The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 16

Garrett Moon, CoSchedule

500 Posts to 7,000 Customers: SaaS Content Marketing

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 $500,000 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 a 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. This wasn't the first time these two had launched a product. They had already tried four times without much success. But this time felt different because their idea would solve a problem their consulting clients were often complaining about - organizing content creation and social media promotion in one place. They started by writing a blog post about the problem and how their new product would solve it. They mocked up some screenshots in Photoshop of a product that didn't exist yet. Within 24 hours, they had 300-400 email signups from people interested in the idea. Then Garrett did something remarkably disciplined. He went through that email list, threw out all the Gmail and Yahoo addresses, and identified 10 potential customers. He created a slide deck and scheduled calls with each of them to get feedback before writing any code. The SaaS content marketing didn't stop there. Garrett blogged once a week about the entire process of building CoSchedule - sharing wireframes, early ideas, and getting community feedback along the way. After launch, they scaled to three posts per week, published over 500 actionable blog posts, and grew their email list to over 100,000 subscribers. What makes this story different from every other "we used content marketing" narrative is Garrett's Blue Ocean strategy. Instead of competing on volume, CoSchedule published fewer but dramatically better posts - several thousand words each, deeply researched, always actionable, and always including downloadable worksheets or resources. Most competitors wouldn't put in that level of effort. That became their moat. Garrett also shares the painful lessons about building features customers didn't want, why he deliberately avoided selling to his consulting clients, and why focus is the single most important attribute for any entrepreneur.

Matthew Bellows, Yesware

The SaaS Distribution Channel That Drove 100% of Early Users

Matthew Bellows is the co-founder and CEO of Yesware, a sales platform that helps salespeople connect with prospects, track engagement, and close more deals. Yesware serves more than 750,000 salespeople at companies like Adroll, Groupon, Salesforce, Twilio, and Yelp. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. To date, the company has raised over $35 million in funding. The Yesware story starts with a frustrating board meeting. Matthew was VP of Sales at a venture-backed startup, putting together his pipeline slide - the one every sales leader has to present showing deals expected to close. He realized he was basically guessing. The CRM industry, a $30 billion market, was built on salespeople manually typing data that nobody trusted. Matthew called his friend Cashman and said "software for salespeople." Cashman said "I can build that." They bootstrapped initially, not taking salaries. When they pitched investors, many said "that's not a category." But Matthew knew that was exactly the point - there was no software built specifically for individual salespeople. One early advisor, Jeremy Allaire, recommended they start with the Google Apps ecosystem instead of the much larger Outlook market. That focus on a smaller but more accessible SaaS distribution channel proved transformative. They built a Chrome browser extension and posted it in the Chrome Store. Within a week they had their first 100 users. Then hundreds per day started flowing in - all free, all organic. Yesware's breakthrough feature wasn't even their first idea. They launched with email templates, which got modest adoption. Then they added email tracking - applying newsletter-level open tracking to individual one-to-one emails for the first time. Engagement went through the roof and became the gateway feature for the product. The challenge came when they needed to convert those free individual users into paying enterprise customers. Matthew shares the difficult period when a 10-person sales team was struggling, what he changed to turn things around, and why he wishes he'd charged more and focused on a narrower target market from the start.