The SaaS Podcast

Episode archive · Page 14 of 21

Browse by topic:All Bootstrapping First Customers AI-Native SaaS Product-Market Fit Enterprise Sales Product-Led Growth Pricing & Monetization Founder-Led Sales Positioning & Differentiation Churn & Retention Content & Inbound Marketing Exits & Acquisitions Fundraising

Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund

SaaS Fundraising 101 from Pre-Seed to Series A

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 and the differences between pre-seed, seed, and post-seed stages. Elizabeth shares 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 how to choose the right investor for your SaaS fundraising round. It's an episode jam-packed with actionable insights. I hope you enjoy it.

Mikita Mikado, PandaDoc

SaaS Customer Acquisition Playbook: 0 to 10,000 Customers

Mikita Mikado is the co-founder and CEO of PandaDoc, a SaaS product that lets you create, deliver, and manage your team's quotes, proposals, contracts, and other sales collateral. Before launching PandaDoc, Mikita and his co-founder Serge were running another business together in Belarus. They had to send out a lot of sales proposals and contracts. It was tedious and time-consuming for them to create and track all these documents. And after investing hours into putting a document together, they had no idea if their prospective customer had even looked at it. So eventually, they decided to solve this problem, not just for themselves but also for other people running similar businesses. They built a SaaS product called QuoteRoller and launched it in 2011. They got some initial traction, but soon realized they hadn't quite built the product the right way and were spending too much time arguing with each other about features instead of talking to customers. A couple of years later, they built and launched PandaDoc and took it from zero to over 10,000 customers using a SaaS customer acquisition strategy built on CRM partnerships, product virality, and relentless experimentation. You'll also hear a great story on how Mikita's sense of humor helped them find an investor in the most unexpected way. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Showing 313–336 of 490 episodes

Steve Benson, Badger Maps

Founder-Led Sales Built a 6,000-Customer SaaS From $35/Month

Steve Benson is the co-founder and CEO of Badger Maps, a sales routing and mapping tool that helps field salespeople be more efficient. The product enables sales reps to map their CRM data, plan routes, integrate with calendars, and find nearby leads. Badger Maps was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco. The company has raised about $1 million in funding. Before founding Badger Maps, Steve worked in sales for IBM, Autonomy, and Google, where he was named Google Enterprise's top performing salesperson in the world in 2009. Steve was scratching his own itch. His entire career was in field sales, and at Google he was selling the Maps API product. He realized there was massive inefficiency in how field salespeople - the ones who sell beer to bars, medical devices to hospitals, tires to tire stores - planned their routes and decided who to visit each day. He started with a simple idea: take customer data and map it as points on Google Maps. With his co-founder, who had a background in private equity, they invested personal savings and raised a friends-and-family round. Six months later, they had a basic web app. Steve charged $35 a month from day one. Founder-led sales drove early growth. Steve talked to 50+ prospects before the product was built, asking them to describe their problems rather than pitching a solution. He asked a critical question after each conversation: "Would you buy this?" Those who said no revealed the real objections. When the product launched, Steve reached out again with proof it worked. The growth model that made Badger Maps scale was land-and-expand. One salesperson signs up at $9 a month. Their manager notices the results and buys it for the team. The regional VP rolls it out nationally. That pattern turned individual seats into six-figure annual contracts with Fortune 500 companies. One deal closed in nine days through top-down executive buy-in. Another took a full year through organic bottoms-up adoption. Both worked. Today Badger Maps has over 6,000 customers, a team of about 50 people, and serves everyone from individual salespeople to Fortune 500 companies. Founder-led sales got the train moving, and land-and-expand kept it accelerating.