The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 5

Evan Liang, LeanData

60 SaaS Customers From One Event in a Category No One Knew

Evan Liang is the co-founder and CEO of LeanData, a revenue orchestration platform that helps B2B teams route leads to the right salespeople across every SaaS go-to-market motion. In 2012, while working at Caring.com, Evan kept running into problems stitching together CRM and marketing automation systems. He built an internal solution, and the experience sparked the idea for a startup. Evan recruited a technical co-founder, Kelvin, and leveraged his venture capital background to raise seed funding before LeanData even had a product. But raising money turned out to be the easy part. Finding customers for a category that didn't exist yet was a completely different challenge. As the solo salesperson, Evan signed LeanData's first 20 customers by selling the pain of dirty CRM data rather than a polished solution. Growth was painfully slow. Some sales cycles stretched to three years because prospects had never heard of lead-to-account matching and had no budget line item for it. Traditional marketing channels failed completely. Paid search returned nothing because nobody was Googling for a product category that didn't have a name yet. The SaaS go-to-market playbook that worked for other startups simply didn't apply to LeanData. So Evan and his team got creative. They started attending events and Marketo meetups where early adopters congregated. At one Marketo conference, they dropped the price to $2,500 and signed 60 customers in a matter of days - proving demand existed even if traditional inbound couldn't find it. Over time, LeanData built a community-driven growth engine. Customers who changed jobs brought LeanData to their new companies. The team launched OpStars, a satellite conference at Dreamforce that now draws over 2,000 attendees. Customer certification programs and customer-led selling at events became the core of their go-to-market strategy. Through it all, Evan had to manage investor expectations while growing slower than the venture-backed playbook demanded. He chose investors he trusted, stayed transparent with his board, and resisted the temptation to chase growth at all costs. Today, LeanData serves over 1,000 enterprise customers including Nvidia, Google, and Snowflake. The company generates 8-figures in ARR and has raised $42 million in funding.

George Richardson, AeroCloud

From Race Car Driver to Vertical SaaS CEO at 60 Airports

George Richardson is the co-founder and CEO of AeroCloud, an airport management platform that helps airports optimize operations and revenue using AI and machine learning. In 2017, after retiring as a professional race car driver, George was looking for a new challenge. He randomly met Ian at a coffee shop in England. Ian had previously built and sold an on-prem software product for airports. Together, they decided to build an app to help airlines resell last-minute plane tickets. But they struggled for two years to gain traction. The airline market was brutal - thin margins, demanding buyers, and no clear path to a category-defining company. Eventually, they asked themselves a simple question: why not take Ian's proven on-prem airport management software and reinvent it for the cloud? They pivoted and started building a vertical SaaS product for airports. But even with Ian's domain expertise, signing those critical first customers proved difficult. Nobody wanted to be the first airport to adopt mission-critical software from an unproven startup. A breakthrough came at the Florida Airports Council conference. After emailing every attendee and getting zero responses, George spent three days floor-walking and getting rejected. Then at 4pm on the last day, a text came from a guy named Parker: "I'm at the bar. You can buy me a beer." By 11pm, they had a handshake deal. If AeroCloud built specific features for his airport, Parker would pay. Within three months, Ian built the product. Parker became their first customer, then evangelized AeroCloud to other airports. Tampa International signed on as their second customer - and actually paid AeroCloud to further develop the product. That revenue, combined with venture capital, launched their vertical SaaS growth engine. AeroCloud scaled from $200K ARR without outside funding to raising nearly $18 million across seed and Series A rounds. They nearly ran out of runway before their second raise when lumpy enterprise deals missed their timelines. But their seed investors led the follow-on round, and a quarter later revenue tripled. Today AeroCloud serves 60 enterprise airport customers, employs 60 people across the US and UK, and generates multiple millions in ARR.