The SaaS Podcast

Episode archive · Page 8 of 21

Browse by topic:All Bootstrapping First Customers AI-Native SaaS Product-Market Fit Enterprise Sales Product-Led Growth Pricing & Monetization Founder-Led Sales Positioning & Differentiation Churn & Retention Content & Inbound Marketing Exits & Acquisitions Fundraising

Josh Haynam, Interact

From $15K MRR to a Year-Long Revenue Plateau

Josh Haynam is the co-founder and CEO of Interact, a platform for creating quizzes, assessments, and giveaways that help build your email list or qualify leads. I originally interviewed Josh in 2015 (episode 57) when he and his college friends had bootstrapped Interact and were doing around $15K in MRR. Today, they're doing around $2.5M in annual recurring revenue (ARR). But there's a lot more to this story than you may think. It took them about 5 years to hit $1M ARR and then they experienced rapid SaaS growth during the pandemic. It was looking like the start of the hockey stick growth curve. But then growth came to a standstill and revenue was flat for about a year. Interact was gaining new customers at roughly the same rate they were losing them, stuck at around $2.3-2.4M ARR. We dig into the realities of SaaS growth - how content marketing drove the business for years, why competitor ads eroded organic traffic, and the specific moves that finally broke the plateau, including a template library that doubled as an acquisition channel and a completely rebuilt onboarding flow.

Tony Summerville, Fleetio

From $50/mo to 8 Figures With SaaS Content Marketing

Tony Summerville is the founder and CEO of Fleetio, a SaaS product that helps businesses automate fleet operations tasks and keep their vehicles and equipment running smoothly. In 2011, Tony was working as a product manager. He'd tried several times to start a business in his spare time but just wasn't able to get any traction. Eventually, he came to the realization that if he was going to have a serious shot at building a business, he had to quit his job and go all-in. He and his wife agreed that he'd give it a try for one year and if things didn't work out, he'd go back to a full-time job. After seeing how his father's business was struggling to manage its fleet of vehicles, Tony set out to build a modern fleet management software for small and medium businesses. He launched his minimum viable product (MVP) in about 7 months and a few months later had his first 10 customers (thanks to the time and effort he'd put into doing customer development interviews). But he was only charging about $50 a month for his product, so there was still a lot of work to do. Today, powered by SaaS content marketing that drives 70% of revenue inbound, he's grown his company into an 8-figure business, built a team of nearly 200 people, and raised $25M in VC funding. In this interview, we talk about how Tony validated his idea, built his MVP, tested pricing, built a SaaS content marketing engine that drives 70% of revenue inbound, and a lot more. So I hope you enjoy it.

Showing 169–192 of 486 episodes

Jordan Gal, Rally

Tripling SaaS Prices Cut Churn from 15% to 2%

Jordan Gal is the co-founder of Rally, a headless checkout that gives e-commerce merchants more control over their checkout experience. In 2014, after running his own e-commerce business for years, Jordan launched a simple abandoned cart app which eventually became a customizable checkout for Shopify merchants. He landed his first customers through cold email and a no-brainer pricing offer: pay 10% of recovered revenue, capped at $99 per month. Within two years, CartHook was processing hundreds of millions in GMV and pulling in 400 free trial signups per month. But underneath the growth, Jordan spotted a serious problem. Monthly churn was stuck between 10% and 15%, and the company was attracting the wrong merchants. His SaaS pricing instinct told him the fix was counterintuitive: raise prices, not lower them. Jordan tripled the price from $100 to $300, switched from self-serve to required demos, and positioned CartHook as the premium checkout for serious merchants. Demand barely changed. Then he raised SaaS pricing again to $500 per month plus a 0.5% transaction fee - and even increased prices on existing customers. The result was dramatic. Monthly churn dropped to 1-2%, MRR doubled from $250K to $500K in one year, and the entire team was happier working with better-fit customers. By 2020, CartHook had processed $2.5 billion in total GMV, with $300 million coming from post-purchase upsells alone - a 12% revenue lift that merchants could not get from Shopify's native checkout. Jordan and his co-founder had found product-market fit, built a product people loved, and were generating about $6M in ARR. And then everything fell apart. Shopify decided CartHook had grown too large and was processing too much revenue outside their ecosystem. CartHook was forced to stop taking new checkout customers and pivot to a post-purchase upsell app that worked inside Shopify's checkout. Jordan lost his appetite for building on someone else's platform, put a new CEO in place, and left to start Rally with his CTO.