Forrest Zeisler
Co-Founder and CTO, Jobber. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerLinkedIn ↗getjobber.com ↗
Forrest Zeisler is the co-founder and CTO of Jobber, a software platform that automates scheduling, invoicing, and operations for home service businesses. Alongside CEO Sam Pillar, he built the Edmonton-based company from an initial customer base of three into a major SaaS scale-up generating more than $100 million in ARR.
1shows
1appearances
24statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Forrest Zeisler said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Startups in massive markets will get steamrolled without aggressively raising venture capital
“If there are the millions of businesses that we are claiming, then other people see this opportunity as well. They're going to go hard. They're going to go raise millions of dollars to capture it. And they will steamroll us unless We're like going at as hard a…”
Zeisler claims software businesses hit true product-market fit at exactly 1,000 customers
“When we crossed a thousand, that's probably when I actually thought like a hundred, it's like we have a business, a thousand, we have product market fit, 10,000, it's, we have a path to building something large and amazing.”
Founders must reject bespoke feature requests not serving 80% of the market
“It is so dangerous to go chasing features. A really important thing is having a vision for where it's going to end up. And anything that people are asking for that is on the path that you had previously envisioned that you is like, wow, that makes sense for 80…”
Most startups fail due to founder conflict, which written plans help prevent
“Most startups fail due to founder conflict. Having things written down creates a lot of alignment.”
Early startup activities are limited to building, selling, or doing bullshit
“You're either building shit, selling shit, or it's bullshit.”
A scalable outbound sales operation cannot function at a $29 price point
“We knew it wouldn't scale long-term, not at 29 bucks a month. Like you can't run a really effective outbound operation. That was one thing we've learned about the economics of a business.”
Founders should never raise capital from investors they wouldn't host for dinner
“Never raise money from anyone who you wouldn't have over to your parents' house for dinner.”
Jobber acquired more customers last month than its first 7.5 years combined
“Last month we made more new customers than we did in the first seven and a half years of the business put together in one month.”
SMB vertical SaaS vendors compete directly against owners' personal credit card expenses
“There's almost never a silver bullet. There's, you're selling the software to the people who are using the software, right? You are competing against their personal credit cards, right? Like it's their money. And they're saying they're Buying groceries, buying…”
Jobber never experienced a viral inflection point or a single silver bullet
“Now I know looking back, we never hit a silver bullet. As a founder, you keep expecting there to be a silver bullet, right? You know, you're trying all these new things every day. It's like, you just need one of them to really hit wood. Everything will change …”
Advice from successful startup founders inherently carries massive survivorship bias
“There's a huge survivorship bias in anything I'm seeing, anything you hear from any successful founders, right? For all I know, there were, you know, 99 other founders that did everything I did who are not here today.”
Jobber founders initially aimed for just $8,000 in monthly recurring revenue
“And we actually, we put it on a piece of paper as we were brainstorming and thinking about our aspirations for the business, that our goal was to hit 8000 dollars of monthly recurring revenue. 3000 for him, 3000 for me, a thousand for the servers and a thousan…”
Early CRMs lacked property-first architectures necessary for home service businesses
“And a client might have multiple properties, but like service addresses are first class citizen when it comes to home services. And that was something that was missing from a lot of the CRMs back then.”
Jobber faced six months of continuous rejections from prospective early customers
“Every couple of days talking to a business, showing them our product and hearing the word no.”
After one year, Jobber had only three customers paying $29 a month
“Now here we are a year in and we have three users paying us 29 bucks a month.”
Founders convinced Lawnsite.com to create a custom $200 monthly ad tier
“They saw our situation, took pity on us and actually like created a brand new marketing tier for the smallest You know, like 10 pixels by five pixel style ad. It's stuck in the very bottom corner of the forum just to make us advertisers. I want to say it was 2…”
Jobber founders created a 55-page business plan to raise $250,000 seed funding
“At this point, we have a 55 page business plan to raise 250,000 dollars of seed investment.”
Jobber co-founders independently pitched investor Boris Wirtz in the exact same week
“The one week I went and pitched Boris Wirtz from OSN or from version one capital. And it turns out Sam had independently in Edmonton working his network and connections, got intro to Boris and went and pitched Boris in the same week, the exact same business.”
Jobber technically lost 33% of its customer base during VC fundraising diligence
“Through that fundraising process, we had our three customers. We were in conversations with Boris and Kristoff. And we actually lost one of the customers. 33% churn.”
Jobber took over two years and five employees to reach 100 customers
“I want to say it took about two and a half years to get our, maybe two years, two and a half years, somewhere in there to get to our 100th customer. We were five employees back then.”
Jobber is currently used by approximately 290,000 home service professionals
“We're being used by about, I'm trying to remember the exact number, about 290,000 service professionals.”
97% of 6.2 million small home service businesses have under 25 employees
“There were still, you know, 6.2 million small home service businesses. 97% of them were under 25 employees. They all had chaotic internal operations and no one had built a good solution for them.”
Jobber's early bootstrap servers were funded on Zeisler's wife's credit card
“Our servers are being run off my wife's credit card. She was the only one with a job amongst us.”
The other half of the tape: Forrest Zeisler's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Pablo Srugo 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
A Product Market Fit Show 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Forrest's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, Jobber | 1 | 24 | 100% 3/3 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |