[Interview] Tabs: Building the System

A behind-the-scenes look at a fast-growing B2B startup

Imagine a B2B SaaS startup that:

• Offers free pilots, saying “we’ll figure out monetization later.”

• Hires AEs before charging for their product

• Stays in stealth for ~18 months while doing the above things

This seems like a guaranteed way to fail.

Unfortunately for our intuitions about how the world works, this is actually what my friends’ company, Tabs, did. They then went $0-$1M in a couple months, recently raised a $25M Series A, and are on a total warpath.

Does Tabs break all my frameworks? I had to know, so I interrogated Rebecca Schwartz, Tabs’ Go-to-Market-focused co-founder.

Here’s Tabs’ story… and how I interpret it.

(PSA: No, this is not sponsored. I don’t do sponsored posts.)

What does Tabs do?

Tabs describes itself as “Revenue Automation for B2B Businesses.” Basically, if your customers sign a contract, Tabs ingests the contract and turns that into structured data you can use to automate billing, receivables, payments, revenue recognition, etc.

Tabs would have saved some MASSIVE headaches in my first startup, where we had to manually take our contracts from PDFs and figure out invoicing, renewals, and everything else manually. Was brutal.

I used an early version of Tabs when I was doing my early fractional / consulting work. I’d upload my contract to Tabs, and it would tell me who it was invoicing, when, and I didn’t have to think about it anymore. Pretty slick.

You know I love a well-designed “where we fit” graphic

This is obviously relevant to any B2B business that’s contract-based. Huge TAM. But they didn’t start there…

How did Tabs evolve over time?

Back in idea mode, Tabs was focused on billing for hardware/software companies. I remember seeing an early pitch deck from Ali, Tabs’ product-focused co-founder, that was talking about how difficult it was at his prior startup, Latch, to accurately bill their customers.

I recall a slide where there were about forty-seven different pieces of solving this problem and a product roadmap that made War and Peace look like light reading.

The first item on their roadmap was taking the customer contract and interpreting it to handle billing. Rebecca: “When we did that first piece, we were like, ‘Oh… this is so obviously a product with much broader TAM.’” 

Here’s what Rebecca had to say about Tabs’ GTM journey:

Tabs’ GTM Journey: Building the System, Feeding the System

Tabs generated a massive volume of prospective customer conversations:  

“Even in idea mode, I was talking with at least 3-4 potential customers every single day. I was spending 1-2 or more hours per day doing outreach to schedule these conversations.”

“I wasn’t pitching the product in the outreach, early on. I’d say something like, ‘Hey I’m working on this idea through Primary Ventures, will you help me with my idea?’ But it wasn’t just cold, we have good networks and got a lot of referrals. Plus when VCs would poke around, we’d ask, ‘Who can you intro us to?’”

“It wasn’t just me, though. There were three of us all doing this. All of us were talking to 3-4 prospective customers per day. We were trying to get the messaging right, and having just one person doing this meant we couldn’t learn as fast… plus we couldn’t risk Tabs being something that only one founder could sell.”

“We wound up making our first GTM hire because I was hitting capacity, something like 7 or 8 customer conversations per day.”

Feedback volume and velocity drove all their decisions:

“A lot of founders hold out to get a few big deals or hot logos for their first customers or users. We just wanted a volume of feedback and interactions, and then product feedback, and we wanted that as fast as possible. We weren’t going to wait for six months to go through procurement for a $50k deal with a hot company, and only then start to get product feedback.”

“We had a theory of our ideal customer profile (ICP), but weren’t necessarily dogmatic about it, and let basically anybody we talked to use Tabs for free. Then, when we started monetizing, we tried to get early paid customers at any price… and then, we figured out and formalized pricing.”

“We really were optimizing for product feedback and learning, and making the product better as fast as possible. That’s why we offered it for free, at first. We just wanted people using it. We knew we would be able to charge for it eventually because we were talking with serious people - heads of finance at Series B startups, for example, are real people with real budgets and will pay real money. I would have been a bit more hesitant to do this in a market like dev tools, for example, where it’s not always clear developers have any budget.”

This engine still works today:

“We only came out of stealth in April 2024. We could have layered on marketing and inbound sooner. But our motion of heavy outbound, referrals, and very aggressively attacking personal networks worked. And it still works.”

My Take on Tabs’ Approach

Should I set all my content on fire? I don’t think so.

Here’s what I think Tabs did insanely well: 

1. They built an engine to have a ton of conversations with prospective customers

2. They optimized their GTM system for rapid product feedback - aka: optimizing for user retention & value

3. They put volume and velocity above all else… yes, including monetization.

I strongly agree with having a ton of conversations and optimizing for retention. Getting people to “why not” before we get them to “hell yes.”

Tabs was able to go without monetization because of their target customer AND their runway (Tabs had raised $4M pre-seed and $7M seed before their $25M Series A). And they were able to go in stealth for so long because, well, they’re beasts and were able to fill up their calendars DESPITE being in stealth.

I don’t think Tabs’ story totally breaks all my frameworks and theories about 0-1 and the PMF journey. What do you think?

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