ups told directly by the founders. I'm Juliet Fallowfield, founder of Fallowfield & Mason, a PR and communications podcasting consultancy where we empower you to take charge of your own storytelling in-house. In today's episode, we're joined by Richard White, founder of Fathom, the AI-powered meeting assistant that records, transcribes and summarizes your video calls so you can focus on the conversation. Previously the founder of UserVoice, Richard brings deep experience in user-centric product design and has built Fathom into one of the fastest growing tools in the productivity space.

0:40Stay tuned to hear Richard's insights on the early product decision that drove Fathom's breakout growth, why their freemium model worked from day one, and how they engineered virality into the onboarding experience. We also dig into how to build AI products that people actually want to use, why storytelling matters even in a product-led company, and how to stay focused on solving real problems in a rapidly evolving tech landscape. And I'm wondering, listeners, if you can tell which part of this podcast production process is using AI and which is not. Richard, thank you so much for joining How to Start Up today.

1:17As I've just mentioned, it's our first episode talking about AI. We are 22nd of July, 2025, so I can't believe we're only just getting to it now, but it's super exciting. I would love you to introduce yourself and the business that you started. Sure. Yeah. Richard White, founder and CEO here at Fathom. Fathom is the number one rated AI note taker on G2, which if you're not familiar with G2 is like Yelp for software, which is very exciting as it sounds. And so Fathom basically joins if you're on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and records it, transcribes it, but critically writes all notes for you using AI, captures action items, fills in your CRM, writes a follow-up email, all that sort of fun stuff.

1:58And it's free. And so it'll do this for you as an individual. It'll also do it for if you're running a company. You can set a fathom for your entire team. And you get these other nice benefits where you can kind of fathom tell you when certain things happen. Like I've got alerts anytime there's a really positive moment between a salesperson and customer, or there's a pricing objection that we don't have a good answer for or something like that. So it's a pretty cool tool for people that are on meetings that don't want to take notes, which is basically everyone, as well as people running companies and running teams, especially kind of agencies, client-facing teams, and they're wanting to keep their finger on the pulse of what's happening in those meetings without watching, having to watch a bunch of recordings, which no one else wants to do.

2:36Oh my God, I have so many questions for you. The fact it's free, the fact that, you know, me, for example, I do a lot of Zoom calls with prospective clients and I typically have a team member there who's taking minutes. And actually one of my colleagues is like, look, why aren't we just using note takers? It's like, you need to learn how to take the minutes like I did, and then we can use AI. But I kind of wanted to instill in them like how hard it is to get their brains really aware of what might be missing if we're using i think zoom's notetaker which was not good last year but i haven't tried it since however my question to you is what problem were you trying to solve when you first built fathom like everyone i was on a bunch of meetings i think it was actually early 2020 actually right before uh pandemic i was actually running a different business a different company I'd started and I was actually doing a lot of user research for new product ideas and was on, I think I was on 15 zoom calls a day with prospective customers.

3:28Yeah. I remember being kind of like excited about the product we were building, but I was even more excited about like, gosh, this taking notes thing is a terrible process all around, right? It's not fun to talk to someone and try to type up your notes. It's not fun to try to stress out and clean them up five minutes later. And then I generally find out, I think I actually took pretty good notes, But even when I take good notes, I look at them two weeks later and be like, I don't really remember which conversation that was. And even worse, the point of me taking notes was to educate my team on what I'm learning.

3:56And when I found out I'd have a great conversation with someone, and then I'd go to my team and show them the notes, and they kind of shrug their shoulders. So much gets lost in translation. So I think it was around that time where I was like, gosh, don't we have technology? Can't we do this better? It's 2020. Why am I still taking notes? And that's kind of where we first came up with the idea for Fathom. Amazing. Well, A, thank you. because it's great and it's so useful to have but I think because we work in communications we're typically talking to founders about how to own their PR or producing podcasts and I don't want to be taking notes typing or writing not looking someone in the eye when I'm having a conversation but I want to make sure that things are captured and of course in a startup headcount is expensive and if I have a member of the team there taking notes it's great exposure for them and great work experience and also useful for us both to be on that conversation it's something about the live conversation that's different to the watching it back as well.

4:47But for us to have efficiencies in headcount, let's be honest, it's a huge cost saving. It's a game changer, but also for me to have a tool I can rely on that isn't going to have a sick day or decide it's late or it can't join because its Wi-Fi's died is brilliant. It is free. How have you managed to do this and make it free? That was probably one of the earliest things we got right. If I go back to 2020, one of the things we recognized is that this is a very expensive product to run originally because if you go back five years transcription cost alone it's about three dollars an hour and if you imagine the average user is at least 10 hours a month that's 30 a month at hard costs alone but we looked at that we kind of played with a bunch of different transcription technologies and we said gosh first of all we didn't think people wanted a transcript but we did think you want that ai was going to get really good and ai would need the transcript to do all the fun stuff we wanted to do.

5:41Actually, kind of a fun aside, in 2020, we put AI in our product name, and all my investors freaked out on me. They're like, no one likes AI. Which is kind of funny now, right? It's easy to forget. There was a first generation of AI tools that everyone's rioted. And this is what, just three years ago? Because this has changed so fast. So fast, right? And so we knew transcription's a really important part of this process in order to give to an AI, and that's 90 % of the cost. And we honestly looked at all the transcription providers and said, they're all pretty good. I think this is a commodity.

6:09I think the cost on the session is going to go to zero. So she bet the whole business that the cost of transcription was going to go to zero over the next couple of years. And if it does go to zero, well, gosh, then we can afford to get this away for free. And we'll lose a bunch of money in the first year or two while that cost is going down, but we don't have that many users right then. So that's okay. So we kind of play in this game of chicken, if you will, right? Our user accounts going up while transcription costs are going down. And we just need those two lines across the right point. But yeah, so we had this theory, If we can get the transcription cost down, we can be the first people to give a product like this away for free.

6:40And if we can do that, I saw from my last business how powerful free is when it comes to virality. If you have a product that you think people can spread virally, or just kind of word of mouth is probably the better way to put it, right? Because I think when I say virality, people think about something blowing up on TikTok or something. I think by virality, just one user tends to spread it to other users, right? In this case, you're bringing this thing into your meeting. It's taking notes for you. You can send the notes out to everyone. on the meeting. And now she has this like inbuilt word of mouth.

7:08A lot of products you use, you can't see that someone else is using them. This is not the case with that. And so for that reason, we saw if we can make it free, not only will people see it, but people recommend it. Because if I charge you money for something, are you going to recommend to your friends? Only if it's like really, really good. And even then not really, if it's free, that's a gift you're giving now, right? So now you're like, oh, you should try this thing out. It's free. And so we bet a lot of the business on this idea that transcription costs go down. we can give this away for free.

7:33If we give it away for free, then we can spread by qualifier. So getting those user accounts up and getting the word of mouth out there, the power of word of mouth. I mean, you're preaching to the converters of someone who works in PR. But how do you revenue generate then? When we first started this business, I think I'm really excited about this model was in my intro, I talked about this kind of two people we help, right? We help people on the meeting that don't want to take notes. We also help the people not on the meeting, the managers, the executives, the colleagues. And we saw like, Hey, we actually think, yeah, you could probably charge 10,$15 a month to individuals at some point, and they would pay you to not take notes.

8:12But there's a way more lucrative opportunity to charge the managers at some point. Hey, you want visibility into what your team is doing. You want to help coach them. You want knowledge sharing across your org. They'll probably pay you$30 a person. So it's a much bigger opportunity. And then you have this nice separation of, are people using the product we're not going to charge them anything they just get this awesome free product because we know one day their usage will get intro into their manager their founder or whatnot and rolling that across the team it's much easier to go on to be a b2b product than to be a consumer product from a pricing perspective and that's also the case is when people use it and they're absolutely dependent on it as well i've seen this happen in the podcasting space i mean even three or four years ago we were paying for transcriptions and now it's all built in software and you become so reliant on it that you're like, you know what, I will, if they up the pricing, in fact, I really hope they're not listening to this, but I would pay more because I've drunk the Kool-Aid and I need it and I like it and I've tested it and I can't live without it.

9:09And also$20,$30 a month is far cheaper than a person that you're employing. Yeah. I think free is also important to us because we were asking people to make behavior change, even though no one likes to take notes, they all know how to take notes. And so if I tell you, Hey, I need you to pay me$30,$50 a month to give you product to take notes, you're going to be skeptical, especially if you haven't seen something like this before. Again, it's all new AI stuff. So no one had seen anything like this before. And so I think free is also valuable, not just for word of mouth, but for when you're trying to sell someone something they've never bought before.

9:36There's already enough friction there because they've never used something like this. You don't want to add more friction by saying, oh yeah, before you even get to the aha moment, get the value, I need you to consider that you wouldn't need to pay me money for it. And so I really like that separation for that reason to. So you didn't even do a two week free trial and then you start paying your subscription because I always clock. I remember, I thought it was it, there was a podcast about Netflix and how subscription income is game changing. And anytime I signed up to a subscription, I cancel it immediately just in case I forget.

10:07And then if cancellation happens and I still want it, then I'm allowed to pay for it again. But I go through my Apple subscriptions, cancel them all. I am the polar opposite to my brother who probably has about 30 and has forgotten all about them. But Scrupulous with finances, I think, is a business 101. For you, you're not even doing a cancel after a month. It's just free. It's just free. And now we have some upgrades you can get. But the core product that takes notes for you is forever free. And I think we looked at that and said, when Freemium stuff first came out, I think a lot of folks weren't savvy.

10:39A lot of consumers weren't savvy to the model. Now, almost all of us are skeptical of two things almost inherently. One is, can I actually use that free product? or is it like going to give me just enough? And I know you're going to be a good enough business to make me trip over something I have to pay for it. And two, I'm savvy enough to be like, if it's$50 or a 30 day trial, I'm still evaluating as I might have to pay$50 for this. And so we not only made it free forever, we had no pricing page in the beginning for the first three years and we had no premium tiers. We kept it really, really clean.

11:05And in fact, the biggest challenge we had is we had to explain that this wasn't a scam because people are like, this is too good to be true. And so we actually AB tested this on the homepage. It was like, no, this really is free. Here's how. And you click the here's how and it would actually pop up a little dialogue in the corner. It's actually still on our website today that explained here's how it's free. Because I think rightfully after 10 years of truly free products like Facebook, you are the product, right? That old saying, you know, people are like, oh, are you selling our data and stuff like that?

11:31Which is always funny to me because can you imagine wanting to read someone else's meetings? I don't even want to read my own meetings. But we had to put it in this disclaimer like, hey, we're not selling your data. Here's our model. One day we're going to charge your manager. Some manager can opt into a premium tier and that's how we're going to do it. But we're not doing anything shady here. We just found a way to operate this product really cheaply. And so we want to pass that on to you. And is that working now? Because you're four years in? Yeah, we're four years in. We are now an eight-figure revenue business pretty quickly.

11:58I think in about two years of monetization, frankly. But still, a majority of our users are using the free product. And we love that. And again, I think having a forever free makes a lot of sense for us because of that word of mouth component. Because every time someone uses Fathom, they're in a meeting. Basically, there's a chance that they will introduce us to a new user. And so Forever Free makes a lot of sense for us given that model. But acquisition, because whoever's using it when their colleagues or clients or whoever else joins that meeting sees it and it's just branded right there. It's there.

12:27You can't not notice it. And that word of mouth, it's interesting because we as a business teach founders how to own their PR in-house and we produce podcasts. and it's that word of mouth if someone or we call it in the beauty world mascara effect if you see a friend wearing a great mascara and you ask them what it is you're far more likely to believe them because they tell you and they're your friend than some random person on an ad or a piece of social content so if someone face-to-face that you're having a live conversation was like oh no it's great and it really works and it's embedded and it's just sorted that virality i'm sure just went crazy did it kick off straight away when you first launched could you see it go not straight off or did it have a bit of a slow burn to start with?

13:07It has a slow burn. I think we did something that I advise most founders to do, which is I spent a long time in closed beta, like really iterated the product to make it really, really good. I think the cardinal sin I see a lot of folks do is launch something that kind of technically works, but no one's going to get excited to tell their friends about. And so, you know, we spent a year basically building this with a group of 50 people and then it got to the point, okay, this is good enough to launch. And even then, I think it still had its warts and kinks to work out. So I'd say it probably took us 18 months until we really started to see everything start working really well.

13:39And people just saying, I absolutely love this. And NPS scores through the roof and stuff like that. Do you mind elaborating on NPS? Because it's recent in the last three to six months, founders have been talking about this. But I'm not sure everyone knows what it is yet. Yeah, net promoter score. So it's the survey. We've all seen it probably before. It's like scale one to 10. Would you recommend this to one of your friends and colleagues? And depending on your industry, it doesn't work super well in B2B because a lot of people take it literally and they're like, I'm using this accounting software.

14:04Why I recommend it to my mom? No. But when you're doing something that's kind of consumerish like we are, it's a good bellwether for do people love it. And the way it's scored is you're looking for people to give you nines and tens. In fact, you only basically get points for nines and tens, and then it deducts points for everything that's a six and below. And so all the best brands, we have Starbucks, Netflix, you name it, all have 70 plus NPS. Software companies are generally in like the 20 to 40 range. we actually saw we were in the 80s on nbs and that was like a really good sign me early on okay we're doing something right here going back to your timing of launch a lot of people have said to me a lot of founders hold back and they wait for it to be perfect before they get it out and it's like actually just get it out because then you hustle because it's out there and you have to get going but for you i think with something like this i agree it has to be really working for you the game-changing moment was the fact that people were excited about it yes we for us It's, you pointed this out earlier, it's like, it needs to work reliably, right?

15:00It's a product where you're going to come to depend on it. And actually making this product work reliably is actually the hardest part about it. We weren't the first people to build something in the space, but a lot of the first tools that we saw were really buggy. And we interviewed their users like, yeah, it works like 80 % of the time. Okay, well, my note-taking process that I've perfected over all my career works 100 % of the time, right? If we're going to replace that, we need something that also works 100 % of the time. So I like to decouple launch, like the marketing side from you should, as soon as possible, try to get people not named you using your product.

15:31The first user for our product was me, right? And I think it's a great hack when you can be your own target user and build something that you absolutely love and use day in, day out yourself, and then convince your friends and your family to do it. And I would say, like, you can't convince your friends, family to use all of your product day in, day out. Yeah, you might do some soul searching about where your product is going and then expose it to like, what are their friends and family think? And I think it's so hard in this day and age to make a first impression because there's so many products coming out.

15:57I have this series, like, you kind of want to stay in this beta phase where the product is working, you're still iterating it, you're putting it in front of users. You're just not putting it in front of random people on the internet yet. You want to basically wait till you've got some groundswell and then you launch. And by the time you launch, you're on product hunt, you're somewhere, but people are already raving about it. And it's not a, this might be good, but I'll go to the website and I can see lots of people raving about it, or I can see that on social media sort of thing. So yeah, I have a better contrarian take on that.

16:22Again, I think you should be building and iterating, but I think you want to wait from a marketing perspective to make a really good first impression because it's so hard to make a second. So was that beta phase, pride, a tested safe space for you guys? You had a kind of closed cohort where you could throw things at them and they give you feedback and you were comfortable in breaking your own business privately before you went big. Right. Right. Yeah. For us, what it looked like is I personally was reaching out to people, friends of friends or connections on LinkedIn, all sorts of different, really unscalable, really grindy kind of ways of getting people to sign up for this product.

16:58We weren't using AI. Yeah, we weren't using AI. We didn't have that yet. I think we put 50 new people into the product every week or two, see how that group went and put another 50 or so. And honestly, it took us a while. I think it went through about 800 people before I got to a group of people where I put 50 people into it. And roughly those 50 people kept using it day in, day out. We got rid of enough of the bugs that we're getting repeat usage, but we burned through hundreds of signups before that, right? People like trying it. Oh, we found this bug. Oh crap. All right. Okay. Never getting that user back, but at least now that bug is fixed for the next user.

17:30Yeah. Amazing. And given how quickly you've done this, how did you decide which features to prioritize? Because I have no idea all of the kind of tiny things that you'd have done to build this amazing, what is now quite a simple thing to use, but behind the scenes, it would not be. How have you gone through that prioritization decision-making process? I think one of the hacks here was me being a target user myself, right? And so it's kind of like, what do I value most? But I think my core product principle is optimized for magic, especially in AI. What feels like something I could never do as a human?

18:03Lean into those things because those are the things that are going to get people excited and blow their mind. For us, it was very straightforward. It You know, it was very clear from the early days. People hate taking notes. Give them all the different ways to reference back to points in this meeting, sharing clips, getting summaries, that sort of thing. We also had a very interesting thing where, you know, we launched AI actually really wasn't that good yet. Right. We launched in 2021. Really, the tipping point for AI getting really good was about two years later. That's when kind of GPT-4 came out.

18:33The AI could write better notes than the human. So we had this interesting thing where in the beginning, we actually were just really a recording transcription engine that allowed you to pull clips out of meetings. And we've always built that knowing that eventually we'll drop in the AI piece. And so in the beginning, we knew the key killer feature was just it works reliably. So like something that we're reliably recording, transcribed your calls. We had a feature where you could like, while you're on a meeting, click a button to flag that part of the meeting because we learned no one else to go back after the meeting, find that interesting tidbit.

19:03So we kind of focused on that. We really focused a lot on reliability. That was actually the thing we saw early on. It's like speed and reliability are the two killer features. The speed one is also interesting because I think note-taking, or who we're trying to replace, is instant. For all the things we hate about trying to take notes, when I get off the call, my notes are there. And most of the technologies we were competing with are things that are already in the market for this. They record a call, they transcribe it, maybe they give you a note, but it'd take 30 minutes to an hour. You know, I got to do my work after.

19:31I got to send out the email. I got to update my task tracker, right? And so one of the big things we worked on was just like speed. And I remember my engineering team, like how fast it needed to be. And I was like, I don't know, keep making it faster and I'll tell you when it's close enough, right? We started off, it took us 30 minutes too, and got down to seven minutes and three minutes and then a minute and then 30 seconds. We hit 30 seconds. I was like, this is fast enough. 30 seconds versus 10 seconds. I really can't tell the difference when I get off a meeting. I think that post-reliability were the two killer things we iterated a lot on.

19:58Which is why I guess a lot of people are panicking about redundancy. And I don't look at it as redundancy. I just look at is it evolution? It's the next industrial revolution. Like we've gone through things in the past that have been game changing and we're all using them today. Imagine, oh no, we can't use the laptop because we're going to give up writing with pens. We send a lot of minutes after our meetings with our clients and we know the clients aren't going to read them. It's more for us to have our task list and be like, guys, you promised us, you give us this and it's written and we've highlighted it for you and you're still not giving it to us, but we're forwarding the email again.

20:29So if we could just take out a good hour of going through our minutes, going through our notes, highlighting actions, moving things around, updating trackers, all sorts of things. To your point, if it can make better notes than we can, I'm in. We're taking a quick 30 second break from this episode to ask, are you thinking of starting your own podcast? If so, this is great news because we run a course that will train you how to produce your own podcast yourself. This course is for people who do not want to outsource and pay someone else to do it. You want to learn how to do it yourself. We teach you everything that you need to get up and running with your own podcast show and so much more.

21:09Just DM us at hello at Fallowfield Mason to book your spot. What did your previous experience at UserVoice teach you that you brought into Fathom? So I ran a company before this for about 10 years. We got to about high kind of seven figures in revenue. Was it your business? Yeah, I mean, I was one of the founders along with a bunch of great investors and colleagues and stuff like that. Honestly, I call that my finishing school. It was a business I ran for 10 years. We did every business model in the sun. We started off as like a PLG company before they called it PLG. When I left, it was very much an enterprise business.

21:41We pivoted a couple different times, got to work with a bunch of great folks. I think probably the most valuable thing that I learned for that business, I got to, when we'd be in between executives, I would step into those roles. And so I ran marketing for us for a while. I ran customer success for a while. I ran sales for a while. And those last two are also really informative to fathom, right? Because not only could I see this problem from the perspective as the person trying to take notes on the meeting, but also from someone who's tried to, as a sales manager, consume other people's notes, try to figure out what's happening on this meeting.

22:10So there was really good perspective. But I think all in all, it was a good product in a really hard market, my previous company. And so I think you actually learn a lot when it's a struggle. I've got some friends who are fantastically successful. And a lot of them, they're very smart folks and they're great business people. they also hit the right thing at the right time. Sometimes you hit the right thing at the right time and it's just like the ball rolls downhill. We didn't do that with my previous company. We definitely had to push the ball up the hill. The upside of that is that we taught us a lot about how to be really good at execution.