Responna

Responna is the company co-founded by Farzad Rashidi and discussed in He demoted his SaaS to sell a service and 4x’d revenue in 12 months. It began as an internal Visme outreach tool for finding websites, backlinks, collaborations, and mentions, then became a standalone SaaS product in 2019.

In the episode, Responna is now framed less as a self-serve outreach tool and more as a done-for-you AI Visibility Service. The company helps brands appear in AI-generated answers by getting them mentioned in third-party publisher pages that systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini may cite.

Key Claims

• The SaaS tool reached a few hundred thousand dollars in ARR but plateaued because customers lacked execution capacity.
• A customer conversation exposed a pricing mismatch: the buyer negotiated software fees but was willing to pay much more for delivered outcomes.
• Responna’s service began manually, then became more software-backed through client ordering, publisher relationships, payment, and delivery systems.
• The company reports building roughly 2,500 brand mentions in one month and using repeat volume to negotiate better publisher access.
• Its defensibility is not only product UI; it includes Publisher Relationship Moat, workflow software, AI-assisted operations, and demand aggregation.

Connections

• Farzad Rashidi - co-founder and episode guest.
• Visme - origin of the internal tool.
• The SaaS Podcast - show where the pivot is discussed.
• AI Visibility Service, Lookalike Publisher Outreach, and Publisher Relationship Moat - operating model.
• Service As Software, Service Productization, Result As A Service, and Outcome-Based AI Pricing - business-model concepts the company illustrates.
• Generative Engine Optimization, AI Discovery SEO, and AI Search Analytics - adjacent AI-search and discovery concepts.