The SaaS Podcast

Every week, one founder breaks down how they grew: the numbers, the mistakes, and what they'd do differently.

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Christian Lund, Templafy

He Closed a Global Enterprise Deal With No Product

Christian Lund had spent years running an on-premise document business before he saw the cloud shift coming. Rather than retrofit the old product, he and his co-founder spun out Templafy and started over from scratch, with two engineers and no product to sell. What they sold instead was a point of view. Christian identified roughly 800 people worldwide who he thought were mature enough to have the conversation, targeted them with specific messaging, and used those conversations to get in front of enterprises long before there was software to demo. Templafy raised its first funding round close to twelve months before the product existed. That approach landed one of the Big Four accounting firms as the first customer. But the deal nearly went the way most enterprise deals go, with a small pilot for ten people and no defined outcome. Christian pushed back, not by refusing, but by attaching conditions: agree exactly what we are proving, and agree what happens if we prove it. When some prospects later opened the decision up to competing vendors, Templafy had effectively written the evaluation criteria. Templafy now runs at eight figures in revenue with a couple of hundred people. Christian is putting the business through the same reset again for AI, rebuilding the technology foundation from scratch over two and a half years. He is candid that the messaging got ahead of the market, and that being eighty percent ahead instead of fifteen percent cost the company conversations it needed.

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Omer Khan

Host

I started this podcast in 2014 because the founder stories I heard everywhere else were too polished. I wanted the real version: what broke, what surprised them, and what they'd do differently if they started again today.

491+ episodes later, the pattern is hard to miss. The tactics change every couple of years. The principles underneath don't: how founders find their first customers, charge what they're worth, and build something people actually need.

Right now, every conversation eventually turns to AI. Some guests are watching their moats erode. Others are growing faster than ever with teams of two or three. The difference is the calls they're making on pricing, product, and what to build next.

I run my own business almost entirely on AI workflows, so I'm asking these questions from inside the same shift. Not from the sidelines.

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The patterns across 491+ founder interviews. What's working now, which bets are paying off, and the founders worth your time.

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Girish Redekar, Sprinto

3 Years of Nothing. Then Product-Market Fit Hit Twice.

Girish Redekar is the co-founder and CEO of Sprinto, an autonomous compliance platform that helps companies prove they're handling data securely. Before Sprinto, Girish and his co-founder spent two to three years trying to build their first startup. They had no programming background, so they taught themselves to code at 28 because they couldn't afford to hire developers. The first few ideas went nowhere. A job search engine. A resume matching tool. None of them got traction. Then they built RecruiterBox, a simple CRM for hiring. It launched before Stripe even existed, so their payment system was absurd. Customers had to click a PayPal link, swipe their card, and get credits that depleted daily. When the credits ran out, they'd go back to PayPal and swipe again. It was terrible. But customers kept doing it anyway. That was the clearest signal of finding product-market fit Girish had ever seen - not from analytics or feedback forms, but from watching people jump through hoops to keep paying. They bootstrapped RecruiterBox to over 2,500 customers and single-digit millions in ARR. Then they sold it. Not because it was failing, but because it got too comfortable. They felt like they were the bottleneck, and the business would grow faster in someone else's hands. The second time around, Girish took a completely different approach to finding product-market fit. He'd experienced the pain of SOC 2 compliance firsthand at RecruiterBox, spending months and tens of thousands of dollars on consultants. So when he started Sprinto, he made a rule - no code until the idea was validated. He used The Mom Test framework, ran 15-20 customer interviews, and then paid auditors to audit his non-existent company. Ten times. Each audit, he built a little more product behind the scenes. By the tenth, he knew exactly what to build and had confirmed the consulting service could actually become software. For go-to-market, Girish tried 20 different channels. Seventeen failed. The three that worked were founder communities (Slack groups, WhatsApp groups), VC portfolio programs with startup discounts, and Google (paid + SEO). His framework - harvest existing demand rather than create new demand - helped him focus on places where people were already looking for solutions. Now AI is changing the game from three directions at once. It's changing Sprinto's product, it's changing how customers operate internally, and it's creating new security threats from the outside. The problems that didn't exist two years ago are now driving a whole new wave of demand. Today, Sprinto generates eight-figure ARR with over 3,000 customers across 75 countries. The team has grown to 350 people and they've raised $32 million.