The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 6

Lloyed Lobo, Boast.ai

Free Pizza Meetups Became a SaaS Community-Led Growth Engine

Lloyed Lobo is the co-founder of Boast.ai, a fintech platform that helps companies claim R&D tax credits and government incentives. The company has grown to over $20M ARR with 1,000+ customers and a team of 120+. But the path to get there was anything but smooth. After graduating with an engineering degree (and no high school diploma - a story you have to hear), Lloyed spent years bouncing between failed startups. When he and co-founder Alex Popa launched Boast in 2012, they had no money, no product, and no CRM. They delivered their service manually, using Zoho Creator and Zapier to cobble together their first version of the software. Cold outreach failed immediately. The founders were two guys in hoodies trying to sell R&D tax credit services to oil and gas executives. Nobody took them seriously. So Lloyed pivoted to community-led growth - hosting small weekly meetups with tactical advice for startup founders in Calgary. Ten-person events grew to 200-person conferences, and a blog post he pitched to a regional outlet turned into a weekly newspaper column that gave Boast credibility, SEO backlinks, and a steady stream of email subscribers. That community became Boast's primary customer acquisition engine. Leads came through event registrations and Zoom webinar signups. Lloyed reviewed every inbound lead personally and forwarded them to his salespeople. There was no marketing team, no marketing automation. The community-led growth strategy took Boast from zero to $5M ARR, and a growth equity firm that discovered the company at a community event offered a term sheet that same year. After selling 52% of Boast in late 2020, Lloyed faced a different kind of challenge. Bilateral COVID pneumonia put him in the hospital. Rapid hiring replaced the scrappy culture he had built. His seven-year-old daughter told him everything he had promised about spending more time with family was a lie. The founder who had built a community for thousands of people suddenly felt like he had lost his own tribe. Lloyed eventually found his way back through fitness, therapy, and writing his book "From Grassroots to Greatness," which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller in its launch week with 7,300+ copies sold.

Nate Sanders, Artifact

How This AI SaaS Solved the Cold Start Data Problem

While working at Pluralsight, Nate Sanders spent 70-85% of his time doing something most product leaders dread - manually synthesizing customer research data across departments. Teams were running thousands of customer interviews a year, but the synthesis was happening in glass conference rooms covered in sticky notes, with 10 people earning $150K+ spending two days on affinity mapping exercises. When the first large language model, BERT, emerged in 2018, Nate ran internal experiments and saw promising results. He and co-founder Trey spent seven months of nights and weekends building prototypes in React, testing half a dozen different product ideas before raising a small angel round from friends and family in the Salt Lake City area. But building an AI SaaS product created a painful chicken-and-egg problem. Artifact needed training data to fine-tune its models, but getting training data required having customers, and customers required a working product. Nate solved this by recruiting nearly a dozen design partners through his network, offering free product access in exchange for their data, feedback, and 30 minutes of weekly time. Each partner signed letters of intent with paid deposits of $1,000 to $1,500 - small enough to vanish on a corporate card, but enough to prove real commitment. With three to four active design partners collaborating weekly, Artifact closed its first $100K in ARR and raised a $5M seed round led by Josh Buckley of Buckley Ventures. But scaling this AI SaaS beyond those initial partners proved harder than expected. The team tried bottoms-up self-service, community building, dinner events in San Francisco, and conferences - spending $30K-$40K on events alone before realizing none of these channels attracted the right buyers. The breakthrough came when Nate discovered that outbound SDR-driven outreach to enterprise accounts produced dramatically better retention, higher ACVs, and stronger engagement than any other channel. Going down-market was tempting because smaller companies moved faster, but enterprise customers had 90% higher ACVs and significantly lower churn. Nate's AI SaaS playbook became clear: double down on a structured SDR-to-AE pipeline with commitment-based sales stages, replacing subjective pipeline assessments with concrete customer actions like sending data source lists and authenticating integrations.