The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 15

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.

Janna Bastow, ProdPad

From 30-Day to 7-Day SaaS Free Trial Conversion That Doubled

Janna Bastow is the co-founder and CEO of ProdPad, a product management tool that helps teams build product roadmaps, prioritize ideas, and organize customer feedback. ProdPad's customers include Disney, Automattic, and eBay. ProdPad was founded in 2012 and has been bootstrapped since day one. The company is based in Brighton in the United Kingdom. Janna is also the co-founder of Mind the Product, an international product community with over 50,000 members and events in 100 cities worldwide. This is a story about two product managers who could not find software to help them do their jobs. Janna showed her co-founder Simon Cast some ideas for a tool, and he offered to build the back end. She handled the front end - built with jQuery and Bootstrap in an era before complex SaaS stacks were standard. They used ProdPad internally for two years before realizing other product managers would pay for it. Janna quit her job first with zero customers. Six months later, they launched a version people could purchase, and their first paying customer signed up within weeks. Growth came organically through blogging about product management topics - how to build roadmaps, write personas, create specs. They ranked at the top of Google for "product management software" because almost nobody else was targeting that keyword yet. ProdPad grew steadily to around $30K MRR, but then hit what Amy Hoy from Freckle called "the plateau of doom." Janna calls 2015 "the year of faffing about" - the team tried AdWords, events, and other unfocused experiments instead of doubling down on what worked. Revenue flatlined for six months. Rather than raise funding, Janna focused the entire company on one metric for three months: free trial conversion rate. They cut trial time from 30 days to 14 (doubling conversions), then to 7 days with gamified extensions for completing key actions. A behavior-based email system recovered 25-30% of users who signed up but did not engage. ProdPad's free trial conversion rate climbed from below industry average to about 10%.