The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 3

Kyle Hanslovan, Huntress

Scaling SaaS From $0 to 8 Figures Without a Single Ad

Kyle Hanslovan is the co-founder and CEO of Huntress, a cybersecurity platform that helps businesses protect themselves against hackers and cyber threats. Before starting Huntress, Kyle was a hacker for the US government and NSA - not the Hollywood version, but as he puts it, "the real life pasty version behind a keyboard." In 2015, he spotted a huge opportunity. The big companies had fancy security teams, but smaller businesses were left wide open to attacks because they couldn't afford that kind of protection. Kyle saw a way to deliver his expertise at the price of a product. Getting those first customers was painful. He made over a hundred calls, many to businesses so small they didn't even have an IT department. His trusted network was too polite to give him honest feedback. The breakthrough came when he started talking to complete strangers who owed him nothing - they told him directly what was wrong with his pitch and his approach. It took nearly a year to land his first three customers. Two of them actually paid. The third one, as Kyle laughs about now, "used my free trial for like seven years before they finally paid me." The first product was incredibly minimal - just an installer that flagged security issues via email. No dashboard, no automation. The founders were doing all the security analysis by hand. But customers didn't care how the sausage was made. They cared about the result. Beyond those first customers, Kyle started scaling SaaS growth without spending a dollar on advertising. His secret weapon was leading with education - showing prospects what hackers were actually doing instead of pushing a sales pitch. He found "watering holes" where IT outsourcers gathered at trade shows and peer groups, then pitched to 20 people at a time instead of one. Things got tough along the way. Multiple seed rounds fell through, investors walked away, and Kyle and his co-founders weren't taking home a paycheck for years. The equity dilution got so painful that they nearly sold the company for $30M. But they stuck it out, took a bridge round from early investors, and went from $1.5M to $5M ARR in a single year. Today, after years of scaling SaaS revenue by doubling year after year, Huntress generates about $120M in ARR, has raised over $300M in funding, and has grown to a team of nearly 500 remote employees with a valuation close to $2 billion. Kyle's journey from bootstrapping to scaling SaaS at this level holds lessons about patience, equity, hiring, and leading with value over sales pitches.

Colin Nederkoorn, Customer.io

18 Months to $10K MRR Then Compounding SaaS Growth

Colin Nederkoorn is the co-founder and CEO of Customer.io, a platform that helps over 7,000 companies send personalized messages based on customer behavior and actions. Today the business generates $70 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of 250 people across 30 countries. But the early days looked nothing like that. In 2012, Colin and his co-founder John were working at a startup together. They started exploring ideas during lunch breaks, looking for something technically challenging, close to revenue, and built for their peers. Their original idea - a more sophisticated analytics product - fell flat when prospective users told them they already had 10 tools showing what people did on their website. What they needed was something to influence behavior. That feedback led to the pivot. They built a bare-bones product where customers would describe what campaign they wanted, and John would manually write MapReduce queries behind the scenes to make it work. They charged $10 a month and gated signups so Colin could talk to every single customer. The SaaS growth was painfully slow at first. Colin and John lived off savings and credit cards for years. Paid ads failed because the market did not have vocabulary for what they were building - terms like "triggered messages" and "segmentation" attracted the wrong buyers. A turning point came when Ramit Sethi told them they were wasting their email list by not communicating with subscribers until launch. Colin took that advice and started teaching conversion copywriting to their audience, building credibility in the email marketing space before Customer.io was even ready. That content-first approach became the foundation of their SaaS growth engine. By educating potential customers on how to write messages that convert, they created demand for the tool that would send those messages. It took 18 months to reach $10K MRR, but once compounding kicked in, the numbers got big fast. As Colin puts it, when you are compounding 50% or 80% year over year starting from $10M or $20M, the growth becomes massive. Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, gave Colin another key insight during those early cash-strapped days: the question is not whether you need more money - it is whether you need more time. That reframing helped Colin extend runway creatively rather than raising too much capital too early, which he believes would have shortened their window to figure things out.

The SaaS Podcast

Open-Source SaaS to 7-Figure ARR With Zero Sales Calls

850 Meetings Before His First Sale Paid Off

How Founders Sell a SaaS Business for 2x More

No-Code MVP to 7-Figure SaaS Onboarding Business

18 Months of Wrong SaaS Go-to-Market Then 100% Growth

The 220% Commission Model That Aligned B2B SaaS Sales

50 Failed Pitches Then SaaS Partnerships Built $7M ARR

Founder-Led Sales: From $6K Deals to $100K in One Year

Scaling SaaS From $0 to 8 Figures Without a Single Ad

How a Vertical SaaS Grew to 7-Figure ARR on $2,500/Month

Grew to 7-Figure ARR with SaaS SEO and One Feature

From $5K Deal to Unicorn - A SaaS Fundraising Story

6 Weeks of Runway to Near 8-Figure Enterprise SaaS

From $0 to $1M ARR Through Competitive Differentiation

10 Customer Interviews That Reveal Why People Really Buy

Scaling SaaS With Zero Product and a Manual Backend

How a Self-Funded SaaS Hit $6M ARR With 3 People

8 Months of Failed Startup Sales Until a 5-Week Fix

From Side Project to 7 Figures With a Freemium SaaS

From 40M Free Users to 8-Figure ARR with Freemium SaaS

How a Vertical SaaS Hit $5.5M ARR Selling to One Niche

$35/Month Flat-Rate SaaS Without Funding to 8 Figures

18 Months to $10K MRR Then Compounding SaaS Growth

5 Years to $1M Then Vertical SaaS Took Off