Product-Led Growth for SaaS

Bilal Aijazi, Polly

Freemium SaaS: From $8/Month to 7-Figure ARR

Bilal Aijazi is the co-founder of Polly, an engagement platform that brings polls, surveys, and feedback workflows into the tools teams already use like Slack, Teams, and Zoom. In 2015, Bilal was working at a consumer messaging company, watching apps like WeChat evolve from simple chat tools into full-blown platforms. He figured the same shift would happen at work. So he and his co-founder Samir started experimenting with simple solutions to collect feedback. Their first attempt was an email-based tool, but engagement was terrible. People just treated it like another survey to avoid. Then Slack opened their API. And Bilal noticed people on Twitter asking for Slack polls. So the founders quickly ported their product over, becoming one of the very first Slack apps ever built. But the installation process was clunky. Five manual steps that required copying and pasting tokens between different screens. Yet 80% of people still completed the setup. So they were clearly providing something people wanted. Then one day someone posted Polly on Product Hunt and they went viral overnight. They were getting thousands of new signups every month and struggling to keep the servers running. Yet they had zero revenue. Their first paying customer spent $8 a month for a fantasy football league. Then came the real challenge of building a freemium SaaS: figuring out who would actually pay. Most users just wanted to do something casual with polls like pick lunch spots. But through hundreds of conversations, they found where the real money was. They focused on company all-hands, sales kickoffs, and other high-stakes meetings where feedback actually mattered. Just when things clicked, Slack threw a spanner in the works. Polly had built a workflow feature for automating feedback. They were signing five-figure deals. Six months later, Slack launched their own solution. The founders had to make a choice. Stay on Slack and hope for the best, or take a massive risk and rebuild everything for multiple platforms. They expanded to Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and embedded directly into presentations. Rebuilding their entire infrastructure was a huge undertaking, but they had no choice. Today, Polly serves millions of monthly active users and generates multiple seven figures in ARR with just 20 people.

Ryan Wang, Assembled

SaaS Pricing Trap: Usage-Based Models Need Minimums to Survive

Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, an AI platform for customer support that helps companies manage both human and AI agents more efficiently. In 2016, Ryan was a machine learning engineer at Stripe. He and his co-founders spent two years building before launching in 2020—the same day WHO declared COVID a global pandemic. Their momentum vanished. About a quarter of demos didn't show up. Their SaaS pricing model—usage-based with no minimums—meant customers could scale to zero without leaving. It took 8 months to earn their first dollar of revenue. In 2016, Ryan was a machine learning engineer at Stripe. He and his future co-founder Brian built ML tools to automate support tickets, but they realized the real problem wasn't automation—it was workforce management. That became the spark for Assembled. The three co-founders spent two years building before they launched in 2020. They lined up a TechCrunch story, hit the front page of Hacker News, and then their launch landed the same day the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic. Momentum vanished. About a quarter of demos didn't show up. It took them eight months to earn their first dollar of revenue. The SaaS pricing trap: When they finally got customers, they had usage-based pricing with no minimums. Customers could scale usage to zero. When usage flatlined during the pandemic, the team blamed themselves before realizing customers weren't leaving because of the product—they were just cutting costs. How Ryan fixed the SaaS pricing problem: 1. Shifted focus from chasing growth to serving customers who were getting value 2. Met customers in person, sat with support leaders, and built what actually mattered 3. Added pricing minimums to prevent revenue from dropping to zero 4. Built sticky features that justified the investment That hands-on approach worked for about 10 customers. Then it broke at 50. Onboarding took weeks. Some features worked in demos but failed in production. So they rebuilt onboarding to get it down to days and cleaned up the product so it could scale. Eventually they grew from their early customers to dozens more and reached 8-figure ARR.

David Shim, Read AI

Product-Led Growth to 8-Figure ARR with $0 Ad Spend

David Shim is the co-founder and CEO of Read AI, a meeting intelligence platform that helps teams capture, analyze, and act on insights from their meetings. David Shim had already built and sold a company for $200 million to Snapchat when he spotted his next opportunity: a reflection in someone's glasses during a Zoom call. During the pandemic, David noticed a fellow meeting participant's glasses reflecting ESPN.com - they were both distracted on the same call. That moment sparked a question: could AI measure meeting engagement in real-time? After cold-emailing Zoom founder Eric Yuan to validate the idea (Eric confirmed Zoom wasn't building it), David raised $10 million and launched Read AI on the Zoom App Store. The initial product showed engagement analytics - sentiment scores, attention metrics, who was distracted. Users thought it was cool. But cool doesn't pay the bills. Monthly retention sat at just 5%. Users would try the product, see their meeting scores, and never come back. David had built a dashboard when he should have built a decision-making tool. The breakthrough came when OpenAI released ChatGPT. David's team combined their proprietary engagement analytics with LLM-powered summaries, creating what they call the "narration layer" - capturing not just what was said, but how people reacted. Tone, emotions, head nods, who looked away. The transcript tells you the words; the narration layer tells you the truth. Retention climbed: 5% to 10%, then 30%, 40%, 50%, and finally 81%. Today Read AI adds 12 million accounts per year with zero ad spend. Every meeting report shared is a viral loop - all participants receive the notes, non-users see the value, and accounts multiply. Product-led growth at its purest.

Sergiy Korolov, Mailtrap

Product-Led Growth: From Internal Mistake to 7-Figure SaaS

Sergiy Korolov is the co-CEO of Railsware, a product studio that helps companies design, build, and scale successful software products, and the co-founder of Mailtrap, an email testing and delivery platform trusted by developers worldwide. Back in 2011, Sergiy's team made a massive mistake. They accidentally sent 20,000 test billing emails from their staging environment straight to real customers. The chaos was immediate. Customers were confused and upset, wondering if they'd actually been charged or not. To make sure it never happened again, they built a small internal tool to stop test emails from reaching real inboxes. When they shared it with the Ruby on Rails community, something unexpected happened. Developers loved it, and Mailtrap spread purely through word of mouth, eventually attracting more than 200,000 users. For the next five years, Mailtrap stayed free. It was a side project until 2016, when Sergiy finally decided to turn it into a real business. Instead of guessing, his team ran over 100 customer interviews and dug into usage data to guide pricing and product decisions. It took another four years to reach $1 million in ARR. Growth was slow and steady, not the overnight success story people imagine. And just as things started to pick up, a new challenge appeared. Customers wanted Mailtrap to handle production email sending too. That meant turning a product built to avoid sending emails into one that had to deliver them flawlessly. It was a risky move. The shift created a whole new set of problems, from dealing with spam attacks and deliverability issues to fighting brand confusion about what Mailtrap actually did. Suddenly, a product known for blocking emails had to prove it could deliver them reliably. Sergiy and his team spent months rebuilding their infrastructure, tightening security, and designing tools that gave developers more visibility and control. It wasn't glamorous work, but it paid off. Mailtrap evolved into a trusted, full-stack email platform used by teams around the world. Today, Mailtrap generates seven-figure ARR with a 40-person team and more than 100,000 monthly active users.

Richard White, Fathom

SaaS Retention: Why 99% of Signups Failed (And How He Fixed It)

Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom, the #1 rated AI note-taking app that automatically captures and summarizes meetings. In 2019, after running UserVoice for over a decade, Richard decided it was time for a change. Like many people, he struggled to take notes while talking in meetings. When the pandemic hit, he saw his opportunity. He recruited four of his best engineers from UserVoice and raised funding on day one. But growth was painfully slow. After nearly a year, they only had 50 stable users. The problem was trust. People wouldn't bring an unknown bot into real meetings. They wanted to test it first, but testing on their own didn't work because the bot would mute itself. So his team built a clever fix - a bot that played pre-recorded video, giving users a "fake" meeting to help them build confidence. Then Zoom launched its app marketplace and included Fathom. They exploded to 100,000 signups in the first month. But only 100 people were actually using it daily. Turns out 99% of signups had zero meetings on their calendars. Zoom had sent them tons of free users who weren't using the platform for business. Richard's SaaS retention numbers looked catastrophic. Instead of giving up, Richard saw opportunity. The thousands of low-quality signups were actually the perfect testing ground to fix their broken onboarding and solve their SaaS retention problem. Just as growth took off in 2022, the funding market crashed. VCs started demanding revenue over user growth. Richard gave his team 60 days to monetize. They started selling a team plan before it was built - just two features ready and a slide deck showing what was coming. It worked - they hit $100K ARR in the first month and reached $1M ARR in a year. Today, Fathom generates eight figures in ARR with 80 employees and serves around 175,000 companies.

Vitaly Veksler, Vista Social

Vista Social: Building a Million-Dollar SaaS in a Crowded Market – with Vitaly Veksler [424]

Vitaly Veksler is the founder and CEO of Vista Social, a social media management platform for brands and agencies. In 2010, while working in corporate tech, Vitaly decided to build a social media management tool. It was his first entrepreneurial venture and over the next 9 years he learned some tough lessons about building a startup. The biggest lesson? He spent years building advanced analytics features when his customers really needed a complete social media management solution. It took him years to realize that and finally start getting some traction. Vitaly had to also learn everything – marketing, sales, customer support, you name it. His persistence eventually paid off when he sold the business in 2019. In 2020, he decided to take another shot with Vista Social, but this time in a much more competitive market. He and his small team faced a huge challenge – they had to build a product that could compete with the big players out there. Creating all the core features customers expected was a massive undertaking, but remarkably, they got it done in about 12 months. The bet paid off – Vista Social reached $1 million in ARR in less than 2 years. Today, the company has over 10,000 customers and a team of 15 people.

Dan Uyemura, PushPress

PushPress: From CrossFit Passion to 8-Figure SaaS – with Dan Uyemura [414]

Dan Uyemura is the co-founder and CEO of PushPress, a gym management software platform for boutique gym owners. In 2009, Dan was working as a front-end developer at Myspace while also falling in love with CrossFit as a personal hobby. His passion for fitness led him to open his own gym, despite having no prior experience in the industry. As a gym owner, Dan quickly realized the existing software options weren't meeting his needs. Believing he could create a better solution, he recruited two friends – a developer and a designer – to help build his own gym management software. Building the software proved tougher than they expected. As they were working on it, they also talked to other gym owners and realized many shared Dan's frustrations. Seeing the bigger opportunity, they decided to build a product they could sell. But for years, the founders struggled to gain traction. They faced several technical challenges, often having to scrap entire versions of their software and start over. The slow progress was demoralizing – it took them nearly 5 years to reach $1 million ARR. Behind the scenes, Dan was battling personal demons. He struggled with drug addiction, which added another layer of complexity to his entrepreneurial journey. These personal challenges threatened to derail both his life and his business. By 2017, Dan was on the verge of quitting PushPress and returning to just running his gym. In a last-ditch effort, he decided to invest in an accelerator program. This decision proved to be a turning point. The changes the founders made worked. PushPress doubled revenue to $2 million ARR the following year. They teamed up with another company to add features they needed. But then a competitor bought that company. Suddenly, the founders were in crisis mode. They had to race against time to build crucial features themselves or risk losing everything they'd worked for. Today, PushPress generates 8-figures in ARR, serves over 3,500 gym clients, and has grown to a team of 100 people. The company has just $11 million in funding.

Peter Loving, UserActivee

7 Key User Flows to Unlock Your SaaS Growth – with Peter Loving [410]

Peter Loving is the founder of UserActive, a UX/UI design agency that helps SaaS companies optimize their user experiences to drive growth. Whether you're struggling with onboarding, activation, or retention, Peter breaks down these essential flows and offers actionable insights to help you optimize each step of your user journey. You'll learn how to improve critical flows like signup, onboarding, and activation, as well as how to reduce churn and increase upgrades by enhancing core workflows and integration experiences.

Jared Brown, Hubstaff

Hubstaff: Overcoming Early Struggles to Bootstrap to $22M ARR – with Jared Brown [390]

Jared Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Hubstaff, a time-tracking and workforce management software for remote teams. In 2012, Jared got a message on LinkedIn from Dave, a complete stranger at the time, pitching an idea for a SaaS product. Dave had already built a basic product that was generating some revenue, but he needed a technical co-founder to help take it to the next level. Jared was intrigued but also cautious. It took three months of discussions before he finally agreed to join forces with Dave. But finding traction in the early days was far from easy. The founders were constantly torn between working on the product and trying to acquire customers. They were stuck in an endless cycle of building features, launching them, and then realizing they still weren't gaining enough traction. On top of that, they struggled with pricing strategy, debating whether to keep prices low to attract more customers or charge more to increase revenue. There were also constant discussions about which features to prioritize and how to allocate their limited development resources. And despite seeing some early signs of success, they couldn't shake the nagging feeling that maybe they were kidding themselves. Would enough people really be willing to pay for this product? But they persevered, and today, Hubstaff generates around $22 million in ARR, serving over 16,000 customers with a team of just over 100 people.

This Is Personal: The Art of Delivering the Right Email at the Right Time, RightMessage

RightMessage: From SaaS Founder Fatigue to Focused Growth – with Brennan Dunn [389]

Brennan Dunn is the founder of RightMessage, a SaaS product that helps increase conversions by showing website visitors the right message at the right time.

Greg Smith, Thinkific

Thinkific: From $29 Online Course to $60M ARR SaaS Company – with Greg Smith [380]

Greg Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Thinkific, a platform for entrepreneurs and businesses to create, market, and sell online courses and other digital products. In 2005, Greg, a law student, began teaching LSAT prep courses in-person, later converting it into a $29 online course that eventually earned him $10k per month. Seeing growing demand for online courses, Greg and his brother Matt launched a basic product in 2012 to simplify creating and selling digital courses. In the first 3 years, they experienced numerous pivots and setbacks, struggling to validate their product and business model and acquire customers. After failing to validate their early product concepts, the brothers shifted their strategy. They started manually building online courses for each new customer. This hands-on, time-intensive approach generated early revenue and gave the founders vital customer insights they needed to develop their software platform. In 2015, after launching their new software, they had a breakthrough moment when a webinar resulted in 20 customers immediately paying $1,000 each. After 5 years of persistence and hard work, the founders hit $10 million ARR, fueled by customer referrals, content marketing, and strategic partnerships. Today, Thinkific, with a 280-person team, generates about $60 million in ARR and has raised over $200 million primarily through its IPO in 2021.

Itai Sadan, Duda

Duda: From Frustrations and Doubts to 8-Figure ARR SaaS – with Itai Sadan [378]

Itai Sadan is the co-founder and CEO of Duda, a professional website builder for digital agencies and SaaS companies. In 2009, Itai and Amir, both at SAP, were eager to start their own venture, always on the lookout for a winning business idea. Noticing that many small businesses struggled with mobile website creation, they dedicated their evenings and weekends to developing a solution. Eventually, they shipped basic software for building mobile websites. But they struggled to find customers because they had full-time jobs and not enough time to dedicate to their business. Getting investors on board was tough, too. Nearly every investor they spoke to wanted to see more customers and traction. And many were skeptical about the business idea. The first year was full of frustration and the founders questioned if they were on the right track. But the pair kept going, relentlessly improving their product and looking for customers. Eventually, they caught a lucky break when their product caught the attention of someone at AT&T, who reached out to learn more about what they were building. Three months later, they had signed a significant contract with AT&T. Today, Duda is an 8-figure ARR company used by 22,000 agencies to manage over 1 million websites. The team's grown to 180 and they've raised $96 million in funding.

Lloyed Lobo, Boast.ai

Boast.ai: The Tough Road to SaaS Success and Beyond – with Lloyed Lobo [377]

Lloyed Lobo is the co-founder of Boast.ai, a fintech platform that helps companies streamline the process of claiming and financing R&D tax credits and government incentives. In 2012 Lloyed set out on his entrepreneurial journey, but for years he faced setbacks and disappointments, with multiple failed ventures. Lloyd's early efforts to get traction with Boast, especially cold-emailing, led to repeated rejections, which ultimately forced him to reevaluate his approach and pivot towards community building. This strategy proved vital for growth, helping him better understand his customers and expand through referrals and partnerships. But, reaching their first $1M in revenue was still full of challenges. However, after several years, Lloyed and his co-founder successfully transitioned Boast.ai from a services back to a product-based company. After nearly a decade of persistence through rejections and hardships, Lloyed's idea evolved into a thriving enterprise, surpassing the $10M ARR milestone. Selling the majority stake in Boast.ai was a moment of triumph for Lloyed, but it also ushered in new personal challenges and a reevaluation of his life priorities.

Dominik Angerer, Storyblok

Storyblok: Turning a CMS Prototype Into an 8-Figure SaaS – with Dominik Angerer [366]

Dominik Angerer is the co-founder and CEO of Storyblok, a headless content management system (CMS) that helps developers and marketers create better content experiences. In 2017, Dominik and Alexander discovered the limitations of trhttps://saasclub.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/tools-and-materials-used-for-fashion-designing-4XD3MX3.jpgional CMS platforms while working at an agency on various client projects. They wanted to find a CMS that could be customized to fit their client's needs. But there didn't seem to be a good solution out there. They developed a simple prototype of a headless CMS to use on client projects while they continued searching for a proper solution. But their prototype grew in popularity, and they started adding more features. Eventually, the duo quit their jobs and started their own company. But it wasn't all smooth sailing. They wasted a lot of time and energy by trying to pursue too many ideas at once instead of being focused on the problem that mattered the most. And they lost a big customer that was very interested in their product once they revealed they were a 2-person company. Today Storyblok is an 8-figure ARR business that serves thousands of customers and has raised $58 million in funding.

Adam Nathan, Almanac

Almanac: Overcoming Horizontal Product Challenges – with Adam Nathan [364]

Adam Nathan is the founder and CEO of Almanac, a collaboration platform for remote teams to write, approve, and organize docs. In 2018, after years of working in product roles and getting frustrated with inefficient work tools and endless meetings, Adam quit his job and set out to start his own company. He spent over a year validating different ideas before picking Almanac. But launching a horizontal product poses huge challenges. And it was no different for Adam. When your product can work for everyone, it's easy to dilute your messaging and end up grabbing no one's attention. So it's no surprise that Adam and his co-founders struggled to find their target customers. However, today Almanac is a 7-figure ARR SaaS with over 50 employees, tens of thousands of customers, and $45 million in VC funding.

Leon Barnard, Balsamiq

Wireframing 101 for SaaS Startups – with Leon Barnard [361]

Leon Barnard is the Education Team Lead at Balsamiq and co-author of the book' Wireframing for Everyone' alongside Michael Angeles and Billy Carlson. Wireframes are fast and easy to make, can be created and understood by anyone, and can be used for both creative ideation and practical UX design. But many teams still struggle to work effectively with wireframes. Others assume that wireframes are something that only product designers should create. Today, we're going to give you a 'Wireframing 101 for SaaS Startups' masterclass. Our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools needed to craft effective wireframes, dodge common pitfalls, and navigate the wireframing process successfully so that you can design great SaaS products.

Sufian Chowdhury, Kinetik

Kinetik: From Failed Software to a $10M ARR SaaS Company – with Sufian Chowdhury [360]

Sufian Chowdhury is the co-founder and CEO of Kinetik, a company that's built the first integrated software for non-emergency medical transportation. Back in 2016, while working on a different startup idea, an old buddy of his, who was running a transportation business, came to Sufian in a panic about a database problem, which was really just a huge out-of-control Excel spreadsheet. While trying to fix the 'database' problems, Sufian discovered a whole bunch of problems with the actual transportation business that was helping Medicaid patients get to their medical appointments. Growing up in a low-income family that relied on Medicaid, Sufian felt an instant need to jump in and solve these problems with his friend's business. Together with a couple of other friends (who later became his co-founders), they started hanging out in the back office of the transportation business. They wanted to get a handle on how the business worked and wondered if they could develop software to replace the Excel spreadsheet. In time, they figured they'd also be able to help other businesses dealing with the same issues. But, 6 months later, they realized they'd built the wrong software. Worse still, Sufian had already burnt through $80,000 of his own money on this venture. So, they had to hit reset and start from scratch on the product. But this time they decided to talk to folks in transportation companies, ensuring they got what was needed and could build the right thing. Fast forward 18 months, and they finally launched their product and started getting paying customers. Things were looking up. But then, the pandemic hit and they lost a whopping 70% of their customers. Instead of giving up, Sufian decided to double down on the software business with an even bigger and bolder vision of what they were going to do.

Aytekin Tank, Automate Your Busywork

Automate Your Busywork: A Guide for Early-Stage SaaS Founders – with Aytekin Tank [354]

Aytekin Tank is the founder and CEO of JotForm and author of the new book, "Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff". Aytekin has almost two decades of experience in the SaaS industry, and JotForm has helped millions of users worldwide eliminate paperwork and automate their workflows. During our conversation, Aytekin shares his personal journey as a SaaS founder and how he discovered the power of automation to scale his business. He explains how his "Automation Flywheel" can help SaaS founders and teams reclaim their time, increase their productivity, and shares some practical tips and strategies for getting started with automation. We'll dive deep into the 6 steps of the Automation Flywheel and explore real-world examples of how Aytekin and his team have used automation to simplify their workflows and free up their time.

Vishal Sunak, LinkSquares

Scaling a SaaS: Lessons from LinkSquares’ $40M ARR Growth – with Vishal Sunak [349]

Vishal Sunak is the co-founder and CEO of LinkSquares, a contract management solution that empowers in-house legal teams to draft, store, search, and analyze agreements. I originally interviewed Vishal on episode 281 in early 2021 where he shared how LinkSquares went from an idea to a thriving SaaS company doing $10 million in ARR, raising $21 million, and growing to a team of 70 people. Fast forward two years, LinkSquares has grown to around $40 million in ARR, raised $161 million – including a $100M Series C round in 2022 – and reached an $800M valuation. The company now employs over 400 people. So it seemed like the perfect time to invite Vishal back to the podcast to unpack what's happened in the last 2 years to drive that growth.

Richard Fenton, Go For No

How to Turn Rejection into Success for Your SaaS Startup – with Richard Fenton [347]

Richard Fenton is a speaker, coach, and author of the bestselling book Go for No!. His latest book is "When They Say No: The Definitive Guide for Handling Rejection in Sales. In this interview, Richard shares his personal story of how he initially failed at sales and how his experience led him to develop the "Go for No" philosophy. He talks about the old and new models for success and failure and how to apply the "Go for No" mindset to achieve your SaaS business goals i.e. how to embrace rejection and turn no into a powerful asset to drive your success.

Jason Bergenske, MoveitPro

MoveitPro: How an Accidental Founder Built a $5M ARR SaaS – with Jason Bergenske [333]

Jason Bergenske is the founder and CEO of MovitPro, a SaaS product that helps moving and storage companies to manage all aspects of their operations. In 2011, Jason took over a moving and storage business in Orlando, Florida, which his grandparents had started in 1968. He quickly became frustrated that the business was still being run with pen and paper instead of modern software. So he started looking around for a solution. When he couldn't find any software to do what he needed, he decided to hire a developer who could build the software for him. It wasn't smooth sailing right away. Jason went through five different teams before he found developers he could rely on to build what he needed. But a couple of years later, he had spent over $75,000 on development and only built about 10% of the features that he thought his business needed. It was at that point he realized there was an opportunity to build a software product he could sell to other moving and storage companies. And so he made a really important decision at that point.

Matt Genovese, Planorama Design

How to Build a Better SaaS Product (and Business) with User Stories – with Matt Genovese [326]

Matt Genovese is the founder and president of Planorama Design, a UX and UI design firm that helps to get complex software projects to market faster.

Ryan Kulp, Fomo

Fomo: From a Small Shopify App to a 7-Figure SaaS Business – with Ryan Kulp [324]

Ryan Kulp is the former founder of Fomo, a social proof marketing solution that enables online businesses to show purchasing activity on their website automatically. In 2016, Ryan acquired a Shopify app called Notify (which later became Fomo) and grew it into a 7-figure SaaS business that he recently sold. The Shopify app already had a few hundred customers, so it was less about a zero-to-one problem and more about how to make the investment worthwhile and grow to thousands of customers so he could quit his job and work on it full time.

Farzad Rashidi, Respona

Content Marketing for SaaS: How to Scale Your Content Promotion – with Farzad Rashidi [323]

Farzad Rashidi is the co-founder of Respona, an all-in-one link-building outreach software that helps businesses increase their organic traffic from Google. In 2018, Farzad was leading the marketing team at Visme and trying to figure out how to grow their organic search traffic. The team spent a ton of time and effort creating content but after many months they had hardly moved the needle on their SEO and organic search traffic. Eventually, they realized that they were spending nearly all their time creating content and almost zero time promoting that content. So that's when they made a major shift. They allocated just 20% of their marketing resources to content creation and 80% of their effort went into content promotion. They also knew that getting links from authoritative websites was key to building organic traffic, but it was a slow and tedious process. So they built an internal tool to make their lives easier. That SEO and content strategy has paid off for Visme, which currently gets almost 3 million monthly organic website visitors, and the product has around 14 million active users. But despite the success they had with their internal tool in helping with link-building outreach, they struggled to get traction when they tried to sell it as a standalone SaaS product. It turns out a big part of the struggle was down to how they had positioned the SaaS product. When they figured that out and simplified their positioning, things finally started to click. It's a great interview with tons of actionable insights. So I hope you enjoy it.

Vedran Rasic, LeadDelta

Product Hunt: How to Launch Your SaaS Product – with Vedran Rasic [322]

Vedran Rasic is the co-founder and CEO of LeadDelta, a product that helps you build better relationships with your LinkedIn connections. Ved is also the creator of "Product Hunt Masterclass", a course that teaches you how to run a successful Product Hunt launch and is based on his personal experience of having done several successful and not-so-successful launches.

Paul Orlando, Startups Unplugged

SaaS Growth Metrics 101: CAC, LTV, Retention and Churn – with Paul Orlando [313]

Paul Orlando is the founder of Startups Unplugged where he's building an internal incubator and accelerator programs around the world. He's a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California (USC), and he's the author of Growth Units: Learn to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost, Lifetime Value, and Why Businesses Behave the Way They Do. This episode is a crash course to help you understand and calculate your customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, retention, and churn (including negative churn and why that's a great goal for your SaaS business). We cover the common mistakes that founders make when working with these metrics and share some best practices to help you be more successful. By the end of this episode, you should have more confidence in understanding those metrics and how to use them to help you drive business growth. I hope you enjoy it.

Tony Sternberg, ProsperStack

ProsperStack: The Challenges of Building a Self-Serve SaaS – with Tony Sternberg [309]

Tony Sternberg is the co-founder and CEO of ProsperStack, a SaaS product that helps companies reduce churn by using a better cancellation flow. After spending 10 years working for a B2B SaaS company, Tony and his two co-founders decided to start their own SaaS business. They launched with a basic MVP but quickly realized that it was too basic and didn't work as they expected. So they went back to the drawing board to try and build a better product. When they finally released their new and improved product, they hit another roadblock. They weren't able to get enough people to signup for the product and the ones that did were often the wrong customers. So despite charging $29 per month, they decided that a self-serve SaaS wasn't going to work for them and switched to providing demos and then manually onboarding new customers. The company is still in its early stages and has from zero to 6-figures in ARR over the last 18 months.

Benn Stancil, Mode:

Mode: How 3 First-Time Founders Built an 8-Figure SaaS – with Benn Stancil [307]

Benn Stancil is the co-founder and chief analytics officer of Mode, a collaborative data science platform for analysts and data scientists to analyze, visualize, and share data. In 2013, Benn and his co-founders Derek and Josh were working for the same company where they had built an internal tool to help them do their jobs. They discovered that a lot of companies were building similar tools and figured that there might be an opportunity for them to launch a startup. In the last 8 years, they've grown Mode into an 8-figure SaaS business, with over 150 employees, and have raised $81M in funding.

Brian Parks

How Not To Raise Capital for Your SaaS Startup – with Brian Parks [305]

Brian Parks is the founder and managing partner of Bigfoot Capital, a company that specializes in lending growth capital to B2B software companies. Going out to raise money for your startup can be overwhelming, especially if it's the first time that you're doing it. As a founder, you have a business to run and if you're not careful, fundraising can easily consume all your time. Brian has an interesting background. He was an investment banker for several years. He's raised money as a startup founder himself. And now he's investing in early-stage SaaS companies and recently raised $30M for Bigfoot Capital. So he has a unique perspective on fundraising and I thought it would be helpful to have him share his insights on how founders of SaaS companies that are looking to raise money, can increase their chances of success.

Raj Sheth, Decalab:

How Raj Sheth Went from Growing to Buying SaaS Companies – with Raj Sheth [301]

Raj Sheth is the founder and CEO of Decalab, a SaaS factory' that buys SaaS businesses that are doing between $1M and $3M ARR and helps them to grow faster and more efficiently. In 2020, Raj acquired a SaaS data migration company called FlyData. He turned that business around and sold it just over a year later for a 3X return on his investment. But it took a long time for Raj to have that kind of success. In 2006 he launched his first B2C software company which failed. A couple of years later he launched another B2C software company which also failed. In 2011, Raj co-founded RecruiterBox, a recruiting SaaS product which he and his co-founders grew to over $4M ARR with around 3,000 customers. They went on to sell that business to a private equity firm, but it took them 7 years to get there. So it was by no means an overnight success story. In this interview, we deep-dive into how the co-founders built RecruiterBox. We talk about how they used SEO, paid media, directory listings, and all kinds of other things to grow the business and the lessons they learned along the way. I hope you enjoy it.

Listener Stories: Early-Stage SaaS Founders Around the World [300]

In this episode, I share listener stories and introduce you to 8 early-stage SaaS founders from across the world.

Alan Silvestri, Growth Gorilla:

A Guide to Content Promotion for B2B SaaS Companies – with Alan Silvestri [299]

Alan Silvestri is the founder of Growth Gorilla, an agency that provides in their words no BS content promotion for B2B SaaS companies. If your content promotion ends right after you click publish and share the content on your social media profiles, then you're not making the most of the content that you worked so hard to create. The truth is that content creation is just half the job. To be truly effective with your content marketing, you need to invest just as much time in promoting the content. Content promotion doesn't just help you reach new audiences, it also helps you to improve your SEO when you can get other sites to link to your content. But doing a content promotion right is hard. Even many SaaS companies that are investing time in content promotion, get it wrong. Their outreach and promotion are ignored and they end up wasting a lot of time and effort, without much to show for it.

Zandra Moore

SaaS Sales Outreach: Do Things That Don’t Scale to Stand Out – with Zandra Moore [292]

Zandra Moore is the co-founder and CEO of Panintelligence, a white-labeled business intelligence and predictive analytics solution for SaaS companies. Zandra and her two co-founders acquired the product they were building at their old company and spun it into a new startup. They packed up and carried a server across a car park to their new office. To get started, they got a list of 500 companies from Dunn and Bradstreet and sent each one a handwritten letter in the mail. It wasn't scalable, but it helped them land customers. Since then, their startup has grown into a multiple 7-figure SaaS business with over 50 employees. They're disrupting the SaaS analytics sector and competing against giants like Power BI and Tableau. And they're doing all this from a city in the north of England. In this interview, we discuss: I hope you enjoy it.

Steve Carroll

Findigs: Focusing on Progress Not Perfection to Hit $2M ARR – with Steve Carroll [290]

Steve Carroll is the co-founder and CEO of Findigs, a property rent management software that improves the leasing experience for renters and landlords. Like many people moving to a big city like New York, Steve had experienced firsthand how difficult it can be to rent a place. He realized that the vast majority of renters were still paying their rent offline or mailing checks every month. So he teamed up with his best friend Keith to launch an online payments solution for renters. People told them they were wasting their time because banks were already solving the problem and could send checks for renters. But Steve had found the experience clunky and almost got evicted when his bank stopped sending rent checks for several months. They started their customer research by going to a local bar and asking people how they paid their rent. Some women thought this was a pickup-line until they'd whip out their phones and show them a Typeform survey. Just taking a scrappy approach like this quickly got them about 1,000 survey results, which gave them enough data to move ahead. Today, their business generates around $2M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with a team of 12 people. In this interview, you'll learn: I hope you enjoy it!

Adrienne Barnes

How to Create SaaS Buyer Personas and Produce Better Content – with Adrienne Barnes [286]

Adrienne Barnes is a B2B SaaS Content Marketer and the founder of Best Buyer Persona. She helps SaaS and tech companies learn more about who their audience is and then turn those insights into useful buyer personas that help create better and more effective content. Buyer personas are a great way to understand your customers and use those insights to improve every aspect of the customer experience from marketing, sales, product, and more. Unfortunately, most companies do a terrible job creating buyer personas, or worse, don't have any. Those companies create buyer personas based on loose assumptions and anecdotal information. While these personas look nice, they often don't serve any useful purpose and are quickly forgotten about. If you create buyer personas this way, there's a huge risk that you're going to make the wrong investments in your product, marketing, and sales, and waste a lot of time and money doing the wrong things. The key reason companies lack or have useless personas is that they don't talk to their customers.

Daniel Scrivner

Flow – How to Turnaround a Struggling SaaS Company – with Daniel Scrivner [275]

Daniel Scrivner is the CEO of Flow, a task and project management product that's used by over 300,000 teams. In early 2019, Daniel was hired to help lead the turnaround at Flow. The company was about 10 years old and in trouble. It was losing customers and revenue at a worrying rate. The team had been spending about $100,000 a month on paid acquisition advertising but it wasn't moving the needle. In fact, revenue was still declining by about 5% month over month. When Daniel joined, continuing to spend any money on acquisition wasn't an option. So with a core team of 6 people, he had to figure out how to lead a turnaround – and do it fast. It was a huge challenge. But Daniel had to deal with one more – this was his first job as a CEO. In this interview, we talk about why an unlikely candidate like Daniel was hired as CEO and how he and his team went about diagnosing and fixing some major problems. We dig into why and how he rehauled the Flow product by improving the design, making it more modern and lightweight, and reducing friction for end-users. And we explore how the team went about fixing their marketing and sales funnel so they were able to improve how they acquired, activated, and retained customers. Today, Flow is growing again. And Daniel's role has evolved from a turnaround to growth CEO. Whether you're working on a SaaS business that's not growing fast enough or one where revenue is in decline, there are a lot of great lessons in this interview. We often look for silver bullets to solve seemingly insurmountable problems. But this story is a reminder about the importance of nailing the fundamentals, constantly improving small things, and eventually seeing them compound into meaningful results for your business. I hope you enjoy it.

Russ Heddleston

DocSend: A Case Study in Product-Led Growth – with Russ Heddleston [273]

Russ Heddleston is the co-founder and CEO of DocSend, a SaaS platform that lets you securely share your documents with real-time control and insights. When Russ was an intern at Dropbox, he found that many people still shared files as email attachments even though it wasn't secure or easy to track. He decided to change that. Being engineers, Russ and his co-founders wanted to build a product right away, but they resisted the temptation. Instead, they decided to meet with potential customers to get feedback on their product idea, which resonated with a lot of people. Once they'd had enough customer conversations, they built DocSend as quickly as possible, putting little effort into design or marketing. And to get the word out, they gave away free accounts in exchange for feedback. It didn't take long for DocSend to become a quick success. But they weren't charging anything for the product. As DocSends' growth continued, the founders realized they needed to change their model. It was hard to keep growing without any revenue, so they created a $10 a month plan and they kept growing. In 2016, the founders built a sales team to help generate more demand. While it felt like the right move, their sales efforts failed. Eventually, they gave up on doing outbound sales and instead went all-in with a self-serve model just two years later. The team increased its prices and reworked the product positioning but didn't actually make any changes to the product. Suddenly, their most expensive plan was the most popular. The more they charged, the better they seemed to do with free to paid conversions. Today, DocSends' growth is driven primarily by word of mouth and SEO, and the team continues to focus relentlessly on building a great product. To date, they've raised over $15 million dollars and have a team of around 55 people. This story is a great example of how to learn from your mistakes and why product-focused models can succeed. I think you'll find it interesting and insightful in many ways. In this interview we talk about:

Paul Campillo

How to Build a SaaS Brand Without Doing ‘Branding’ – with Paul Campillo [270]

Paul Campillo is the director of brand and communications at Typeform, a SaaS platform that lets you create interactive forms, surveys, quizzes, and more. Paul was a social worker helping youth involved in the juvenile justice system and he was helping adults coming out of prison to find jobs. One day, the CEO of the non-profit where Paul worked told him that she'd heard about some software called Typeform which might be useful for them and asked if he could look into it. Paul went to the Typeform website and thought the product looked pretty cool. He came across a job application form that was created in Typeform. Filling out the form seemed like a good way to play around with the product so he answered the questions and submitted the form. About a week later, he got an email from the head of HR at Typeform asking him if we could chat with their CEO about his job application. And eventually, he became Typeform's first marketing hire. In this interview, we talk about his journey from joining a startup in its early stages and seeing it grow into an 8-figure SaaS company with over 300 employees and $52M in funding. Paul explains that whether you realize it or not, your startup is building a brand. And we dig into what exactly that means beyond how many people think of branding. We explore the importance of building a product people love, how to build deeper connections with customers and Paul shares a painful example of what happened at Typeform when they didn't pay enough attention to customers. We cover the fundamentals of storytelling, why it's so powerful, and how you can start using it to communicate with your customers in a more engaging way. And Paul shares a simple but powerful 5-part copywriting framework that you can use to market and sell your product. I really enjoyed doing this interview. Paul is a real down to earth, no BS kind of guy. He shares some great ideas and insights in this interview and I'm sure you'll get a ton of value from listening to Paul. So I hope you enjoy it.

Shruti Ghatge

Zomentum: SaaS Customer Development and No-Code Prototypes – with Shruti Ghatge [269]

Shruti Ghatge is the co-founder and CEO of Zomentum, an all-in-one sales product built for IT managed service providers (MSPs). Shruti used to work as an investment analyst at a private equity firm. She noticed that a lot of companies were building great products, but struggled with marketing and sales. She and her co-founder Rahil identified this being an even bigger issue and opportunity with IT managed service providers. But neither of them had any experience with that market. So they spent six months doing customer development and resisted writing even a single line of code. And then they spent another 4 months building the product. When the product was ready, they sent out 2,500 cold emails to prospects. And they got a zero response rate — not even one person replied to their email. Both founders were discouraged and started second-guessing themselves. Maybe the problem didn't exist and they had spent the last year building a solution no one wanted. Their product lacked a lot of features and was unstable. And Shruti often felt embarrassed showing people the product and would worry that things were going to break during demos. But, they just kept going and trying different approaches. Eventually, they found a marketing channel that was working and started attracting some customers. Today, their business does multiple 6-figures in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and they've just raised $4M in funding. There are some good lessons in this interview about doing customer development, why you shouldn't build a product too soon, how you can create a prototype without coding skills, and the importance of trusting your gut. I hope you enjoy it.

Nick Mehta

A Guide to SaaS Customer Success: Reduce Churn & Grow Revenue – with Nick Mehta [267]

Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a customer success technology that helps businesses retain customers and drive growth. Nick joined Gainsight in 2013 and has led the company through multiple funding rounds, raising a total of $156 million. And he's grown the company from a handful of employees to over 700 people around the world. He's also the co-author of Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue'.

Panos Siozos

Lessons on Perseverance from a SaaS Startup That Almost Failed – with Panos Siozos [264]

Panos Siozos is the co-founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, a white-label SaaS platform that lets you create your own, personally-branded online school. This is a story of three guys in Greece who built an e-learning software product while doing research for their PhDs. At the time, they had no intention to start a business. But some years later, after seeing how most learning management systems missed the mark, they teamed up and set out to build a better product. Two of the founders kept their day jobs and paid the salary of the third founder, so he could quit his job and work on the product full-time. It took them two years to ship the product. And then to their dismay, they realized that while people seemed excited about their product, no one seemed ready to buy. It took them another year to find their first few customers – that's three years after they started. And during those three years, there were times when they thought about quitting. But they'd invested so much time and money that it was hard for them to walk away They kept telling themselves – let's just get in front of people, let's listen to the feedback and keep improving the product. And maybe one day this will all pay off. Today, they have customers in 70 countries, a team of 40 people, and have built a multi-million dollar SaaS company. It's a great story and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Blake Bartlett

SaaS Product-Led Growth and the New Customer Journey – with Blake Bartlett [263]

Blake Bartlett is a partner at Openview, a venture capital firm that focuses on B2B companies in the expansion stage such as Highspot, Calendly, and Expensify. These days it seems like everyone in SaaS is talking about product-led growth (PLG). But for many critics, it's just a buzzword and for others, it's not even a new concept. So I decided to sit down with the guy who actually coined the term product-led growth and explore this topic in more depth with him. If you're not familiar with product-led growth, then I'd suggest you listen to episode 251 where I cover the fundamentals of PLG with Wes Bush (founder of Product-Led Institute). In this interview with Blake Bartlett, we build on that and answer questions like: We also explored how a fictional sales-led SaaS company might transition to a product-led growth model. And we examined some of the challenges the company would face trying to do that and how it might overcome them. I think it's a great conversation with someone who thinks deeply about product-led growth all the time and is involved in a number of PLG focused B2B SaaS companies. I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Tanner

Qwilr: SaaS Freemium Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them – with Mark Tanner [261]

Mark Tanner is the co-founder and COO of Qwilr, a SaaS product that helps you create design-perfect proposals, quotes, client updates, and more. This story starts in 2013 with a designer/developer named Dylan. He was running a micro-agency and found himself wasting a lot of time creating proposals. Like any self-respecting designer, he wanted to create beautiful proposals. But that meant a lot of work and back-and-forth using Word, Excel, and Adobe InDesign. One day, out of frustration, he created a website as his proposal doc. Not only did he get hired, but the client loved the website proposal and was impressed by how quickly he'd built a website for them. And that's how the idea for Qwilr was born. Dylan and Mark teamed up and decided to give this business idea a try for a couple of months. They wanted to learn if they could find their first 10 customers. In this interview, you'll learn how they turned that 2-month experiment into a business with 45 employees, $7.5M in funding, and around 3,000 customers. We also talk in-depth about the pros and cons of a freemium business model. And you'll learn about the mistakes, failures, and successes that Qwilr had with their freemium plans. We also identify some important considerations you have to make before choosing a freemium model and how you can avoid making some of the same mistakes Dylan and Mark did. I hope you enjoy it.

Jacob Eiting

RevenueCat: Overcoming Self-Doubts as a First Time SaaS Founder – with Jacob Eiting [257]

Jacob Eiting is the founder and CEO of RevenueCat, a SaaS platform that helps mobile apps to power in-app subscriptions. Jacob was working as a CTO for a mobile app company… It was a real pain for him and his team to enable in-app purchases and subscriptions. He thought it would be a great idea if someone could make it easier. But he did nothing with the idea for 2 years. Eventually, he left his job to build a solution himself. He started with a simple SDK and posted about it on Reddit. And he was torn apart by people who thought that he was trying to become an unnecessary middleman. But there were a few people who understood the pains and were interested in his solution. He focused on them. He improved his product and did a beta launch. He only had 5 people signup and created an account. It seemed like his idea was going nowhere. He wasn't generating any revenue and relying on his wife's job. He had a few months of runway left. But he didn't want to spend a lot of time improving the product if he didn't have customers guiding him. So he started writing content. He spent 6-12 hours a week writing and publishing a blog post. And he did this for a couple of months. He kept doubting himself. He didn't think he had what it took to turn this idea into a real business. Slowly, he started to see some SEO traffic trickle in. He finally got customers and was making $400 MRR. That gave me the encouragement to get more serious. By the end of that year, he'd grown his business to $7K MRR. He started thinking that maybe we could grow it to a 6-figure a year business. But the last couple of years have been huge. Jacob has grown his business to over $160K MRR ($2M ARR). In this interview, you'll learn how he's gone from struggling to find customers to building a multi-million dollar SaaS that's still growing fast every month. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Rachel Liaw

Overcoming the Challenges of a Female-Founded SaaS Startup – with Rachel Liaw [253]

Rachel Liaw is the co-founder and CEO of Fuse Inventory, a SaaS inventory planning solution that helps brands scale their supply chain. It was 2015, and Rachel had been working in the e-commerce space for a few years. She was continually struggling with inventory management. If you didn't manage inventory correctly, you either ended up with not enough product to fulfill customer demand or too much inventory that you couldn't sell. She realized that this wasn't a unique problem — it was an industry-wide issue. When she started researching software solutions, all she found were outdated software products not designed for modern e-commerce businesses. And even worse, she realized that many companies were managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of inventory every year in a spreadsheet. So in 2016, she and her co-founder Bridget quit their jobs and set out to build a modern SaaS solution for inventory management. In this interview, we talk about: It's a great story about a SaaS startup. But I think it's an even more interesting story about a female founder who's faced a ton of challenges and how she's overcome them and learned to believe in herself. I hope you enjoy it.

Wes Bush

A Guide to Product Led Growth for SaaS Founders – with Wes Bush [251]

Wes Bush is the founder of Product Led Institute and author of the book Product Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself'. Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a term coined by the VC firm Openview Venture Partners and is a growth-model that relies on the product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. In this interview, you'll learn about the 3 tidal waves or trends that are forcing more and more SaaS companies to focus on product-led growth as the main growth driver. You'll learn the differences between a sales-led' approach and a product-led' approach and we'll help you understand which one is right for your SaaS company. We talk about the pros and cons of using free trials versus a freemium model, and you'll learn how to pick the right one for your go-to-market strategy. And we'll teach you the MOAT framework, which will help you figure out the right marketing strategy, understand if you're in a red or blue ocean business, determine if a top-down or bottom acquisition strategy is right for you and how you can help showcase value to new users and customers as fast as possible. You'll also learn about the Bowling Alley framework and how it can help you improve your onboarding process.

Matt Barnett

Bonjoro: Building a SaaS Company in a Bear Suit – with Matt Barnett [248]

Matt Barnett is the founder of Bonjoro, a SaaS product that helps businesses to build relationships with their customers at scale using personal video. Matt used to run a small market research agency in Sydney, Australia. Most of his clients were based in other countries. So he decided to use video to help him build relationships with those clients. Every day, he'd check to see what new leads they had and then on his morning commute (which was on a ferry across Sydney Harbor) he'd record personal videos on his phone for each potential client. The quality of videos wasn't great and sometimes there was so much noise on the ferry, that people watching the video couldn't even hear Matt properly. But they all seemed to love getting those videos. One day, a client asked if they could also use the tool that he was using to send those videos. But the truth was that they didn't actually have a 'tool' – they'd just cobbled a few things together with Slack, Zapier and a lot of manual work to record, publish and share those videos. It seemed like an interesting project, so Matt and his team decided to spend a weekend building a basic tool for that client. They weren't able to spend much time on it and it looked awful, but it worked. But that was enough for them to be able to charge the client $15 a month. And that's how Bonjoro was born. Within a year, Matt had completely stepped away from the agency and was working full-time on Bonjoro. In this interview, you'll hear more of that story and we dig into how Matt's acquired over 40,000 users by building a viral product and partnering with influencers and affiliates. I hope you enjoy it.

Todd Chambers

6 PPC Mistakes SaaS Companies Make (and How to Avoid Them) – with Todd Chambers [244]

Todd Chambers is the director and founder of Upraw Media, an Amsterdam based agency that helps SaaS companies to grow and scale using paid media.

Darren Chait

Turning a Simple Slack Plugin into a Growing B2B SaaS Startup – with Darren Chait [243]

Darren Chait is the co-founder and COO of Hugo, a SaaS product that provides connected meeting notes for teams. Darren used to work as a corporate lawyer in Australia. He became frustrated with how inefficient meetings were and had an idea for improving things. He partnered up with a close friend, and they built a mobile app that helped people prepare for meetings. It seemed like a great idea. And it didn't take the founders long to get a couple of thousand users. But they found it hard to monetize the product, and sales were slow. At the same time, their team was struggling with internal communication. Someone had the idea to build a simple Slack plugin that reminded everyone to share notes after every meeting. It was a simple solution, but within weeks they saw huge benefits and better team communication. So they kept improving their tool and adding new features. One day, during a customer meeting, Darren was using the tool to share notes with his team. His customer was intrigued and asked if their company could also try out the software. That's when the founders started to realize that their internal tool was far more valuable than the mobile app they were trying to sell. So they pivoted and focused instead on selling their tool. It was a simple idea but still hard for people to understand. The founders struggled with their messaging. When you're creating a new product category, people aren't looking for your product. And sometimes they don't even realize they have the problem that you're solving. There are some great lessons in this interview about figuring out your value prop and messaging, how the most straightforward solutions are often the best business opportunities and using product-led growth to drive user adoption and revenue. I hope you enjoy it.

Robin van Lieshout

Getting Your SaaS Product Messaging Right – with Robin van Lieshout [242]

Robin van Lieshout is the co-founder and CEO of Insided, a customer success community platform for SaaS companies. What do you do if you've built a great SaaS product, but no one seems to care about it? In 2010, Robin launched a SaaS company in the Netherlands. He was able to pre-sell the idea to T-Mobile for a six-figure annual contract. It seemed like the perfect way to start his business. And in the next couple of years, he grew the business to around 40 customers. But he started seeing a worrying trend. The majority of his customers weren't actually using the product. He knew that it was just a matter of time before those customers churned. So he made the decision to refocus his business on a new customer segment – high-growth SaaS companies. But when he started reaching out to his prospective customers – no one seemed interested in his product. His sales team couldn't even get people to reply to their emails. They wondered if maybe they were trying to solve a problem that his target market didn't care about. Robin had to figure out what was going on and he had to do it quickly. He spent a lot of time listening to recordings of sales calls, talked to a lot of prospective customers and eventually realized that they didn't have a product/market fit issue – they had a messaging issue. He and his team didn't understand their target customers well enough. And so their messaging was off and as a result, their sales efforts were failing miserably. Once they eventually got their messaging right, things started to click. They started making sales and growing the business again. Today, they're doing just under $10 million ARR. In this interview, we talk about how Robin figured out the right messaging, how he optimized his pricing to increase the average contract value and how he's now generating 100% of his leads through inbound marketing. I hope you enjoy it.

Sabba Keynejad

A SaaS Founder Shares His Lessons on Overcoming Failures – with Sabba Keynejad [241]

Sabba Keynejad is the co-founder of Veed.io, a UK-based SaaS startup that provides a simple online video editor. Sabba and his co-founder Tim were frustrated working with complex and time-consuming video editing software. They realized that for many tasks, these products were overkill. So they set out to build a simple online video editing tool. They failed to raise seed funding so they had to work contract jobs during the day. And then they worked on their business at night. A few months later they applied to YC and made it to the final interview. They flew out to the YC offices in Mountain View excited to be on a cusp of a big break. But they were rejected by YC because they weren't making any money. So 48 hours later, the founders implemented a paywall and had their first 20 paying customers. It was a promising sign that they were solving a worthwhile problem, so they kept going. But by August, they had less than one month's runway left and knew they were going to struggle to make payroll. So they doubled their prices with little to no impact on user growth. Today, they're generating over $10K in MRR and are growing 50% month over month. The key takeaway from this story is that failure is part of life. It's how you bounce back that matters. I hope you enjoy it.

Sam Dolbel

Freemium Model for SaaS: Lessons from a Startup Founder – with Sam Dolbel [239]

Sam Dolbel is the co-founder and CEO of SINC, a SaaS product, and a mobile app that helps companies manage their mobile workforce by taking care of timesheets, location tracking, staff scheduling, and job tracking. In 2017, Sam was running a small business in New Zealand. He had 10 employees and found himself spending several hours every week managing payroll. He reached out to a friend and asked him if he could help him create a spreadsheet that might help him save some time and make dealing with payroll easier. Sam's friend suggested that they build an app. It sounded like a great idea. The only trouble was that his friend (who was a mechanical engineer) didn't know how to code either. And at the time, his friend was filming a documentary in Africa. But he had some time, so he started learning how to code while living in a tent in Tanzania. A couple of months later, the app was ready and Sam was using it in his business. Once they realized the value of the app, they decided to join forces and launch it as a product. In this interview, we talk about: Today, SINC has over 1,000 paying customers and the founder's journey is a really interesting story. I hope you enjoy it.

ClickFunnels: The $135 Million Self-Funded SaaS Startup – with Dave Woodward [237]

Dave Woodward is Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Partner at ClickFunnels, a SaaS product that lets you design and create sales pages, landing pages, order forms and more, to easily sell your product or service online. This is the story of a fast-growing $135 million SaaS company which was started in a small town in Boise, Idaho. What's more, the company is self-funded and has never raised any VC money. A couple of internet marketers had built a successful business selling online info products. But they realized they were wasting a lot of time repeatedly building the same sales funnels. Wouldn't it be great if we could use a tool to automate most of this work?, they wondered. So they started brainstorming what the ideal tool would look like. And when they couldn't find a tool like that, they decided that they were going to build it themselves. A few months into development, they realized that this was more than just a tool to help them with their info products business. A lot of people needed a tool like this. And that's when they decided they were going to build a SaaS product. But when they launched, they had a hard time selling the product. They had relationships with a lot of affiliate marketers, so they figured selling through those affiliates would be easy. But it wasn't. And for a while, it looked like this product was going nowhere. Yet, in the space of 5 years, they've been able to go from zero to $135 million ARR.

John-Daniel Trask

Raygun Founder: From Developer to SaaS Entrepreneur – with John-Daniel Trask [231]

John-Daniel Trask is the co-founder, and CEO of Raygun, a SaaS product that helps developers to monitor the health and quality of their web and mobile applications. JD and Jeremy were working as software developers for an IT services company in New Zeland. They cared deeply about the quality of their software and hated having unhappy customers. So they were always looking for better ways to track and fix errors quickly. In 2007, they both put $10,000 each to start a business and launched their first product that notified developers when their software crashed, so they could quickly fix the issue. But the business grew very slowly. And they both had to keep doing consulting work on the side to be able to pay the bills. Today, their business is doing several million dollars a year in annual recurring revenue (ARR). They are cash-flow positive and have customers in over 100 countries. But it's taken them 12 years to get to this point. And it hasn't been an easy journey. In this interview, we talk about how they've grown the business, some of the challenges they've had along the way, and how they've been able to innovate by ignoring competitors. I hope you enjoy it.

David Okuniev

Typeform: A Case Study in Product-Led SaaS Growth – with David Okuniev [230]

David Okuniev is the co-founder of TypeForm, a Barcelona-based SaaS company that specializes in online form building and online surveys. David and Robert were running a small design agency in Barcelona. A client asked them to create a form that could be used to collect information about people attending an exhibition. Instead of building a regular old form, they wanted to do something different. And inspired by the 1980s movie War Games, they created something a form that was more conversational. After that project was over, they talked about turning that idea into a product. But they weren't in a particular rush. And they spent the next 2 years trying to build the right product. When they were almost ready to launch the beta, they put up a landing page and promoted it on Betalist. In a few weeks, they had collected around 5000 email addresses. When they launched the beta, people started creating and sharing forms. And when they shared a form, new people discovered the product, signed up and created their own forms. The product that they'd spent years trying to get right was quickly going viral. In fact, when they introduced a paid plan, it took them about a year to get to a million dollars ARR. The interesting thing about Typeform is that the founders didn't start with a niche market. They built a product for everyone — which is counter-intuitive to what the majority of startups do. Today, their business does around $30M in ARR and employs around 200 people. In this interview, we talk about why the founders focused so much on building a great product, why design and user experience were more important to them than customer development or marketing and how they have grown Typeform into an 8-figure business. We also talk about a new product they've recently launched called VideoAsk and they're once again building a unique online form and survey experience with a different product. I hope you enjoy it.

Timothy Campos

From Software Engineer, to Facebook CIO to SaaS Founder – with Tim Campos [221]

Timothy Campos is the co-founder and CEO of Woven, an intelligent calendar to manage your schedule and get the most out of your meetings. Tim started his career as a software engineer. In almost two decades, he climbed the ranks from engineer to CIO (Chief Information Officer). In 2010, Tim was hired as the CIO of Facebook. He'd only be on the job for 2 weeks when he was summoned to Mark Zuckerberg's office. Tim was excited that his CEO was so motivated to get into the details of IT, that just two weeks in, he was taking time to meet with Tim. But when Tim arrived, there was no sign of Zuck. Instead, he was met by a group of executive assistants who wanted to complain about the company's internal calendar app. They told him he had to get it fixed in the next week or he was done. From that moment, Tim set to work designing creative tools that would help Facebook employees easily find optimal times and places to meet. Tim's experience managing productivity for the entire Facebook workforce helped him realize that trhttps://saasclub.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/tools-and-materials-used-for-fashion-designing-4XD3MX3.jpgional calendars are broken. And in 2016, he left Facebook to co-found Woven, an intelligent calendar that helps busy professionals maximize their most valuable asset – their time. In this interview we talk about Tim's experience at Facebook, why he feels the world needs another calendar app, how he tested different marketing channels to acquire users and why we should trust Woven with our data. I hope you enjoy it.

Geoff Atkinson

How a Founder Successfully Pivoted His SaaS Business – with Geoff Atkinson [219]

Geoff Atkinson is the founder and CEO of Huckabuy, a SaaS platform that takes SEO to the next level by automating the creation of structured data to help search engines better understand your website. In 2015 Geoff started an affiliate website. It was a simple business model — promote other companies' products and get commissions from the sales. So his priority was to do a great job with search engine optimization and drive plenty of traffic to his website. And in order to do that, he needed to create lots of content. So he built a software tool to help him generate content. He struggled with that business for the next two years and he got nowhere. He knew that he had to either shutdown the business or pivot quickly. And he had two interesting insights at this point: So based on those two factors, Geoff decided to pivot into a SaaS business. This was something that he knew nothing about. And it became even more challenging when he had to try and sell his new product. Initially, there was no user-interface, so he was going to sales meetings and trying to explain to prospects what his product would do for them but he had nothing to show them. It was too much of a leap of faith for many prospects, but a few decided to give him a shot. And finally, after three and a half years of working on his business, he started to get sales. Today is business is almost $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). So in this interview, you're going to hear Geoff's story and how he went through three and a half years of lean times for his business, how he pivoted into a SaaS business, what he learned about sales and the importance of structured data and how it could help you with SEO. I hope you enjoy it.

Derek O'Carroll

SaaS Turnaround: From Near Failure to $10 Million ARR – with Derek O’Carroll [218]

Derek O'Carroll is the CEO of Brightpearl, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) product for retailers and wholesalers. In 2016, a SaaS company founded in a small city in the UK was struggling with a business model that was unsustainable. After almost 10 years in business, the company was struggling to retain customers and was quickly running out of money. That same year, Derek O'Carroll was hired as the new CEO to help turnaround the company. He spent a lot of time talking to employees, partners, and customers to figure out the issues. He started building a list of things that needed to get fixed. And the more conversations he had, the longer his list got. He quickly realized that he wouldn't be able to fix everything. He needed to focus. So he eventually identified 3 key areas of improvement. And he decided to focus the majority of his time and his teams' time on solving those 3 things. It looked like a good plan. But it wasn't smooth sailing. In fact, when they started executing on the plan, they actually made the customer churn problem even worse for a while as they lost a lot more customers very quickly. But they stayed the course and kept executing the plan. And eventually, it paid off. In the last 3 years, revenue has more than doubled and is growing at almost 50% year over year. And they've significantly reduced their customer churn. The key lesson here is that if your business is struggling, or you feel like revenue has flatlined, or you have high churn, sometimes it can be overwhelming. Where do you start? What do you solve? You might have a super long list of things. But identify the top 2 or 3 things that you believe will make a difference and do a really great job to execute relentlessly in those areas. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Aaron Zakowski

How to Grow Your SaaS Startup with Facebook Ads – with Aaron Zakowski [214]

Aaron Zakowski is the founder of Zammo Digital, a marketing agency that specializes in using Facebook ads to help SaaS companies grow and scale their businesses. His clients include companies such as InVision, Digital Ocean and Treehouse. Have you struggled to make Facebook ads work for your SaaS business? Maybe you read every blog post you could about Facebook ads. You identified your target audience and put together great copy and images for your ads. And then when everything looked good, you put the campaign live. Facebook quickly started eating up your advertising budget, but your investment didn't turn into many leads or sales. If that's happened to you, then you're not alone. A lot of SaaS companies struggle to make Facebook ads work. And many B2B companies dismiss Facebook ads because it's a B2C platform. But with the right knowledge, mindset and approach you can use Facebook ads to generate leads and sales for your SaaS business.

Why You Should Invalidate Your SaaS Startup Idea – with Dennis Mortensen [212]

Dennis Mortensen is the founder and CEO of x.ai, an artificial intelligence-driven personal assistant that schedules meetings for you.

SaaS Funding: A Different Way to Finance Your Startup – with BJ Lackland [211]

BJ Lackland is CEO of Lighter Capital, a Seattle based company that specializes in providing financial capital to early-stage SaaS companies. Let's say your SaaS company is generating revenue… Your business is still in the early stages and you want to raise money to help you grow faster. But you know that raising angel or VC funding is going to take a lot of time and effort. You're already busy enough working on your business, product, and marketing. You know you need to raise money, but how are you also going to find the time to do fundraising? Well, there's another way to finance your startup that you might not have considered. It's called revenue-based financing and it allows you to quickly and easily raise funding without giving up equity or providing personal guarantees.

Kyle Poyar

SaaS Pricing Strategy: Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid – with Kyle Poyar [210]

Kyle Poyar is the of VP Market Strategy at OpenView, an expansion stage venture capital firm that helps build software companies into market leaders. Your SaaS pricing strategy can make or break your business. But getting your pricing right is really hard. And many companies struggle to understand what they're worth to their customers and how to clearly communicate that.

Chris Ronzio

SaaS Growth Marketing: Zero to $2M ARR in 18 Months – with Chris Ronzio [209]

Chris Ronzio is the founder and CEO of Trainual, a SaaS product that helps companies to onboard employees, automate training, systemize processes, and put everything about your business in one place. Paid advertising doesn't work. That's what I often hear from the founders of SaaS companies. They tell me that they tried Facebook and Google ads, but it was too expensive to acquire customers and so they focused on other growth strategies like content marketing instead. And when we hear things like that, it's easy to dismiss a growth channel and do what everyone else is doing. But sometimes, we find success by doing what everyone else is not doing. Chris Ronzio was running a consulting business in Arizona. He realized that many of his clients were struggling with the same issue. So one day he hired a developer to build a simple tool for him. And he started using that tool to help his clients run their businesses better. Some years later, Chris decided that he'd had enough of consulting. He really wanted to build a product business. And he realized that the simple in-house tool he'd been using with his clients all those years could actually be turned into a SaaS product. He decided to go all in with this new business. And he quickly got to a few thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue by selling his product to his consulting clients. But finding more customers beyond his consulting clients wasn't so easy. He tried a bunch of things that either didn't work or had disappointing results. But he kept looking and trying different things and eventually he found a way to get customers – by using Facebook ads. Initially, it was expensive to acquire customers using Facebook ads. But Chris kept at it and eventually he figured out how to get customers profitably. He knew how much a customer was worth and how much he could spend to acquire a new customer. And once he had that working, he took a calculated risk. He started spending as much as he could on Facebook ads. At one point, he had over $300,000 worth of credit card debt. But it enabled him to grow the business much faster. He went from zero to over $2 million in annual recurring revenue in less than 18 months. In this interview, we talk about the ups and downs that Chris experienced. We explore some of the mistakes he made and what he learned from those mistakes. And we dig into exactly what he did with this Facebook advertising campaign to acquire those customers. I hope you enjoy it.

Tim Soulo

SaaS Growth: Unconventional Wisdom Leads to a $40 Million Startup – with Tim Soulo [205]

Tim Soulo is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Ahrefs.com, a SaaS startup that provides SEO tools to help grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your market niche. In 2015, Tim joined a SaaS startup as head of marketing. The company had spent several years building their blog, but it still wasn't generating much traffic or leads. Tim decided that publishing higher-quality content regularly on their blog was going to be one of his top priorities. But after a year he still had little to show in terms of traffic and leads. Eventually, Tim figured out the problem. They were creating high-quality content, but they weren't optimizing it for SEO. They weren't doing keyword research or doing on-page optimization. Now that's not uncommon. A lot of companies make that mistake. But the startup that Tim worked for was in the business of SEO and their product helped their customers to grow search traffic! So it was pretty crazy that they weren't thinking about SEO on their own blog! Once he figured out the problem, Tim made a simple change – he started by doing keyword research to find out what people were searching for and then focused on creating the best content around those keywords. And in a couple of years, their blog traffic grew from 15,000 to over 250,000 monthly visitors and has become one of the biggest drivers of new customers and revenue growth. But the real story here is about a SaaS startup that's incredibly product-focused and breaks a lot of rules and conventional wisdom about marketing and growth. For example, they don't have a target customer or persona. They don't do growth hacks. They don't use analytics software or track conversion rates. They don't even do proper' SEO. They focus on building a great product and educating people on how to use that product through their blog. And that approach is working — they're bootstrapped and doing over $40M ARR. It's a great story. I hope it'll inspire you to think differently about your business and give you some insights to grow faster by ignoring conventional wisdom and trying something new. I hope you enjoy it.

Thomas Smale

How to Build a SaaS Business You Can Sell – with Thomas Smale [201]

Thomas Smale is the founder of FE International, an M&A firm that helps business owners to sell their SaaS, e-commerce and content businesses. FE International offers comprehensive exit planning services, as well as direct access to an established network of pre-qualified international investors. And Thomas has consulted with hundreds of internet entrepreneurs on exit strategy, growth and business development. You're hoping to sell your SaaS business in the next year or two. But you're not sure where to begin and how to put yourself and your company in the best position for a sale.

This

How to Create a SaaS Offer Your Prospects Can’t Refuse [200]

This is a special episode and I have three guests on the show today! Jimmy Ellis and Chris Rizzo are the co-founders of Prospecting Hub, a performance-based marketing firm. They generate leads for companies but only get paid when the lead is closed. Charles Kelly is the founder and CEO of Logic54, a SaaS platform, and service that helps school districts to run more efficient bus routes and save money.

Christian Owens

This Founder Went from Failed SaaS Launch to $10 Million ARR – with Christian Owens [199]

Christian Owens is the founder and CEO of Paddle. Paddle is a SaaS product that helps other software companies sell their products. It provides checkout, subscriptions, taxes, licensing, and insights in one unified platform. Christian learned to build websites when he was 12 years old. He started walking into local businesses and asking them if they wanted a website. Some business owners just laughed at him, but others hired him to do the job. At the age of 15, Christian built an invoicing application for Mac. But he had no idea how to sell software and no money to spend on marketing. So he started contacting other people with Mac products and persuaded them to do a special 2-week promotion where they'd combine all their products into a heavily discounted bundle and promote that to all their existing customers. The promotion was a huge success and they made over $400,000 in sales in 2 weeks. At the age of 16, Christian dropped out of school and focused 100% on this business and kept running these bundle promotions. By the time he was 18, he had already made his first million dollars. In 2012, Christian founded Paddle with his co-founder Harrison. They wanted to make it easier for software companies to sell their products. But they quickly realized that they had a big problem and it seemed like no one wanted their product. Things weren't looking good, but they kept at it. And one day they had a surprising insight about their product. They realized that most of their customers only cared about one feature. They didn't want everything else. And that insight led to the founders throwing away 90% of the product and focusing on that one feature. Today Paddle generates over $10 million in annual recurring revenue. And Christian at the age of 24 has become CEO of a company with over 140 employees. In this interview you'll learn exactly what the co-founders did to take a business that looked like it was going to fail and turn it into 8-figure SaaS business. It's a great story and I hope you enjoy it.

Dave Rogenmoser

How a Founder Went From a Failed SaaS Business to $250K MRR – with Dave Rogenmoser [198]

Dave Rogenmoser is the co-founder and CEO of Proof, a SaaS product that helps build social proof and increase conversion rates by displaying recent customer activity on your website. Dave started as an entrepreneur about 5 years ago. He paid a developer on Upwork $10,000 to build a software product, but he didn't know how to get customers and so the business quickly failed. He started learning as much as he could about marketing. And as he developed those skills, he was able help local businesses get more customers. So he started an agency. But he quickly realized how much he hated the agency life. Next he and his co-founders launched an information publishing business and sold courses and coaching. But deep down, he still longed to have a software business with recurring revenue. One weekend, Dave and his co-founders built a widget for their website to help them sell more courses. The widget showed you names of people who had just purchased the course. It was social proof and it doubled their sales almost overnight. Dave started testing this widget on his friends websites. And they all reported back positive results and improved sales conversion rates. And that's how Proof was born.

Olof Mathe

How to Differentiate Your SaaS Against the 800 Pound Gorilla – with Olof Mathé [197]

Olof Mathe is the co-founder and CEO of MixMax, a productivity tool for Gmail. MixMax lets you track emails, set up meetings, save time with email templates, and schedule emails to be sent later. In 2011, Chanpory Rith was a UX designer working at Google. His job was to make the Gmail iOS app better. He proposed adding features like scheduling and email tracking to make Gmail more useful for businesses. But those features just weren't a priority for Gmail's broader user base. Chanpory loved his job but hated the killer 2-hour commute. Eventually, he left Google and joined a local startup. That's where he met two guys who would later become his co-founders. Olof Mathe was a product manager and Brad Vogel was an engineer. All three considered themselves communication geeks'. They would often talk about how difficult some of their tools were and brainstormed how to make better communication tools. And that's when Chanpory told them about the idea he'd had years ago to make email for work' better. There was just one BIG problem. The email market was dominated by Gmail. And Google already had a consumer and a business version of Gmail. How could they possibly compete with Google? They realized that the answer wasn't to compete with Google but to build a product that would make Gmail better. And that's what they set out to do with MixMax. And their strategy paid off. In 5 years since they launched, they've grown MixMax to over 10,000 customers and generate around $5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Bart Lorang

Too Many SaaS Ideas? Discover How This Founder Found His Focus – with Bart Lorang [196]

Bart Lorang is the co-founder and CEO of FullContact, a SaaS product that helps you manage your contacts and relationships better. It transforms partial contact information into complete profiles and more useful customer data. Bart came up with the idea for his business when he looked at how well his wife organized her contacts in Outlook. And he started thinking how great it would be if he could build software to enrich his own contacts data. He and his co-founders developed a simple tool called Rainmaker that would automatically update your Google contacts with data from social networks. They launched it in Google's Marketplace and it didn't take too long to find a few customers. But then they did what many of us have done – they had another product idea that they were excited about, so they started working on that instead. And for many months, they pretty much ignored Rainmaker other than fixing a bug or two. After a few months of working on that second product, they had another idea for a third product. So they started working on that. Now they basically had 3 products and very little focus on what exactly they were trying to achieve. And then one day they had a conversation that changed everything. It was when they realized that with all 3 products they were trying to solve the same problem, but in different ways – they were taking partial contacts and turning them into full contacts. And that's when they finally committed to focusing on one product. Today their company generates 7-figures in monthly recurring revenue and has raised over $55 million in funding. It's a great story and I'm sure you'll get a ton of great insights from this interview.

Allan Dib

The 1-Page SaaS Marketing Plan – with Allan Dib [193]

Allan Dib is a serial entrepreneur, marketer, and author of the book The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money and Stand Out from the Crowd. To build a successful SaaS business, you need to stop doing random marketing' and instead follow a reliable plan for rapid business growth. But creating a SaaS marketing plan can often be a difficult and time-consuming task for early-stage SaaS founders. Allan wrote the book with direct response marketing in mind. However, in this interview, I talk to him about how to take the best of his 1-page marketing plan concept and make it work for SaaS businesses.

How to Use Email to Generate More SaaS Leads – with Delamon Rego [191]

Delamon Rego is, the COO of TOMIS Tech, the first AI-powered marketing intelligence platform for tour operators. He's also the founder of SaaS Ops Factory and the creator of The Win Rates Bible, an online resource that helps SaaS companies to improve their sales win rates. When Delamon was working as director of sales for a previous company, he was having a hard time figuring out how to close more sales. So he decided to take a step back, identify all the reasons why they weren't closing more sales and then come up with a comprehensive list of things they could do to improve sales win rate. And then he started testing all those ideas. And it worked — in the space of a year, his close rate increased from 20% to 45%. He took everything he learned about improving rates and created The Win Rates Bible.

Lindy Ledohowski

How a Non Technical Founder Built a SaaS Company with 12,000 Users | Lindy Ledohowski [190]

Lindy Ledohowski is the co-founder and CEO of EssayJack, a SaaS product that makes it easier for students to write essays and get better grades. It helps to reduce writing anxiety, procrastination and plagiarism. Lindy is a former teacher and research professor. Before launching EssayJack she'd never run a company before, let alone a software business. And when she started out, she had zero technical skills – she didn't even know how to register a website domain. She founded the company with her husband Rueban, who's a law professor. So neither of the founders had a tech or software background. Yet, they've gone on to build a software product that's now used by over 12,000 students and their business is generating around $500,000 in annual revenue. It's a great story.

Nick Macario

SaaS, Blockchain & Your Personal Data – with Nick Macario [189]

Nick Macario is the co-founder and CEO of Dock.io, a service that lets you control your information across the web. Dock gives you ownership of your data and connects your online accounts using blockchain technology.

Martin Gontovnikas

SaaS Marketing: A 6-Step Engineering Approach – with Martin Gontovnikas [188]

Martin Gontovnikas is the VP of marketing and growth at Auth0. Auth0 is a platform that makes it easier for developers to implement authentication and authorization for web and mobile products. Martin or Gonto' as he's more commonly known, started coding at the age of 12. He was a software engineer most of his career, but then a few years ago decided to move into a marketing role. At Auth0 he developed a 6-step engineering approach to marketing. Using that framework, Auth0 has grown from $200,000 a year in revenue to an 8-figure business in less than 5 years.

Calvin Correli

The Power of Purpose in Building a SaaS Business – with Calvin Correli [187]

Calvin Correli is the founder and CEO of Simplero. Simplero is a SaaS platform that makes it easy for topic matter experts to market, sell and deliver their information online. It combines email marketing, invoicing and billing, and digital delivery into one complete package to help you run your entire business. This is the story of a freelance developer who always wanted to build a product business. He tried and failed several times. So he kept working as a freelancer. One day, a major client that generated the majority of his income told him that they'd decided to outsource the work he was doing to a company in India. He and his wife had just bought a new house and had their second child. To say that this was bad timing would be an understatement. He had a new sense of urgency to make money. But everything he did fell flat. Out of frustration, he sat down one night and did something that changed the course of his life. It sounds a bit dramatic, but it really was a pivotal moment for him. And that's when things seemed to start going his way. He built a SaaS product for himself and as word spread, he started letting other people use his product for free. Eventually he started charging for his product. He spent a lot of money on marketing, but nothing seemed to work. So he focused on building a great product and hoped that the marketing would work itself out through word of mouth. And that bet paid off. Today his company generates over $2 million a year in recurring revenue. It's a great story and there are a ton of useful lessons to learn. I hope you enjoy it.

Christopher Gimmer

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy: Going from Zero to $45K MRR – with Christopher Gimmer [185]

Christopher Gimmer is the co-founder and CEO of Snappa, a SaaS product that makes it easy to create online graphics in your browser. Before launching Snappa, Christopher and his co-founder Marc built a student-only dating website. Although they got some early traction, the business quickly failed. Later they built a website to help people find royalty free images online. They started blogging which helped them get traffic and slowly build an email list. But it was a pain for them to create images for their blog posts. They sucked at using Photoshop and weren't designers. They wanted a simple tool for the job. So one day, they emailed their list to find out if they had the same problem. It turns out that a lot of people did. And so they decided to build a tool to solve that problem. And that's how Snappa was born.

Andrea Waltz

How to Get Over the Fear of Failure with Your SaaS Startup – with Andrea Waltz [183]

Andrea Waltz is the author of the book 'Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No Is How You Get There'. There's plenty of advice out there on how to get people to say yes. But 'Go for No' recommends just the opposite. And it shows how focusing on increasing your failure rate can accelerate your momentum towards success. So I invited Andrea to discuss what SaaS founders and entrepreneurs can learn from this. In this interview, you'll learn: So if you're currently struggling to get more people on demo calls, or struggling to close more sales or you're having a hard time getting investors to say yes to your pitch, then you might find this episode useful. Or if you don't currently have any of those specific issues, but feel like you need to build your mental resilience, then you might get some useful insights here. So I hope you enjoy it.

Elizabeth Yin

SaaS Fundraising 101 for Early Stage Startups – with Elizabeth Yin [178]

Elizabeth Yin is the co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund – the seed fund for hilariously early hustlers. She's also the co-founder of Hustle Con, a conference for non technical startup entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth founded LaunchBit, which was acquired in 2014. She was also a partner at 500 Startups where she led the accelerator program. In this interview we cover SaaS fundraising 101 for early stage startups. So if you are thinking of fundraising but don't know where to start, this episode will help you figure that out. We talk about the fundraising landscape in 2018 and the differences between pre-seed, seed and post-seed stages. Elizabeth shares some awesome advice on how to approach investors, how to set up meetings, the do's and don'ts of pitching to an investor, how to think about valuation of your startup and a lot more. It's an awesome episode, jam packed with actionable insights. I hope you enjoy it.

Max Armbruster

How a SaaS Chatbot is Turning Conversations into $100K MRR – with Max Armbruster [175]

Max Armbruster is the founder and CEO of TalkPush, a SaaS recruitment platform that leverages the power of messaging and social media to help businesses that need to hire large numbers of employees. Max used to interview hundreds of candidates on the phone every year. It took up a lot of his time and at the end of each day he felt drained. He desperately wanted to use technology to make hiring more productive, but he couldn't find anything that didn't create unnecessary barriers between him and the candidate. So he kept calling. In 2014, he released the first prototype of TalkPush and sold it to a small call center. The product would call candidates and use an interactive voice response service to ask them screening questions. One day during lunch with his team, someone mentioned that Facebook had launched a platform that enabled you to build and integrate chatbots with Facebook Messenger. Max hadn't heard about this before, but immediately he knew that this was what they needed. So before they finished lunch, Max had already told his team that they needed to stop what they were doing and start focusing on building a chatbot. From its humble beginnings in 2014, TalkPush has used its SaaS chatbot technology to develop a business that's doing over $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue. We talk about how he took a pain that he was personally experiencing and turned it into a business. And we have a great discussion on the ups and downs of building a million dollar SaaS business and the lessons he's learned along the way. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Startup Lessons from a First Time SaaS Founder – with Kelsey Recht [171]

Kelsey Recht the founder and CEO of VenueBook, a booking platform that connects event planners with venue managers. VenueBook helps venues to manage their leads and bookings, and market their space. And it helps event planners to easily find and book the right venue for their event. VenueBook was founded in 2010 and is based in New York. The company has raised over $9 million in funding. Kelsey is a first time SaaS founder who came up with the idea for this business after experiencing the pain of finding venues and booking events herself. And one of the smart things that she did in the early days wasn't to start building a software product right away, but going and talking to prospective customers and talking about their pains. In fact, that's how she found her first few customers and her first developer. We also talk about SaaS fundraising. Although Kelsey's raised over $9 million, it hasn't been as easy as it may sound. She started with a small family and friends round to get the business started, but raising a seed round was seriously hard work. In fact, she had to go out and talk to over 100 investors before she was able to get her seed round. So we talk about the lessons she's learned there, as a SaaS entrepreneur, as a first-time founder, and as a female entrepreneur. So I hope you enjoy the interview…

Mike Muhney

Failing to Succeed: Lessons from a Failed Software Startup – with Mike Muhney [169]

Mike Muhney is the founder and CEO of VIP Orbit, a software company focused on building great contact management products. He launched their flagship product VIP Orbit in 2010 and they raised $6.5 million. Recently Mike had to shut down the business because he ran out of money and wasn't getting the traction that he'd hoped for.

Luke Swanek

Using a SaaS Reseller Program to Scale Faster – with Luke Swanek [165]

Luke Swanek is the co-founder of GrowSumo, a marketplace that connects B2B SaaS companies with resellers. The GrowSumo platform provides its customers with the tools they need to build and scale reseller programs. And it enables the resellers to earn revenue from selling those products. GrowSumo is a YC backed startup. But the founders had to apply three times before they were finally accepted into YC. So that alone is a great lesson in being persistent. One of the biggest challenges for building a marketplace is that you've got a chicken and egg' situation. You don't have buyers and you don't have sellers when you start. And it can be hard to get the flywheel spinning and build a marketplace that actually works. So we talk about how they built that marketplace and how they landed customers like Evernote. And we explore some of the tough lessons the founders have learned along the way such as what happens when your product is not ready for a big customer or how you can lose customers when you try to build a scalable product too soon. I hope you enjoy this interview.

Tim Broom

ITProTV: From Brick & Mortar to $9M SaaS Training Company – with Tim Broom [150]

Tim Broom is the co-founder and CEO of ITProTV, a subscription-based learning site for IT Professionals. The company provides an easy and entertaining approach to IT training. Content is broadcast live every day and available on-demand.

Rob Percival

How a High-School Teacher Earned $5 Million With Online Coding Courses – with Rob Percival [149]

Rob Percival is a former high school math teacher from England who started teaching people to code. He posted his first online web development course for $199 in June 2014 and only made 1 sale in the first 24 hours. Since then he's gone on to launch several coding courses with well over 500,000 students and has generated over $5 million in revenue. You can find his online courses at Udemy.com. The topics range from web and mobile development courses to Ruby on Rails & Python programming and database development. He's also the founder and managing director of Eco Web Hosting, a company that focused on environmentally friendly web hosting and packages that are 100% carbon neutral.

Raj Bhaskar

How to Build a SaaS Startup in the Uber & Airbnb Ecosystem (& Beyond) – with Raj Bhaskar [148]

Raj Bhaskar is the co-founder and CEO of Hurdlr, a mobile app for independent workers, freelancers and solopreneurs to manage their business finances. It seamlessly tracks all of your income streams, expenses and tax deductions in real-time, on the go. Previously, Raj was the founder and CEO of VisualHOMES, a software company focused on property management and real estate solutions which he built and sold after 10 years. Hurdlr was founded in 2012 and is based in Washington DC. This episode is about a guy who came up with an idea for a startup after noticing that many freelancers were struggling with a specific problem. And then he realized that Airbnb hosts and Uber drivers were also dealing with the same problem. So he set out to build a product that would solve that problem. The product wasn't an overnight success, but the feedback from the market was positive enough to keep going. Today, his product has over 100,000 users and is continuing to grow. Most of the growth has been driven by content marketing. But he didn't just create content, he put just as much effort into distributing that content. So in this interview, we explore how he made content marketing work for his business. And we look at how he's built a business within the Uber and Airbnb ecosystems and beyond.

JD Graffam

How to Grow Your SaaS Recurring Revenue Without Marketing – with JD Graffam [147]

JD Graffam is the founder of SimpleFocus, a design agency that helps create user interfaces and digital products. The company's clients include Starbucks, Oracle, and the U.S. Air Force. But this agency is a little different because it also has its own portfolio of software products. This includes Pulse (a cash flow management software for small businesses), Sifter (a bug and issue tracking app for nimble teams), and BallPark (an invoicing and time tracking app) that JD acquired from Metalab's founder Andrew Wilkinson (who was my guest on episode 76). And JD just acquired another app called Curated (a product that helps you grow your audience by collecting and sharing engaging content). This episode is about a design agency owner who wanted to get into the SaaS business. He didn't have any success building his own SaaS product, so he acquired one instead. The SaaS product that he acquired, already had customers and some recurring revenue. He and his team improved the product and over time, more than doubled the monthly recurring revenue. So he acquired another SaaS product and did the same again. And in the last few years, my guest has built a portfolio of 6 SaaS products, all through acquisitions, and he's still looking for more. The remarkable thing is that he's grown recurring revenue for his products without any marketing. He just focused on serving the existing customers better and improving the products.

Clate Mask

How to Grow a SaaS Company to $100M ARR – with Clate Mask of Infusionsoft [146]

Clate Mask is the co-founder and CEO of Infusionsoft, which makes sales and marketing automation software exclusively for small businesses. Infusionsoft combines CRM, email automation and e-commerce capabilities into one product. It helps small businesses capture more leads, improve conversion rates and generate more sales. The company was founded in 2001 and has raised over $125 million to date. Infusionsoft has over 125,000 users and so far has processed $3.4 billion of payments for its customers. Clate is also the author of Conquer the Chaos: How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy', a New York Times bestseller which focuses on balancing personal and work life, will becoming successful as a budding entrepreneur. This episode is a story about a guy who always wanted to be an entrepreneur. But he decided to go to law school and got an MBA instead. Then, with $100,000 in debt, he finally decided that to take the leap and become an entrepreneur. He described the first 3 years of working on his business as a 'nightmare'. He was getting deeper into debt every month. But he was determined to make his business work, yet he also had his wife and 4 kids to think about. Eventually, his wife had enough and told him that he needed to find a job. But he had a surprising conversation the next day and decided (with his wife’s support) that he was going to continue working on his business for a little longer. And his determination paid off. Today, his company employs 675 people and does over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. He’s a great guy and very transparent. He shares his story and how he got through those first three ‘nightmare’ years. We explore how he got his first 1000 customers and started to get traction. And we discuss how he’s building a product-driven culture and how he thinks about competition.

Nadim Hossain

How BrightFunnel Went from a Spreadsheet to a 7-Figure SaaS Business – with Nadim Hossain [145]

Nadim Hossain is the founder and Executive Chairman of BrightFunnel, a SaaS product that generates predictive and actionable insights for B2B marketers, and shows what impact marketing is having on revenue. Founded in 2012, BrightFunnel has raised just under $9 million in funding to date. And its customers include companies such as Verizon and Cloudera. My guest has over 17 years of experience in building, marketing, and selling cloud applications. Prior to founding BrightFunnel, he was VP of marketing and sales at PowerReviews which had a $170 million exit. And he was also a product marketing executive at Salesforce.com during their hyper-growth years. This is a story about a marketing guy who was working at a tech company. He was frustrated about how hard it was to understand the impact that marketing was having on revenue. He started creating his own solution by gathering data from different sources and putting it all into Excel spreadsheets. And he thought to himself, someone should really find a good solution for this. Eventually, he realized that he was the one who needed to solve this problem. But he wasn't a developer so needed to find the right technical co-founder. He was also a first-time founder and was trying to build this business while he and his wife were expecting a baby. So there was a lot of pressure on him and a huge sense of urgency. Fast forward to today, he's grown his startup into a company that's generating several million dollars in revenue. He's raised just under $9 million in funding to date. And his company now employs 35 people and that number is likely to double in the next year. He shares some great insights both from the early days of turning his idea into a business. And we also explore lessons he's learned as his role as a CEO continues to grow.

Claudiu Murariu

Signs You’ve Got the Wrong SaaS Co-Founder (and What to Do About it) – with Claudiu Murariu [137]

Claudiu Murariu is the founder and CEO of InnerTrends, a growth analytics platform for SaaS and web products. InnerTrends uses data science technologies to help you understand every aspect of your user onboarding process and convert more first-time users into customers. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in Romania.

Stuart McKeown

3 Growth Lessons to Get Your First 5000 SaaS Customers – with Stuart McKeown [135]

Stuart McKeown is the co-founder of Gleam, a growth platform that helps businesses to drive more engagement with customers. Gleam provides a suite of marketing apps focused on giveaways, rewards, and user feedback. Stuart's background is in search engine marketing. He's originally from the UK and moved to Melbourne, Australia in 2005. Gleam was founded in 2013 and has over 400,000 users and 5000 customers including companies such as Hubspot and Shopify. The company generates over a million dollars in annual recurring revenue.

Gregg Pollack

How a Solo SaaS Founder Built and Sold His Startup for $36 Million – with Gregg Pollack [133]

Gregg Pollack is a software developer and serial entrepreneur. In 2011, he founded Code School, an online learning platform that teaches you programming and web design skills. And 5 years later, he sold that business for $36 million. He's also the founder of Envy Labs (a web consultancy) which he launched in 2009 and he's also the founder of Starter Studio, a business accelerator that combines mentorship with educational events to help startups in Orlando, Florida. I first came across him, years ago when I watched his Rails for Zombies tutorial to learn Ruby on Rails. And I'm glad to finally have him as a guest on this show.

Aaron Dallek

How a SaaS Startup is Disrupting the Eye Care Industry – with Aaron Dallek [132]

Aaron Dallek is a serial entrepreneur who started his first business at the age of 14. He's currently the co-founder and CEO of Opternative, an online service that gives you a convenient way to get a prescription for glasses or contacts. With Opternative you complete an eye exam on your computer or tablet and get a prescription signed by a doctor without ever having to go to a doctor's office. The company was founded in 2012 and to date has raised $9.5 million in funding.

Pini Yakuel

SaaS Fundraising: How to Raise $20 Million for Your SaaS Startup – with Pini Yakuel [131]

Pini Yakuel is the co-founder and CEO of Optimove, a SaaS product that uses its predictive customer modeling technology to help marketers understand customers and create personalized marketing campaigns. The company was founded in 2009. It initially started out as a consulting business. And the co-founders used the consulting revenue to fund the SaaS business. In 2012, they were offered $1.5 million in VC funding and turned it down. They continued self-funding the business until this year, when they raised $20 million in their first round. Optimove is based in Tel Aviv and has offices in New York and London.

Garrett Moon

How to Boost Your SaaS Growth with Content Marketing – with Garrett Moon [130]

Garrett Moon is the CEO and Co-Founder of CoSchedule, a content marketing, and social media publishing calendar for small businesses and marketing teams. CoSchedule helps over 7,000 customers organize their content marketing and social media publishing in more than 100 countries around the world. CoSchedule was founded in 2013 and to date has raised around $500K in funding. This episode is the story of two guys who ran a web design and marketing consulting business. One day, they hatched a plan for a new SaaS product on the plane ride between North Dakota and Atlanta. By the time they landed, they were fully committed to the idea and had decided what they were going to do next. Now, this wasn’t the first time these two had launched a product. They had already tried 4 times without much success. But this time felt different because their idea would solve a problem their consulting clients would often complain about. And perhaps this time, their 5th attempt to build a product might be successful. They started by writing a blog post about the problem and how their new product would solve that problem. And they mocked up some screenshots in Photoshop of their product, which didn’t exist at this point. They found a few potential customers and got feedback from them each step of the way as they built their product. And they started publishing detailed and actionable blog posts every week. In fact, they published 3 times every week. And over the last 3.5 years, they’ve published over 500 high-quality blog posts. And they’re content marketing efforts have paid off for them. Today, they have over 100,000 blog subscribers, 7000 paying customers and a 7-figure SaaS business.

7 Mental Hacks to Help You Stop Feeling Overwhelmed – with Omer Khan [129]

Do you ever feel like there's not enough time in the day to get everything done? Do you start feeling overwhelmed as soon as you think about everything on your plate? If you're an entrepreneur, you probably know this feeling well. You're running on all cylinders trying to build your business. You have a long to-do list that seems to grow longer every day. You just don't have enough hours in the day. Which makes you start to feel seriously overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed can result in negative emotions such as anxiety, worry or irritability. And it can increase your stress levels, which could lead to even more serious issues with your mental or physical health. While you can't add more hours to your day, there are a number of strategies you can use to help you stop feeling overwhelmed and get yourself in the right physical and mental state. And I'm going to share 7 of those mental hacks today, which are relatively easy to implement and could potentially make a huge difference to your health as well as your ability to get things done.

Luke Kervin

How to Find SaaS Product/Market Fit Without a Product – with Luke Kervin [126]

Luke Kervin is the founder and co-CEO of PatientPop, an all-in-one marketing automation platform for healthcare providers. The company was founded in 2014 and has raised around $24 million to date. Prior to launching PatientPop, my guest co-founded two companies that both had successful exits and were acquired.

(Part 3) Improving User Onboarding for Your SaaS Product – with Pulkit Agrawal [124]

It's not just about better design. There's a framework for success to user onboarding.

(Part 2) Improving User Onboarding for Your SaaS Product – with Pulkit Agrawal [123]

There's no point selling until somebody has the pain and needs the solution. We only needed a few customers to come into the private beta and start using the product. Our biggest competitor is the "we don't have enough time to do onboarding" customer objection.

(Part 1) Improving User Onboarding for Your SaaS Product – with Pulkit Agrawal [122]

"When we are conscious of the choices we make in each moment, the future takes care of itself" – Gotham Chopra User Onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product. – UserOnboard.com

How to Turn Frustration Into a Million Dollar Software Business (Part 2) – with Shane Melaugh [120]

"We never hire anyone unless they've gone through a trial and shown us what they can do." "A social network for finding a co-founder is a potential recipe for disaster." "Ask yourself — would I want to work with me?" "Don't build a mailing list, build an audience." "The reason launching Thrive Themes was 'easy' is because we first spent 5 years doing the ground work." "I still want to be here in 5 years and that success will come from long-term value not short term revenue opportunities."

The idea for Thrive Themes came from Shane's own frustrations with building marketing websites. He was having a frustrating experience trying to build lead generation and sales pages on WordPress. He often had to use multiple plugins and different WordPress themes to cobble together what he needed. And often all these plugins didn't work together well and created a poor user experience. WordPress, Thrive Themes

How to Turn Frustration Into a Million Dollar Software Business (Part 1) – with Shane Melaugh [119]

"It's very possible to hire someone to build a piece of software, that's technically a piece of software, but not usable in any way." "Validating an idea with money in the bank, is the best type of validation." "I've often used writing as a learning tool."

Kreg Peeler, SpinGo

The Surprising Website Metric That Gave This Founder His Startup Idea – with Kreg Peeler [115]

Kreg Peeler is the founder and CEO of SpinGo, an integrated solution that helps event makers list, manage and promote events. SpinGo's event platform combines content from 100,000 sources to produce a robust local event search engine. Its API powers 5,500 entertainment apps, delivering event content to almost 200 million viewers per month. And it's Event Management product helps customers manage all aspects of event planning. In 2012, Kreg had a media website which included a local events section. His wife was curating the web, finding events and then manually entering this information into the website. One day, they discovered a surprising website metric that gave Kreg the idea for a new startup. It turned out to be a pretty good idea. Since then, they've grown SpinGo into a community of 200,000 event organizers and raised over $7 million in funding.

Zal Dastur, Lucep

How This Founder Went from a Failed Startup to Product/Market Fit – with Zal Dastur [114]

Zal Dastur is the co-founder of Lucep, a sales acceleration tool that helps companies increase their lead conversion rate and boosts revenues by providing faster access to interested leads. Lucep's customers include companies such as Starwood Hotels, Jaguar Land Rover and Citibank. The company was founded in 2014 and is based in Singapore. The co-founders actually worked together on a previous startup which failed. But they learned some valuable lessons from that experience and when the time was right, they decided to launch their second startup together. There are some great lessons here, which this co-founder learned the hard way, so hopefully you won't have to make some of those same mistakes.

Jeremy Reeves, lempire: From $1K Launch to $26M ARR Profitable SaaS - with Guillaume Moubeche [405]

5 Steps to Crafting Your Startup’s Online Sales Funnel – with Jeremy Reeves [111]

Jeremy Reeves is a sales funnel expert. He specializes in building strategic and automated online sales funnels that help his clients generate more revenue. He created millions of dollars in additional profits for his clients.

Marcelino Alvarez, Uncorked Studios

How This Entrepreneur Built an Agency for an Internet of Things World – with Marcelino Alvarez [110]

Marcelino Alvarez is the co-founder and CEO of Uncorked Studios, a rapidly growing design and engineering firm that builds connected products for both the digital & physical world – ranging from an app/website to a wearable device or smart home technology. The company also has a history of developing social impact projects e.g. in 2011 my guest and his team developed an open data initiative to help residents of Japan report and understand the levels of radiation following the earthquake and nuclear disaster. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in Portland, Oregon. Its clients include companies such as Google, Adidas, Intel and Lego. Here are 3 reasons why you should listen to this episode:

Judy Robinett, JudyRobinett.com

How to Pitch Your Startup and Get Funding (Even if You’re an Introvert) – with Judy Robinett [107]

Judy Robinett is the author of the book How to Be a Power Connector: The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network into Profits. In her 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur and corporate leader, she served as the CEO of both public and private companies. She's been on the advisory board of several venture capital firms and she was the managing director of Golden Seeds Angel Network (one of the largest angel investment groups in the US). She's been profiled in Fast Company, Forbes, Venture Beat, Huffington Post and Bloomberg Business Week as an example of a new breed of power connectors.

Alexandra Keating, DWNLD

How This Female Startup Founder Raised $14 Million – with Alexandra Keating [106]

Alexandra Keating is the co-founder and CEO of DWNLD, a mobile app platform that enables media companies, brands, and influencers to easily and affordably create beautiful, native mobile apps. The platform can transform any website or web medium (social media channels, photos, GIFs, videos, etc.) into a fully-functional app in a matter of minutes. The company has raised $14M to date and is based in New York. Previously, Alexandra sold her first tech company, a charity platform that she started in Australia at the age of 19. And if that wasn't impressive enough, she's also the daughter of former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating.

B Byrne, Clef

Surprising Lessons from a 24-Year Old Startup CEO – with B Byrne [103]

B Byrne is the co-founder and CEO of Clef, a service that provides secure two-factor authentication without passwords or tokens. You just hold up your phone in front of any computer in the world and Clef will instantly log you in. The company is based in Oakland, California. It was founded in 2013 and to date has raised over $2M in funding.

Stuart Crane, Definitive Homecare Solutions

How a $400 Startup Got Sold for $43 Million – with Stuart Crane [102]

Stuart Crane is an entrepreneur and advisor. His previous company, Definitive Homecare Solutions, provided a software product for the home infusion pharmacy industry called CPR+. He and his co-founder started the business with just $400 and went on to sell it for $43 million. But this wasn't an overnight success story. It took them 20 years to build that business. And they had two failed attempts trying to sell the company before they were successful. We're going to talk about the successes, failures, and challenges of that 20-year journey and the lessons learned to help inspire you to keep going with your startup…

Conrad Egusa, Publicize

How to Get PR for Your Startup in 5 Simple Steps – with Conrad Egusa [099]

Conrad Egusa is the founder and CEO of Publicize, a startup that's aiming to change the way companies approach PR. As opposed to PR companies that charge $10,000 a month, Publicize provides a month-to-month solution starting from $399 a month. Conrad has been featured in publications such as The Financial Times, Bloomberg and TechCrunch. He's also a global mentor at 500 Startups and Founder Institute.

Diego Oppenheimer, Algorithmia

Meet the Startup Founder Building a Marketplace for Algorithms – with Diego Oppenheimer [097]

Diego Oppenheimer is the co-founder and CEO of Algorithmia, a Seattle-based startup that created an online marketplace that connects academics building powerful algorithms with app developers who can put them to use. The company was founded in 2013 and to date has raised almost $2.5 million in funding.

Vincent Cassar, Keeping

3 Surprisingly Simple Growth Hacks That Could Double Your Leads – with Vincent Cassar [095]

Vincent Cassar is the founder of Keeping.com, a Gmail extension that adds helpdesk functionality into any Gmail or Google Apps account. It allows you and your team to manage your customer support right from your mailbox instead of using an external helpdesk app. Now Vincent first came on my radar, when I came across a free online resource that he'd created called The Growth Hacking Experiment. Basically, he took all the growth hacks that they've tried with their startup and documented both the process and results they achieved with each growth hack.

Robert Coorey, Feed a Starving Crowd

How to Find a Starving Crowd Hungry for Your SaaS Product – with Robert Coorey [093]

Robert Coorey is an author, marketer and reality TV pilot host. He's the author of the book Feed a Starving Crowd which features more than 200 marketing strategies to help you find hungry customers. The Huffington Post called him one of the most influential online marketers across the globe & Startup Australia named him as one of Australia's top 50 entrepreneurs.

Nick Kellet, Listly

How Nick Kellet Sold His Startup for Millions & Created a Board Game – with Nick Kellet [092]

Nick Kellet is the co-founder of Listly, a product that helps bloggers & publishers engage their audience with continuously evolving lists. According to Listly, 30% of all content on the web is built around lists. But these lists can quickly get stale and don't do much to engage the audience. So Listly, allows bloggers, content marketers, and publishers to create interactive lists which they can embed on their own site or syndicate across other sites. In 1999, Nick sold his software product called AnswerSets to Business Objects for over $8 million. A few years later, he came up with the idea for a board game while talking to his daughter. Without knowing anything about the toys & games business, he jumped into the deep and launched a new board game which has won multiple awards and sold almost 100,000 copies worldwide.

What You Need to Know About SEO in 2015 to Generate Leads – with Adam Dicker [091]

Adam Dicker is a serial entrepreneur and former VP of GoDaddy. He’s a prolific domainer with a portfolio of over 30,000 domains.

Benji Rogers

How a Night Sleeping on an Air Mattress Changed Benji Rogers’s Life – with Benji Rogers [090]

Benji Rogers is the founder and president of PledgeMusic, an online music platform that allows artists to pre-sell, market and distribute recordings, music videos and concerts directly to their audience. He's an independent musician from London, who has been making his own records since 1999. He founded PledgeMusic in 2009 as a way to engage directly with music super fans who drive the bulk of spending in the music industry. He came up with the idea for PledgeMusic while lying on an air mattress in his mother's spare bedroom. Almost 6 years later, the company has over 50 employees and has offices strategically around the world to support artists and fans. In 2013, he was recognized on Billboards 40 Under 40 Power Players list and in 2014 at MUSEXPO International Music Awards he won Digital Executive of the Year.

Aaron Epstein, Creative Market

7 Proven Strategies for Launching an Online Marketplace – with Aaron Epstein [089]

Aaron Epstein is the co-founder of Creative Market, an online platform that lets you sell and buy handcrafted, mouse-made design content such as fonts and graphics. He launched his first software product called Color Schemer when he was still in college and went on to grow that into a 6-figures a year business. A few years later he met his co-founders and combined forces to work on an online creative community called COLOURlovers and eventually went through Y-Combinator. COLOURlovers grew into a community with over a million users. In 2012, they launched Creative Market and raised $2.3M dollars in funding, and 3 years later, sold Creative Market to Autodesk for an undisclosed amount.

Aaron Epstein, Creative Market

What Happens When You Stop Second Guessing & Trust Your Instincts – with Aaron Epstein [088]

Aaron Epstein is the co-founder of Creative Market, an online platform that lets you sell and buy handcrafted, mouse-made design content such as fonts and graphics. He launched his first software product called ColorSchemer when he was still in college and went on to grow that into a 6-figures a year business. A few years later he met his co-founders and combined forces to work on an online creative community called COLOURlovers and eventually went through Y-Combinator. COLOURlovers grew into a community with over a million users. In 2012, they launched Creative Market and raised $2.3M dollars in funding, and about 16 months later, sold Creative Market to Autodesk for an undisclosed amount.

Amir Salihefendic, Doist.io

Part 2 – How a Neglected Side Project Turned Into a Multi-Million Dollar Startup – with Amir Salihefendic [085]

Amir Salihefendic is the founder and CEO of Doist.io, the makers of Todoist, an online and mobile task management app. He started Todoist in 2007 when he was still a student with two programming jobs on the side. He needed a way to manage his own work and productivity but couldn’t find the right tool. So he decided to build his own tool. He didn’t see it as a startup and he didn’t have any big ambitions. It was just a tool. Today, the company has over 4 million users and Todoist is also used by a number of Fortune 100 companies. And the tool that our guest built for himself has grown into a company with over 40 employees and several million dollars in annual revenue.

Amir Salihefendic, Doist.io

Part 1 – How a Neglected Side Project Turned Into a Multi-Million Dollar Startup – with Amir Salihefendic [084]

Amir Salihefendic is the founder and CEO of Doist.io, the makers of Todoist, an online and mobile task management app. He started Todoist in 2007 when he was still a student with two programming jobs on the side. He needed a way to manage his own work and productivity but couldn't find the right tool. So he decided to build his own tool. He didn't see it as a startup and he didn't have any big ambitions. It was just a tool. Today, the company has over 4 million users and Todoist is also used by a number of Fortune 100 companies. And the tool that our guest built for himself has grown into a company with over 40 employees and several million dollars in annual revenue.

Maria Dykstra, TreDigital

Part 2 – How to Use Content Marketing to Get SaaS Customers & Consulting Clients – with Maria Dykstra [083]

Maria Dykstra is an entrepreneur, startup mentor & digital marketing strategist. After a 14 year career at Microsoft, she founded her own company, and in 3 years grew it from a 2 and person consulting firm to a digital agency with offices in 3 countries. She also runs the Seattle chapter of the Founder Institute, the world's largest startup accelerator program. And she's also on the board of Women in Wireless, a non-profit that empowers and develops female leaders in mobile and digital media.

Maria Dykstra, TreDigital

Part 1 – How to Use Twitter to Get SaaS Customers & Consulting Clients – with Maria Dykstra [082]

Maria Dykstra is an entrepreneur, startup mentor & digital marketing strategist. After a 14 year career at Microsoft, she founded her own company, and in 3 years grew it from a 2-person consulting firm to a digital agency with offices in 3 countries. She also runs the Seattle chapter of the Founder Institute, the world's largest startup accelerator program. And she's also on the board of Women in Wireless, a non-profit that empowers and develops female leaders in mobile and digital media.

Syed Balkhi, OptinMonster

Lessons from a 24 Year Old Who’s Built Several 7-Figure Online Businesses – with Syed Balkhi [081]

Syed Balkhi is an award-winning 24-year-old entrepreneur with several 7-figure online businesses. He was recognized as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by the United Nations. His businesses include WPBeginner, which is the largest free WordPress resource on the planet and OptinMonster a popular lead generation SaaS product that you see on so many sites around the web.

Dave, Ninja Outreach

How to Use Influencer Marketing to Grow Your SaaS Business – with Dave Schneider [079]

Dave is the co-founder of Ninja Outreach, a SaaS prospecting & outreach tool which was created to streamline the process of connecting with influencers. Before founding Ninja Outreach, Dave ran a travel blog that did six figures a year. Today we're going to take everything that Dave's learned about influencer marketing and teach you how to apply it to your own business. You'll learn how you can find & work with influencers in your market and use those relationships to grow your brand and generate more leads and customers.

Douglas Calhoun, Hack Reactor

How a Developer Created & Sold a $15,000 Training Course with no Sales Pitch – with Douglas Calhoun [078]

Douglas Calhoun is the co-founder of Hack Reactor, a San Francisco-based startup whose vision is to create a CS degree for the 21st century. Hack Reactor runs 12-week intensive coding boot camps (which you can do in-person or online) designed to accelerate your software career. According to Hack Reactor, 99% of its graduates receive at least 1 full-time job offer within 3 months graduating and earn an average salary in the six figures.

Andrew Wilkinson, Metalab

Part 2 – How a Guy in Canada Built 3 Multi-Million Dollar Businesses by Age 30 – with Andrew Wilkinson [077]

Andrew Wilkinson is the founder of MetaLab and Flow. Metalab is a design agency that Andrew founded when he was just 20 years old and has grown it into a business with over 60 employees. MetaLab is the design team behind Slack which is now valued at $2.8 billion. And Flow is a task management SaaS application for teams which is used by companies like Etsy, Tesla, Adobe, and TED.

Grant Miller, Replicated

How This Founder Sold His Company for ‘Millions’ in Just 9 Months – with Grant Miller [075]

Grant Miller is the co-founder of Replicated, a service that solves the problem for companies who want to install & deploy a SaaS application inside their own firewall. Previously, he was the co-founder of Look IO, a mobile live-chat problem that was acquired by LivePerson after just 9 months.

Robi Ganguly, Apptentive

How App Store Frustration Helped Make Over $100,000 a Month – with Robi Ganguly [074]

Robi Ganguly is the co-founder and CEO of Apptentive, a SaaS platform that provides tools for mobile app makers to engage with customers for positive ratings, feedback and customer research. Apptentive's customers include UrbanSpoon, Overstock and RealNetworks. The company was founded in 2011 and to date has raised $6.5M in funding.

Rob Rawson, Time Doctor

A Marketer Shares Ninja Tactics to Acquire Customers for Your Startup – with Rob Rawson [073]

Rob Rawson is the co-founder and CEO of Time Doctor and Staff.com. Time Doctor is an app that helps you manage your time (and your team's time) more effectively. And Staff.com is a global recruitment platform that helps companies hire talented people from anywhere in the world and track their hours worked with Time Doctor. Rob originally trained as a Medical Doctor and worked in hospitals in Australia for 3 years.

Rob Rawson, Time Doctor

How a Medical Doctor Quit His Job to Build a Million Dollar SaaS Business – with Rob Rawson [072]

Rob Rawson is the co-founder and CEO of Time Doctor and Staff.com. Time Doctor is an app that helps you manage your time (and your team's time) more effectively. And Staff.com is a global recruitment platform that helps companies hire talented people from anywhere in the world and track their hours worked with Time Doctor. Rob, originally trained as a Medical Doctor and worked in hospitals in Australia for 3 years.

How to Find the Courage to Execute on Your Big Bold Plans – with Peter Shallard [070]

Peter Shallard is known as The Shrink for Entrepreneurs. He's a renowned business psychology expert and therapist gone renegade. He works with all types of entrepreneurs around the world and helps them get measurable results. He's also the founder of CommitAction.com, a service that pairs accountability coaching with cutting-edge digital productivity tracking tools.

Peter Shallard is known as The Shrink for Entrepreneurs. He, Peter Shallard – The Shrink for Entrepreneurs

How Peter Shallard Teaches Entrepreneurs the Psychology of Success – with Peter Shallard [069]

Peter Shallard is known as The Shrink for Entrepreneurs. He is a renowned business psychology expert and therapist gone renegade. He works with all types of entrepreneurs around the world and helps them get measurable results. He is also the founder of CommitAction.com, a service that pairs accountability coaching with cutting-edge digital productivity tracking tools.

Ankur Nagpal, Fedora

How 2 Guys Learned to Code and Then Made $2M Teaching Others – with Ankur Nagpal [068]

Ankur Nagpal is the co-founder and CEO of Fedora, a platform that enables anyone to easily create and sell online courses. The company was founded in 2013 and to date has raised $2M in funding. Prior to launching Fedora, Ankur launched a business while at college building social widgets between classes which generated over a $1M. Bloomberg Business called him a widget mogul.

Ankur Nagpal, Fedora

How this Entrepreneur Built & Launched a Udemy Competitor in 3 Days – with Ankur Nagpal [067]

Ankur Nagpal is the co-founder and CEO of Fedora, a platform that enables anyone to easily create and sell online courses.

Walter Chen, iDoneThis

How a Blog Post Led to Zappos’s CEO Investing in This Startup – with Walter Chen [066]

Walter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of IDoneThis, an email-based productivity tool that allows people to track their productivity with a daily email reminder. You reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, you get a digest with what everyone on the team got done. The company was founded in 2011 and its investors include folks such as the CEOs of Zappos, Shopify & Wistia. Walter is a software engineer and former big law firm lawyer.

Walter Chen, iDoneThis

How a Frustrated Lawyer Quit His Job & Launched a Successful SaaS Startup [065]

Walter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of IDoneThis, an email-based productivity tool that allows people to track their productivity with a daily email reminder. You reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, you get a digest with what everyone on the team got done. The company was founded in 2011 and its investors include folks such as the CEOs of Zappos, Shopify & Wistia. Walter is a software engineer and former big law firm, lawyer.

Katherine Sears, Booktrope

How YC-Backed Startup Booktrope is Reinventing Book Publishing – with Katherine Sears [064]

Katherine Sears is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Booktrope, a web platform that allows authors, editors, marketers and designers to form a team and work together to create and market a new book.

Ruben Timmerman, Springest

How a Startup Got Customers to Pay $6000 Each Before Launch – with Ruben Timmerman [063]

Ruben Timmerman is the founder and CEO of Springest, a comparison website that helps you find the right training program or course. Ruben launched the business as a side project in 2008. Today the site has a presence in 4 countries and helps you compare over 160,000 programs and courses. The company is based in the Netherlands.

How Adeo Ressi Helped Launch Over 1500 Startups & Could Help You Too – with Adeo Ressi [060]

Ready to launch your startup? What if there was a proven training program that could give you all the skills and knowledge you needed? What if you could take this training over a few months without even quitting your job? Today’s guest founded an organization that has helped to launch 1563 startups so far and if you get through their training program, you have an 87.5% chance of your startup surviving. Adeo Ressi is the founder and CEO of the Founder Institute – the world’s largest entrepreneur training and startup launch program, which helps aspiring founders across the globe to build successful technology companies. FI has helped launch companies such as Udemy, Virtual, and Retailigence.

Joshua Parkinson, Post Planner

How a Startup Grew Its Blog from 9K to 500K Monthly Unique Visitors – with Joshua Parkinson [053]

Joshua Parkinson is the Founder & CEO of PostPlanner, a Facebook tool that makes it easy for people to find and post amazing content to increase their social media engagement. Joshua founded the company in 2011 and to date Post Planner has over 25,000 monthly active users.

Joshua Parkinson, Post Planner

How a Philosophy Teacher Built a 7-Figure SaaS Business – with Joshua Parkinson [052]

Joshua Parkinson is the Founder & CEO of PostPlanner, a Facebook tool that makes it easy for people to find and post amazing content to increase their social media engagement. Joshua founded the company in 2011 and to date Post Planner has over 25,000 monthly active users.

Chris Barton, Shazam

How to Build a Business When Everyone Says Your Idea is Impossible – with Chris Barton [050]

Chris Barton is the co-founder of Shazam, a mobile music recognition service which started out as an idea that Chris had in 1999. All the experts told him that it was impossible. Today, Shazam has over 100 million active users each month. In 2004, Chris joined Google and currently he’s working at Dropbox, where he’s responsible for business development for mobile operators. He also continues to serve on the Shazam Entertainment board.

Josh Pigford, Baremetrics

How to Generate $30,000 a Month in Revenue from Content Marketing – with Josh Pigford [049]

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

How to Use Marketing Automation to Put Your Growth on Auto-Drive – with Rob Walling [046]

In this 'Mini Crash Course for Startups', we explain what marketing automation is, why you should care about it, and we share a step by step plan to help you implement your first marketing automation campaign which puts your customer acquisition efforts on auto-drive.

Rob Walling, Drip

How Rob Walling Grew Drip Revenue by Over 300% in 6 Months – with Rob Walling [045]

Rob Walling is the founder of email marketing tool Drip and the owner of SEO keyword tool HitTail. He's also the author of the book "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup". And his blog "Software by Rob" is a top 20 startup blog and is read by about 20,000 web entrepreneurs each month.

5 Mistakes Startups Make with SEM & How You Can Avoid Them – with Kevin Lee [041]

Kevin Lee is the founder & CEO of We-Care.com, a service that allows online shoppers to donate a percentage of their online shopping (at no cost to them) to a non-profit, school, or association.

Kevin Lee, We Care

How a Startup Helped Consumers Raise $7.8 Million for Their Cause – with Kevin Lee [040]

Kevin Lee is the founder & CEO of We-Care.com, a service that allows online shoppers to donate a percentage of their online shopping (at no cost to them) to a non-profit, school, or association. It has partnered with over 2,500 merchants from Travelocity to Sears, 1800Flowers and Apple. To date, We Care has raised over $7.8M. Kevin is also the co-founder & CEO of Didit, an award-winning full-service online advertising and marketing services agency that has been in business for almost 20 years.

Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing Lessons for Startups – with Rand Fishkin [038]

Rand Fishkin is the Co-Founder of Moz, a Seattle-based SaaS company that sells inbound marketing & marketing analytics software.

Rand Fishkin, Moz

How Rand Fishkin Built an 8-Figure SaaS Business – with Rand Fishkin [037]

Rand Fishkin is the Co-Founder of Moz, a Seattle-based SaaS company that sells inbound marketing & marketing analytics software. The company was founded in 2004 as a consulting firm and shifted to software development in 2008. The Moz website has an online community of more than one million digital marketers. To date, the company has raised just under $20M in funding.

Dan Norris, WP Curve

How to Launch a 6-Figure Startup in 7 Days – with Dan Norris [036]

Dan Norris is co-founder of WP Curve, one of the world's fastest-growing WordPress support companies. He's an entrepreneur with an obsession for content marketing and was voted Australia's top small business blogger by 'Smarter Business Ideas', Australia's largest business magazine. He's also the author of 'The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch'.

How to Get Startup Traction & Acquire More Customers – with Gabriel Weinberg [034]

Gabriel Weinberg is the Founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn’t track you, with over a billion searches in 2013.

Michael Pryor, Trello

How a Simple Idea Turned Into a Product Loved By Millions of Users – with Michael Pryor [032]

Michael Pryor is the CEO of Trello, a free app that makes working on group projects as easy as using sticky notes on a whiteboard. He is also the co-founder and President of Fog Creek Software, the makers of products such as FogBugz and Kiln. To date, Trello has raised over $10M in funding and is used by millions of people and companies of all kinds and sizes including Google, Adobe, and The New York Times.

Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics

How This Non-Technical Founder Launched Two Successful SaaS Startups – with Hiten Shah [031]

Hiten Shah is the co-founder and president of analytics companies KISSmetrics & Crazy Egg. He founded KISSmetrics with Neil Patel in 2008. The company has raised over $10M in funding and is used by thousands of companies around the world. Hiten is also an advisor and investor who's actively involved in the software industry.

Martin Novak, Visidom

Why Finding the Right Co-Founder is Critical to Startup Success – with Martin Novak [029]

Martin Novak is the co-founder of Visidom, a SaaS tool that records your website visitors' interactions and creates custom heatmaps, so you can see exactly how people are interacting with your website.

Liz Pearce, LiquidPlanner

How Project Management Uncertainty Helped Build a 7-Figure SaaS Business – with Liz Pearce [028]

Liz Pearce is the CEO of Seattle-based LiquidPlanner, the industry’s only priority-based, predictive online project management solution. LiquidPlanner was founded in 2006 and although Liz isn’t a founder, she joined the company before the product launched and so has been involved since the very early days. To date, Liquid Planner has raised over $11 million in funding.

Stu McLaren, Wishlist Member

Why Stu McLaren Quit His Successful 7-Figure Software Business – with Stu McLaren [027]

Stu McLaren is the founder of Wishlist Member, a powerful and easy to use a plugin  that can turn any WordPress site into a full-blown membership site. Wishlist Member powers over 54,000 online communities and membership sites worldwide. Stu is also the founder of Rhino Support, a helpdesk SaaS application.

Stu McLaren, Wishlist Member

How to Build a 7-Figure Software Business from a WordPress Plugin – with Stu McLaren [026]

Stu McLaren is the founder of Wishlist Member, a powerful and easy-to-use plugin that can turn any WordPress site into a full-blown membership site. Wishlist Member powers over 54,000 online communities and membership sites worldwide. Stu is also the founder of Rhino Support, a helpdesk SaaS application.

Rick Perreault, Unbounce

How a Marketer Turned His Own Pain Into a 7-Figure SaaS Business – Rick Perreault [025]

Rick Perreault is the co-founder and CEO of Unbounce, a software platform that enables marketers to create, publish, and test landing pages. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in Vancouver, Canada.

Spencer Haws, Long Tail Pro

How an Online Marketer Built a 6-Figure Software Business – with Spencer Haws [023]

Spencer Haws is the founder of Longtail Pro, a keyword research software. Long Tail Pro allows you to generate hundreds or thousands of “long tail” keywords in minutes. Spencer launched Long Tail Pro in 2011 and successfully grew it into a 6-figure software business.

Jesse, You Need a Budget

How to Build a $5 Million Software Business from a Spreadsheet File – with Jesse Mecham [020]

Jesse is the founder of “You Need a Budget”, a software product that helps you with your personal budgeting. Jesse is a former Certified Public Accountant (CPA) turned software entrepreneur. He founded YNAB in 2004 and has successfully grown it into a multi-million dollar business with tens of thousands of users from all over the world.

Josh, Kickoff Labs

How to Scratch Your Own Itch and Build a 6-Figure SaaS Business – with Josh Ledgard [017]

Josh is the co-founder of Kickoff Labs, a lead generation platform which provides easy-to-set-up landing pages, combined with lead capture forms and email marketing to help you grow your customers. Josh and his co-founder Scott, launched Kickoff Labs in 2011 and since then have helped their customers generate over 3 million leads.

Adam Schoenfeld, Simply Measured

How a Failed Startup Helped Build an 8-Figure SaaS Business – with Adam Schoenfeld [015]

Adam Schoenfeld is the co-founder & CEO of Simply Measured, a leading social media analytics and measurement platform used by brands such as Samsung, Microsoft, American Express and Pepsi to name a few. Adam founded Simply Measured in 2010 along with his co-founders Aviel Ginzburg and Damon Cortesi. The company now has over 150 employees and to date has raised $29 million in venture capital funding.

Kirk Simpson, Wave

How Wave Is Making Over a Million Small Business Owners Happier – with Kirk Simpson [013]

Kirk Simpson is the co-founder and CEO of Wave, an integrated online solution designed for small businesses to manage their financial life. Wave has signed up well over 1,000,0000 users and currently serves customers in more than 200 countries around the world. And to date, Wave has raised over $25 million in VC funding.

Melanie Perkins, Canva

How Canva is Making Graphic Design Amazingly Simple for Everyone – with Melanie Perkins [012]

Melanie Perkins is the 27-year-old co-founder and CEO of Canva, an online design platform which makes graphic design amazingly simple for everyone, by bringing together a drag-and-drop design tool with a library of more than a million stock photographs, graphic elements and fonts. Melanie founded Canva in 2012 and to date has raised over $6M in VC funding.

Gary Swart, ODesk

How Gary Swart Built the World’s Largest Online Workplace – with Gary Swart [011]

Gary Swart is a Venture Partner at Polaris Partners, an 18-year old venture capital firm. Gary is also the former CEO of Odesk, the world’s largest online workplace with over 1 million clients and 5 million freelancers. He joined the company as its CEO in 2005 and has guided the company to industry leadership and through their recent merger with Elance.

Andrew Filev, Wrike

How to Raise $11 Million by Making Project Management Social – with Andrew Filev [010]

Andrew Filev is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a provider of social project management and collaboration software that helps co-located and distributed teams to get things done together in real-time. Andrew founded the company in 2006 and to date has raised more than $11M in funding.

Sahil, Gumroad

How to Build a SaaS Product in a Weekend and Raise $8 Million – with Sahil Lavingia [009]

Sahil is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a startup which enables creatives (such as writers, designers and musicians) to sell their products directly to their audience. Sahil founded Gumroad in 2011 and to date has raised more $8 million in funding.

Ruben, Bidsketch

How a SaaS Product Helped Its Customers Earn Over $261 Million – with Ruben Gamez [007]

Ruben is the founder of BidSketch, a web app which helps freelancers, consultants, and agencies to create professional-looking proposals in minutes. Ruben launched Bidsketch as a one-person company in 2009. Since then, it’s grown to help over 1000 paying customers earn over $261M in revenue.

Brian Gardner, StudioPress

Creating a Multi-Million Dollar Business from a WordPress Theme – with Brian Gardner [006]

Brian Gardner is the founder of StudioPress, which makes WordPress themes based on their Genesis framework. Brian grew StudioPress from nothing into a multi-million dollar business. In 2010, Brian merged StudioPress and several other companies with Copyblogger to create Copyblogger Media. Brian is a founding partner of Copyblogger Media and also its Chief Product Officer.

Nathan Latka, Heyo

How a 24-Year Old Built a Highly Successful 8-Figure Business – with Nathan Latka [005]

Nathan Latka is the founder and CEO of Heyo. Heyo helps businesses easily create Facebook contests, sweepstakes and mobile-optimized landing pages to help get more fans, leads and sales. Heyo achieved over 6-figures in revenue in its first year and is currently an 8-figure business. Nathan and his team are currently on a mission to get to 500,000 paying customers by 2017.

Neil Patel, KISSmetrics

How to Launch 2 Successful SaaS Products & Build a $1M Blog – with Neil Patel [004]

Neil Patel is a Seattle-based entrepreneur, angel investor and analytics expert. He is best known for his work in digital marketing and as the co-founder of the analytics companies KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg. And his current blog, QuickSprout generates over $1 million in annual revenue. Neil shares with me how they took a couple of simple ideas and turned them into highly successful SaaS products.

James Deer, GatherContent

How a Design Agency Became a Successful SaaS Business – with James Deer [002]

James Deer is the co-founder of GatherContent, a UK based content development platform that helps agencies plan and produce web content for their clients. James founded the company with his wife in 2010. GatherContent now has around 700 paying customers across 100 countries.