The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 16

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.

Jerrod Bailey, Tallwave

LinkedIn Lead Generation System That Books 60 Demos

You can spend months waiting for inbound marketing to generate enough leads, or you can build a LinkedIn lead generation system that starts filling your pipeline this week. Jerrod Bailey chose the latter, and the results speak for themselves. Jerrod is a Partner and VP of Business Development at Tallwave, an innovation design firm in Arizona. Before Tallwave, he spent 12 years as an operator in three venture-backed startups with exits ranging from $77 million to $2 billion. He came to Tallwave to figure out how to systematize the hard parts of startup growth - the ones that took him years - and compress them into months. In this conversation, Jerrod shares the exact LinkedIn lead generation framework he uses with portfolio companies. It starts with the product foundation - making sure activation, engagement, and retention metrics are healthy before scaling acquisition. Then he dives into the tactical playbook: using LinkedIn's advanced Boolean search to build targeted prospect lists of thousands, extracting and verifying email addresses with tools like Prospectify, and running automated outreach cadences through tools like Reply. One of the most counterintuitive findings from Jerrod's LinkedIn lead generation work is that half of all leads come from steps 3 and 4 of a 4-step email cadence. Most founders give up after one or two touchpoints, leaving half their pipeline on the table. He also reveals that 20-30% of well-crafted LinkedIn connection requests get accepted, and from there, another subset converts into qualified demos. Whether you are a technical founder who has never done outbound sales or a growth-stage company looking to scale your pipeline, Jerrod's system turns the intimidating work of prospecting into a repeatable, measurable machine.