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.

Will Van Der Sanden, Dux-Soup

From Side Project to 7 Figures With a Freemium SaaS

Will Van Der Sanden is the founder and CEO of Dux-Soup, a LinkedIn automation tool that helps B2B sales professionals find and connect with potential customers at scale. Before Dux-Soup, Will spent about eight years as a developer at two different startups that both fizzled out. He also built his own product called Swivel Script, a desktop automation tool for call center workers. It was technically solid but too complex to explain, and it never gained traction. Then in 2014, Will built a simple scraping tool to help his wife find contacts for her book-selling business. When people kept telling him they wanted the same thing for LinkedIn, he pivoted the tool into a Chrome extension focused entirely on LinkedIn lead generation. He put it on the Chrome Web Store with a freemium SaaS model - a free version with basic features and a paid Pro edition - and people started downloading it. Within six months, Dux-Soup was generating around 5,000 euros per month, enough for Will to go full-time. The Chrome Store handled distribution and payments through Google's built-in infrastructure, keeping the barrier to try and buy as low as possible. An influencer named John Nemo discovered the tool organically and started promoting it, which combined with word of mouth from happy users drove rapid adoption. Will did everything himself for the first two years - development, support, bug fixes, even remote troubleshooting via Chrome Remote Desktop. He worked every weekend and brought his laptop on every family vacation. But the freemium SaaS approach paid off. By keeping the product focused and affordable while competitors charged 8-15x more, Dux-Soup hit $1M ARR in just two years. The growth also attracted unwanted attention. LinkedIn contacted Will with legal threats and shut down his personal profile. Will consulted a lawyer, confirmed the threats had no real legal basis, and chose to sacrifice his LinkedIn account rather than shut down the business. To this day, he runs a LinkedIn automation company without a LinkedIn profile. Now, nearly 10 years later, Dux-Soup has over 80,000 customers, a team of 20+ people, and continues to generate seven-figure annual revenue - proving that a focused freemium SaaS can scale without outside capital.

The SaaS Podcast

The Bootstrapped SaaS Exit That Beat a Funded Giant

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