IN CLEAR FOCUS: Richard White, CEO of AI meeting assistant Fathom, discusses his counterintuitive marketing strategy that generated 70% of signups via word-of-mouth. Richard explains why he waited nearly five years to hire a marketer, focusing instead on creating “superfans” through a robust free product and exceptional customer delight. He shares why marketing is “rocket fuel” that can be disastrous without product-market fit and details the future of AI in transforming meeting productivity.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Richard White: In general, I just think of marketing as rocket fuel. If you put it into a rocket, it makes it go faster, further. But if you pour it into something that’s steaming on the launch pad, you have a chance that thing’s going to blow up!
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Meetings are the foundation of how we communicate and collaborate. As marketing professionals juggle multiple internal or external client relationships, strategic discussions, and creative sessions across various platforms, the challenge of documenting, organizing, and extracting value from these conversations has never been greater. This has, of course, created a growing need for tools that can help streamline the meeting experience, allowing teams to focus on meaningful engagement rather than administrative tasks. Our guest today is addressing precisely this challenge. Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom, a platform that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings, allowing participants to focus on the conversation rather than taking notes. With a background as a software engineer turned product designer, Richard previously founded UserVoice, one of the leading platforms that technology companies use to manage customer feedback and make strategic product decisions. His entrepreneurial journey also includes working on Chicco, a company in the first batch of Y Combinator. Richard’s approach to building technology products that encourage word-of-mouth growth has resulted in remarkable success for Fathom, which has achieved nearly 5,000 reviews on G2 with a perfect 5.0 rating, and was recognized as the number one highest satisfaction product on G2 last year. To discuss how AI is transforming meeting management and his unique approach to product marketing, I’m delighted that Richard is joining us today from San Francisco. Rich, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Richard White: Thanks for having me.
Adrian Tennant: Well, before we dive into Fathom specifically, I’d love to hear a bit more about your background. I know you started as a software engineer and transitioned to product design, Rich, can you tell us about that journey and how it led you to become a founder?
Richard White: Sure. Yes, I went to school for computer science. I think all growing up, I was working on websites and building little web apps, you know, like calculator apps, I think, if I want to date myself a little bit here. But yeah, I think I found myself really drawn to not just being able to do kind of the back end of a product, but also to work on the user experience as well. And so, kind of early in my career, I was very lucky that I joined a startup in actually the first batch of Y Combinator. And one of the great things about joining startups is you often can do jobs you’re not really qualified for. And I was like, “I’m an engineer by trade, but I’d love to do design.” And they kind of let me do that. And that was all from there. I’m also very fortunate in that I grew up with two sets of parents that were both entrepreneurial. And so I think that was kind of the de facto assumption growing up. Like, “Oh yeah, that’s just what everyone does.” So I remember selling things to kids in first grade and selling like fake Oakleys to students in high school and stuff like that. So I actually had a period after college where I tried to be an employee for two years, and I’m so bad at that. I was like, “Well, I guess I have to be a founder because no one will want to hire me otherwise.”
Adrian Tennant: Fathom is your current venture, which you founded in 2020. What inspired you to create an AI-powered meeting assistant?
Richard White: I think, you know, early 2020, actually even before the pandemic, I was just on a lot of Zoom meetings and a lot of back-to-back Zoom meetings. We were actually doing research on a different product. And I remember being on about 15 Zoom meetings a day, back-to-back, and being on those meetings and just feeling very stressed because I’m like trying to capture every important nugget that someone’s saying because I’m doing a lot of interesting market research. And so stressing out trying to write type notes while I talk to people and spend a lot of time like cleaning up those notes after the meeting. And then I’d look at them two weeks later and be like, “I don’t exactly remember which meeting this was.” Right? And more problematically, I do all these calls, write all these notes in service of coming back to my team with some insights. And I just found that so much was lost in translation. I’d have some really great conversations. I’d get some really big emotional reactions to things, positively, negatively. And then all of that just turned into like six bullet points on a slide and the team kind of shrugging their shoulders, right? And so I was like, “Gosh, there’s got to be a better way to do this, right? We’ve got to have tech that allows us to solve this now. Because no one likes taking notes and no one really likes reading other people’s notes. They don’t really do a great job of conveying what will actually happen in those meetings.”
Adrian Tennant: Well, I learned when we were preparing for this episode that when starting Fathom, you had three core hypotheses. Number one, AI would improve significantly. Number two, transcription costs would drop to near zero. And your third hypothesis was that the video conferencing market would remain fragmented. So here we are, how have these predictions worked out for you, and how has it shaped your product development?
Richard White: Yeah, I mean, they’ve all worked out, which has been great, right? Not only have they worked out, they worked out just the right time, right? I think sometimes you can be directionally correct, and you get the timing wrong, because the timing is the hardest part to get right. And so, for example, when we did get started, transcription cost was about $3 an hour, and now it’s about a couple of cents an hour. And if that transition had taken two years longer to happen, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. So yeah, I think there’s a big difference, especially as a second-time founder, between what I’ve done with Fathom and what I did with my previous companies. And one of the biggest differences is what I call it being hypothesis-driven from the start. And so having these hypotheses allowed us to say, “Gosh, okay. We know AI doesn’t exist in 2020, or at least it’s not any good.” In fact, I remember our investors early on got really panicked when I started calling us an AI company in 2020. It’s hard to remember now, but the first wave of quote-unquote “AI companies” were pretty lackluster. They’re like, “You don’t want to get thrown in with that.” We’re like, “No, no. This is where we think it’s going.” So we kind of had this vision that we’d be the first people to make an AI notetaker that everyone can use for free, but that we would build all the other stuff first. We would go build the recording infrastructure, the user experience, and the desktop app, and go build distribution channels and all those sorts of things. with this belief that at some point in the future, AI will hit this threshold and it’ll actually be able to take the notes for us. Because until then, we’re just a really good transcription tool. And then basically when AI shows up, we’ll get to drop it in. We’ll basically build the whole car except the engine. We’ll put a crappy lawnmower engine in there. At some point, someone’s going to invent a V8. We’re going to drop that in there and it’s really going to take it from being a kit car to something we can take to the track. And that’s exactly what happened. And so it’s fun to see. I actually have Fathom recordings from 2020 where we laid out this vision for how we thought this was going to play out. And it’s fun to see that it actually did.
Adrian Tennant: Well, one thing that sets Fathom apart is that it works across multiple platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, of course, and Google Meet. Why was cross-platform compatibility so important to your vision?
Richard White: I think this is actually the one thing we learned along the way. We actually started off being exclusively for Zoom. And then as we saw users sign up, and we had access to anonymized calendar data, we could see that gosh — there’s a lot of folks that are cross-platform themselves, right? They’ll do a Zoom meeting in the morning. They’ll do a Google Meet in the afternoon. Next week, some client of theirs will put them on a Teams call. And so you kind of exist in this world where there’s, it reminds me of like, you know, Neapolitan ice cream. Like some people on chocolate, some people on vanilla, some people on strawberry, and those, none of those three flavors are going away. And so if you want to have a solution that allows them, that takes notes on 100% of their meetings, You’ve got to be on all of these platforms because everyone else is. And I think there’s also no one’s going to spend their social capital to say, “No, no, I don’t want to meet with you on Microsoft Teams. You need to meet me on Google Meet.” You just click whatever links on your calendar. And so for that reason, we found it was super important to be able to support all those platforms.
Adrian Tennant: You mentioned to me that you’ve taken a pretty unconventional approach to marketing Fathom. I think your exact quote was “ripping up the playbook” when it comes to traditional strategies. Rich, can you elaborate on your approach and why you chose this path?
Richard White: Sure. Yeah, I think there’s always a tendency to try to do everything marketing-wise and do all the channels. And I remember early on, right, we’re not doing content, we’re not doing social, we just we said “no” to basically every kind of marketing angle or channel you could do, because we had such strong conviction in one channel. And that channel was word of mouth. We said, “Gosh, this is a product where if you’re using it, you’re going to bring it into your meetings. You have to explain to other people why you’re recording and why you have this bot that’s taking notes for you.” And those people are going to naturally ask questions and maybe even want to access those notes themselves. Like you don’t really get that in most B2B software, right? Most times you use it and no one knows you’re using it sort of thing. And so we thought, “Gosh, if we combine this with being free, that’s we think a really winning combination for kind of a very organic viral adoption of your product.” And so we said, “Gsh, we’re going to invest just everything in that. We’re not going to spend anything on marketing.” In fact, we just hired our first marketing people a few months ago, and we’re almost five years into this thing. And it has worked out. We put a lot of effort into customer delight and experience and great customer support. And you combine that with a product that’s great, but also free and is in your meetings. And so it’s really taken off.
Adrian Tennant: Well, today I understand that about 70% of your signups do come from word-of-mouth referrals. What specific strategies have you implemented to encourage this viral growth?
Richard White: I think, yeah, I think in some ways the strategy really was make sure we delight customers at every turn. And think about, we will send them things, like if we notice an issue before they do, we’ll send them an outreach email. We will send them swag. We’ve let users invest in the company. We invested really early in having really good customer support, which most free products don’t. Yes, we just… I think even early on, we used to pay customers just to give us their feedback in their first meeting with Fathom. So we just were very customer-obsessed about like, this is not sufficient for you just to like Fathom. We want you after your first experience or two to be like, to love the product, to be blown away. And that’s one of the nice parts of AI, right? AI feels magical. So that’s at least a tailwind on our back. But we want you to feel blown away because I think that’s the only way you get true word of mouth. You don’t get word of mouth from product people like, right? I see products they absolutely love and find transformational. And I knew this product was transformational for how I worked. I was confident it would be transformational for other people. I just want to make sure we had everything else around that. So great support, great service, great outreach and great community engagement.
Adrian Tennant: Well, as you mentioned, you’ve only recently hired your first VP of marketing after, what was it, almost five years in business? And I think you’ve raised something like $25 million. What made this the right time to incorporate more traditional marketing experience?
Richard White: Yeah, I think marketing is super important. As I said in the beginning, I think you really only need one channel. And then at some point, you get to this point where you’re like, “Okay, now we’re big enough that we should add another channel.” Maybe they won’t become the majority, they won’t eclipse that 70% from organic, but if they can add another 10%, that’s super valuable once the machine is up and running and working. But in general, I just think of marketing as rocket fuel. If you put it into a rocket, it makes it go faster, further. But if you pour it into something that’s steamy on the launchpad, you have a chance that things are going to blow up. I’ve seen examples where people pour a lot of money into marketing pre-product-market fit. In some ways, it sometimes makes things worse because now you’re burning a ton of money when you really haven’t solved the core thing. We worked on Fathom for a year. At the end of the first year, we only had 50 active users. And that still, though, was good enough for me. I was like, “Cool, that’s the milestone.” We didn’t need 5,000. I need 50 people that use it day in and day out. And so I think a lot of people jump to user acquisition way too early instead of spending a lot longer time just with a small group of people and iterating your product until it is something that is lovable and referable and something people want to tell their friends about.
Adrian Tennant: That’s a very counterintuitive approach. I think most founders just want to reach as many people as they can as quickly as they can, right? And then figure it out once they’ve got active subscribers.
Richard White: Yeah, I think that’s true. The other thing is I think people try to do a lot of things at once. They try to figure out acquisition and is it a sticky product, and how much are you going to pay for it? I think that’s hard. We did that one step at a time. We actually didn’t even charge anyone until two-and-a-half, three years in because we just want to stay really focused on building a great core experience first.
Adrian Tennant: That’s great. Well, let’s talk about your business model. Fathom today offers a free version for individual users. Rich, what was the thinking behind this strategy, and how does it support your ultimate growth and monetization goals?
Richard White: Yeah, I think the other nice thing that got me really excited about this company when we were starting it was this business model where there really are two people that care about the meetings you’re in, right? One is you, the person on there is supposed to take notes, remember how this thing works. But there’s other part where your manager is probably interested in like If you’re in sales, customer conversations you’re having, or prospect conversations, same thing for customer success. Even if you’re in engineering, maybe your internal standups and stuff like that, people are interested in. So there’s this nice model where we knew eventually there was a manager use case. And we saw this with some existing incumbent solutions, specifically ones for sales, where there was a value as a product to the manager to help them understand what’s happening without having to sit in a bunch of meetings. And we said, “Gosh, that’s the person that’s going to pull out the credit card one day.” So we don’t need to actually charge the individual to try and take notes. All we want from that individual is to use the product, love it. And by using the product, they kind of spread it in their org to other companies. And so it made this really clean business model in my mind, where you keep a separation of church and state, if you will. On one side, it’s all about customer love, and we give you an amazing product for free, and you’re going to tell your friends. On the other side, great, once we know we get a certain kind of groundswell of usage at your company, there’s going to be a natural kind of movement to, hey, I want to standardize my use of Fathom across my sales team, my CS team, my marketing team. And that’s the point where it’s like, great, company can pull out its company credit card instead of you pulling out your personal credit card. And so I think that’s worked really well. And I mean, in the beginning, it almost worked too well. We had all these people saying, like, how can this possibly be free? Because I think over the last 10 years, there’s a lot of companies that said things were free, and they found all sorts of tricky ways to get you to upgrade, or it really wasn’t. They were selling your data. And so if you go to our website, we actually have this whole little pop-up. It’s like, “How is this free?” And it actually explains our business model to people, because I think people were so kind of incredulous that it’s too good to be true sort of thing. But it works, and it’s been great.
Adrian Tennant: Well, for marketing leaders looking to implement AI tools into their workflow, what key considerations should they keep in mind when evaluating solutions like Fathom?
Richard White: I think the hardest thing about both building and evaluating products in the AI age is it’s so easy to get the AI to say something. It’s really hard to get to say the quote-unquote “right” thing. We have a whole team that spends a lot of time testing subtle variations and LLM models we use, the prompts we use to generate them, the pipeline we use to generate output. And so, I think when we see people do bake-offs between other tools or just when we evaluate AI tools, we spend a lot of time not just like, does the thing work? You know, we’re used to software. It’s okay. Something showed up on my screen. Great. It must be working. No, no. Now we have to spend a lot of time actually evaluating the quality of the output of these tools. And so, I think that’s again, I think that’s something we’ve invested a lot in, but I also think it’s something not a lot of companies have that DNA. A lot of companies, especially more incumbents, they’re just like, “Oh, we got AI products. We shipped this AI feature.” And they tend to be very lackluster because they don’t have this DNA to rigorously test this and find out, like, “Oh yeah, that output is technically right, but it’s too verbose. That output’s too concise. It’s concise, but it’s not accurate enough. And so it’s weird.” It’s become kind of this art form. And I think the smaller startups tend to do a little better at it, and folks like ourselves who really invest a lot in it. So my number one thing would be like, test the output of these things, not just it spits something out, because it’s really easy to get to spit something out, really hard to get to spit out the right things.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Richard White, founder and CEO of Fathom, an AI-powered meeting assistant that works across multiple video conferencing platforms. Well, for our audience of brand marketers and advertising professionals, could you walk us through some specific use cases that demonstrate how they might benefit from using Fathom in their day-to-day work?
Richard White: So there’s probably two angles to this, right? One is I think anyone who’s on a bunch of meeting, and everyone you just mentioned is that, right? Benefits, I think, from having Fathom, it’s kind of a second brain. You don’t feel like to be switched on the entire time. You can always refer back to things. I think also, especially if you’re meeting with customers or prospects, you’re doing any kind of that kind of research, super valuable because you can then show other people in your org kind of your supporting evidence, if you will. But where I think I see the most value for folks like that is when you do have a teamwork space set up, and you can then mine all the conversations that are happening across your sales team, across your customer success team, across your support team. We see a couple different things. One is you can start setting up awards where you can start hearing about, “Oh, hey, any time competitors get mentioned by a prospect, I want to hear that conversation.” You can start taking some of the relevant transcripts out of Fathom, putting them into an LLM, maybe NotebookLM, and using that to kind of hone your messaging. I’ve also seen folks use it in a totally different angle. Like we take a lot of my meetings, all hands, sometimes shows like this. And we plug that into LM and we get out like interesting LinkedIn content that we can come up with. Right. We’re like mining our all hands and just internal meetings for that. So there’s a, I think a lot of different ways you can use this once you realize like, Oh, I can now have almost omnipotent access to customer conversations at my company.
Adrian Tennant: Rich, with so many AI note-taking tools now available, including those built into the video conferencing platforms themselves, how does Fathom differentiate itself and stay ahead of the competition?
Richard White: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, we always knew that once our hypotheses became true, AI was good, the transcription was free, there was gonna be a lot of folks entering the space, right? And so that’s why it was important for us to get ahead of that, so we could build what we think is the most reliable and robust way to basically record these meetings, transcribe them. But also, again, like I said, we spent a lot of effort into testing summaries and making sure the notes you get out of Fathom are better than any other system out there. So I think when you combine, kind of like best in class output with the most robust free version out there, right? Majority of our users are on free, and we’re totally happy with that. And then you combine that with being cross-platform, which again, I think most of us are cross-platform in our daily lives. So we find that those three things are a pretty winning combination.
Adrian Tennant: Got it. Rich, how has being a fully remote company influenced your product development and company culture?
Richard White: Yeah, I did a remote company 10-15 years ago before it was cool. And then my last company, we had two offices and I spent most of my life flying between those two offices. And so, when we started Fathom, one, we started during the pandemic. So, we kind of were like, it was default remote at that point. But we always really intended to be a remote company. In terms of culture, I think we value actually work-life integration, as opposed to separation. We don’t want you to just like come to the office and then like that show severance, I actually watch it, but leave your brain behind at work during the day, right? I think one of the advantages startups have is you get really smart people, really senior folks, you remove their commute time and you let them kind of anytime pop back in and what they have an idea, commit it to the code base. I think that’s super, super valuable. And obviously given what we’re doing, right? We’re building tools for video conferencing meetings, helps it remote, right? Because every meeting we have is that. And so we really get to kind of dog food, our own product pretty well. There are some challenges to it. I think in this day and age, actually the biggest benefit is that so few companies are committed to being fully remote. And through the pandemic, a lot of great talent got exposure to working remotely and loved it. They love not having that commute. They love being able to move to a venue with an area with a lower cost of living. And now you see these big companies really struggle with how to manage this, because I do think remote gets much harder at scale, right? We’re about 75 people today. But I think in this phase we’re at, it’s a huge advantage in the talent market, really more than anything, because we can say, you don’t need to leave. You don’t need to move back to some major city that’s really expensive. You don’t need to commute an hour through traffic every day. And there’s just so much efficiency gains to be had from that. And there’s a lot of great people now that, again, got a taste of that and want more in an era where everyone’s swinging back to RTO.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve referenced your previous ventures a couple of times. I’m curious, based on your experience with both UserVoice and now Fathom, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are developing products for the B2B space but want to achieve the kind of organic growth typically associated with consumer products?
Richard White: I mean, this is where I think it’s helpful to, again, have some hypotheses early on, so you’re building to where the world is going, not where it is today. And I think especially around marketing channels, I think a lot of founders look at the big companies they want to become, and they see them doing everything. They’re doing social, they’re doing content, they’re doing SEM, SEO, right? GEO, they’re doing all the things, they’re doing the events, blah, blah. And not realizing that, like I said, one, you don’t need that many people to get started, right? You don’t need to immediately figure out how you’re going to get to 10 million. You should have a hypothesis about how you’re going to get there. But you really should be like, great, take it one step at a time. I need to find 50 people that love this product and use it day in, day out, or week in, week out. Great. Once I get that, now I need to find 500 people. Great, now I need to get to 5,000. And each step, you’re going to need a probably different working channel. And so I think you should have a hypothesis around how you’re going to get to each step. You don’t want to be flat-footed. And you don’t want an answer where the answer is, oh, we’re going to do a mix of five of these things. It has to be. It’s not a multi-select. It’s a single-select. And so I think if you can answer a question credibly around how you’re going to get from, on a team of 50 users, you should just get that through your network. You’re going to hustle. You’re going to whatever to get those. But 50 to 500. How are you going to do it? Oh, you’re probably going to do some cool app mods, right? Okay, now you’re probably going to need some inbound channel or something scalable. But I think you just need to know, pick one channel, all the great companies generally start with one, and then know that that’s going to change each one of these kind of set levels, set function jumps in users. But don’t feel like you’re not going to become a billion user company overnight. So take it one step at a time.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve mentioned building superfans rather than just users. How do you cultivate this sort of deeper level of engagement?
Richard White: One is trying to involve the folks. I actually hate the word ‘users,’ right? So it’s like, I try to avoid the people that use our product as much as possible. Like I said, I think doing things that build these feedback loops with them, I think is super important, right? So. We have some, you know, we do some in-app surveys. And after you give us a really high score, you actually get an outreach for me, right? Thanking you. And you know, if you get a really low score, you get outreach from some of my team that wants to pay you 20 bucks to get on a call and walk us through where we went wrong sort of thing. And so I think more than anything, it’s a, one is probably a cultural thing, just like at the outset setting that we, our bar is 10 out of 10. Our bar is customer love. Our bar is not, “Yeah, this is fine. It’s good enough.” And then making sure that’s reflected in all of who you hire, how you do things with customer support. But then I think the key thing is building in… And you don’t have to have a ton of them, but building in enough of these feedback loops where you’re giving users a chance to reach out to you. That’s very natural. Or you’re hitting them at the right moments. “Oh, you should finish your first call with Fathom. We’ll pay you 50 bucks to tell us how it went, right?” I mentioned that one, right? Or like I said, “You didn’t love your first experience, great, like what’s your phone call?” Explain that too. So I think just getting in the rhythm of doing that regularly is so, so helpful.
Adrian Tennant: Well, looking ahead, Rich, how do you see AI-powered meeting tools evolving? And what’s next for Fathom?
Richard White: Yeah, what’s really excited about, it feels like we’re definitely surfing on the wave, right? And as I mentioned with our hypotheses, we’re out in the water well before the wave kind of showed up, and now it’s kind of fun to be riding it. And what’s cool is that like every six to nine months, these things are improving so much, it unlocks a whole new set of features we can build. So really about a year ago, year and a half ago was when you really get to a point where the AI can write better notes on an individual meeting than you can, right? It’s kind of like GPT-4 quality. Now we’re at a place where what we’re able to do is we now have an AI that watches your meeting and can answer any question about it. So you can go, “Do we talk about salaries in this recruiting conversation?” Or “What were the top three things?” You can interrogate almost the meeting itself, right? And it does a really good job. That’s a feature we have called ‘Ask Fathom.’ And now what’s next is we’re starting to be able to do both of those things now for a much larger set of meetings. We’ve had 30 meetings with this customer. “What’s a high-level summary of what we’ve discussed?” that’s giving me that kind of AI interface where I can interrogate it too about, “was there any features that came up? Do we offer them discounts?” It’s not just looking at one meeting, it’s looking at hours of meetings. And I think we’re seeing that expand now where we can even access and cross your entire kind of meeting space. So we’re prototyping some stuff now in beta, where the AI understands emotion, it understands intent, and I can just say things like, “Hey, anytime someone had a really negative reaction or pricing, can you just send me that, put that clip in my inbox or put it in the Slack channel? Anytime there’s a product blocker in a sales call, let’s know about that too. There’s a heated debate between my engineers on an engineering stand-up. I want to know about that.” So that’s one side of what’s coming. The other side is expanding that ChatGPT for your meetings. Even further, we did a prototype the other day where we asked Fathom, “Hey, tell me the history of transcription engines at Fathom.” And it went through four years of meetings. all-hands engineering meetings and wrote me like a five-page document about here’s exactly everything we’ve done and how it worked. And when you think about how challenging it is to document things in a company and knowledge management is a whole space unto itself, this idea that we’ll just go to have meetings and have great discussions and we don’t have post-meeting work, we don’t have to write notes anymore, we don’t have to document our action items, we don’t have to fill in our CRM, we don’t have to update our Asana, all this stuff gets done for us. And oh, by the way, now we get this omnipotent knowledge management tool for free just by, again, having conversations with our colleagues. I think it’s going to be mind-blowing. I think it’s going to change meetings from something we all loathe to something that’s like, no, they’re great again because we got rid of all the work we don’t like. We don’t like all the extra work. And we don’t like the fact that all this great stuff happens and gets lost in the ether afterwards. The future here is like, you’re just going to speak stuff into existence in your meetings. And you’re also going to be aware of meetings you weren’t even in. You’re going to have an unprecedented level of knowledge across your organization. Which I think is really exciting, because that’s the problem with meetings. They’re the primary way we disseminate knowledge in organizations. But they historically only worked if everyone was in attendance. And so it was really fragmented. Now, great. Tim, for marketing, doesn’t have to be on any of these meetings to know the things he needs to know about stuff that’s relevant to his projects, right? And so, anyways, that world gets me, as you can tell, super excited.
Adrian Tennant: Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s interesting to meet somebody who’s excited about meetings, but that’s what this podcast is about. Great conversation. Rich, if listeners are interested in trying Fathom, what’s the best way to get started?
Richard White: Yeah, just go to fathom.video and you’ll click the sign up button. You can be set up and honestly, if you’ve got a meeting coming up in five minutes, you can have it ready for then. So it’s a pretty quick setup process. So yeah, check it out and let me know what you think. You can find me on LinkedIn.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Rich, thank you very much for being my guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Richard White: Thank you for having me.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Richard White, founder and CEO of Fathom. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com, just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Marketing as Rocket Fuel
00:17: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS
00:39: The Challenge of Meeting Management
01:22: Guest Introduction: Richard White
02:24: Richard’s Background and Journey
03:50: Inspiration Behind Fathom
05:25: Core Hypotheses for Fathom
07:08: Cross-Platform Compatibility
08:11: Unconventional Marketing Approach
09:37: Strategies for Viral Growth
11:10: Timing for Traditional Marketing
12:29: Counterintuitive Growth Strategies
13:01: Fathom’s Free Business Model
15:01: Key Considerations for AI Tools
17:35: Use Cases for Brand Marketers
19:18: Differentiating Fathom from Competitors
20:21: Impact of Remote Work on Culture
22:05: Advice for B2B Entrepreneurs
24:06: Cultivating Superfans
25:30: Future of AI-Powered Meeting Tools
28:49: Getting Started with Fathom
