Getting Your First SaaS Customers

Nate Baker, Qualia

How to Find Your First Customers by Living in Their Basement

Nate Baker is the co-founder and CEO of Qualia, a software platform for title companies that helps coordinate the complex process of buying a home. Today, Qualia generates over $100 million in ARR with a team of 600 and has raised more than $200 million. In 2015, Nate was 21 years old and decided to build software for the real estate industry. He had no experience in that space. He didn't talk to any customers. He just did some research and decided that was the thing he was going to do. Then he started building. Still without talking to anyone. Nate admits this was a mistake. He and his co-founders got key things wrong about how the business would work. They wasted months building things they eventually threw away. It wasn't until they found their first customer that they started making real progress. Their first customer was Barry Feingold, a state senator in Massachusetts who also ran a real estate law firm. Barry believed in the vision, taught them the industry, made introductions, and helped them understand what actually mattered. The relationship was unconventional: Nate and the first 25 employees rotated through living in Barry's basement. New hires would get a call Sunday night: "Your onboarding is in Andover. You're going to live in Barry's basement for two weeks. He's going to teach you title. You have to tutor his kids in math." But then Barry's existing software vendor found out he was working with Qualia and shut off his access overnight. Nate and his team didn't even have the core features built yet. They had to figure it out fast. It became the most productive month in company history. Barry didn't just become a customer—he introduced Qualia to his competitors. Those network-based relationships became the foundation for the first 10 customers. Nate learned that your first customers must come from your network, not cold outreach. In this episode, you'll learn: How to find your first customers through network-based selling instead of cold outreach The multi-year upfront contract strategy that brings cash forward and locks in commitment Why geographic focus beats national expansion in the early days How to embed yourself with customers to truly understand the problem When to hire your first sales leader and how fast to scale

Richard Hollingsworth, Fyxer

Agency to AI SaaS: Scaling from $1M to $18M ARR in 9 Months

Richard Hollingsworth is the Co-founder and CEO of Fyxer, an AI-powered email assistant that predicts and drafts emails for busy professionals. Richard and his brother Archie grew up on a farm, but they knew the slow pace of agricultural life wasn't for them. They saw tech as the opposite environment—fast feedback loops, results within your control. They started by building the UK's largest executive assistant agency, bootstrapping it to $5M in revenue. But from day one, they had a bigger vision: turning the service into software. For years, they tried to build "tech-enabled" solutions, but nothing worked to pull the price down enough for the mass market. Then GPT-3 launched. It was the breakthrough they'd been waiting for. Unlike other AI SaaS startups starting from scratch, Fyxer had a secret weapon: six years of detailed logs from human assistants. They knew exactly how an EA organizes an inbox because they had thousands of hours of data on it. They used this proprietary data to train their AI models, ensuring their product was more accurate than a generic LLM wrapper. The growth was explosive. They started the year with $1M ARR and a team of four. Within 9 months, they hit $18M ARR. They moved to San Francisco, joined an AI residency, and shifted their focus from "Tech Bros" to "Professional Services"—real estate brokers, consultants, recruiters—people who actually drown in email. One of their biggest wins came from a single signup via a Facebook ad. That user turned out to be the CEO of a massive real estate brokerage. Within 7 days, Richard's brother Archie flew to Seattle, met the CEO at his lake house, and closed a $1.2M deal to roll Fyxer out to 5,000 employees.

Stefan Bader, Cello

First Customers From a Notion Page and Python Scripts

Stefan Bader is the co-founder and CEO of Cello, an all-in-one referral platform that helps SaaS companies reward their users for bringing in new customers. Back when Stefan was Chief Revenue Officer at a payment processing company, he noticed something odd. His users were bringing in tons of new customers, but there was no way to reward them. Every tool out there was for affiliates and influencers. Stefan saw the opportunity. And in 2022, he quit his job and started Cello. But building it turned out to be way harder than he'd imagined. Paying individual users meant navigating compliance laws in dozens of countries, international banking regulations, and tax requirements that no one had mapped out before. And his MVP was embarrassingly basic. Customers got their analytics through shared Notion pages. No login portal. No dashboard. Just Stefan's team running Python scripts and configuring everything manually behind the scenes. "This is not a product," one early customer told him. But Stefan stayed focused on what mattered - could it actually generate referrals? The answer was yes. He also made pricing dead simple - pay nothing until you make money from referrals. However, most SaaS companies didn't even know they needed this product. Stefan had to educate every prospect about why user referrals were different from affiliate programs, and why they were leaving money on the table. As early customers started seeing results, word spread. But the real breakthrough came from something tiny - a "powered by Cello" link in their widget. As customers grew, millions of their users saw it. That little link became their biggest growth driver. Today, Cello generates $2.5M in ARR, powers referral programs for companies like Miro and Typeform, and reaches over 7 million users each month.

Jonathan Festejo, Salesbricks

First Customers: Why Selling to Enterprise Almost Killed This SaaS

Jonathan Festejo is the CEO and co-founder of Salesbricks, a deal-closing platform that handles quoting, billing, and subscriptions for SaaS companies. Before Salesbricks, Jonathan ran RevOps for multiple unicorns. He knew the pain of "Quote-to-Cash" intimately. But when he started his own company, he made a classic mistake: he built for the Enterprise first. He spent nearly two years over-engineering a robust platform designed to replace Salesforce CPQ. But when he tried to sell it, he hit a wall. Enterprise buyers had 3-month sales cycles, complex approval chains, and often decided to "do nothing" because switching was too risky. The breakthrough came when he pivoted down-market. He realized that early-stage founders ($500K-$2M ARR) were the ones with the most urgent pain. They were hacking together Stripe and spreadsheets late at night and were desperate for a solution. Jonathan used these 3 strategies to find his first customers and reach $1M ARR: 1. Targeted founders who were personally doing billing at night - they felt the pain and could make instant buying decisions 2. Built a "Powered By Salesbricks" button into every contract sent, turning each transaction into a high-intent lead channel 3. Leveraged founder-to-founder referrals from his network, converting warm intros into paying customers By shifting his focus to founders, sales cycles dropped to 5 days. The product roadmap started writing itself based on real user feedback, and Salesbricks hit $1M ARR with over 100 customers.

Joseph Lee, Supademo

First Customers: How Free Reddit Demos Built a 7-Figure SaaS

Joseph Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Supademo, an AI-powered platform that helps you create interactive demos for onboarding, sales, and product education. In 2020, Joseph was running Freshline, a B2B seafood marketplace he'd grown to $3M in revenue with a 13-person team. But when the pandemic hit, the business lost 95% of its revenue almost overnight. He and his team tried several new approaches and eventually pivoted to a white-labeled platform for food distributors that helped keep the company alive. In 2023, Joseph started exploring new ideas. He kept coming back to a problem he'd struggled with for years: product videos didn't work, and most customers didn't watch them or understand their value. But when he could get someone on a live screen-sharing session and walk them through the product, they instantly got it. The problem was, he couldn't scale that. That insight sparked the idea for Supademo. But getting his first customers to pay was tough. His first target market - early-stage founders - liked the concept, but few became paying customers. Cold outreach went nowhere. Product-led growth stalled. And for a while, nothing really worked. So Joseph went back to basics. He created free demos for strangers on Reddit, replied to product update emails with personalized Supademos, and embedded interactive demos in helpful how-to content. Joseph Lee used three core strategies to land Supademo's first customers and reach $1M ARR: Created free interactive demos for other founders on Reddit, generating thousands of signups without spending on ads Responded to product update emails from SaaS companies with personalized Supademos of their new features Built ungated free tools that drive 50%+ of traffic by letting users experience the product before signing up

Oscar Rubio, Lodgerin

First Customers: 850 Rejections Before the First Yes

Oscar Rubio is the founder and CEO of Lodgerin, a SaaS platform helping organizations manage housing and relocation services for students and employees moving abroad. For nearly a decade, Oscar bootstrapped a traditional relocation services business, solving complex problems manually for universities and corporations. The business grew steadily, but scaling was impossible since everything depended on people and physical presence. Then COVID hit. Overnight, his entire business collapsed. Mobility stopped, borders closed, and revenue vanished. With no investors and no co-founder, Oscar made a critical decision: pivot from services to software. He spent months in an empty office, taping paper to walls and transforming eight years of operational know-how into digital processes. As a non-technical founder, he taught himself how SaaS products worked, built a small team, and launched a barebones MVP. Then came the hardest part - getting his first customers. Oscar powered through 850 meetings before anyone said yes. He flew from Spain to the US, drove from college to college, knocked on doors without appointments, and slept in cheap motels and his car. Oscar Rubio grew Lodgerin from zero to $1.3M in revenue using three strategies: 1. Validate through years of service delivery before building software 2. Go direct to customers with extreme persistence - 850 meetings to close the first deal 3. Let early customers define the product roadmap by solving their specific problems first Today, Lodgerin serves organizations across Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, the UK, Dubai, and the US, and has raised 400,000 euros to accelerate expansion.

Paul Holder, OnRamp

First Customers: No-Code MVP to 7-Figure B2B SaaS

Paul Holder is the co-founder and CEO of OnRamp, a platform that automates and orchestrates customer onboarding for B2B companies. In 2019, while leading customer success at Troops, Paul and his co-founder Ross kept reflecting on the challenges they'd faced with customer onboarding at their previous companies. They spent several months validating their idea by interviewing customer success leaders to ensure the problems they saw weren't unique to their experience. Both co-founders were non-technical, but that didn't stop them. They learned to use Bubble, a no-code platform, and although their MVP was far from perfect, they still managed to get their first customers - 15 paying companies - using it. Their customers didn't even know the product ran on Bubble. After raising a pre-seed round, they hired their first engineer and began transitioning from their Bubble prototype to a custom-built solution. Initially focusing on startups, they discovered their solution was even more valuable for larger organizations where small efficiency improvements could drive million-dollar impacts. Paul used three strategies to find first customers and grow OnRamp to 7-figure ARR: 1. Pounding personal networks for warm intros - every meeting led to another referral 2. Shifting paid spend from Google Ads (which attracted non-ICP leads) to LinkedIn where their buyers actually live 3. Deploying AEs with a "bear hug" approach combining LinkedIn content, Dripify connections, and strategic calling The journey wasn't without significant challenges. They struggled with trying to build too many features simultaneously instead of going deep on one wedge. Cold email outreach became increasingly ineffective. And making the tough decision to move upmarket meant potentially losing SMB customers. Today, OnRamp serves nearly 100 customers, has raised over $14 million in funding, and generates 7-figure ARR with a team of 25 people.

Tom Dunlop, Summize

How to Find Your First Customers by Narrowing Focus

Tom Dunlop is co-founder and CEO of Summize, a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform that helps companies create, review, and manage contracts. In 2019, Tom was working as an in-house lawyer for a tech company. During an acquisition, he had to manually review 500 contracts - a painful task that got worse when he had to repeat the entire process just to check one additional clause. This frustrating experience led him to partner with a software engineer to build a prototype that could automatically create contract summaries. After getting positive feedback from potential customers, they raised 250K to build the product. Then COVID hit right as they were launching. But what seemed like terrible timing became an opportunity. Companies scrambled to understand their contract obligations during the crisis, and Summize found its first customers among catering and events businesses that needed to understand cancellation clauses overnight. Still, the path to repeatable growth was unclear. Tom spent the next 18 months chasing any customer he could find - law firms, in-house legal teams, companies of all sizes. He fell into the "happy ears" trap, where positive feedback felt like validation but never turned into deals. The breakthrough came when Summize narrowed its focus to in-house legal teams at mid-market companies and built the product to work inside tools people already used daily - Teams, Slack, Outlook, Salesforce. Tom Dunlop grew Summize to late 7-figure ARR with 100%+ year-over-year growth by focusing on a narrow ICP and building outbound sales as the primary growth engine. The company has raised $10 million and serves customers like Revolut, Rothschild, and Miami Heat. Today, Summize is approaching 8-figure ARR with dual headquarters in Manchester and Boston.

Markus Stahlberg, N.Rich

Getting First Customers When Nobody Understands Your Product

Markus Stahlberg is the co-founder and CEO of N.Rich, an ABM platform helping B2B companies target and win high-value customers more efficiently. In 2015, Markus and his co-founder spotted an opportunity while running their B2B publishing business and started building a new marketing platform. But finding their first customers was far from easy. It took nearly a year to get the first 10 customers, and they struggled with massive churn as buyers expected instant leads rather than understanding that ABM requires 6-18 months of relationship building. After years of bootstrapping and slowly building their product, they hit their first million in ARR and raised a Series A round of $4 million in 2020. But a series of missteps toward rapid growth created major challenges. They hired 150 SDRs in the Philippines with no management structure, burning through most of their funding in months. Then tragedy struck. Markus's co-founder was diagnosed with cancer and passed away a year later, leaving Markus to run the company alone with little runway left. Rather than give up, Markus rebuilt the company from scratch. He focused on three things: building a proper in-house team, getting serious about cash flow management, and refining their ICP using "dark attributes" - proxy signals like LinkedIn ad library data that reveal which companies are high ad spenders and therefore ideal first customers for an ABM platform. Markus Stahlberg grew N.Rich from churning first customers to a profitable business generating $5-10M ARR with a team of 55 people across 25 countries. His approach to finding the right first customers through quarterly ICP iterations and warm outbound with 220% sales commissions turned a struggling startup into a Gartner-recognized challenger.

Jenn Knight, AgentSync

AgentSync: From $5K Customer to SaaS Unicorn in 3 Years – with Jenn Knight [426]

Jenn Knight is the co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, a company modernizing how insurance companies handle agent licensing, compliance, and onboarding. In 2018, Jenn was working at Dropbox while her co-founder (and now husband) Niji was at Zenefits. He saw firsthand how insurance companies were struggling to keep their agents licensed and compliant. No one had figured out a good solution. Niji became so convinced there was an opportunity that he quit his job to work on the idea from their kitchen, while Jenn kept her day job at Dropbox and built the product evenings and weekends. As tech outsiders trying to break into the insurance industry, they got a lot of pushback. People kept telling them this wasn't even a real problem. After months of building the product and talking to potential customers, they finally landed their first customer who paid $5,000 a year for their solution. But everything changed after a product demo when insurance professionals started listing all the ways AgentSync could make their lives easier. Their excitement showed the co-founders they were onto something big. In late 2019, the couple took a huge leap of faith. When they found out Jenn was pregnant, she quit her job at Dropbox. They decided to move to Denver, where they'd both work on AgentSync full-time without any funding lined up. The timing seemed terrible. The pandemic hit just months later, but instead of failing, they thrived. They raised their seed round and grew to 35 employees by the end of 2020, then to over 100 the following year. Today, AgentSync has achieved unicorn status, pulls in eight-figure revenue, has over 250 customers, and employs more than 200 people.

Tony Jamous, Oyster

Oyster: From Wizard of Oz MVP to 8-Figure Global HR SaaS – with Tony Jamous [422]

Tony Jamous is the co-founder and CEO of Oyster, a platform that makes it easy for companies to hire and pay people anywhere in the world. Born in Lebanon, Tony had to leave his home country as a teenager and move to France for better opportunities. He didn't know it then, but this experience would shape his entire future. After studying computer science, Tony started his first company, Nexmo, a cloud communications platform. He grew it from zero to $100M in annual revenue in just 5 years before being acquired by Vonage. Most founders might have taken it easy after that kind of exit. Not Tony. At Nexmo, he had built teams across 45 countries and saw how hard it was to hire people internationally. So after taking some time off, he started exploring solutions. He found a huge market for international hiring that nobody had modernized yet. The whole industry ran on paperwork and manual processes and Tony saw a chance to change that with software. He launched Oyster in January 2020. Two months later, when the pandemic forced companies to go remote, global hiring became essential and demand for Oyster surged overnight. But there was a problem – the product wasn't ready for so many customers. Instead of turning people away, Tony and his team got creative. They built a simple website where customers could submit their requests. Behind the scenes, real people did all the work manually. The approach worked and allowed them to improve their product. But then came the tech downturn in 2022. Companies started laying off workers and Tony had to shift from rapid growth to efficient scaling. His team found a clever solution which helped them grow by 60% when other tech companies were cutting headcount for the first time ever in 2023. Today, Oyster has over 2,000 customers and 550 employees spread across 70 countries – with no offices anywhere. They're about to hit $100M in ARR.

Palash Soni, Goldcast

First Customers: 8 Months of Failed Cold Emails Before $10M ARR

Palash Soni is the co-founder and CEO of Goldcast, an event marketing platform that helps B2B companies host engaging virtual and hybrid events. In 2020, Palash and his co-founders launched Goldcast to help B2B companies run better virtual events. They started by sending thousands of cold emails, but none of them worked. The team had built their product around a hypothesis about measurability—helping event marketers prove ROI to their CMOs. They sent 200 emails split between trade show organizers and field marketers. Field marketers responded; trade show organizers didn't. But even with interested prospects, nobody would buy. After months of struggling, they realized the problem wasn't their features—it was their UI. Palash had dismissed feedback about the interface as "personal preference," but the extreme pressure of zero traction forced them to listen. They rebuilt the entire UI in five weeks. The breakthrough came when Drift's founder David Cancel saw their platform during an event, liked what he saw, and responded to the third cold email Palash sent. Once Drift ran events on Goldcast, other marketers saw the platform and inbound leads started flowing. But landing first customers was just the beginning. At $5M ARR, they spotted a churn problem and made a bold pivot from events-only to a full video content platform. That bet doubled their win rates in enterprise segments. Today, Goldcast has grown beyond $10 million in ARR with 400 customers including Salesforce, Zuora, and Lattice—proof that persistence through failed outreach, willingness to rebuild, and courage to pivot can turn early struggles into enterprise success.

Jason Radisson, Movo

Movo: Lessons from Growing a SaaS in Tough Industries – with Jason Radisson [409]

Jason Radisson is the founder and CEO of Movo, a mobile-first platform that helps large enterprises manage their frontline workforce more efficiently. Jason's story began in poverty. Raised by a 16-year-old single mother in rural Massachusetts, he worked multiple jobs to pay for school. Despite these challenges, his determination led him to become a Fulbright scholar, attend Harvard for grad school, and land a job at McKinsey. His career spanned telecoms, casinos, e-commerce, and eventually Uber, where he gained valuable insights into the gig economy. In 2015, Jason saw an opportunity to use his operational experience from Uber to solve workforce management problems, which led him to launch Movo. But building the company from scratch wasn't easy. Jason initially bootstrapped the business, running early pilots on a shoestring budget and constantly facing the risk that he wouldn't be able to deliver. Securing early customers was even tougher. Getting into industries that were slow to adopt new technology wasn't easy every sale was a tough win. Jason and his team had to focus on early adopters with urgent needs, constantly tweaking their pitch and product just to gain some traction. As the company grew slowly, new challenges popped up. They had to juggle customer demands while keeping the product flexible. Jason had to balance customization without turning Movo into a bunch of one-off solutions. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It disrupted everything, but at the same time, it created an urgent demand for Movo's solution. Companies everywhere struggled to manage remote and essential workers, and Jason and his team had to adapt quickly to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Today, Movo serves nearly 100 customers with around 700,000 workers on their platform. The company generates multiple 7-figures in ARR and has raised just under $10 million in funding.

Michael Zuercher, Primastic

Prismatic: Unlocking PMF with a Clear Value Proposition – with Michael Zuercher [402]

Michael Zuercher is the co-founder and CEO of Prismatic, an embedded integration platform that helps SaaS companies build faster integrations for their customers. In 2003, Michael founded his first software company, which he ran for 15 years. During that time, he faced significant challenges integrating with other software products. Over the years, his team built over 600 different integrations. In 2019, after selling his first company, Michael co-founded Prismatic with two former colleagues. Their goal was to create an embedded integration platform to help SaaS companies easily connect their products to other software their customers use. The team spent the first 8-9 months validating the idea and building a prototype. One of their biggest challenges in the early days was articulating how their product differed from existing integration platforms. It took the founders about a year to figure out their messaging and how to clearly communicate their unique value proposition to prospective customers. Building a production-ready version of their product also took over a year. During this time, they had to use an early prototype to sell their idea to prospects. Creating a new product category also proved to be a significant challenge. With no established market to tap into, they had to get creative with their growth strategies. Eventually, SEO and paid ads became their go-to growth channels, but getting traction was hard when prospects weren't even aware a solution like theirs existed. The team continually refined its product, messaging, and go-to-market strategies. Their persistence eventually paid off as they gained traction and found a product-market fit. Today, Prismatic is a SaaS business generating multiple seven-figure ARR, serving over 200 customers with a team of 60 people.

Zach Rattner, Yembo

Yembo: From Cold Calls & Rejections to Scaling an AI Startup – with Zach Rattner [400]

Zach Rattner is the co-founder and CTO of Yembo, an AI-powered platform that enables virtual home surveys for the moving and insurance industries. In 2015, while working as a software engineer, Zach noticed that computers were becoming better than humans at identifying objects in images. His wife's experience working at a moving company inspired him to apply this technology to the industry, which struggled with giving accurate quotes and handling logistics due to the complexities involved in each move. However, building an AI-powered product was no easy feat. As introverted engineers, Zach and his co-founder Sid had to force themselves to step out of their comfort zone. They made cold calls, visited moving companies in person, and often faced rejection. In the early days, the founders also handled sales themselves. They attended industry trade shows and conferences to generate leads and build relationships with potential customers. Despite their efforts, the first version of Yembo's product had limitations in its AI capabilities and user interface, which led to some customer churn. The founders realized they needed to focus on finding early adopters willing to work through initial challenges and continuously iterate based on customer feedback. Through their determination and hard work, Yembo gradually gained traction. Today, the company serves customers in about 30 countries, processing hundreds of hours of video daily and generating high seven-figures in annual revenue with a team of 70 people.

Lars Grønnegaard, Dreamdata

Dreamdata: Scaling a SaaS to 7-Figures with Perseverance – with Lars Grønnegaard [395]

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Andrew Guttormsen, Circle

Circle: Scaling a Community Platform from Seed to $19M ARR – with Andrew Guttormsen [393]

Andrew Guttormsen is the co-founder and chief revenue officer at Circle, a platform for creators to build communities and memberships. Andrew and his co-founders spent 5 years at Teachable, where they saw firsthand how creators often struggled to build engaged communities. So after Teachable's acquisition, they saw an opportunity to build a community-first solution that was tailored to the needs of content creators. The plan was to grow slowly, maybe even bootstrapping the business. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, demand for online community tools skyrocketed. The founders raised a small seed round and worked tirelessly to spread the word, engaging with potential customers on social media and building a waitlist of early adopters. Andrew personally did over 1,500 demos in the first 18 months. Their efforts paid off as Circle skyrocketed to the first $1M ARR in just 4 months. But the journey wasn't without challenges. The founders faced a major blow when an influential customer publicly shared his negative experience with Circle and why we moved to a different platform. For Andrew, it felt like a punch in gut. He and the team had to swallow their pride, confront their shortcomings head-on and work overtime to fix them. Also, as they started bringing on enterprise customers, they struggled to adapt their approach to customer success and support. Despite those challenges, the founders kept listening to their customers and quickly improving their product. Fast forward to today, Circle has over 10,000 customers, generates $19 million ARR with a team of about 150 people and they've raised $30 million in funding.

Adam Gavish, DoControl

DoControl: A Founder’s Lessons on Validating & Selling Your SaaS – with Adam Gavish [392]

Adam Gavish is the former co-founder and CEO of DoControl, a SaaS security solution that helps companies protect sensitive data stored in their SaaS applications. In 2020, while working as a product manager at Google, Adam faced the challenge of securely sharing sensitive company data with external partners. The experience made him realize the need for a better way to balance security and productivity. Adam eventually teamed up with a friend to validate their idea. They leveraged their network to connect with 50 security professionals, spending three months interviewing them and digging into their challenges. After building confidence in their idea, the founders traveled to Israel for a week and pitched to 22 VCs. All but one rejected them, but thanks to that one VC, the founders raised a $3 million seed round. With funding secured, the founders formed a small team and collaborated with early design partners to develop an MVP. They also went back to the security professionals they'd interviewed in the hope of landing their first customer. After three months, they reached a point where one company saw enough value to pay $2,000 annually and become DoControl's first paying customer. To grow further, Adam had to take on the role of SDR, even though he had no prior sales experience. He found himself sending hundreds of LinkedIn messages each week, hoping to book customer calls. Despite the challenge of learning sales from scratch, Adam persevered and slowly started to gain traction with customers. But as the company grew, the crowded cybersecurity market made it increasingly difficult for DoControl to communicate its unique value proposition. This became an uphill battle for the founders. However, despite those challenges, the founders have grown DoControl into a multiple 7-figure ARR SaaS company and raised $43M in funding.

Simon Taylor, HYCU

HYCU: Innovating and Standing Out in a Competitive Market – with Simon Taylor [388]

Simon Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of HYCU, a Data Protection as a Service (DPaas) company for on-prem, cloud, and SaaS applications. In 2016, Simon was at a Las Vegas steakhouse when he bumped into Goran, an engineer from his past. They got talking about the state of outdated data protection solutions, an area Goran was working in. Initially, Simon was uninterested in data protection. He found it rather unexciting. But, by the end of the night, the idea of building a modern "Uber for data protection" had sparked his enthusiasm. The duo assembled a team of engineers to design a data protection platform for on-prem, cloud, and SaaS applications, which one engineer had told them was impossible. Eventually, the team overcame the big technical issues. But marketing and sales proved to be incredibly challenging. Early on, Simon had people doing cold calling to generate leads but soon realized this would undermine their brand's perception and trust. Convincing potential customers to take a chance on their fledgling startup instead of established competitors was an uphill battle. And getting their messaging right was also difficult. Simon had to rethink how they were compared to legacy data protection companies by focusing on simplicity instead of technical details. However, taking this totally different approach from the norm made getting traction really tough in those early days. Today, HYCU protects over 4,000 customers across 78 countries. They've grown to 300 employees, generating 8-figures in ARR, and have raised $140 million.

James Evans, Command AI

Command AI: Mastering Cold Emails to Grow a 7-Figure SaaS – with James Evans [385]

James Evans is the co-founder and CEO of Command AI (acquired by Amplitude), a user assistance platform that makes your software product easier to use. In 2019, James and his co-founders were working on an EdTech product to help teachers give coding feedback to students. They got frustrated with their product's complexity, so they built a search bar tool to help users find features and complete tasks more easily. And then they realized, the search bar tool was a more interesting product. Despite having no customers, they got into YC. However, they struggled to get traction as they spent most of their time explaining what their product did. The breakthrough came when they made a Chrome extension that visually showed their product working in potential customers' own websites. James made Loom videos for each potential customer, showing Command AI integrated with their app and how it could help. His cold emails had a whopping 30% response rate and helped land their first 10 customers. But the team kept struggling to explain their unique product and its value. James realized they were spending over 80% of meetings with potential customers explaining how Command Bar was different from other options and what exact issues it solved. It made it incredibly difficult for them to grow the business more quickly. Today, Command AI is a 7-figure ARR SaaS business, with over 20 million end-users across hundreds of customers like Hashicorp, Freshworks, and Hubspot. They've grown to a team of 40 people and raised $24 million.

George Richardson, AeroCloud

AeroCloud: A SaaS Journey of Pivot and Persistence – with George Richardson [383]

George Richardson is the co-founder and CEO of AeroCloud, an airport management software that helps airports optimize operations and revenue. In 2017, after retiring as a professional race car driver, George was looking for a new challenge. He randomly met Ian at a coffee shop in England and after they got to know each other, they decided to start a business together. Ian had previously built and sold an on-prem software product for airports. So given his domain expertise, the duo decided to build an app to help airlines resell last-minute plane tickets, but they struggled for 2 years to gain traction. Eventually, they had an aha moment. They asked themselves – why not take Ian's proven on-prem airport management software and reinvent it for the cloud? It seemed like the winning idea they had been searching for. So they pivoted and started building a new product. But even with Ian's strong track record, they still struggled to sign those critical first customers. A breakthrough eventually came at a conference when a potential customer said he'd use AeroCloud if the founders could build custom features for his airport. It wasn't trivial work and risky to use up much of their limited time and money. But the gamble worked – after making the improvements to the product, their first airport signed up to pay for AeroCloud. This success convinced other airports to sign on too, giving George and Ian much-needed early momentum. Fast forward to today – AeroCloud now serves 60 enterprise airport customers, has grown to a team of 60 across the US and UK, and hit multiple millions in ARR.

John Griffin, m3ter

m3ter: From Early Sales Struggles to Finding Product Market Fit – with John Griffin [379]

John Griffin is the co-founder of m3ter, a subscription management platform that helps software companies enable usage-based pricing models. In 2020, John was working at Amazon Web Services when he and his co-founder Griffin realized many software companies struggled to implement effective usage-based pricing. Having dealt with these challenges in their previous startup, which was acquired by Amazon, they decided to start a new company aimed at helping subscription businesses seamlessly adopt usage-based pricing. As second-time founders, John and Griffin quickly encountered familiar roadblocks trying to drive early sales. Despite their experience and a well-thought-out product, their initial attempts at connecting with potential customers fell flat. As their cold outreach efforts continued to stall, the founders felt increasing pressure to sign those critical first customers to validate their product offering. And to add to their struggles, they initially made the mistake of going too broad with the types of customers they sold to. This inevitably spread them too thin, making it difficult to focus on the right features and craft a clear message. Just when things started to feel hopeless, they got a lucky break, an investor made an introduction to a significant first buyer. Landing this major customer finally gave John and Griffin the desperately needed sales momentum. Today, m3ter generates multiple seven figures in annual revenue and has raised over $30 million in funding.

Mang-Git Ng, Anvil

Anvil: From Zero Sales Skills to 7-Figure ARR SaaS – with Mang-Git Ng [375]

Mang-Git Ng is the co-founder and CEO of Anvil, an automation platform that helps businesses build simple online workflows for cumbersome paperwork processes. In 2017, while struggling through a frustrating mortgage application process that involved exchanging PDF documents over email, Mang-Git had an aha' moment. He realized that moving all this paperwork to online forms could solve a massive pain. Mang-Git and his co-founder, Ben, spent months interviewing people. Once confident that they were solving a real problem, they built their initial product. But then they made a classic founder mistake – trying to sell to anyone and everyone. With no sales experience, Mang-Git struggled with crafting cold outreach emails. He'd obsess over each one, often taking 25 minutes or more per email, but barely got any responses. Adding to their struggles, they also attracted the wrong early customers. Many of them were excessively demanding and created a huge distraction for the founders. Fast forward to today, Anvile is a 7-figure ARR SaaS company that's raised $10M.

Andrew Brown, Check

Check: Building a SaaS Startup You’re Not Rushing to Sell – with Andrew Brown [373]

Andrew Brown is the founder and CEO of Check, a payroll infrastructure startup that embeds payroll directly into other software platforms. In 2015, Andrew sold his B2C startup, Oyster, to Google. But that big win also left a void in his professional life. He decided his next startup would be something he could work on for a decade or more, rather than just aiming for a quick sell-off. After spending years carefully searching for the right business idea, Andrew finally landed on the concept for Check when a potential partner revealed just how complex it was to build payroll functionality directly into their HR platform. Andrew spent several years operating in stealth mode, entirely focused on establishing Check's initial product and early partnerships before ever officially launching. But earning trust was much harder than Andrew expected, with many early prospects questioning why they should trust an early-stage startup with their payroll solution. It took years of relationship building through warm introductions, thoughtful cold outreach, and diligently preparing for every meeting to finally land pilots with initial partners. As Andrew described, payroll is an incredibly complex 50-state problem requiring going state-by-state to ensure proper setup before anyone will trust you with money. Today, Check has grown to a team of over 100 people and raised $119 million so far.

Jonathan Fields, Assembly

Assembly: Going from Nice to Have to Must Have SaaS Product – with Jonathan Fields [365]

Jonathan Fields is the co-founder and CEO of Assembly, an employee engagement platform modernizing company intranets. In 2013, Jonathan got a job at ZipRecruiter, and over several years he watched it grow from 15 to 1,500 employees. He noticed the company invested heavily in culture and wondered if technology could help other companies with fewer resources do the same. So in 2016, he and three co-founders decided to do something about it. But they weren't ready to quit their jobs just yet. So they bootstrapped and worked on their company at night and on weekends for over three years. They initially launched with a simple peer recognition and rewards product. But finding the first customer (let alone their first 10 customers) turned out to be extremely difficult, e.g., they didn't know what an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) was back then, so they wrongly assumed anyone could be a potential customer. Eventually, through a lot of persistence, finding people to talk to through their network, and learning from mistakes, they finally got a customer. Today Assembly is a multi-million dollar ARR business, serving over 4,000 customers, and has raised $14.5 million.

Jeremy King, Attest

From Zero to a Million: SaaS Founders Share Their Growth Journeys [357]

In this episode, I’m going to share 5 highlight clips that contain insights and lessons which I believe are going to be super-helpful for early-stage SaaS founders.

Thomas Kunjappu, Cleary

Cleary: Transitioning from Custom-Services to SaaS Product Success – with Thomas Kunjappu [356]

Thomas Kunjappu is the co-founder and CEO of Cleary, an employee experience platform or modern intranet for hybrid teams. In 2017, while at Twitter, Thomas and his co-founder Ryan noticed that large tech companies often developed in-house tools to improve the employee experience. They had an idea: Why not create a solution for these companies before they even think about building their own tools? That's how Cleary was born. But instead of building a product, the founders took a different approach. They leveraged their network to pitch the idea to the team at Square, offering to build a solution while keeping ownership of the intellectual property. For the next 2 years, the founders focused on just one customer. This helped them get started, but it also created challenges when they wanted to shift from a service to a product that would meet the needs of lots of customers. Eventually, they had to stop accepting ongoing feature requests from Square and concentrate on building a genuine product they could sell to other customers. Currently, Cleary is doing over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has raised $7.5 million in funding. Their customer list includes notable companies like Door Dash, Scale, and of course Square.

Roxanne Petraeus, Ethena

Ethena: Breaking the SaaS Mold – Women in Tech – with Roxanne Petraeus [344]

Roxanne Petraeus is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a SaaS startup building modern compliance training software. In 2018, Roxanne started a new job as a McKinsey consultant and was surprised to find that even a company known for its phenomenal training used mediocre compliance training software. It sparked an idea in her mind to create better software. She started to talk to people about her idea, which eventually led to meeting her co-founder and CTO, Anne. The two of them set out to build Ethena in 2019. Roxanne talked with HR folks at over 30 different companies to understand their challenges. And in a few short weeks, the duo created their MVP. Although they didn't charge for it initially, they were able to land the first customer in 4 months. Today, Ethena is a seven-figure SaaS business with around 250 customers, including Netflix, Zendesk, Figma, and Notion. Almost 100,000 employees are using Ethena for their compliance training. And the founders have raised just over $50 million to date.

Shruti Kapoor, Wingman

Wingman: From CRM Frustrations to 7-Figure SaaS – with Shruti Kapoor [341]

In this episode, I talked to Shruti Kapoor, the co-founder and CEO of Wingman, a SaaS product that helped sales teams get better results by providing them with real-time insights from every sales interaction. In 2017, Sruthi was working for a FinTech company in India and ended up running a sales team, but she constantly struggled to get the CRM to work the way their team needed. And she couldn't find a good alternative solution, so she and two friends got talking and decided to start their own startup. The following year they launched the first version of their product, but getting customers was a struggle when they started out. Their first 40 meetings with prospective customers resulted in zero sales. Despite the rocky start, they've grown their SaaS company to multiple seven figures in ARR and in 2022, sold the business. In this episode, we talk about the struggles and challenges the co-founders faced while starting and building their SaaS business. What they did after failing to close even a single sale after 40 meetings with prospective customers, how they've used online groups and communities to find customers by getting their existing customers to post and talk. And we talk about how they've used SEO, content marketing and social media to create an inbound marketing engine that drives over 90% of their revenue today. I hope you enjoy it. All right, Shruti, welcome to the show. And I think that's an important lesson in life overall you know, not just for founders. One, get sales folks better coaching feedback to enable them in real time. So as they're going through a call, if you could get the feedback versus, you know, waiting for the manager to review the call a week later and then, you know, maybe have a coaching session two weeks and three, it enables people to get a full picture of what their pipeline looks like, where their deals are so that they can go and, you know, make sure that they're doing everything that they need to win. Decided I wanted to get my hands dirty with startup. Joined a FinTech company called Payoneer and, you know, figured that I would be best suited to figure out their go-to-market strategy right knowing absolutely nothing about go-to-market strategies. And at that point, you know, what that meant was working with the product and the marketing teams and of course creating the sales team, going out and selling myself and trying to get those early customers for Payoneer in India. And through that process I kind of realized some of the challenges you know that I'm trying to solve with Wingman. One of them was definitely not knowing why certain sales reps in my team were doing so well, and some reps who were putting in a lot of effort but still not getting the numbers. So, I think that's kind of where I got curious and said, listen, I want to join your calls, but then it becomes too onerous. You know, one out of every two or three calls will get canceled. You waste so much time. And so, I was like, you know what? If they could just record their calls and then I could go back and review it. But the other challenge was that because we were a distributed team, we have product and marketing sitting in Israel and then, you know, sales sitting in every country that they were selling to. And so, the other challenge that I was frustrated by is getting the voice of customer over to product. So, I think both of those as I thought more and more about it, I was like, you know, if we could only have these calls recorded, archived, searchable that would be a gold mine. And that's where the journey started. Like, how do I get value out of this data? Because we understood that this was valuable data, but you know, this is such a large volume of data. The last thing we wanted was that you have all of these call recordings and then you know, nobody is listening to it. So, I think we spent some time in just understanding what the real challenges were, validating that it wasn't just a problem for me. And then, you know, trying to kind build our own MVP. What would an MVP look like? And so that's the context with which we got together. And you're right, it, it took some time for things to come together. So, you know, we met almost a year and a half before we started up. And so, through that period, you know, we were just hanging out, getting to know each other. Brainstorming on a bunch of ideas, trying to validate, invalidated a bunch of ideas. And Muralid and Srikar have known each other since their first jobs out of college, and they were also at Google together. And so, Muralid was very clear that he would want Srikar to also be part of the team when we started off. And he managed to convince Srikar to also quit his job and moved from the Bay Area to India to start this up, Right? So, what we felt was, one, nobody had a clear thesis or understanding of how to use this data. And we felt that, you know, the winner wasn't just because somebody decides to record calls and transcribe them because, you know, recording of calls has existed for at least, you know, a few decades. Right? We felt that the real innovation or you know, where the business needed to be built was. Identifying the right use case for the data and being able to make sure that you're able to deliver that value quickly. And we felt that was not answered when we started building this out, and you know, when we were trying to validate whether or not that was answered, we went and also spoke to some of the customers who were using the computer competitor's products because we wanted to understand like, Hey, if you're using this today, does it solve everything for you or are there still gaps? Through that process, we identified that there were definitely things people were struggling with. And I think that was also an important learning in just knowing that, you know, what people say they will do in an ideal world versus what people do is dramatically different, right? Like I, I know we are all familiar with New Year resolutions and how they land up. And that was exactly the case with sales coaching where, you know, I think the products were built on a promise of saying that, hey, Sales managers are motivated to do sales coaching, and I will build a tool to help them do sales coaching better. But the fundamental problem was that sales coaching doesn't happen as often as people would like. How long did it take to build that 1.0 version of, or the mvp, I guess, of Wingman? Five months. Yeah, I mean, that sounds great. You know, you ship the product, you already got one customer and you get excited and you're like, wow, we're gonna be closing more and more of these deals. But from what I said, it wasn't that straightforward. When you talk to a lot of potential customers and you didn't close any sales. So, so tell us about that . You know, from our network, right? So, these were not customers who we did not know, and therefore you know, these were really useful customers for, you know, as co building partners and, you know, for giving us early product feedback, et cetera. But what we wanted to do was to, of course, and you know, you need to do that. Is make sure that you actually also reach out to customers who are buying the product for the sake of the product and don't necessarily know you. I think the first challenge that we hit was even with these friendly customers that we had early on, they were not using the product the way we would expect them to. Right. So, we were hitting the same roadblocks in terms of product usage. And you know, that was baffling, but I think that was also our own lesson in understanding that, you know what people say they would do, and what they actually do is different. And so we had to kind of go and really sit down, understand what their workflows look like, tweak you know, the product, understand what is the first, you know, wow moment we could deliver them and you know, how do you make that repeatable, et cetera. So there was some work required there. The second thing we did was, like I said we kind of went and spoke to people who were using the competitor's products and understood, you know, what were the challenges they were facing? Was it a product issue or was it just setting the right expectations? And then what we did was once we felt we were ready to kind of scale up, we you know, at that point we launched. Dramatically new feature for the product, which was this whole idea of being able to give real time feedback to salespeople while they were on sales calls. And we felt that was, you know, going to hit the nail on the head. That was allow going to allow people to actually coach without being there. And we were you know, ready to kind of take it to the market. So we got a sales consultant to help us you know, accelerate that process of reaching out to new customers. And that person set up you know, great meetings for us. He set up 40 meetings with our ICP companies and, you know, we, we sold exactly zero to those 40 customers and we were like, you know, something's not right. And that was really tough because we felt at that point, you know, we had a good product, we had a real differentiation and we were talking to the people that we wanted to be selling to. And so that was the point where we were like, you know, there's something that we need to go back and think about. And I think what we realized at that point is you know what the product does right and what the promise is. Sometimes as founders, we tend to oversell the promise as well. But what we don't account for is, you know, how the customer is thinking about it in terms of. Their implementation costs or effort required to get value out of it. So that was the challenge that we were facing in getting people to, you know, adopt this new real-time feedback mechanism. And so, you know, once that became clear to us we were able to kind of go and make changes to say, how do we make this easier and quicker to get value out of? Give me one example of that. Like what was it that was, that you realized they were seeing as difficult to implement and get started with? Like, what did they have to do that they didn't want to do? Right. So if somebody says you know, talks about discount, then we want like, these three talking points to show up for the salesperson. And that was what we needed sales enablement to do but this wasn't something that they were used to doing because they're used to, you know, creating content either for trainings which is typically long form or, you know, self-service content, which is, you know, these detailed documents. They're not used to writing like three bullet point pieces of content. But the other struggle that they had was they did not, they were also not kind of sure whether they knew what content they. All right. So, so to them it seemed like they needed to invest in something without fully understanding, like, you know, how that would work or how that would get them results. And I think it was also a case of, you know, the stakeholder who was going to be the decision maker versus the person who needed to actually implement the product and get value were different people and, you know, we didn't kind of know how to navigate that well. And I think that was, a reflection of you know, us as founders because none of us had actually worked in SaaS. Right? None of us had actually also worked in a situation of understanding how a multi-stakeholder, you know, product adoption cycle looks like. And you know, how do you kind of navigate that from a sales and post sales point of view. So that's kind of a difficult leap to make. So, so how did you solve that? I mean, that's, I think this is something that a lot of SaaS founders go through that the perceived work, even though the customers might not say it, and it sounds like the 40, or at least the 39 people you spoke to, weren't that explicit about it. But it's, I think it's a common problem. So how did you go about solving it? So in our case, like with the real time feedback and you know, just having a real time note taker there we identified that, you know, giving feedback on behavior did not require any setup. So I could have something that tells them that, Hey, you've been on a long monologue and we didn't need the manager or anybody else to do anymore. Similarly we could, you know, use, get them to bookmark parts of the call in real time without, you know, managers or setup needing to do work. So one was identifying pockets that required minimal setup, and using those as the hero examples in those sales conversations versus, you know, using all these complex things that required a ton of setup as the hero example. So it was easy for somebody to say, oh, I can instantly get value. Without putting in a lot of effort. And then if I wanted to put in effort, you know, this is what I could do. Right? So essentially constantly being very diligent about saying, how do I create a wow moment with minimal effort so that then the person, once they see the value, then they will put in the effort. I think the second thing we did was you know just taking away a blank canvas approach and saying, we will give you enough in the canvas so that you only need to fill in the blanks. So, you know, basically creating all sorts of templates that made it much easier for people to say, oh, okay, I only need to write these three bullet points. I know what the use case is. And in some cases we would even use you know, like different methodologies, different sales information that existed to create you know, that set of templates and initial things for them. So again, trying to get, give them value before we ask them to invest effort. So we are still trying to figure, trying to figure out the positioning value, et cetera. And so at that point we did like a bunch of more you know, larger scale launches. And through that feedback cycle we realized that there were some people who were buying the product and not using it for this specific use case. So we were like, you know, the first thing we did was. Became open to saying that we could have different packages of the product for people who might have different levels of tech readiness. So that allowed us to at least start getting some customers who did not necessarily want this complicated feature and who did not care that there was, you know, maybe not a big differentiation story, et cetera. Right? And in the meantime , thankfully the changes that I talked about weren't so much product changes. They were more positioning and conflict changes that, you know, we didn't need longer cycles for. So we were able to quickly iterate on that and like we spent you know, the next four, five months just saying that, we'll just, you know, customers who are interested in buying, we'll just try to listen to them, understand what they're buying for, what they're using the product for, versus trying to get people to adopt everything that we are trying to build on day one. And I think that really helped in you know, getting to the juicier parts of the product. I think the second point was that we were very clear about what our differentiation was. Yeah. Right? And that was around saying, can we actually help people scale coaching? The third thing was that I think we had also spent time and energy in understanding how we might be able to use our geographic advantage and distribution. To actually deliver better value for the customer. So in our case so, so there were basically things around saying how do we make sure that we are going to continue to be competitive? And it's not just about, you know, one feature versus another. And I think those were things that YC really cares about. Like what is your long-term you know, chances of success and why? All right, so we kind of went from, I said, you know, close to zero to six digits in revenue very quickly at that point. And that was, you know, within the matter of those three months or so. From there on you know, we kind of felt that what was working for us was having you know, some sort of inbound funnel or customers because what had worked in getting some of these was you know, we did like a product hunt launch and some you know, some early P R that happened around Visim. And so, what we realized was that we then wanted to start building on that inbound engine. Because, you know, maybe we were not ready for some larger customers. We needed to still build more trust in the market, but we could still be selling to you know, the smaller end of the customers to start with and then you know, work our way up. Which we then very often you know, even for our inbound funnel and marketing overall. We did also get some customers through the outbound engine early on. But what we realized was that inbound seemed like, what could be much more scalable. Of course, early on it was, you know, me as the only person doing sales and marketing and SDR and, you know, all of those fancy things that we have teams for today. And I think, therefore, my approach was to say how do I spread the message across based on what I understand about the sales leader’s buying behavior. And I think that's something that people miss on sometimes, you know, you kind of reach out to multiple people for advice on, hey, how did you get your first 10 customers or your first 20 customers? And people forget that, you know, if you're selling to a salesperson versus to a developer you know, the way they buy a product, the way they evaluate a product, the way they think about the product is very different. And so what we realized was that salespeople one, are very social right? And they like to talk to each other, and they like to get you know, inputs from each other. And a lot of what happens in sales is through word of mouth. And so we kind of just doubled down on that and we said, Where are people giving each other advice and sharing this, right? And so, this was already you know, by now we are already in the times of the pandemic, and we are beginning to see that, you know, there are all these online communities that are popping up. And I think that landed up being very fictitious for us because we were then able to get you know, spread that word of mouth using those communities, those online selected platforms versus just trying to do Google ads or, you know, G2 ads, et cetera. Yeah, so this was, you know, like lots of revenue leaders, slack communities that existed. You know, there are lots of forums were revenue leaders exchange advice. You know, there were Reddit threads that our customers saw where, you know, people are asking questions around, say, price of a competitor, and they were like, hey, you know, we use this tool and this is why. And so, you know, it was very niche targeted communities through which we then built the word of mouth. One thing that a lot of people do, which isn't particularly well taken, is going into a new community that you just joined and just start pitching your product. So, what was the approach that you took if you were telling people about Wingman, how did you get to that point where you were doing it in a way that you know, people were more receptive to it. And I think when you and I were talking, you were saying that you were also getting customers as well to help with, you know, amplifying this word of mouth. So just tell me a little bit about that because there's a right way and a wrong way to do this, and I want to kind of figure out what you did. Like, they don't even have to say anything else. Even if they say, you know, if there's a thread around, hey, what do you use for doing this task? And somebody says, oh, I'm using this, you're much more likely to go check it out versus saying, hey, I'm the founder of and you know, we also do this. So, I think through that right, what we were really looking to do was just amplify the word of mouth from the customers, right? Like, you know, in the real-life situation, we would've expected this to happen through events and through casual networking, you know, social settings. And you know, what we were thinking of was just, you know, today, nobody can step out because of the pandemic. How do we leverage what exists in terms of still spreading the word of mouth? And so, it literally started out that way. Some of our customers initially found like some threats saying, hey, you know, I saw this discussion you know, would you want me to say something on this? And we were like, oh, that's fantastic. And so, it was not us posting about ourselves, I think, which definitely helps. And I think our role in that was really. Identifying where those discussions were happening at some point, and then nudging our customers if needed to say, hey, you know, do you mind just, you know, sharing what your experience has been? Yeah, and I think that worked. One of the lessons that we, that I overall learned in that journey of getting, you know, the first five customers to try to scale that up through inbound was what you really need throughout that journey. One thing that is common, how do you build trust and as you try to scale, how do you amplify that trust through various ways? And I think that was a big learning also from saying that, hey, we hired the sales consultant early on. You know that person was able to set up meetings for us, but we are not able to close. Partially also because that trust doesn't translate. And especially if you're hiring somebody part-time. I think that was that was a big lesson and therefore as we went through this journey, we were always very conscious about, hey, how do we build trust? And how do we continue to scale the ways for building trust? So, so people listening to this can understand like how much volume and sales you're actually driving through your inbound engine now? You know, today of course, we do invest a ton in content. , our approach to content has been can we do something that people actually laugh at or relate to, versus, you know, some more corporate jargon. And I think that has landed well. So, you know, we do partnerships on Instagram around, you know, fun memes on sales, things like that. Just a bunch of educational and thought-provoking posts on social media. So, I think social media is one channel that helps us build brand and be present in conversations. And I think the other piece has definite, so, you know, the other piece has definitely been SEO as well. As you know, things have scaled up and I think today we have a pretty strong game there. And I think the third piece has definitely been you know, continuing to focus on personal brand you know, for the leaders and for other folks in the marketing team because I think that's super important. And so, we make sure that you know, folks are visible and yeah, I think personally I've probably you know, interacted with a lot more people being on several social campaigns, podcasts, et cetera. And that I think again, helps you know, create that recall and brand. It seemed like sales tech was on a consolidation spree. We were definitely getting that feedback from the investors we were talking to as well. And, you know, within a matter of couple of weeks, we happen to get inbound interest from three different buyers. And you know, we haven't started thinking about it, but you know, I was like, hey, maybe there is something here. Let me just go and dig a little bit deeper. And so that's kind of how that conversation started. And I think you know, as a founder, that was something that I was open to at that point just in terms of you know, the fundraise cycles you know, it always makes sense to consider an acquisition. You know, before you do a fundraise work, you know, you can't really get acquired immediately after a fundraise because your investors won't be very happy about that. So, I think in that sense, the timing was good. And so I decided to take a pause and just, explore that a bit. Fundraising can be pretty distracting. We did you know, try to fundraise. , you know, in 2020 mid of 2020 or so. And then I think what we realized was with the pandemic and, you know, sales teams getting laid off we were seeing like, you know, ups and downs in our own business and in the revenue numbers. And what that eventually meant was it wasn't the greatest time to try and fundraise. And then I think, you know, later a lot of times investor sentiment impacts these things. Right. And then as it happened, and the second time that we tried to fundraise was in the middle of the and you know, when we started things were stable, but then suddenly, you know, the whole Delta variant came about. And like, especially in India, it was pretty bad. And investors were just focused on like, you know, helping people actually survive, and it wasn't, again, the greatest time to fundraise. So what you realize is that, you know, sometimes you can't really control the timing on these things, you know. In hindsight, if it works out, then it's great. Right. Like if you're able to fundraise at the top of a you know, valuation cycle but very often you know, as many things in business, it lands up being a little bit of luck.

Gil Feig, Merge

Merge: How a SaaS API Startup Raised $75 Million – with Gil Feig [340]

Gil Feig is the co-founder of Merge, a unified API platform that allows you to add hundreds of integrations to your app. After experiencing firsthand the pains of managing integrations at previous companies, Gil and his co-founder, Shensi, decided to build a solution. Before starting their business, they talked to around a hundred companies to research and get feedback. Most conversations were pretty positive, but some feedback was harsh. There were three companies where people told them they would never use the product and that they should probably give up on the idea. The two founders spent 6 months building the first version of the product. And thanks to all those interviews, they landed their first 10 customers. But as they tried selling their product to more companies, they quickly realized that they still had big obstacles to overcome. Most companies were building their own integrations, and many of them weren't convinced they needed help or a product to make it easier. And other companies weren't willing to trust their integrations to an early-stage startup that might not be around tomorrow. Despite those challenges, Gil and Shensi have grown their business to multiple 7-figures in ARR, with a team of around 65 people, and they've raised almost $75 million in funding.

Khadim Batti, Whatfix

Whatfix: 7 Steps to Finding Our SaaS Go-To-Market Fit – with Khadim Batti [337]

Khadim Batti is the co-founder and CEO of Whatfix, a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that helps businesses simplify training and support.

Hung Dang, Y42

Y42: How a SaaS Hit 7-Figures Without Any Customer Validation – with Hung Dang [334]

Hung Dang is the founder and CEO of Y42, a fully-managed DataOps Cloud that helps companies design production-ready data pipelines on top of their Google BigQuery or Snowflake data warehouse. After having spent many years working in data analytics, Hung became frustrated with all the various tools needed to build out a proper data infrastructure. In 2020, he decided to build an end-to-end data platform to replace those tools. But Hung didn't go out and interview customers to validate his idea. Instead, he started working on his product and spent a full year building it. When he finally launched and put his product in front of customers, he realized it was still missing about 30% of the features they actually needed. He also learned that his customers didn't need 20% of the features he thought they needed. Yet, in the first year after launching, his business hit the first $1M in ARR.

Jeremy King, Attest

Attest: Growing a SaaS From Zero to First Million ARR in 7.5 Months – with Jeremy King [331]

Jeremy King is the founder and CEO of Attest, a research platform that enables companies to engage directly with over 125 million consumers worldwide and do market research faster. In 2015, after spending 9 years as a McKinsey consultant, Jeremy decided to build a SaaS product that would make it easier for B2C companies to do market research. He realized that often those companies were guessing what consumers wanted instead of using market research data. And he was convinced he could solve that problem. His wife gave him 6 months to get the business going. So he knew he had to work fast to validate the idea, build a product, and get paying customers. The clock was ticking. But what Jeremy did next was surprising.

Christian Owens, Paddle

Paddle: From a Failed SaaS Launch to a $1.4+ Billion Valuation – with Christian Owens [330]

Christian Owens is the founder and CEO of Paddle, a payments infrastructure provider for SaaS companies. Christian started building websites when he was 12 years old. He walked into his local high street stores and asked them if they wanted him to build a website. His first customer was an Indian Restaurant. At 14 years old, inspired by Groupon, Christian persuaded a number of software vendors to participate in selling a discounted software bundle to their email lists and generated over a million dollars in sales. Today, Christian is running a company that employs nearly 400 people, is approaching $100M in ARR, and has raised $300M in VC funding. Paddle also acquired Profitwell earlier this year in a deal worth $200M. I originally interviewed Christian over 3 years ago when Paddle was doing around $10M in ARR.

Zak Holdsworth, Hint Health

Hint: Building Customer Trust as an Early-Stage SaaS Startup – with Zak Holdsworth [329]

Zak Holdsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Hint Health, a membership management, billing, and payment software for primary care, urgent care, and specialty practices. In 2014, Zak and his co-founder Graham set out to transform the US healthcare system. They were both frustrated with the cost of healthcare and believed they could make a difference. They decided to build software to help direct primary care practices. Despite both of them lacking experience in healthcare, they jumped right in and hit the ground running. Within 30 days, they attended an industry event, talked to potential customers, started building a product, and got their first paying customer. And a few months later, they closed their first 10 paying customers.

Stefan Laven, Data Talks

Data Talks: The Importance of Focusing on One Market – with Stefan Lavén [325]

Stefan Laven is the founder and CEO of Data Talks, a customer data platform (CDP) that helps sports organizations create world-class supporter experiences based on their data. In 2018, Stefan was running a consultancy and helping clients turn their data into insights. But he realized that many clients struggled to figure out what to do with those insights. So he and his team decided to build a product to help their clients get more value from those insights. They built an MVP and started showing it to their clients. And it didn't take them long to signup their first 10 customers. Most founders would be delighted by that, and Stefan was too. But today, he looks back and wishes that they hadn't sold their MVP so quickly, and we talk about why and what he would have done differently. Also, when they launched, they hedged their bets and decided to go after three different vertical markets at the same time instead of picking one vertical. That approach didn't work, and they wasted a ton of time and money. Eventually, they decided to focus on just one vertical. And that's when everything clicked, and the business grew faster. We talk about why it's so difficult to commit to one market and how Stefan and his team got there. Currently, Data Talks has about 500 customers and is generating around $250K in monthly recurring revenue. I hope you enjoy it.

Tony Summerville, Fleetio

Fleetio: How a Solo Founder Built an 8-Figure SaaS Business – with Tony Summerville [317]

Tony Summerville is the founder and CEO of Fleetio, a SaaS product that helps businesses automate fleet operations tasks and keep their vehicles and equipment running smoothly. In 2011, Tony was working as a product manager. He'd tried several times to start a business in his spare time but just wasn't able to get any traction. Eventually, he came to the realization that if he was going to have a serious shot at building a business, he had to quit his job and go all-in. He and his wife agreed that he'd give it a try for one year and if things didn't work out, he'd go back to a full-time job. After seeing how his father's business was struggling to manage its fleet of vehicles, Tony set out to build a modern fleet management software for small and medium businesses. He launched his minimum viable product (MVP) in about 7 months and a few months later had his first 10 customers (thanks to the time and effort he'd put into doing customer development interviews). But he was only charging about $50 a month for his product, so there was still a lot of work to do. Today, he's grown his company into an 8-figure SaaS business, built a team of nearly 200 people, and raised $25M in VC funding. In this interview, we talk about how Tony validated his idea, built his MVP, tested pricing, built a content marketing engine, and more. So I hope you enjoy it.

Gary Vanbutsele, Whale

Whale: The Realities and Struggles of Building a SaaS Startup – with Gary Vanbutsele [316]

Gary Vanbutsele is the co-founder and CEO of Whale, a knowledge transfer and training platform that helps businesses onboard and train employees. In 2018, a couple of friends in Belgium decided to build a SaaS product to help small business owners monetize courses. Everyone they spoke to told them it was a great idea. So Gary and Bram spent over a year building their product. They were both excited to show their prospective customers what they had built until they realized that no one was interested in paying for it. They hadn't validated their idea properly and had spent almost a year and a half building something that nobody wanted. A few months later, Gary had an idea to build software to help with training and onboarding employees. He had experienced these problems firsthand with the IT company that he owned and knew it was a widespread problem. This time Gary and Bram did things differently. They validated their idea and even pre-sold their product idea to a couple of customers before they started building the product. Things were looking great and everything seemed to be coming together this time. But little did the founders realize that their struggles were just beginning.

Alfonso de la Nuez, UserZoom

UserZoom: Getting to $100M ARR by Falling in Love with a Problem – with Alfonso de la Nuez [315]

Alfonso de la Nuez is the co-founder and co-CEO of UserZoom (now part of UserTesting), a SaaS product that delivers actionable UX insights to help businesses design and deliver better digital experiences. In 2001, Alfonso and his partners started a user experience research consultancy in Spain. But doing research in a physical lab was slow, manual, and expensive. After several years of doing user experience research that way, they decided that they'd build a tool to help them automate the process and become more efficient. And the tool, once it was built, helped them run the consultancy better. Only when a client asked if they could use the tool to conduct their own user research did Alfonso and his partners realize that there was an opportunity for them to become a product business. In this interview, we share how they transitioned from a consultancy to a SaaS company, some of the struggles they faced in finding customers, and how they have gone from a humble start as a consultancy in Spain to a SaaS business that is now doing almost $100M in annual recurring revenue and has raised $136M. I hope you enjoy it.

Khadim Batti, Whatfix

Whatfix: From a Failed SaaS Startup to a Potential $1B Unicorn – with Khadim Batti [310]

Khadim Batti is the co-founder and CEO of Whatfix, a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that helps businesses simplify training and support. In 2014, Khadim and his co-founder Vara launched a new SaaS business called Whatfix. In 8 years, they've grown their company to multiple 8-figures in ARR, hired over 600 employees, and they've raised $140 million in VC funding. It sounds like another great Silicon Valley startup story, but it isn't. Both these founders were based in India. Prior to founding Whatfix, they spent 3 years building another product that never really got traction. Both founders came from an engineering background, so they spent too much time trying to build a great product and not enough time talking to customers. During those 3 years, there were many times when they wanted to quit and go back to their corporate jobs. At one point, they realized that there was one feature in their product that their customers seemed to be most interested in. In fact, it wasn't even a product feature, but a tool they'd built to help their customers learn how to use their product. So they decided to shut down the product they'd been working on for 3 years and instead focus on turning that tool into a product. But this time they took a very different approach. They spent most of their time talking to customers and validating their idea. And they didn't start building the product until they'd made their first sale. In this interview, Khadim shares his lessons on the mistakes they made in building their first product. And we dig into how they took a very different approach the second time with Whatfix, and how they've gone from zero to a company valued at over $600 million. I hope you enjoy it.

Jody Glidden, Introhive:

A Founder’s Journey from Engineer to CEO of Introhive – with Jody Glidden [304]

Jody Glidden is the co-founder and CEO of Introhive, an AI-powered SaaS platform that helps companies improve sales by making sense of huge amounts of data and understanding their relationship graph. Jody and his co-founder Stewart started Introhive in 2011 and have grown it into a SaaS business doing tens of millions in revenue and around 400 employees. They have also raised over $135 million in funding. It all started when they realized how difficult it was for most organizations to keep their CRM system up to date. Being an engineer, Jody figured that this was a data problem that they could solve within 6 months. But it took them almost 4 years to solve that problem. And during that time they struggled with customer churn because their data just wasn't good enough. They also tried a lot of inbound marketing and got almost nothing from that for a long time. Eventually, they decided to do more outbound and chose one vertical market to focus on. That approach got them onto the right path, but even then it took them almost 3 years to close a deal with the first customer in that vertical. In this interview, Jody and I talk about how they've gone from zero to a business that's currently on track to hit $100M ARR in the next 2 or 3 years. We deep dive into all the major challenges they faced, how they solved them, and extract some lessons that might help you if you're currently dealing with similar issues. I hope you enjoy it.

Dave MacLeod, ThoughtExchange:

Building an 8-Figure SaaS by Focusing on One Market – with Dave MacLeod [298]

Dave MacLeod is the co-founder and CEO of ThoughtExchange, an enterprise tool that helps leaders quickly gain critical insights and make better decisions. In just over 10 years, Dave and his co-founder Jim have grown ThoughtExchange into a $20M annual business with 200 employees, and $45M in funding. But there was a time when no one was interested in buying their product. They built the product first and then tried to find people who had a problem that they could solve. It wasn't a smart way to go about building a business. So it was hardly surprising that they struggled to find customers. They kept hearing the same feedback i.e. it's an interesting idea, but it's not a product we'd ever use in our organization. But eventually, they did find a customer in an unlikely place. It turned out that a school superintendent had exactly the problem their product could solve. And at that point, the founders made a very smart decision – although they didn't fully realize it at the right. They decided to go all-in and focus on school districts. For almost 5 years, they focused almost exclusively on that one market instead of going out and trying to sell their product to everyone. Today, half their business comes from enterprise customers. But their success was originally built by focusing on one target market and one customer for years. Whether you're trying to find your first 10 customers or your first $100M in annual revenue, having focus is critical. And that's what we dig deeper into in this interview. I hope you enjoy it.

Liam Gerada, Krepling:

Krepling: How Two Teens Co-Founded a Shopify Competitor – with Liam Gerada [295]

Liam Gerada is the co-founder and CEO of Krepling, an e-commerce platform for online stores. In 2018, two teenage brothers in Malta wanted to start an agency. They'd recently sold their Shopify store and decided that they wanted to help others running similar businesses. They spent a few months validating the idea but realized people didn't need an agency, they needed a better platform. So Liam and Travis set out to build a Shopify competitor. Neither of them was a developer, but Travis had taken some courses so knew just enough to start building something. After months of work, they shipped a product with a clunky backend and ugly user interface. But the product was free and they were still able to attract new users. But as soon as they started charging, every user they had churned. The brothers pushed on and tried anything they could think of to find customers e.g. posting on sites like Quora and Reddit, sending cold emails, etc. Eventually, they were able to find a handful of customers. Fast forward to today, Liam is now 21 and Travis is 18. The two brothers have made significant improvements to their product. They now have over 500 customers. And they've raised a pre-seed round from Jason Calacanis' Launch accelerator. They still have a long way to go and a lot more work to do. But I think they've accomplished a lot in the last couple of years. They're both still pretty young, don't have tons of experience, didn't know how to code, and live on a small island in the Mediterranean. But that hasn't stopped them from building their SaaS business and finding customers. I hope you enjoy it.

Ryan Fyfe, Workpuls

From Struggling Bootstrapper to $10M+ SaaS CEO – with Ryan Fyfe [294]

Ryan Fyfe is the co-founder and COO of Workpuls, an employee monitoring, and time tracking software. Previously, he founded Humanity, an employee scheduling software product. In 2010, Ryan set out to build better employee scheduling software. Early in his career, he had worked in the service industry and experienced the pains of scheduling shifts both as an employee and manager. He believed there was an opportunity to build an easier solution. He targeted the lower end of the market and quickly built a basic scheduling solution. He didn't do customer interviews or much market research. Instead, he trusted his gut that based on his experience, there was a need for his solution. But getting early customers was disheartening. He went from being excited about how his product was going to help hundreds or maybe even thousands of small businesses to struggling to get even 10 customers. People seemed interested in his product but always seemed to have an excuse for why they couldn't or weren't ready to pay for it. And things got worse when Ryan realized that it wasn't working out with his co-founder and decided to buy him out. Suddenly he became a solo founder of a product that he believed in, but one that was clearly struggling to get traction. And now Ryan had to do everything from product, marketing, and sales on his own. But after a lot of persistence and hard work, he figured out how to sell his product. He went from having a struggling product that nobody wanted to bootstrap it to $100K ARR. And then after raising VC funding, he went on to grow the business to over $12M ARR, 150 employees, and 40,000 customers (including companies such as Nike, CNN, and Lyft). In this interview, you'll learn exactly how he did that, what mistakes he made along the way, the lessons he learned, and what he's doing differently with his latest startup. I hope you enjoy it.

Iris Shoor, Oribi:

Oribi: How a B2B SaaS Startup is Competing Against Free – with Iris Shoor [293]

Iris Shoor is the founder and CEO of Oribi, an AI-based web analytics tool that gives you actionable insights to help you make better data-driven marketing decisions. In 2016, Iris had an idea for a new SaaS product. She'd already built two successful startups and was ready for a new challenge. As a marketer, she knew how hard it was to make good data-driven decisions and so she decided to solve that problem. She spent the next year talking to people and researching her idea. She had one big question: why is nobody doing something about this problem? During that year she also hired a developer and started building an MVP. She used Facebook ads to get her first customer for less than $50. In fact, you'll be shocked how quickly she got that first customer. The product was clearly solving a pain point because it didn't take long to find more customers. She had a great product, early customers, and was ready to raise money. But then Iris decided to kill the product. She shut it down and started looking for a different product idea. In the interview, you'll learn exactly what led to her making such a drastic decision. She talks about why the decision made sense at the time but is something she still regrets today. There's an interesting story behind that decision and a useful lesson for all founders. Eventually, Iris did build another product. This time her product was focused on web analytics. And in the last 4 years, she's grown her company to 60 employees and several thousand customers. And she's also raised $28 million in funding. It's a great interview with some interesting insights. As a serial entrepreneur, Iris already learned some tough lessons with her previous startups. In this interview, you'll learn about some counter-intuitive things she did this time. Those insights may help you to avoid making the same mistakes too. I hope you enjoy it.

George Carollo, TopFunnel:

Dover: How to Get Customers without a Product or Website – with George Carollo [287]

George Carollo is the co-founder of Dover, an end-to-end recruiting automation platform that helps companies to find and hire top talent. Dover uses advanced matching software to identify the perfect candidates across all recruiting channels and drives the hiring process for companies and candidates. In 2019, three friends teamed up to launch a new SaaS startup. They'd all felt the pain of recruiting in previous companies and decided to solve that problem. They got their first 10 customers without a product or website. In fact, at that point, they didn't even have a company or product name. For the first 9 months, they solved the problem manually for customers. The team would review resumes, create a shortlist of candidates and then connect the right candidates with the right companies. By taking this approach, the founders were able to better understand customers and identify exactly the right problem to solve with software. But growing beyond their initial customers was tough. They sent about 1,000 cold emails to recruiters which turned out to be a waste of time. They hired writers to create content, but they couldn't find anyone who understood the problem, market, and data well enough to create meaningful or useful content. Nothing seemed to be working. And then COVID hit and suddenly things looked even worse. Not only were they unable to acquire customers, but they were also now struggling to keep the ones they had. The founders then made an important but risky decision. They decided to stop selling and instead focus all their time on building a better product. In this interview, we explore why they made that decision and how they turned things around to get the business to $4M in annual recurring revenue (ARR). It's an interesting story, but what I really love about it is the super-simple approach the founders have taken to build this business and how they got initial customers without a product or website. I hope you enjoy it!

Vishal Sunak, LinkSquares:

How Vishal Sunak Took His SaaS From Zero to $10 Million ARR – with Vishal Sunak [281]

Vishal Sunak is the co-founder and CEO of LinkSquares, a contract management solution for in-house legal teams to draft, store, search, and analyze agreements. In 2015, Vishal was working at Backupify which was about to get acquired. The acquiring company wanted to know what was in their customer agreements. But Backupify had thousands of different customer agreements. No one knew what was in them and there was no easy way to get that information. That first-hand experience of contract management and the pain points in-house legal teams face planted a seed in Vishal's mind of a potential SaaS solution. Eventually, Vishal and his two co-founders (Chris Combs and Steve Travaglini) took the leap and launched their startup to revolutionize contract management. They built a Ruby on Rails MVP with no backend. In other words, it was good enough to use for demos but wasn't a product that customers could use. The founders then spent 9 months interviewing nearly a hundred general counsels. And it took them over a year to land their first few customers. Vishal was worried about building the wrong product and wasting their money. So they wanted to be sure they were solving the right problem. Today, LinkSquares does $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), has a team of 70 people, and has raised over $21 million in funding. I hope you enjoy it.

Thibaud Clement

Loomly: How We Grew Our SaaS to Over 7000 Customers – with Thibaud Clement [280]

Thibaud Clement is the co-founder and CEO of Loomly, a SaaS platform that helps marketing teams to streamline their social media communication and improve collaboration. Update: Loomly was acquired by ASG in 2021 and is now part of the Traject suite. Thibaud is no longer with the company. In 2015, Thibaud and his wife Noemie were running an advertising agency. They were working with clients in France and the US. But collaborating with them was time-consuming and inefficient. Nearly everything was done using spreadsheets. One day, Thibaud decided to build a software tool to make their lives easier. He was a self-taught Ruby on Rails developer, so he had enough knowledge to build something. The first version of what later became Loomly took Thibaud a few months to build. It didn't do much and was pretty basic. All people could do was upload an image, add text, and see a mock-up of what the post would look like on social media. But the tool helped them streamline how they collaborated with clients. And their clients loved the tool even though it didn't do much. So in 2016, they launched it as a product and 2 months later had their first paying customer. Today, Loomly generates north of $5M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and is used by over 7000 marketing teams around the world. In this interview we talk about: I hope you enjoy it!

Pete Kazanjy

A Data-Driven Approach to SaaS Sales Management – with Pete Kazanjy [278]

Pete Kazanjy is the co-founder of Atrium, a sales management tool that uses data and smart analytics to help sales leaders and managers improve team performance. He's also the author of Founding Sales, a book on startup sales for founders and other first-time sellers. And he's the founder of Modern Sales Pros, the world's largest sales operations, leadership, and enablement community. In 2009, Pete co-founded TalentBin, a talent search engine and recruiting CRM, which Monster Worldwide acquired five years later. After the acquisition, Pete led new product sales for over 600 sales reps at Monster. Although Pete is known as a sales thought leader, author, and speaker, he doesn't come from a sales background. He started in product marketing, became a founder, his startups' first sales rep, and accidentally became an early-stage sales leader.

Suneera Madhani

Overcoming Rejection to Build a High-Growth SaaS Business – with Suneera Madhani [276]

Suneera Madhani is the co-founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a payment technology company that makes it easy and affordable for businesses of any size to accept modern forms of payment, track data, and stay competitive. In 2012, Suneera was working in sales for a merchant services company. She would drive around from one shopping plaza to another in her VW Beetle selling payment terminals out of the trunk of her car to small businesses. She describes it as the worst job she's ever had. As a self-confessed data nerd' Suneera saw all these transactions being processed through the merchant services company and wondered why they weren't turning that data into analytics that their customers could use to increase their sales. She also realized that their pricing was too complicated and customers couldn't understand what they were being charged. She believed that instead of monetizing the transactions, they should monetize their SaaS platform with a flat-rate unlimited processing subscription. Suneera wanted to solve this problem and did a lot of research. But she had zero desire to build a payment infrastructure network and absolutely no idea where to even start. So she pitched her idea to her bosses – who laughed in her face. They thought it was a ridiculous idea. Shortly after that she left the company and pitched her idea to about 12 different payment processing companies. And she was rejected a dozen times. So she borrowed money from friends and family and gave herself 6 months to her idea off the ground. If she failed, she could always go back and get another job. In this interview, you'll learn what Suneera did in those first 6 months to prove her idea and find initial customers. And we explore how she's gone on to build a company with over 7,000 customers and more than 130 employees. She's also raised over $20M in VC funding and last year her company was valued at $140M. I hope you enjoy it.

Grant Deken

Unstack: How to Spot a Gap in a Crowded SaaS Market – with Grant Deken [272]

Grant Deken is the co-founder and CEO of Unstack, a SaaS content marketing platform designed to help you rapidly build, measure, and scale your digital presence without writing code or hiring developers. In 2013, Grant co-founded an influencer marketing platform called Grapevine, which he eventually sold in 2019. During that time he worked with hundreds of advertisers and saw that a lot of them struggled when they had to quickly update their website or create a landing page. That got him thinking about what the ideal content management platform might look like. And he started having conversations with other founders about what they were doing to build out and manage their web presence. Eventually, he realized that there was a market for the type of product he'd been thinking about. So he basically pre-sold the idea to a few people and then spent the next few months building the first version of Unstack. He and his co-founder Steve charged for the product from the day they launched. And they were able to find their first 10 customers through their existing relationships. But getting to their first 100 customers was much more challenging. In this interview we talk about: We also talk about some of the mistakes that the co-founders made and what Grant wishes that they had done differently. I hope you enjoy it.

Jeffrey Tiong

PatSnap: Surviving Tough Times as a First Time SaaS Founder – with Jeffrey Tiong [266]

Jeffrey Tiong is the founder, and CEO of PatSnap, a connected innovation intelligence platform used by R&D teams and Intellectual Property (IP) professionals. Jeffrey was fresh out of college in Singapore and trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life. A few years earlier, he had interned for a startup in the US where he'd spent a lot of time researching patents and intellectual property. He recalled how hard it was to do that research. And he started thinking about a software product that could help to make that work much easier. He managed to raise around $40,000 from a startup grant through his university. He spent a third of that money on buying servers and the rest of it on hiring developers. But that wasn't enough money to get the product built. In fact, it took two years to ship the product. And during that time, his team had to take on all kinds of projects to help pay the bills. He finally managed to sign his first customer – which happened to be his university library. And he closed that sale by pleading with the librarian to give his product a shot. But even after two years, the product was unstable and full of bugs. And while they found more customers, the team had to deal with complaints and unhappy customers. It was a stressful time for Jeffrey. He was finding customers and closing sales, but at the same time, he and his team were desperately trying to make the product better and more stable. Today, Jeffrey's company employs 800 people and has around 8,000 customers. They've also raised over $51 million in funding, and their customers include organizations like Walt Disney, Tesla, and NASA. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Renat Zubairov

Elastic.io: Getting Traction by Charging More for Your SaaS – with Renat Zubairov [236]

Renat Zubairov is the CEO and co-founder of Elastic.io, a hybrid integration platform that helps businesses connect APIs, and on-premise and cloud applications quickly and securely. In 2012, Renat and his co-founders were working for a company where they were doing a lot of integration work. They realized that they weren't the only ones feeling the pain. Eventually, they came up with an idea to build a SaaS integration platform. They used their savings to start their company and spent the first six months building a product. But they didn't talk to any customers. So when they eventually launched, it was hard for them to find customers. Even giving away the product for free didn't help much. But when they started charging for their product, something interesting happened. They started attracting better quality customers. And the feedback they got from those customers allowed them to build a better product and serve those customers better. They realized that they could charge even more for their product by targeting larger companies. Today, a typical customer pays them around $10K a year and they're currently doing around $2.5 million in annual revenue. And they've been growing over 100% year over year (YOY) for the last 3 years. Renat shares the story of how they've built Elastic.io, what they've been doing to grow so fast, how he wishes that they'd charged much earlier for their product and the impact of not thinking big enough when they started. I hope you enjoy it.

Uri Haramati

Torii: A SaaS Platform to Manage All Your SaaS Apps – with Uri Haramati [234]

Uri Haramati is the co-founder and CEO of Torii, a SaaS platform that helps you discover, optimize and control your organization's SaaS usage and costs. Looking for a SaaS business idea? Maybe you just need to solve something that frustrates you. Uri was having a hard time keeping track of all the SaaS applications that were being used at his company. He talked to his peers in the IT space and realized they had the same problem. He wondered how much demand there was for a solution that solved this frustration. He looked around for solutions, but couldn't find something that really solved the problem well. So he and his two co-founders developed an MVP in 2 weeks. All it did was connect to your bank account and generate a simple report of your SaaS subscriptions and costs. They used their network to find companies that needed their solution. They didn't charge for their MVP. They just kept talking to users, collecting feedback and improving the product. In fact, it took them one year to get their first paying customer. But the real milestone was when they signed Pipedrive – their first unaffiliated customer. This was a real validation for them. The year of relentlessly focusing on their potential customers and their product was starting to pay off. It had taken longer than they'd wanted, but they'd finally found a product/market fit. Today, they have around 50 customers and are closing in on their first million dollars in ARR. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Josh Ho

How Josh Ho Bootstrapped His SaaS from Zero to $70K MRR – with Josh Ho [217]

Josh Ho is the founder and CEO of Referral Rock, a SaaS product that helps businesses to design, launch and manage a customer referral program. You've got a great idea for a SaaS product, but no one else seems as excited about it. Does that mean it's a bad idea and you should move on to something else? Not necessarily. In 2013, Josh was at a car dealership waiting for his car to be serviced. He overheard a conversation which got him curious about how brick and mortar companies like car dealerships got referrals and if there was a way to automate word of mouth referrals. He did some research that evening and thought he'd found a gap in the market. He was excited about his idea, but he didn't like what he heard when he interviewed prospective customers. No one seemed excited about his idea. But being a bit stubborn, he decided to build an MVP anyway. He kept things really simple and cobbled together a few different tools and technologies to quickly build an MVP. And he started getting the word out anyway and every way he could. And slowly he started getting people signing up for his product. About 18 months later, he had around 500 users signed up. But there was one big problem. Josh wasn't charging any money for his product. He had hundreds of users but no customers and no revenue. One day, a close friend told Josh something that he needed to hear. He didn't have a real business until he was charging for his product and generating sales. So reluctantly that weekend, he added a paid plan. And to his surprise, a week later he had his first customer paying him $59 a month. Today, Josh runs a 100% remote company with 12 full-time employees and he's generating $70,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And his business is totally bootstrapped. At every step, he kept second guessing himself and questioning how big his business could become. But he kept executing, trying new things and taking action. There was no magic bullet or hack that helped him grow. He kept doing small things to see what worked and if they did, they figured out how to scale them. And that's what he's still doing today. It's a great story and Josh talks candidly about his successes and failures. I hope you enjoy it.

Tyler Tringas

Bootstrap and Sell a Profitable Micro-SaaS Company – with Tyler Tringas [207]

Tyler Tringas is a General Partner at Earnest Capital which provides early-stage funding for bootstrappers. So you want to start a SaaS company. And people keep asking you how big the market opportunity is and if your idea will scale. But maybe you don't want to build a huge business. Maybe you just want to create a sustainable and profitable business that gives you more freedom. In 2011, Tyler quit his job to start a venture-backed software startup called SolarList. He was a first-time founder and non-technical. So he also started learning how to code. Getting his startup to take-off was slow going, so he started doing some freelance work. Several of his clients wanted a way to add store locator functionality to their websites. So on a 30-hour flight from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, Tyler built a store locator SaaS app as a side-project. When he landed, he deployed the code and launched the product. He emailed some of these clients and within 24 hours he had a handful of people paying him $5 a month. The product was terrible and had a lot of missing functionality, but it did the basic job. A year later, SolarList still wasn't getting traction and had to be shut down. And Tyler was left with over $50,000 of credit card debt and uncertainty about his future. He had to dig himself out of a financial hole. So he started doing more freelance work and putting more time into his StoreMapper side-project which was now doing around $1000 MRR. By being able to spend more time on StoreMapper, Tyler was able to grow it over $5000 MRR in about 9 months. And eventually got it to over $40,000 MRR a few years later. But he built it as a sustainable and profitable micro' SaaS company. It helped him to pay down his credit card debt, travel the world and spend more time on projects he found interesting. And if building that type of business appeals to you, then you'll love this episode. I hope you enjoy it.

Rick Perreault

Challenges of Scaling a SaaS Business to $20 Million – with Rick Perreault [194]

Rick Perreault is the co-founder and CEO of Unbounce, a SaaS product that makes it easier to build custom landing pages, improve conversion rates and drive more leads & sales. The company was founded in 2009 and went from zero to over $7 million dollars in annual revenue within 5 years. Rick was an early guest on this podcast (on episode 25 back in 2014) where he shared what happened in those 5 years. Since then, Unbounce has continued to grow and is now a $20 million dollar business. So I invited Rick back to talk about the challenges of scaling a SaaS business.

Mikita Mikado

SaaS Growth: How This Startup Went from 0 to 10,000 Customers – with Mikita Mikado [177]

Mikita Mikado is the co-founder and CEO of PandaDoc, a SaaS product that lets you create, deliver, and manage your team's quotes, proposals, contracts, and other sales collateral. Before launching PandaDoc, Mikita and his co-founder Serge were running another business together in Belarus. They had to send out a lot of sales proposals and contracts. It was tedious and time-consuming for them to create and track all these documents. And after investing hours into putting a document together, they had no idea if their prospective customer had even looked at it. So eventually, they decided to solve this problem, not just for themselves but also for other people running similar businesses. They built a SaaS product called QuoteRoller and launched it in 2011. The product helped to create and track sales proposals. They got lucky when they launched and got some initial traction. But soon they realized that they hadn't quite built the product the right way and that they were spending too much time arguing with each other about features, instead of talking to their customers. That was the wake-up call for them.

Dan Faggella

SaaS Recurring Revenue: Lessons from a Former MMA Fighter – with Dan Faggella [163]

Dan Faggella is the founder and CEO of TechEmergence, an artificial intelligence market research firm. TechEmergence helps companies to gain insights on the application and implications of AI and machine learning technologies. Prior to launching TechEmergence, Dan founded Science of Skill, an eCommerce business which he grew from zero to over $2 million in annual revenue in 4 years. He went on to sell that business for 7-figures. Dan is a very interesting guy. He's actually a former martial artist and MMA fighter who has been training other fighters. And Science of Skill initially started as a blog where he could teach more people. So what does this have to do with SaaS? Firstly, there are some valuable lessons that Dan shares on how he built a recurring revenue business. Those lessons will be useful for anyone focused on SaaS recurring revenue. Secondly, he talks about how he generated traffic for Science of Skill and a systematic approach he took to convert as many leads as possible into customers. So if you're struggling to find customers, you might get some useful tips. And thirdly, I think it's crucial that he thinks outside of the box and learn from people in different industries and types of businesses. I think that's how we can find more creative solutions to problems in our own space. So I hope you enjoy the interview.

Greg Mercer

Think Big, Start Small: Lessons on Starting a SaaS Business – with Greg Mercer [157]

Greg Mercer is the founder and CEO of Jungle Scout, a product that helps sellers on Amazon to research and find profitable product ideas and market niches. My guest launched Jungle Scout in 2015 as a tool to help him find product ideas to sell on Amazon. With just $1000 and no coding skills, he's grown it into a business doing multiple 7-figures in annual revenue and a fully remote team of over 30 people. He and his wife, quit their corporate jobs once the business took off and sold their home. Today, they live in different Airbnb's around the world and manage the business from anywhere and everywhere in the world. This week's episode is a story about a guy who was working as a civil engineer but wanted to become an entrepreneur. But he didn't have a business idea and no business experience. One day he heard about people who were selling products on Amazon. And he decided that he was going to do the same. Over the next year, he built a decent business as an Amazon seller. But he realized that he was wasting a lot of time doing research on what types of products to sell on Amazon. So he hired a developer to build a Chrome extension for him. He figured that this would save him time and if he was lucky, he might be able to sell it to another Amazon sellers too. A few weeks later, he built a one-page WordPress website with a PayPal button. And he had his first sale within a month. He had a modest goal of making 1 or 2 sales a day. Today, he's running a multi-million dollar SaaS business. And it's taken him 3 years from the day he had the Chrome extension idea. He wasn't technical and he didn't have business experience. But he knew the value of starting small and making daily progress. It's a great story which I hope will inspire you. And there are some great lessons that you may be able to apply yourself.

Bastiaan Janmaat

How a SaaS Company Uses Artificial Intelligence to Generate B2B Leads – with Bastiaan Janmaat [151]

Bastiaan Janmaat is the co-founder and CEO of DataFox, an artificial intelligence and prospecting platform. DataFox helps sales and marketing teams prospect smarter and have thoughtful, personalized conversations at exactly the right time. DataFox's algorithms structure information on millions of businesses and deliver reliable data and machine-learned suggestions where and when they're needed. Prior to launching DataFox, my guest was an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs. He and his co-founders launched DataFox in 2013 and to date have raised $9 million in funding. The company's investors include Goldman Sachs and Google Ventures. And their customers include companies such as Twilio, Box, Google, Amazon & SalesForce. This episode is a story about 4 co-founders who decided that they could use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help sales & marketing people to make better decisions. They saw firsthand how the explosion of information available to sales & marketing people was overwhelming and making it harder for them to do their jobs. They decided to use data science and machine learning to capture millions of data points about companies and people. And turn that data into actionable insights. But they also knew that they needed to move fast. So they started building the AI technology, but also did a ton of work manually to process the data they collected. In other words, they focused on solving customer's problems however they could. The first version of their product was sold for $49 per month. Today, their customers pay them anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000 a year.

Bruno Didier

How a Product Manager Quit His Job to Build a $2 Million SaaS Business – with Bruno Didier [140]

Bruno Didier is the founder and CEO of Y-Combinator startup Trackin. The company provides a software solution to help restaurants get better control of their deliveries by connecting managers, drivers and customers. Trackin offers an online ordering system for customers, a dashboard for managers, an app for drivers and a real-time tracking solution for deliveries. The company was founded in 2014, has raised $400K to date and is based in San Francisco. This is a story about a guy who ordered dinner from a restaurant for himself and a few friends through an online delivery service. After waiting for hours and not getting his food, he went and bought a pizza from a local grocery store. He decided that he was never going to order a delivery from a restaurant again. He kept thinking that there had to be a better delivery solution for restaurants that tracked deliveries and helped customers know exactly where their order was and when they were going to get the delivery. He wished that someone would come up with a solution for this. Eventually, he realized that he was the guy who had to solve this problem. He's a solo founder who decided to move away from San Francisco to start his business. In 4 years he's gone from zero to over $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). He also got accepted in Y-Combinator, which helped him to think bigger and grow his business faster. And if it wasn't for a dinner he had with a stranger in France, he would never have even considered applying to YC because it seemed to big of a goal.

Matt Ekstrom

How Prospectify Grew SaaS Revenue from Zero to $20K MRR in 9 Months – with Matt Ekstrom [138]

Matt Ekstrom is the co-founder of Prospectify, a B2B prospecting platform that helps you to automate your lead generation process. Prospectify uses data search, data enrichment, and verification systems to help you build highly targeted prospect lists. The company was founded in January 2016 and was self-funded for the first year. At the end of 2016, the company raised $1 million in funding.

Antonio Carlos Soares

How to Implement a Successful SaaS Business Model – with Antonio Carlos Soares [136]

Antonio Carlos Soares is the co-founder and CEO of RunRun.it, a SaaS product that helps teams to manage tasks, projects, performance and corporate communication. The company was founded in 2012, is based in Sao Paolo, Brazil and to date has raised $4.4 million in funding. RunRun.it has more than 1000 paying customers and generates over $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Antonio is a serial entrepreneur from Sao Paulo, Brazil. He quit a successful consulting career to build his own startup. Like most entrepreneurs, he had a roller coaster of a ride. He had tough moments such as having to put this mother’s apartment up as collateral for a business loan. And he had highs by successfully building and selling a business. Since 2012, he's taken RunRun.it from zero to over $2 million in annual recurring revenue, 1000 customers, and over 65 employees.

How to Turn Frustration Into a Million Dollar Software Business (Part 3) – with Shane Melaugh [121]

"I was the opposite of a 'model student'" "Even if you know nothing about entrepreneurship, you are more qualified now than I was." "How do I get hired? I had no idea." "It made me realize how I'd gone from zero to an authority in the niche by being totally obsessed with something." "That business turned out to be the worst decision I ever made." "Eventually, it dawned on me that I need to learn about marketing." "I have a better life now than pretty much anyone I meet – thanks to the hard work I've done over many years." 1. What's the best business advice you ever received? 2. What book would you recommend? 3. What's one attribute or characteristic of a successful entrepreneur? 4. What's your favorite productivity tool or habit? 5. What new business idea would love to pursue one day? 6. What's an interesting or fun fact most people don't know about you? 7. What's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Ian Harris, IanHarris.com

How Storytelling Can Help Your Startup Get More Customers – with Ian Harris [118]

Ian Harris is the author of the book 'Hooked on You – The Genius Way to Make Anybody Read Anything'. He's the associate director of Gatehouse, a UK-based communication agency. And regularly speaks about how to build an audience and use storytelling to capture people's attention. In his book, he explains why storytelling matters in the business world. And how you can use storytelling to get people's attention and eventually turn them into your customers. Whether you're writing emails, blog posts, or landing page copy, you'll discover how storytelling can help you be more effective at getting customers. It seems that we're all getting more and more overwhelmed with content these days. More blog posts are being published, more emails are being sent, there are more tweets, shares, and likes. And it's no different for our customers. They're overwhelmed with information and if you want to grab their attention, then storytelling is a perfect way to do that. We're going to talk about what exactly storytelling, how all of us have stories that we can tell, we'll share some hacks on how you can find stories, and we'll go through a step-by-step process for using those stories to grab people's attention and get more customers.

Zvi Band, Contactually

How an Idea in Evernote Grew Into a Multi-Million Dollar SaaS Business – with Zvi Band [116]

Zvi Band is the co-founder and CEO of Contactually, a CRM tool which helps you turn relationships into results. He's a software developer and entrepreneur who founded Contactually in 2011. And he's grown it into a multi-million dollar business with over 70 employees. The company is based in Washington DC and to date has raised over $12 million in funding. It all started in 2010 when Zvi fired up Evernote and wrote down an idea for a new product. He had no plan on what he was going to do with that idea. What he didn't realize at the time was that he had just planted a seed for a new business that he was going to build. For the next few months, he played with the idea, hacked together a prototype over a weekend, but didn't see it any more than a side project. Today, after 5 years that idea in Evernote has grown into a business that's generating several million dollars in revenue with over 70 employees. It's a great story and we'll share what Zvi did to turn that idea into product and business. We talk about the ONE thing that he wished he'd done differently — which is great advice for anyone in the early days of building their product. And we talk about what he still struggles with today (despite the success that he's had).

Daniel Ha, Disqus

How 2 Students Grew Their Startup Idea Into an 8-Figure Business – with Daniel Ha [113]

Daniel Ha is the co-founder and CEO of the blog commenting platform Disqus. He and his co-founder founded the company in 2007 while they were undergraduates at the University of California, and then shortly after dropping out to work on the business full-time. Not only was Disqus my guest's first business, it was also his first job. 9 years later, Disqus is used by millions of websites. It reaches over a billion unique visitors and handles over 50 million comments a day. The company generates 8-figures in annual revenue. It has raised over $20 million in funding and is based in San Francisco. We talk about how they came up with the idea, what they did to get early traction and how they've successfully grown the business to where it is today.

Jerrod Bailey, Tallwave

A Step-by-Step Guide to Generating Business Leads on LinkedIn – with Jerrod Bailey [112]

Jerrod Bailey is a Partner and VP of Business Development at Tallwave, an Arizona-based business design and innovation agency focused on helping companies build great products and take them to market successfully. Jerrod is a revenue growth specialist focused on getting to that first dollar of revenue and beyond. He helps startups and growth companies to develop their business model, their go-to-market, and launch plans and then structure their company to reach a lot of customers very efficiently, whether they have a hundred sales reps or none. For 12 years prior to Tallwave, Jerrod served as an operator in three venture-backed startups, all having exits between $77M and $2 billion.

Alex Berman, InspireBeats

What We Learned From Sending a Million Cold Emails – with Alex Berman [105]

Alex Berman is the head of growth for InspireBeats, a company that does fully manage sales and lead generation for startups and agencies. One of the most common challenges I hear from SaaS entrepreneurs is that they're struggling to generate leads. And many of you may have tried sending cold emails and wished that you hadn't even wasted your time.

Brandon Pearce, Treehouse: How a Developer Bootstrapped an 8-Figure SaaS Company - with Ryan Carson [246]

How Brandon Pearce Bootstrapped a Startup from $0 to $70K a Month – with Brandon Pearcer [104]

Brandon Pearce is the founder of Music Teachers Helper, a SaaS application that's helping thousands of music teachers around the world manage their studio. It lets them handle everything from billing and lesson schedules to automatic reminders and even tax reports. I first came across my Brandon in 2012 when I read his story in a book called The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. He started the business with almost no money in 2004 and within a few years, the business was generating almost $30,000 in MRR. So he decided to sell his home and belongings in Utah and moved with his wife and 2 young daughters to Costa Rica (where his third daughter was born). And in the past 6 years, they've visited over 30 countries, while still building his business.

Scott Klein, StatusPage.io

Part 2 – How StatusPage Went from Zero to a Million Dollars in 18 Months – with Scott Klein [087]

Scott Klein is the co-founder of StatusPage, a Y-Combinator backed startup that lets you create a hosted status page for your app or website. You can use the status page to display downtime notifications, performance metrics, or any other information that your customers might need to know. StatusPage launched in 2013 and has raised about $250,000 to date. Its customers include companies such as KISSmetrics, Vimeo, and Kickstarter.

Scott Klein, StatusPage.io

Part 1 – How StatusPage Went from Zero to a Million Dollars in 18 Months – with Scott Klein [086]

Scott Klein is the co-founder of StatusPage, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that lets you create a hosted status page for your app or website. You can use the status page to display downtime notifications, performance metrics, or any other information that your customers might need to know. StatusPage launched in 2013 and has raised about $250,000 to date. Its customers include companies such as KISSmetrics, Vimeo, and Kickstarter.

Josh Haynam, Interact

How 3 College Friends Bootstrapped their Startup from $0 to $15k a Month in 10 Months – with Josh Haynam [057]

Josh Haynam is the co-founder of Interact – a SaaS product that makes it easier to create shareable quizzes for your website. You can create a quiz to engage with your audience or generate new sales leads. Josh and his two co-founders bootstrapped the company since its launch just over a year ago. In 10 months, they went from $0 to $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And they landed clients like Disney, NBC, and the American Red Cross. And they did that with zero outbound sales calls and all through content marketing.

Pete Koomen, Optimizely

How the Co-Founders of Optimizely Went from Idea to First Customer in 1 Day – with Pete Koomen [056]

Pete Koomen is the co-founder and CTO of Optimizely – a leading website optimization and A/B testing platform. The company was founded in 2010 and to date has raised over $88 million in funding. Optimizely has over 8000 customers, including major brands such as Salesforce, Disney, and Starbucks. Prior to launching Optimizely, Pete worked at Google for 3 years.

Tim Sae Koo, Tint

How This Startup Went from Zero to $400K a Month in 2 Years – with Tim Sae Koo [055]

Tim Sae Koo is the co-founder & CEO of Tint, a platform that enables brands to aggregate, curate and display social media feeds anywhere – including desktop, mobile, retail TV displays, event walls or jumbotrons at big events. Tint was founded in 2013 and was profitable within 3 months or launch. Today, their platform is used by over 45,000 brands around the world.

Josh Pigford, Baremetrics

How to Take Your Business from $0 to $30,000 a Month in Recurring Revenue – with Josh Pigford [048]

Josh Pigford is the founder of Baremetrics, a product that provides SaaS analytics for Stripe.

Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo

How DuckDuckGo is Making Search Better Than Google – with Gabriel Weinberg [033]

Gabriel Weinberg is the Founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn't track you, with over a billion searches in 2013. He is also an angel investor and co-author of Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers. Gabriel has been featured on CBS, FOX, the Guardian, the Washington Post and many more.

Ben, Olark

How an Idea to Improve Live Chat Built a Multi-Million Dollar Company – with Ben Congleton [021]

Ben is the co-founder and CEO of Olark, a tool that brings a hassle-free live chat to your website. Olark is a Y Combinator startup that was founded in 2009. Today, Olark has over 5000 customers in 151 countries and has grown into a multi-million dollar business.