The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 16

Luke Kervin, PatientPop

SaaS Product Validation With Zero Code and 9 Doctors

Luke Kervin is the founder and co-CEO of PatientPop, an all-in-one practice growth platform for healthcare providers. The company was founded in 2014 and has raised around $24 million to date. Prior to launching PatientPop, Luke co-founded two companies that both had successful exits and were acquired. The PatientPop story starts in a doctor's office. Luke's wife was pregnant, and he started noticing how uncoordinated the healthcare experience was. He had an idea for a product to fix that problem - but when he went out to interview doctors, they told him flat out they weren't interested. Most founders would have stopped there. But Luke kept asking questions. He started hearing the same thing over and over: doctors were struggling to survive as independent practices. They knew their front door was moving online, but they had no idea how to manage their web presence. They were cobbling together five or six different vendors and had no way to measure what was actually working. That's when Luke realized his experience building e-commerce marketing technology could solve a massive problem in healthcare. He and his co-founder Travis Schneider created business cards for a company called "Patient Tap," built a one-page landing page, and went out to pitch doctors on a product that didn't exist yet. The first nine doctors they pitched all signed up at $400-$500 per month. With SaaS product validation complete in under two weeks, Luke moved to the next phase: proving the product could deliver results. They cobbled together a manual solution and drove an average of 21 new patients to each practice in the first 30 days. That was enough to raise capital and start scaling. Two years later, PatientPop had 142 employees, a field sales team closing at 30%+ rates, and four different sales channels driving growth. Luke shares the specific tactics they used, the mistakes they made trying to move upmarket too fast, and why spending time sitting in front of customers was the best advice he could give any founder.

Kreg Peeler, SpinGo

How a Website Metric Sparked a SaaS Go-to-Market Shift

Kreg Peeler's first entrepreneurial venture was at age 12 - selling avocados at a busy California intersection with a cardboard sign. His SaaS go-to-market journey started in a similarly scrappy way, with a DVD containing 6,000 menus that he distributed through university bookstores. That DVD led to a website called Spin Local, which had a local events section. Kreg's wife Amanda manually curated event listings - digging up content from venue websites, correcting typos, and publishing comprehensive calendars. When they checked their analytics, 80% of all website traffic was going to that events section. That one metric changed everything. When newspaper companies tried to acquire Spin Local, Kreg countered with a licensing deal instead. He broke off the events section as a separate product called SpinGo and signed up media companies as clients who paid monthly fees for event content they could embed in their entertainment sections. SpinGo's SaaS go-to-market strategy evolved through three phases. Phase one was licensing event content to media companies and app developers. Phase two was promotions - letting event makers pay for premium placement, featured listings, and self-serve Facebook and Google ad campaigns. Phase three was Event Master, a full SaaS platform that unifies ticketing, marketing, volunteer management, and event apps into one solution. By 2016, SpinGo had grown to 200,000 registered event makers, powered 5,500 entertainment apps reaching 200 million monthly viewers, and raised over $7 million in funding. The Event Master SaaS product, launched in February, signed 254 events in its first few months and was projected to generate 80% of the company's revenue. Kreg's trade show strategy was particularly effective. He brought professional stage lighting, 80-inch TVs, and event production expertise to newspaper industry conferences where competitors showed up with pop-up banners. The visual contrast won attention, and his message - "own local, don't try to be national" - positioned SpinGo as an ally rather than a competitor.