This episode is for SaaS founders wondering why adding more features to their niche product isn't creating the edge it used to.

Most niche SaaS races to add features—and wonders why margins shrink.

Martin Gourdeau, CEO of Vacation Tracker, took a different path. After running Workleap as President and GM, he took a year off to study what's actually changing in software—then chose a 22-person bootstrapped company over another large stage.

And he didn't pick Vacation Tracker by accident. He picked it because he believes the next wave of software will be won by a very different kind of company.

And this inspired me to invite Martin to my podcast. We explore what he saw in that year off—and why it shaped a very different bet on what wins next. Martin shares why a small bootstrapped company now has an edge most large companies will never get back, why he changed the one number that decides when his whole team gets a raise, and what kind of SaaS he thinks AI will quietly destroy.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Aim to be different, not just better – Create NEW value possibilities

Martin's journey proves that the next wave of remarkable software companies won't look like the last.

Here's something Martin observed that explains where he thinks the real opportunity sits:

"High performers are notoriously bad at managing their energy levels because of this obsession to perform."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why most SaaS companies are competing in the wrong layer
• Why ARR-per-head changes the behavior of every employee
• What high performers get wrong about their own energy
• Why delegation to agents is the skill most leaders lack

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Martin Gourdeau, CEO of Vacation Tracker

Website: https://vacationtracker.io

This episode is for SaaS CEOs with a nagging feeling that their growth isn't compounding the way it should.

Most CEOs chase market size. And miss what actually matters.

Chad Gaydos, CEO of Procurify, took a different path. With 30 years across SAP, Skillsoft, Talkdesk, and Total Expert, he's learned that growth isn't about how big the market is—it's about how well you fit it. When he took the CEO seat in January 2025, he asked a question most operators skip: Is there a real use case here—or just a big number?

And this inspired me to invite Chad to my podcast. We explore why use-case fit—not market size—is what actually compounds growth. Chad shares why his first move was repositioning the entire company, why the product was being sold to the wrong customers, and why saying yes to the wrong customer is more expensive than saying no.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Master the art of curiosity – Acknowledge you cannot please everyone

Chad's journey proves that remarkable companies don't grow by chasing markets—they grow by reading them differently than everyone else.

Here's one of Chad's quotes that captures how he reads markets:

"What drew me wasn't procurement per se. It was really what was going on in this last category of the Office of the CFO. I felt like it hadn't been written yet."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why use-case fit beats TAM size
• What happens when pricing finally matches the value you deliver
• When the first 90 days demand subtraction, not addition
• How to make hard decisions without committee paralysis

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Chad Gaydos, CEO of Procurify

Website: https://www.procurify.com

This episode is for SaaS founders quietly wondering whether trying to be a fit for every buyer is what's slowing them down.

Most founders think the goal is to be a fit for as many buyers as possible. Burak Karakan, Co-founder and CEO of Bruin, runs his company on the opposite belief. A former engineering manager at HelloFresh, he built an opinionated product — and he's at peace with the buyers who walk away because of it.

And this inspired me to invite Burak to my podcast. We explore why being opinionated on purpose creates focus, speed, and the right kind of customer base. Burak shares his thinking on the question that qualifies a buyer in five minutes, why he hires juniors over seniors right now, and what happened when his team stopped tracking competitors altogether. You'll discover why he turns down deals that other founders would take.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Acknowledge you cannot please everyone – Aim to be different, not just better – Master the art of curiosity

Burak's journey proves that remarkable companies don't try to be a fit for everyone — they hold their position, and the right customers find them because of it.

Here's one of Burak's quotes that captures his thinking:

"It's unbelievable to me that engineers think they are there just to build stuff. No, you're there to solve problems, and sometimes solving that problem will especially require you to not build something."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why opinionated products attract better customers than agreeable ones
• What question reveals whether a buyer is a real fit in five minutes
• When ignoring your competitors becomes your sharpest strategic move
• Why hiring juniors right now beats hiring seniors

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Burak Karakan, Co-founder & CEO of Bruin

Website: https://getbruin.com

This podcast is for SaaS founders wondering whether the playbook they've been running is still enough to keep their edge.

Most software CEOs scale by hiring. Few question that.

Tim Barker, CEO of Attain IP, walked away from the obvious next move. After scaling Salesforce in EMEA, leading DataSift through Twitter's data shutdown, and running a public mental health platform for five years, he turned down PE roles and board seats to start over. New company, new market — white-box AI for patent attorneys. But the real bet wasn't the market. It was the build: five people, no functional org, agents doing the work a department used to. That's the choice I wanted to understand.

This inspired me to invite Tim to my podcast. We dig into how the operating model of a software company gets rebuilt when one person can run what used to take a department. Tim shares his thinking on why products should be bought not sold, why trust is now a measurable input, and why the obvious next move is rarely the remarkable one.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Sell the idea, not the product
• Master the art of curiosity

Tim's story proves that remarkable companies don't follow the obvious playbook—they question the foundations everyone else takes for granted and build what works now.

Here's one of Tim's quotes that captures how his definition of a winning product has shifted:

"There's no MVP in our world, in our vocabulary. It's replaced by the minimum magical product. Magical products drive word of mouth, and our North Star is: once I've used it, I'm never going back."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why systems beat super prompts in any AI-first business
• What separates products people buy from products you have to sell
• Why trust is a measurable input, not just a brand value
• Why uncomfortable choices teach faster than comfortable ones

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Tim Barker, CEO at Attain IP

Website: attainip.ai

For SaaS founders quietly wondering whether their next round will fix what the last one didn't.

Most founders who fail try harder the next time.

Amos Bar-Joseph, co-founder and CEO of Swan, took a different path. Three-time founder. Two prior B2B startups built on the unicorn growth-at-all-costs playbook—both ended in failure. On the third one, he didn't tighten his execution. He rejected the play—and reached seven figures in ARR in just nine weeks.

And this inspired me to invite Amos to my podcast. We explore why questioning the playbook creates a different kind of edge. Amos shares the thinking behind scaling talent first, not headcount—why mental capacity is the bottleneck, why knowledge has to become software, why meetings and alignment calls are the real cost of scale.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Aim to be different, not just better – Master the art of curiosity – Focus on the essence

Amos's journey proves that remarkable companies don't follow consensus—they question what everyone else accepts and walk away from it.

Here's one of Amos's quotes that captures his philosophy on how a business should be built:

"We're scaling our talent inside the company so we can discover what does it look like the 100x version of an engineer, the 100x product, the 100x seller, the 100x marketeer. [...] A business that is designed from the ground up to scale its employees, not a business that employees are designed to scale the business."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why convention is the fastest path to mediocrity in software
• What changes when revenue per employee becomes your North Star metric
• Why mental capacity is the real bottleneck, not headcount
• Why knowledge has to live in the system, not the team

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Amos Bar-Joseph, Co-founder & CEO of Swan

Website: https://www.getswan.com

This episode is for SaaS founders who are watching better-funded rivals raise round after round—and questioning whether outspending is really the only way to win.

Most founders chase scale before they've earned the right. Joseph Lee, CEO of Supademo, took a different path. After six years and several pivots in his previous company, he started Supademo in early 2023 with a bootstrap mindset—even after raising. He did the gritty work that bigger competitors refused to do, and shared every harsh lesson in public from day one.

The result: mid-seven-figure ARR — built by a team of 11.

And this inspired me to invite Joseph to my podcast. We explore why founder-led grit beats capital when capital is everywhere. Joseph shares why he stopped tracking twenty metrics to focus on three, and why he believes 99% of a startup's momentum has nothing to do with the founder. You'll discover what happens when the smaller player chooses the work the bigger players won't touch.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Turn customers into fans
• Master creating momentum

Joseph's journey proves that remarkable companies don't outspend competitors—they build flywheels competitors can't buy.

Here's one of his quotes:

"You need to build the right levers into your business where you're riding the momentum of the market or momentum of the product. We're not doing as much like hand-to-hand combat."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why structural market dynamics drive 99% of a startup's momentum
• What makes 100 early customers more valuable than 10,000 later ones
• Why measuring twenty metrics hides what three actually reveal
• Why trust compounds when founders share lessons publicly from day one

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Joseph Lee, CEO of Supademo

Website: https://supademo.com

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders wondering why adding more people keeps making growth harder, not easier.

When I last spoke with Alex Levin in 2022, Regal was already scaling. Since then, revenue has grown 4x—with the exact same team.

Back in 2022, Regal was growing fast, and the team was expanding with it. Alex made a different call. He stopped hiring to solve problems—and started solving problems instead. Three and a half years later, the team is exactly the same size. The revenue isn't.

He said no to entire customer segments. He stopped solving product gaps with people. He moved from $50K average contracts to over $150K—without adding a single person to make it happen. The result is a business approaching cash-flow break-even with most of its $83M still in the bank and revenue growing 50 to 100% a year.

And this inspired me to invite Alex back to my podcast—three and a half years after our first conversation. We explore how questioning every default assumption about growth creates compounding advantage. Alex shares hard-won insights about the ego trap of hiring, the shift from $50K to $150K average contracts, and why AI agents didn't change his core belief—they finally made it scale.

You'll discover what happens when a founder refuses the obvious answer—and finds that the constraint was always the key.

We zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Acknowledge you cannot please everyone – Focus on the essence

Alex's story proves that remarkable companies grow their leverage, not their headcount.

Here's one of Alex's quotes that captures his thinking on building a business that forces clarity:

"Don't solve problems with people, like solve the problem and then hire people if you, you know, if you want to. That's a very big shift in how companies are run."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why the most valuable employee is the one who automates their own job out of existence
• What saying no to a whole customer segment does for average contract value
• Why the constraint you kept accepting was actually the problem all along
• Why the fastest solution to a product gap is often the most expensive one long-term

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Alex Levin, CEO & Co-founder

Website: regal.ai

When I started this podcast, I had one simple belief: the best lessons in building a remarkable software company don't come from business books or consulting frameworks. They come from CEOs who've lived it — the ones who made the hard calls, paid for the wrong assumptions, and built something worth talking about.

I went back through the last 99 conversations — and pulled the 18 insights that I believe will genuinely open your eyes. Not the ones that make you nod. The ones that hold a mirror.

I selected them for one reason: each one connects directly to the traits I write about in The Remarkable Effect. The patterns that separate the software companies people keep talking about from the ones that quietly disappear.

Six don'ts. Twelve do's.

The don'ts follow one thread — each one is an assumption that ended up costing a CEO everything. The do's move from the inside out — who you need to be, how you compete, how you grow, and who you put around you.

Here's who you'll hear from:

DON'TS

• Harpreet Singh, Co-CEO Launchable — on the mistake that erodes confidence in leadership faster than anything else
• Josh Ellars, CEO OpenGTM — on the decision he kept making wrong, more than once
• Ed Bradley, CEO Virtualstock — on why being turned down by every investor was the best thing that happened to him
• Emeric Ernoult, CEO Agorapulse — on the reason he almost gave away part of his company for nothing
• Krishna Raj Raja, CEO SupportLogic — on which hiring mistake is actually more dangerous
• Jason Cohen, Founder WPEngine — on the belief that quietly kills more scaling companies than anything else

DO'S

• Matt van Itallie, CEO Sema — on why the leadership book's answer didn't work
• Richard White, CEO Fathom — on what the best YC founders had in common that surprised him
• Matt Achariam, CEO Mesh — on what falls apart when momentum arrives too fast
• Scott Reynolds, CEO UpCodes — on the question most AI founders can't answer
• Mark Walker, CEO Nue — on why creating a new market isn't always the best idea
• Caitlin MacGregor, CEO Plum — on why CEOs should spend more time selling
• Tal Peretz, CEO Onfire — on saying no to customers who wanted to pay him
• Jason Cohen, Founder WPEngine — on the one thing worth fixing before everything else
• Emeric Ernoult, CEO Agorapulse — on why testing for the outcome is the wrong test
• Theo Saville, CEO CloudNC — on the difference between a busy team and a focused one
• Randy Wootton, CEO Maxio — on what nobody tells you before you sit in the CEO chair
• Jon Jorgensen, CEO The Access Group — on how he actually went about finding the right people
• Dinakara Nagalla, CEO EmpowerMx (acquired by IFS) — on what remarkable actually means when nobody is watching

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders who've never tested whether their revenue would survive a major market shock — and aren't sure they want to know the answer.

Most software companies are built to serve as many customers as possible. Louis Hoch, CEO of Usio, chose differently.

Louis has been building in payments since 1998. He raised $50 million while competitors raised $200 million—and won. He built a company that processes enough direct bank payment volume to rank as the 50th largest bank in the United States. When COVID hit and rivals saw revenue drop by as much as 80%, Usio grew. That outcome wasn't luck. It was a customer decision made years earlier that most CEOs would never make.

What Louis did—deliberately, by design—was say no to entire industries. Not because he couldn't serve them. Because serving them would have cost him everything else.

And this inspired me to invite Louis to my podcast. We explore how deliberate customer rejection builds a resilience that no market crisis can touch. Louis shares insights about turning regulatory hurdles into early competitive positioning, building payment channel diversity while staying ruthlessly focused on vertical, and why the companies that fail are often the ones who stayed truest to their original idea. You'll discover what happens to your revenue when a crisis hits — and you made the right customer choices years earlier.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Acknowledge you cannot please everyone
• Aim to be different, not just better

Louis's story proves that remarkable companies don't just pick their market—they pick what they will never serve, and build their advantage from that constraint.

Here's one of Louis's quotes that captures his philosophy on what it takes to survive as a founder:

"What you think you're going to be when you start a software company and what you end up being are often different. The companies that are successful understand that. The companies that fail try to maintain their focus on what their original product or service is."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why going public before your first customer can be your strongest sales move
• Why giving customers the conditions to choose beats telling them what they need
• Why your original business plan may be the biggest threat to your survival
• Why operating leverage has to be designed in from the start — not stumbled into later

Guest: Louis Hoch, CEO and Chairman of Usio

Website: usio.com

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders who feel their product lead shrinking—and wondering what actually creates a position competitors can't close.

Most founders chase obvious markets. Scott Reynolds chose a complicated one nobody else wanted.

Scott, co-founder and CEO of UpCodes, is a trained architect who has lived the pain of navigating construction regulations. Weeks buried in phone-book-sized regulations that no software had organized—until he built it.

While others built broad tools for obvious problems, Scott went narrow and deep. His conviction: if it's not dramatically better, it isn't worth building.

And this inspired me to invite Scott to my podcast. We explore why going deep into one vertical beats building broad for everyone. Scott shares what forces professionals to call a tool irreplaceable, why vertical depth compounds, and what a decade of quiet data does when AI arrives. You'll discover why his bet keeps getting stronger.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Aim to be different, not just better – Offer something valuable and desirable

Scott's story proves that remarkable companies find the problems others walk past—and build advantages that compound.

Here's one of Scott's quotes that captures his thinking on competition in the AI era:

"We view that marriage of our data and their data to give them a unique instance of AI that can just answer questions better than their competitor could. And I think that's a very critical component of competition in an AI era."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why a 10% improvement rarely moves anyone—and what threshold actually drives adoption
• What choosing a vertical others ignore reveals about long-term defensibility
• When combining your data with customer data creates an advantage nobody else can access
• Why the hardest problems to solve are often the strongest positions to own

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Scott Reynolds, Co-founder and CEO UpCodes

Website: up.codes

This episode is for SaaS founders who sense their growth metrics are missing something — and can't put their finger on what.

Many SaaS companies track monthly active users. Dean Mathews asks a different question when he looks at that number.

Dean Mathews, Founder and CEO of OnTheClock, launched his time-tracking company in 2004 after reading complaints in a small business forum. For the next decade, he ran it as a side project — patient, focused, and measuring success by one question: are we actually helping people?

That question changed what he built, how he hired, and why customers keep coming back.

And this inspired me to invite Dean to my podcast. We explore how measuring success by people rather than revenue changes what a software company becomes. Dean shares why monthly active users became his north star, why 20 years of patience in one segment compounds in ways rapid growth never does, and what really drives customers to recommend you without being asked.

You'll discover how a 4.9 out of 5 customer support rating and 7–8% word-of-mouth referrals trace back to one belief about what business is actually for.

We zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Turn customers into fans – Master the art of curiosity

Dean's story proves remarkable companies don't obsess over revenue metrics—they obsess over the people those metrics are supposed to represent.

Here's one of Dean's quotes that captures his philosophy on what makes a team culture actually work:

"The biggest one for me is connecting their work to the actual value that's delivered to a customer, and showing them that their work actually matters. That's like gold."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why measuring success by people helped—not revenue—changes how your whole team behaves
• What turns occasional users into customers who recommend you to friends and colleagues
• Why staying in one segment for 20 years compounds in ways most founders never see
• Why connecting every team member to customer outcomes creates effort no salary can buy

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Dean Mathews, Founder & CEO of OnTheClock

Website: ontheclock.com

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders wondering whether their expansion strategy is building strength—or spreading them thin.

Most SaaS founders treat $10M as proof the playbook works. Hewitt Tomlin, CEO of TeamBuildr, treated it as a reason to question everything.

He and his college teammate James Peters built TeamBuildr from a frustration with paper workout programs into a $10M strength and conditioning platform—with fewer than 50 employees and zero outside capital.

But at $10M, Hewitt made a choice most founders wouldn't. He stopped building new products—and started rebuilding the one that got him there.

And this inspired me to invite Hewitt to my podcast. We explore why a bootstrapped founder at $10M chose restraint over expansion—and what that decision reveals about building real competitive advantage. Hewitt shares hard-won lessons about a pricing mistake he calls his biggest error, an acquisition that taught him the cost of scarcity thinking, and why he now hires from the profession he serves. You'll discover what happens when a founder stops chasing more and starts going deeper.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Focus on the essence – Master the art of curiosity

Hewitt's story proves that remarkable companies don't keep adding—they challenge everything that doesn't move the needle, even when it's their own strategy.

Here's one of Hewitt's quotes that captures his long-term conviction:

"Our existing application is responsible for 10 million in revenue. It's not bad. There's a good argument there for not changing anything, and continuing to tack on 2 million in revenue a year. But no, we're convinced it's the right thing to do, because we feel like, if it's gotten us so far for 10 years, then the new version will carry us for 10 years into the future."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why early revenue matters less than the insight your first customers carry
• What happens when a $10M founder chooses depth over new product lines
• Why analysis without intuition leads to your most expensive mistakes
• How hiring from your customer's profession builds a moat competitors can't copy

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Hewitt Tomlin, CEO & Co-Founder

Website: teambuildr.com

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders who suspect their product is slowly becoming a custom shop—and don't know how to stop it.

Bassem Hamdy, CEO and Co-Founder of Briq, has spent 25 years in construction technology—three software revolutions, three companies.

He says Briq found product market fit every 24 months. Each time meant tearing something down to build the next version.

Each time, the same thing triggered the rebuild — the company had started solving for individual customers instead of the market.

And this inspired me to invite Bassem to my podcast. We explore why the instinct to please your biggest customers creates exactly the kind of fragility that kills companies. Bassem shares hard lessons about killing a product he spent two years building, the moment his QA team exposed how far the company had drifted, and why domain expertise—not platform size—determines who wins in vertical AI.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Acknowledge you cannot please everyone – Master the art of curiosity

Bassem's journey proves that remarkable companies refound themselves before the market forces them to.

Here's one of Bassem's quotes that captures what happens when a company starts drifting:

"Software is like jello. You slap that thing, it's going to shake the hell out of it. So the moment you inject that code, that's client specific, you're pooched."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why saying yes to customers can turn your product into something nobody else wants
• When to check whether your team is building a product or managing client tickets
• Why deep domain expertise matters more than platform size in the age of AI
• How one metric—revenue per employee—changes every decision a CEO makes

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Bassem Hamdy, CEO and Co-Founder of Briq

Website: briq.com

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders who feel the business is getting slower the bigger it gets—and starting to accept that as normal.

Most software companies slow down as they scale. Access got faster.

Jon Jorgensen, Co-CEO of The Access Group, joined as a telesales trainee straight from school. In 2011, the company was doing £24 million. Fifteen years later, it's a £1.2 billion business with 160,000 customers.

His belief: if you build what he calls a "Forever Business," growth compounds instead of stalling—even after six private equity transactions.

And this inspired me to invite Jon to my podcast. We explore why companies that never stop learning outgrow everyone else. Jon shares lessons about what shifted when Access moved from profit-driven to value-creation thinking, why he pushed equity to over 50% of employees, and what a "Forever Business" actually demands. You'll discover how a company survives six private equity transactions and 9,000 employees—without becoming the corporate machine everyone expects.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Master the art of curiosity – Master creating momentum

Jon's journey proves that remarkable companies treat curiosity as a daily practice, not a poster on the wall—and that's what creates momentum competitors cannot replicate.

Here's one of Jon's quotes that captures his leadership philosophy:

"I can't change you. You've got to want to change. I can't make you do something. You've got to want to do it."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why shifting from profit-driven to value-creation thinking changes everything about growth
• What happens when you push equity deep into the organization instead of hoarding it
• Why the psychology of belonging matters more than strategy at scale
• How building a "Forever Business" protects against short-term pressure from investors

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Jon Jorgensen, Co-CEO, The Access Group

Website: theaccessgroup.com

This episode is for SaaS founders questioning whether their current traction is real momentum—or just comfortable motion.

Traction can be the most dangerous thing in a startup.

Andrei Pitis, CEO of Genezio, built a serverless developer platform with real users and real momentum. Then he killed it. Andrei Pitis built Vector Watch, a smartwatch with 30-day battery life, and sold it to Fitbit. With Genezio, he did something harder—killed a working product because he spotted a shift most founders missed.

And this inspired me to invite Andrei to my podcast. We explore why reading the future matters more than optimizing the present—and how that belief shaped a company pivot that produced 5-10x growth in months. Andrei shares candid insights about saying no to big customer money, choosing conversations over search terms, and why the best products are sculptures, not feature lists.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Acknowledge you cannot please everyone – Master the art of curiosity

Andrei's journey proves that remarkable companies don't optimize what exists—they spot what's coming and build for it before the market catches up.

Here's one of Andrei's quotes that captures his philosophy on building products:

"A good product is not about the features that you put in. It's more about the things that you take out. Like a block of stone—you make a sculpture. You take out a lot of the stone, and you are left with something that appeals to certain kinds of people."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why walking away from traction can be the boldest growth decision a founder makes
• What separates reading trends from following them in fast-moving markets
• Why saying no to big customer money protects long-term product value
• How building for global from day one shapes competitive advantage

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Andrei Pitis, CEO & Founder at Genezio

Website: genezio.com

This episode is for SaaS CEOs stuck around 20% EBITDA and wondering what it actually takes to double it without cutting their way there.

Most SaaS companies treat 20% EBITDA as a healthy number. Georgi Petrov targets 50.

Georgi, CEO of Uxify, has founded four companies in 15 years with two exits—including one to WP Engine. He doesn't get there by cutting. He gets there by building differently from day one: small teams with high ownership, self-service at premium prices, and a refusal to add cost before it earns its place.

And this inspired me to invite Georgi to my podcast. We explore why targeting 50% EBITDA changes every hiring decision, every pricing decision, and every partnership decision a founder makes. Georgi shares hard-won lessons on why small teams outperform large ones, why focus beats optionality, and why selling business outcomes—not product features—makes premium self-service pricing work.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Acknowledge you cannot please everyone – Focus on the essence

Georgi's journey proves that starting from profit forces every decision to earn its place.

Here's one of Georgi's quotes that captures how he actually gets to 50% EBITDA:

"Most of the high-leverage decisions that we made turn out to be not so good decisions. We find the good somewhere in the middle. Not having a support team sounds like a high-leverage decision, but that's ultimately bad, because customers need 24/7 support. So, ultimately, expand the support team, but do it in a smarter way, and that's how we end up. If we're super able to leverage a lot, very likely we can achieve much more than 50%, but I think you end up somewhere about 50% ultimately."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why profitability shapes better decisions than fundraising ever will
• What self-service at premium prices requires to actually work
• Why the biggest partners rarely deliver the biggest results
• When adding people stops creating productivity and starts destroying it

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Georgi Petrov, CEO of Uxify

Website: uxify.com

This episode is for SaaS founders wondering why their users like the product but don't love it.

Second movers usually copy the leader's playbook.

Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster Labs, took a different path. He joined as Head of Engineering in 2022, became CEO ten months later, and inherited a company that was #3 or #4 in a crowded category. Today they're #2 overall—and #1 for greenfield deployments.

The difference? Pete built a product with values so clear that choosing it feels like choosing sides.

And this inspired me to invite Pete to my podcast. We explore what happens when users choose you for reasons competitors can't copy. Pete shares why being #2 means you have to be 10x more aggressive, why relabeling a version number created an inflection point without changing code, and what broke when his sales forecasts started slipping.

You'll discover why the real challenge wasn't preserving his culture—it was changing it.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Acknowledge you cannot please everyone – Master the art of curiosity

Pete's journey proves that remarkable companies don't just build tools—they build tribes.

Here's one of Pete's quotes that captures his contrarian belief about technical buyers:

"These technical folks connect with the values of the product in an emotional way. It's a very powerful thing. People would choose JavaScript frameworks based on their values—something that becomes their identity. People say brand marketing doesn't work on developers. I just think it's completely wrong.

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why healthy pipeline numbers lie
• Why crossing the chasm meant changing culture, not preserving it
• What a version number change did that new features couldn't
• Why sales teams hold onto deals they should kill

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster Labs

Website: dagster.io

This episode is for SaaS founders chasing international expansion—and questioning if dominating locally first makes more sense.

Most SaaS companies chase international markets early. Get traction locally, then expand globally fast.

Jim Whatmore, CEO of Joblogic, walked away from that playbook. He spent three years attending HVAC shows in the US, picked up customers, then stopped. He saved his marketing budget for UK and Ireland only. He turned down international revenue to dominate his home market first.

From 11 people and £500K revenue in 2013 to 500 people today. Ten-year grind to £9M, then quadrupled in two years through four strategic acquisitions. Vista Equity Partners betting £100M+ on the execution.

And this inspired me to invite Jim to my podcast. We explore how geographic restraint and strategic patience create market dominance. Jim shares his thinking about why he walked away from US customers, how staying trade-agnostic opened entire markets, and why he spent four years completely rebuilding his cloud platform while competitors kept betting on their old stack. And you'll discover why he bought competitors instead of trying to outbuild them.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

1. Acknowledge you cannot please everyone – UK and Ireland only, walking away from US revenue
2. Focus on the essence – Field engineer workflows are similar regardless of trade
3. Master creating momentum – Quadrupled revenue in two years after a decade of patient building

Jim's story is proof that dominating your home market beats chasing global reach too early.

Here's one of Jim's quotes that captures why geographic focus matters:

"Our tagline for job logic is growing job logic, for us, it's personal, and it's personal because of the tenure of a lot of my team have been with us for a long time, and a lot of our customers have been with us for a long time. And there's a lot of value in that, that we're present and that we're on the ground, and that we know our customers, and that's more difficult to achieve in a different geo without a bulletproof strategy."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why walking away from international revenue accelerates home market dominance
• When staying trade-agnostic beats vertical specialization in field service
• Why acquiring competitors with legacy tech accelerates customer base growth
• What patience actually looks like when rebuilding platforms under competitive pressure

Guest Info

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Jim Whatmore, CEO at Joblogic Website: joblogic.com

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders wondering why their AI product investments are not creating the competitive edge they expected.

Most SaaS companies race to add AI features and wonder why nothing changes.

Tal Peretz, CEO of Onfire, took the opposite path. Before writing a single line of code, he interviewed 275 revenue leaders. Then he spent months building a proprietary data layer from the public web—Reddit, Stack Overflow, Discord—tracking 50 million engineers. Only after that foundation was solid did he add AI on top.

The result: customers generating 4x more pipeline with the same headcount, $50 million in closed deals since beta launch, and a $20 million funding round.

And this inspired me to invite Tal to my podcast. We explore how mastering curiosity—reading signals competitors ignore—creates competitive moats that compound over time. Tal shares how 275 customer interviews revealed one critical pattern everyone else missed, and why choosing the hardest buyers simplified everything else. You'll discover why he spent months building invisible infrastructure before writing features, and how that decision alone separated Onfire from hundreds of AI tools fighting for attention.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Master the art of curiosity
• Aim to be different, not just better
• Sell the idea, not the product

Tal's journey proves that remarkable companies don't chase the obvious path—they build the hard thing first, creating advantages no competitor can copy.

Here's one of Tal's quotes that captures his contrarian thesis:

"AI basically makes sales much harder, not easier, because the noise-to-ratio right now goes up. When we started the company, we said the main advantage is to find the needle in the haystack in your context. Building what we call our Knowledge Graph—this is probably the main IP of the company."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why building infrastructure before features creates advantages competitors cannot replicate
• What customer discovery reveals when you interview hundreds before building anything
• Why focusing on the hardest segment often creates easier sales than targeting everyone
• Why adding intelligence to strong foundations beats bolting features onto weak data

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Tal Peretz, Co-founder and CEO at Onfire

Website: onfire.ai

This episode is for SaaS founders with deep domain expertise—and wondering why the market isn't responding the way they expected.

Most SaaS companies struggle because they know what the solution should be.

Panos Siozos, CEO of Learnworlds, came from a research background in educational technology—three generations of teachers, deep pedagogical expertise. He could have built the pedagogically perfect platform.

Instead, he put the scientists in the backseat and listened to what customers actually needed. That decision took him from building in isolation to 12,500 customers across 150 countries.

This inspired me to invite Panos to my podcast. We explore why expertise becomes dangerous when it drowns out customer truth. Panos shares what happens when your expertise blinds you to what customers already know. You'll discover why Learnworlds wins where every competitor chooses: learning depth or selling power.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They offer something valuable AND desirable
• They master the art of curiosity
• They create NEW value possibilities

Panos's story is proof that customer problems beat perfect solutions.

Here's one of Panos's quotes that captures his customer-first philosophy:

"We put the scientists in the backseat. We said, Okay, now we may be theoretical experts in pedagogy and educational technology, but these guys, they have a problem. We need to solve their real problem, not the things that we have in our mind."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why theoretical expertise becomes dangerous when it silences customer problems
• What happens when you marry deep capability with practical customer needs
• When customers show you markets you never planned to serve
• Why solving today's customer problem beats building tomorrow's perfect product

Guest Info

Guest: Panos Siozos, CEO & Co-founder Learnworlds Website: www.learnworlds.com

This episode is for SaaS founders frustrated watching their solution solve real problems—but wondering why no one actually buys it.

Most healthcare startups don't fail because their tech doesn't work. They fail because they can't find anyone willing to pay for it.

Mariano Garcia-Valiño, Founder and CEO of Axenya, spent 18 months proving his preventive care model worked clinically—reducing diabetes costs by 20% and mortality risk by 18%. Then he spent another year without selling a single dollar because insurers, hospitals, and patients all had reasons not to care enough to pay.

He found the answer by buying a healthcare broker and changing who he sold to: employers in Brazil who actually bear the cost and have the timeframe to benefit from prevention.

This inspired me to invite Mariano to my podcast. We explore why solving the right problem for the wrong buyer kills traction—and how changing your business model changes who cares. Mariano shares how he rejected the obvious paths (selling to insurers, doctors, or patients) and instead built a broker model that aligns incentives with outcomes. You'll discover why clinical proof means nothing without economic urgency.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Acknowledge you cannot please everyone
• Master the art of curiosity
• Aim to be different, not just better

Mariano's story is proof that the best solution dies without the right buyer—and why changing your business model, not your product could be the easy way out.

Here's one of Mariano's quotes that captures the challenge he faced:

"It's one thing to actually see the problem and find a technical solution for the problem. It's a different thing to deploy it in the right place within a very complex value chain that has a lot of incentives that are not well aligned."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why solving a highly valuable and critical problem alone won't create a market without economic incentive alignment
• What happens when you build for huge global humanity problems instead of expensive local ones
• Why focusing on who pays reveals better opportunities than focusing on who uses
• How buying your distribution channel creates stickiness competitors can't copy

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Mariano Garcia-Valiño, Founder and CEO at Axenya

Website: axenya.com

This episode is for SaaS founders tired of chasing growth rounds—and wondering if slow, profitable building could win.

Most software companies raise capital to scale fast. Rex Kurzius, Founder of Asset Panda, rejected that path entirely. His father ran a bakery. His brother built MailChimp. Rex grew up watching immigrant work ethic turn into entrepreneurial success—and applied the same principle to software.

He spent 13 years building Asset Panda from startup to a world-class asset tracking platform. No investors. No board pressure. No artificial timelines. Just solving one problem—asset tracking—and letting customer revenue fund each next step.

And this inspired me to invite Rex to my podcast. We explore why staying curious matters more than being right. Rex shares his thinking on positioning pivots (consumer to business, product to platform), building without investor timelines, and the inverse relationship between AI and headcount growth. You'll discover why he calls himself the turtle in the race—and what slow, steady building creates.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Master the art of curiosity
• Focus on the essence
• Turn customers into fans

Rex's story is proof that building slow beats chasing speed—when you solve real problems.

Here's one of Rex's quotes that captures his growth philosophy:

"It's not about being perfect, and it's not about being right. It's about being curious and having the ability to deal with failure, learn from that failure, and adapt to succeed."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why staying curious beats being right when building software
• What happens when you fund growth with customer revenue, not investor capital
• Why solving client problems matters more than hitting investor timelines
• How building slow creates more enduring value than chasing speed

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Rex Kurzius, Founder and CEO of Asset Panda

Website: assetpanda.com

This episode is for SaaS founders who feel stuck between landing big logos and building what actually scales.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because they lack ambition. They fail because they chase the wrong customers.

Mark Walker, CEO of Nue, took a different path. With decades in enterprise software—ERP, CRM, NetSuite—he joined Nue in March 2022 when it was pre-revenue and a "science experiment." He made one decision that changed everything: focus on speed over complexity. When Nvidia came calling, he said no. When asked to build for everyone, he picked his peers instead.

And this inspired me to invite Mark to my podcast. We explore why treating speed as your core product creates defensible value. Mark shares his philosophy on saying no to wrong-fit customers, building modular systems that compress implementation from years to weeks, and why honesty beats hype when competing against legacy vendors. You'll discover why OpenAI went live in 8 weeks and Anthropic in 12—and what that speed signals to the market.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They acknowledge they cannot please everyone
• They aim to be different, not just better

Mark's story is proof that when you optimize every decision for customer speed, saying no to complexity becomes your competitive advantage.

Here's one of Mark's quotes that captures his approach to market focus:

"If you want to be great at something, you have to be bad at something else. There are no NFL linemen who are also World Champion marathoners. They're both elite athletes, but they're not the same athlete."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why the fastest implementations come from saying no to features, not adding them
• What happens when you tell a billion-dollar prospect they're not the right fit
• When modularity beats monolithic systems in multi-model revenue businesses
• Why traditional enterprises are preemptively switching systems before they know what's coming

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Mark Walker, CEO at Nue

Website: nue.io

This episode is for SaaS founders who feel trapped competing on speed—and suspect their customers actually want something else.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because they're too slow. They fail because they optimize for speed over trust.

Sid Masson, CEO and Co-founder of Wokelo, took a different path. He started his career as a management consultant doing private equity due diligence with dozens of tabs open, knowing how costly missed insights could be. When he began experimenting with early GPT models while pursuing his second master's in AI, he saw the potential to automate deep analysis—but refused to compromise on rigor.

While others chased instant gratification, Wokelo focused on producing more in-depth, decision-grade insights. That choice became its edge. Enterprise clients quickly recognized that thoughtful, well-supported answers were worth more than instant ones.

This inspired me to invite Sid to my podcast. We explore why building for accuracy rather than instant gratification creates differentiation in competitive markets. Sid shares hard-won lessons about segment selection, the hidden cost of trying to serve everyone, and why their first 10 customers taught them more about usage patterns than any growth hack could. You’ll hear how customers measured ROI not in hours logged, but in the depth of impact—renewing and expanding after a single insight shifted key client conversations.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They acknowledge they cannot please everyone
• They aim to be different, not just better

Sid's story is proof that constraints drive innovation—and capital efficiency forces strategic clarity.

Here's one of Sid's quotes that captures his approach to capital efficiency:

"Capital efficiency for us, being slightly constrained at times, actually helps us in being more innovative. The most innovations, the most disruptive ideas, actually come out of constraints. We don't want to give our team that luxury that, hey, there's enough money on the table that I can go and do a land grab. We need to still solve a few fundamentals."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why accuracy at scale requires patience—not just better prompts
• What happens when you design for outcomes instead of feature parity
• When capital constraints become competitive advantages rather than limitations
• Why your first 10 customers teach you more about segmentation than any persona document

Guest Information

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Guest: Sid Masson, CEO and Co-founder of Wokelo AI
• Website: wokelo.ai
• Email: sid@wokelo.ai

Joshua Summers, CEO of EnFi, took a different path. After helping dozens of startups move their cash during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, he discovered the real problem wasn't deposits or covenants—it was human capacity to assess risk. While others rushed to capitalize on the crisis, he spent months investigating what actually broke.

And this inspired me to invite Joshua to my podcast. We explore how building from crisis reveals opportunities others miss. Joshua shares hard-earned wisdom about why founder-led sales beats hiring early, what happens when you achieve greater-than-human accuracy, and why building a culture where employees jump at the chance to work with you again matters more than your product. You'll discover why taking more capital early can save your company—even if it means more dilution.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Remarkable software companies focus on the essence
• Remarkable software companies create something valuable and desirable

Joshua's story is proof that the best insights come when you're not trying to sell anything.

Here's one of Joshua's quotes that captures his approach to building companies:

“Culture itself is an organism. It lives, it breathes, and it is impacted positively or negatively by every single thing around it. You can't design a culture. You can't say here's what our company will feel like, not look like, but feel like as an employee, it's impossible, but you can feed a culture with all the good things that hopefully help it to evolve like an organism."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why building in the open beats perfectionism
• How 14 people can operate like a company of 150
• When discovering the essence changes everything
• What makes employees want to work with you (again)

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Joshua Summers, CEO of EnFi

Website: www.enfi.ai

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad product. They fail because they try to please everyone. Martin Balaam, CEO of Pimberly, chose restraint over reach. Former physicist turned serial entrepreneur, he'd already scaled and exited Jigsaw24 at 3x returns. At Pimberly, he refuses customers his team can't delight—even when they're ready to sign.

And this inspired me to invite Martin to my podcast. We explore how qualifying customers as rigorously as they qualify you creates compound advantages. Martin shares hard-won insights about why he walked away from license-only models, when to choose service depth over customer volume, and what happens when you give your product roadmap to customers instead of VCs. You'll discover why maintaining sub-5% churn matters more than doubling growth rates.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Aim to be different, not just better
• Focus on the essence

Martin's story is proof that sustainable SaaS growth comes from doing what others call unscalable.

Here's one of Martin's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"I really don't want to lose customers. I know from my life experience how much time and effort, blood, sweat, and tears you have in trying to acquire a customer. We'll openly put our hand up and say I can't see that this is actually gonna add the value—even though they might be happy to sign."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why saying no to willing customers protects your business
• What "VIP leads" actually means (hint: not big orders)
• When founder-led sales should naturally transition
• Why physical presence beats remote-first for market entry

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Martin Balaam, CEO & Founder Pimberly

Website: pimberly.com

This episode is for SaaS founders who feel the weight of building something that matters—and wonder if being contrarian is worth the risk.

Most software companies fail because they rush to market without questioning what they're building. They see opportunity and chase it.

David Villalon, CEO of Maisa, saw the AI gold rush differently. When everyone was building faster, he spent a year building trust into the foundation. He recognized that when you can see the future—truly see it—you carry responsibility for building it right, not just first.

And this inspired me to invite David to my podcast. We explore why making AI accountable matters more than making it powerful. David shares hard-won insights about choosing regulated industries first, empowering task-doers instead of technical teams, and why he positions his company to compound value from every AI model maker instead of competing with them. You'll discover why focusing on one customer before ten creates the foundation for horizontal growth.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Aim to be different, not just better
• Offer something valuable and desirable

David's story is proof that vision without responsibility is just opportunism—and real founders feel the weight of building the future right.

Here's one of David's quotes that captures his entrepreneurial philosophy:

"Whenever you have success, what you're going to hear is everyone saying how good you are. But if you act without that ego, without wanting to become something that you are not, everything looks much better."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• When to compound competitors' value instead of fighting
• What happens when you empower task-doers, not technicians
• Why first principles thinking requires empathy, not just logic
• When everyone wanting your product means stay focused

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: David Villalon, CEO Maisa

Website: https://maisa.ai

This episode is for founders questioning whether their personal frustration is worth building a business around.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad tech. They fail because they solve problems that don't actually hurt.

Ken Rapp, CEO of Blustream, took a different path. When his $2,000 guitar cracked, he didn't blame himself—he questioned why no brand had ever taught him prevention. That question led to a 10-year journey building what didn't exist.

And this inspired me to invite Ken to my podcast. We explore how solving your own problem first gives you conviction others lack. Ken shares why he spent years on IoT sensors before realizing the real problem was human connection, not data collection. You'll discover why category creation takes a decade—not because building is hard, but because changing behavior is harder.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Focus on the essence – Aim to be different

Ken's story is proof that unmet needs hide in plain sight—we just learn to live with them.

Here's one of Ken's quotes that captures his key insight:

"Once your customer is at home, that's the moment where they will be most vulnerable, and that curve of emotional connection to you drops. It's almost like the buyer's remorse is setting in. You're all excited to go home with the product, or to open the product, and right there is when you really need to conquer that new product and make it a habit, and really get what you were hoping and dreaming for out of the product. But there's no connection between you and the company."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why personal problems make the best businesses
• When to pivot from technology to psychology
• Why categories emerge from nerve strikes, not planning
• What 100 customer interviews actually teach you

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Ken Rapp, CEO & Founder of Blustream

Website: blustream.io

This episode is for Mid-market SaaS founders tired of AI hype who want to build something that creates real customer value—not just impressive demos.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad tech. They fail because they chase hype over value.

Zohar Bronfman, CEO of Pecan AI, took a different path. After years researching AI and philosophy in academia, he saw Amazon, Uber, and Spotify dominating with predictive AI—while thousands of smaller companies couldn't even get started. Instead of building another "AI for everything" platform, he focused obsessively on one thing: making predictive AI accessible to mid-market companies who couldn't afford data science teams.

And this inspired me to invite Zohar to my podcast. We explore why curiosity beats strategy when building in uncertain markets. Zohar shares hard-won insights about deprecating profitable features, why small teams outperform large ones, and how to identify which enterprise capabilities actually matter for mid-market customers. You'll discover why Pecan almost never loses customers—despite operating in the brutally competitive AI space.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Trait #2: Be valuable and desirable
• Trait #6: Create fans, not just customers

Zohar's story is proof that sustainable growth comes from solving real problems—not riding waves.

Here's one of Zohar's quotes that captures his philosophy:

"You can sell things, especially to larger organizations. You can sell things that actually don't have ROI. You can sell things that either look shiny, sound shiny or smell shiny, or all of the above. But ultimately, if you put yourself in a rigorous test, did I make a change? Did I actually add value to the system? The answer could have been no in many cases."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why killing profitable features strengthens retention
• What happens when you ignore VCs' market advice
• When customer honesty beats sales promises
• Why hiring slower creates faster growth

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Zohar Bronfman, CEO Pecan AI

Website: pecan.ai

This episode is for SaaS founders exhausted from chasing every opportunity—and wondering if extreme focus actually works.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad tech. They fail because they can't stop building.

Ray Meiring, CEO of QorusDocs, discovered this during a meeting with a bank CIO. While trying to find use cases for their generic document tool, Ray realized they had it backwards—they were hunting for problems to fit their solution instead of solving a specific problem.

That realization changed everything. Ray narrowed QorusDocs from "any document" to proposals to specific verticals. He even developed a system for passing lucrative but wrong-fit customers directly to competitors.

And this inspired me to invite Ray to my podcast. We explore how narrowing from documents to proposals to law firms and engineering firms created users who'd "pry QorusDocs from their cold dead hands." Ray shares why moving 10,000 miles to Seattle transformed their network, how building inside Microsoft Office became their differentiator, and why consistency beats constant pivoting. You'll discover how saying no to features actually accelerated growth.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Acknowledge you can't please everyone
• Aim to be different, not just better
• Focus on the essence

Ray's story shows how narrowing your focus can multiply your impact.

Here's one of Ray's quotes that captures his philosophy:

"We were trying to be everything to everyone and just build this very generic product. But as we worked with more customers, we started to see a pattern around a very specific set of documents that were challenging—proposal documents."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why the A-B-Z framework beats traditional segmentation
• What happens when you deprecate features instead of adding them
• When proximity to customers trumps remote efficiency
• Why integration beats innovation for enterprise retention

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Guest: Ray Meiring, CEO QorusDocs
• Website: qorusdocs.com

This episode is for SaaS founders tired of building "professional" products nobody remembers—and anyone wondering if controversy beats convention.

Most SaaS companies fail because they try to please everyone.

They play it safe with every decision.

João Marques, CEO of Oscar, took a different path.

He quit his job, built the app in four months, then raised 70K euros to start acquiring customers. Created an on-demand home services marketplace that sends marketing messages designed to provoke action. Became Portugal's market leader in two years—by deliberately risking cancellation with every campaign.

And this inspired me to invite João to my podcast. We explore how strategic controversy creates memorable brands faster than perfect products. João shares hard truths about focus, growth over features, and why being hated by some customers beats being ignored by all. You'll discover why having your entire company obsess over one metric beats any complex strategy.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Focus on the essence – Master the art of creating momentum

João's story is proof that market leadership often starts by doing what makes others uncomfortable.

Here's one of Joao's quotes that captures his philosophy:

"Just having one goal. My focus, for example, right now, is acquisition and then GMV, so volume in my app. I'm refreshing the dashboard every 10 minutes. Every decision that we make is based on that. Every goal is based on that. Everyone in my team, and we are, like, 50 people, from customer support to senior management, everyone knows GMV on a daily basis.”

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why building features before growth is startup suicide
• What happens when you do the unscalable things competitors avoid
• When being annoying drives better retention than being nice
• Why one metric beats ten strategies

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: João Marques, CEO Oscar

Website: oscarapp.com

This episode is for SaaS founders exhausted from building "nice-to-have" solutions.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad tech. They fail because they prefer to solve sexy problems instead of expensive ones.

Dinakara Nagalla, CEO of EmpowerMX (acquired by IFS), took a different path. He spent 14 years in aviation watching mechanics waste 50% of their day on paperwork. Instead of building another dashboard for executives, he built tools for the technicians themselves—and turned a cost center into a profit driver with 78% gross margins.

And this inspired me to invite Dinakara to my podcast. We explore how solving unglamorous problems creates fanatical customers. Dinakara shares hard truths about why productivity software beats regulatory software, how guaranteeing 10% efficiency shrinks sales cycles by 67%, and why hiring from the industry you serve changes everything. You'll discover why his customers became his sales force—without being asked.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They create fans, not customers
• They sell the idea, not the product

Dinakara's 14-year journey proves that the most loyal customers come from solving their daily frustrations, not their strategic initiatives.

Here's one of Dinakara's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"Being remarkable shouldn't just be a slogan. You should make it as a responsibility. It's what you do when no one is watching. It's a system you build after the pitch is done, and it should be built with the highest level of accountability, with the most trust you can possibly put in. To me, the most remarkable companies don't scale high; they scale trust."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• How his customers became his sales force
• What happens when you guarantee 10% productivity gains
• When hiring only from aviation changed everything
• Why reducing organizational stress beats adding features

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Dinakara Nagalla, CEO & Founder of EmpowerMX (now part of IFS)

Website: https://dinakaranagalla.com/

For SaaS founders tired of feature bloat—and wondering if serving fewer people better might be the smarter path to freedom.

Most SaaS companies fail because they try to please everyone.

They fail because they spread themselves across every platform, every feature request, every shiny opportunity.

Samy Dindane, CEO of Hypefury, took a different path.

He spotted a gap nobody else cared about—Twitter thread scheduling—and built a prototype in three days. Instead of raising money or hiring fast, he chose freedom through focus.

And this inspired me to invite Samy to my podcast. We explore how deliberate constraints create stronger businesses. Samy shares hard-won insights about platform dependence, community-driven development, and knowing when to say no. You'll discover why his users became product owners and how charging more actually made customers happier.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They acknowledge they can't please everyone – They master the art of curiosity

Samy's story is proof that sustainable freedom comes from saying no to good opportunities—not just bad ones.

Here's one of Samy's quotes that captures his philosophy:

"Whatever time you spend on something, you don't spend on something else. So whatever time you're going to try to build something crazy for another platform, it's the time you're not spending improving."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why power users matter more than market size
• What happens when the platform you depend on demands $500K yearly
• When adding features becomes a liability
• Why your best product managers pay you monthly

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Samy Dindane, CEO Hypefury

Website: hypefury.com

Want to dig deeper into the 10 traits of remarkable SaaS companies?

• Get my book The Remarkable Effect at valueinspiration.com/book
• Or sign up for Espresso with Ton at valueinspiration.com/daily - a 2-minute daily email to sharpen your thinking and strategy.

This Episode is for SaaS founders who are tired of customers seeing their solution as just another expense—and those questioning whether there's a smarter way to build something customers actually want to pay more for.

Most SaaS companies position themselves as efficiency tools. They help you do things faster, cheaper, better.

Chad Rubin, CEO of Profasee, took a different path. After selling his previous inventory management company in 2021, he had a realization: he was always building solutions that lived on the expense side of his customers' businesses. He wanted to be on the revenue side.

So he started questioning assumptions in his own struggling Amazon business. Why doesn't anyone change price dynamically? Why do sellers copy pricing from competitors who might be broke?

This led him to build Profasee—dynamic pricing software that uses AI to help Amazon brands optimize pricing and ad spend together, creating a flywheel that drives profit growth.

And this inspired me to invite Chad to my podcast. We explore how questioning fundamental assumptions creates breakthrough opportunities. Chad shares insights about turning your founder story into sales leverage, the shift from efficiency to effectiveness in SaaS, and why data-driven pricing decisions compound over time. You'll discover how he's building a lean organization while investing heavily in AI and quant teams to create competitive moats.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They acknowledge they can't please everyone – They sell the idea, not the product

Chad's story proves that the biggest levers are hiding in plain sight.

Here's one of Chad's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"You have to always be a dot, a dot collector. Constantly collecting dots. Most brands are not looking at their whole system. They're not zooming out to understand the process, understand with clear thinking, how you can have some self-awareness and look at, okay, price and PPC, how do these things interconnect?"

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why questioning belief systems creates challenger advantages
• What happens when you connect isolated business levers
• What happens when you refuse to compete on other people's terms • Why founder stories become leverage in sales conversations

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Chad Rubin, CEO of Profasee

Website: profasee.com

This Episode is for SaaS founders struggling to identify their real target audience—and wondering how to separate urgent problems from nice-to-have features.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad tech. They fail because they try to solve problems they don't actually feel.

Davit Baghdasaryan, CEO of Krisp AI, took a different path. Former head of product security at Twilio, he spent evenings in Armenia taking morning calls from San Francisco—dealing with background noise that existing solutions couldn't touch. One personal frustration became the foundation for technology that now processes over a billion minutes monthly and powers 80% of human-to-AI voice interactions.

And this inspired me to invite Davit to my podcast. We explore how building from real pain creates unbeatable product-market fit. Davit shares insights about choosing problems with no alternatives, why great demos feel like magic, and how focusing on essence over speed built technology that companies like Discord and Twilio now license. You'll discover why their "marketing experiment" desktop app became Product of the Year—and how they accidentally created infrastructure that now processes over a billion minutes monthly.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They focus on the essence – They offer something valuable and desirable

Davit's story proves that breakthrough technology starts with problems that personally bother you.

Here's one of Davit's quotes that captures his philosophy on problem selection:

"In order to understand the pain, you need to understand the alternative. If you are in an office, the alternative is to go find a quiet room—probably not that painful. But if you're in an airport or call center with people speaking next to you, there is no alternative."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

1. Why understanding alternatives reveals true market urgency
2. What separating horizontal from vertical markets actually means
3. When building hard technology first pays off long-term
4. Why great demos feel magical instead of technical

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Davit Baghdasaryan, CEO of Krisp AI

Website: krisp.ai

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This Episode is for SaaS founders tired of rushing features to market—and wondering if there's a smarter way to build lasting competitive advantage.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because they move too slow. They fail because they chase shortcuts instead of building what customers actually value.

Hikari Senju, CEO of Omneky, took a different path. The son of an artist with computer science training from Harvard, he focused on building real customer value while competitors rushed AI tools to market. He spent years perfecting return on ad spend and aesthetic quality that customers actually cared about. When AI quality finally improved in 2024, he was the only one delivering superior outcomes, and his signups grew 4x in one month.

And this inspired me to invite Hikari to my podcast. We explore how understanding what customers actually value beats building impressive features. Hikari shares insights about why focusing on outcomes customers pay for eliminates vanity metrics, how "grow slow, grow real" keeps you from blowing it later, and why most founders optimize for what impresses other founders instead of what drives customer results. You'll discover the difference between building systems that work versus building features that sound clever.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They focus on the essence
• They acknowledge they can't please everyone

Hikari's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Hikari's quotes that captures his build-real philosophy:

"You can hustle and you can fake it till you make it only so far, but it's going to catch up to you. If you want to build a generation-defining company, then you have to focus on the basics. It's usually not just one hack or one thing. It's usually a million small things that you've assembled together in a way that works perfectly as a system and that is hard to replicate by a competitor, because it's built off all these teeny differentiations you've done because you've just thought way more deeply about this problem for a longer period of time."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why understanding what customers actually value beats building impressive features
• What "grow slow, grow real" means for founders chasing quick wins
• When building complete systems creates unbeatable advantages over feature builders

Guest Info

Guest: Hikari Senju, CEO at Omneky

Website: https://www.omneky.com/

This Episode is for SaaS founders who feel increasingly disconnected from their customers as they scale—and anyone questioning whether growth has to mean losing touch with what made you successful in the first place.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad product decisions. They fail because founders lose their superpower as they scale.

Eli Portnoy, CEO and co-founder of Backengine, experienced this visceral pain twice before. In his garage days, he was everything—salesperson, customer success manager, product manager. He had an incredible view into customer pain and could align his entire company around solving it. But as he grew and hired specialists, layers formed between him and customers. He started making decisions based on anecdotes instead of insight.

In 2023, he decided to found Backengine and solve the problem that had haunted him: How do you preserve that founder superpower at any scale?

And this inspired me to invite Eli to my podcast. We explore how customer obsession creates sustainable competitive advantage when it's embedded everywhere, not siloed in one team. Eli shares insights about building 20-year customer relationships, category creation through unique points of view, and why focusing solely on customer value makes everything else—funding, team happiness, growth—fall into place. You'll discover why the voice of the customer needs to be a living organism that works inside every tool your teams already use.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They acknowledge they can't please everyone – They create fans, not just customers

Eli's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Eli's quotes that captures his contrarian approach to customers:

"Every customer interaction is important. Every customer interaction is thoughtful. Every customer opinion is thoughtful and insightful, but it's not always right, and so you have to make sure you're hearing it from multiple people in multiple places, and then you have to put your own internal, sort of like translation layer on top of it, because the customer isn't always right."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why customer obsession beats investor optics every time
• What building 20-year relationships means for daily decisions
• When you know you've created a category
• Why solving myopic problems can lead to bigger opportunities

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Eli Portnoy, CEO and co-founder of Backengine

Website: backengine.ai

This episode is for SaaS founders tired of chasing short-term monetization—and wondering if there's a smarter way to build something customers actually fight to keep.

Most SaaS companies fail because they take technical shortcuts.

They outsource infrastructure to move fast, then discover they can't compete on price.

Richard White, CEO of Fathom, took a different path. He's the inventor of the feedback tab and builder of UserVoice before founding Fathom in 2020. White spent two years building infrastructure that competitors shortcut with expensive third-party services—creating an economic moat that lets him "bully competitors" out of the market.

And this inspired me to invite Richard to my podcast. We explore how building instead of buying infrastructure creates economic warfare advantages. Richard shares insights about choosing technical battles that matter, why he'd rather have angry customers than apathetic ones, and his "external validation addiction" that drives breakthrough products. You'll discover how owning your full stack lets you set pricing rules that competitors can't match.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They don't create customers—they create fans – They focus on the essence

Richard's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Richard's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"We're the only people that run all of our own infrastructure outside of the LLMs, and that allows us a huge advantage economically, because our costs are so much lower than everyone else, which allows us to basically bully all the other competitors by setting the bar for what you can do on free."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why building infrastructure beats buying third-party services
• What choosing technical battles strategically actually requires
• When lower unit economics become competitive weapons
• Why economic moats trump feature moats every time

Guest Info

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Richard White, CEO of Fathom

Website: https://fathom.video

This Episode is for SaaS founders who feel stuck chasing trendy markets—and anyone wondering if there's more money in solving unglamorous problems than building the next shiny thing.

Most SaaS companies chase crowded markets because they seem exciting.

They fail because they're fighting for scraps in oversaturated categories.

Marne Martin, CEO of Emburse, took a different path.

After 30 years in software, she chose the "unsexy" expense management space when everyone else was chasing AI startups and flashy consumer apps.

At Emburse, she’s helping finance teams to elevate their work by applying the focus and discipline of elite athletes to modernize spend in their organizations.

And this inspired me to invite Marne to my podcast. We explore how treating your company like an elite athlete creates sustainable competitive advantage. Marne shares insights about choosing markets others avoid, building profitable unit economics in private equity environments, and applying AI where it actually drives revenue. You'll discover her simple filter that eliminated wasted innovation.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They master the art of curiosity – They offer something valuable and desirable

Marne's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Marne's quotes that captures her investment philosophy:

"There are a lot of cool things that I wouldn't be willing to pay for, right? So you have to make sure you're not just doing things because you're cool or you're curious, but because there's a market for that."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why choosing "boring" markets eliminates competition
• What elite athlete principles mean for SaaS companies
• When AI investments actually drive profitable growth
• Why unit economics matter more than cool features

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Marne Martin, CEO of Emburse

Website: https://www.emburse.com/

This episode is for SaaS founders tired of vendor dependency—and those questioning whether the "obvious" infrastructure choices are actually the smartest business decisions.

Most SaaS companies fail because they optimize for short-term convenience over long-term differentiation.

Alexander Sommer, CEO of DSwiss, took a different path. He's the first non-founder CEO to lead this 17-year-old Swiss company specializing in secure digital services. Rather than following industry defaults, DSwiss runs vertically integrated infrastructure—controlling their entire technology stack from hardware up.

This inspired me to invite Alexander to my podcast. We explore how contrarian infrastructure choices create unbreakable customer trust. Alexander shares insights about building fans through consistent execution, why compliance becomes a competitive moat, and how platform thinking solves the "custom request" dilemma. You'll discover why some customers now specifically seek vendors with zero ties to major cloud providers.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They offer something valuable and desirable
• They aim to be different, not better

Alexander's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Alexander's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"We have taken a slightly contrarian view and are running a vertically oriented business. From a hardware perspective, up the software stack, we actually control the entire infrastructure. That makes us definitely not going to be impacted by some of the ties to larger technology vendors."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• What contrarian choice he made to create highly defensible differentiation
• What makes compliance a desirable outcome, not just a checkbox
• When saying "no" to custom requests leads to platform innovation
• Why trust-based businesses require different growth strategies

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Alexander Sommer, CEO

Website: dswiss.com

This podcast is for SaaS founders who feel stuck chasing feature parity—and anyone wondering if there's a smarter way to build something customers can't live without.

Most SaaS founders won't kill a profitable company. They'll optimize it to death instead.

Chris Brisson, CEO of SalesMsg, took a different path. He killed his first company while it was still making money. Then spent two years building what messaging should actually do—create conversations, not broadcasts.

This inspired me to invite Chris to my podcast. We explore why choosing destruction over optimization creates breakthrough opportunities. Chris reveals his thinking about engineering backwards from outcomes, disrupting yourself before others do, and building what customers consider indispensable. You'll discover why he chose the harder path of starting over—and what happens when you stop chasing features and start solving friction.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They acknowledge they can't please everyone
• They master the art of curiosity

Here's one of Chris's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"We always take that approach, like, how are we going to disrupt ourselves before someone else does? All right, what are we going to do? How do we disrupt ourselves. Just leaning into, ‘Hey, you know what? We got to kill that product.’ The reality is that it actually doesn't solve the problem. What really solves the problem is this.”

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why killing profitable products unlocks bigger opportunities
• What happens when you engineer backwards from outcomes
• Why saying yes to custom features can actually scale your platform
• Why friction removal beats feature addition every time

Chris's story proves traction starts by doing what most others avoid—choosing to disrupt yourself before someone else does.

Guest Info

Chris Brisson, CEO and Co-Founder at SalesMsg

Website: salesmessage.com

This episode is for SaaS founders chasing feature parity with bigger competitors—and those wondering if there's a smarter way to compete with tech giants.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad technology. They fail because they try to be everything to everyone.

Quentin de Quelen, Co-founder & CEO of MeiliSearch, took a different path. A former carpenter's son turned developer, he saw search as a fundamental problem worth solving properly. Instead of building another complex enterprise solution, he chose to make search so simple that any developer could implement it in five minutes.

This inspired me to invite Quentin to my podcast. We explore how focusing on three core principles—simplicity, performance, and relevance—creates both developer love and business wins. Quentin shares insights about choosing open source as strategy, not ideology, and why saying no to features actually accelerates growth. You'll discover how one conversation with their community led to a breakthrough that took two hours to code but changed everything.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They acknowledge they can't please everyone
• They focus on the essence

Quentin's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Quentin's quotes that captures his philosophy on building:

"Open source is not, should not be by default. It should be thought as a strategy, also for your company to grow. Because everything we are doing at the end is for business wise."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why letting competitors copy you actually creates competitive advantage
• What happens when you optimize for developer joy over enterprise features
• Why saying no to customers actually accelerates product growth
• Why three simple principles beat complex competitive analysis

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Quentin de Quelen Co-founder & CEO of MeiliSearch

Website: meilisearch.com

Discount code: mission (2 months for free on all plans and valid until end of August '25)

This episode is for SaaS founders building in regulated industries—and anyone tired of chasing the next quick win.

Most SaaS companies fail because they launch too early. Dimitri Masin, Co-Founder & CEO of Gradient Labs, took a different path. He spent 14 months building before serving a single customer—against every startup playbook. His AI customer support platform now guarantees better performance than human teams and hit $1M ARR in five months after launch.

And this inspired me to invite Dimitri to my podcast. We explore how setting impossibly high standards creates customer trust that competitors can't match. Dimitri shares tactical insights about building for regulated industries, creating objective guarantees, and why most automation claims are misleading math. You'll discover the quality standards that created 100% POC win rates.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They focus on the essence
• They acknowledge they can't please everyone

Dimitri's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Dimitri's quotes that captures his quality-first philosophy:

"We kind of set the bar very, very high for us, because from the beginning... the bar needs to be at least as high as humans in those companies can produce, or higher, ideally."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why building for 14 months before launch created competitive advantage
• What objective guarantees do for risk-averse financial services buyers
• When focusing on one vertical becomes your biggest growth lever
• Why 50% ticket automation only delivers 20% business value

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Dimitri Masin, Co-Founder & CEO Website: gradient-labs.ai LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitrimasin/

Want to dig deeper into the 10 traits of remarkable SaaS companies?

• Get my book The Remarkable Effect at valueinspiration.com/book
• Or sign up for Espresso with Ton at valueinspiration.com/daily - a 2-minute daily email to sharpen your thinking and strategy.

Most SaaS companies don’t fail because of bad tech.

They fail because they try to win by copying playbooks that were never made for them.

Trevor Francis, Founder and CEO of 46 Labs, took a different path. A former telecom engineer, he bootstrapped 46 Labs into an $80M infrastructure business by staying lean, solving the problems others ignored, and resisting the pressure to follow the VC script.

In this episode, we explore Trevor’s approach to staying capital-constrained, solving real customer problems, and how rejecting venture capital became their biggest advantage.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – Offering something truly valuable and desirable – Aiming to be different—not just better

Trevor’s story is proof that long-term traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

By listening to this episode, you’ll learn: – Why staying lean for 12 years built more leverage than funding ever could – What made billion-dollar carriers trust a small, unknown startup – How to scale through acquisition without losing your culture – The power of constraint when building long-term momentum

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders who feel pressure to chase funding, follow trends, or expand too fast—and want a smarter way to build something that lasts.

You can learn more about this weeks’ guest:

Trevor Francis, CEO

Company: 46labs.com

This podcast interview reveals why the best software breaks all the rules. My guest is Sunil Patel, CEO of Tekmetric.

Before building software, Sunil owned and operated multiple auto repair shops, giving him a rare insider's perspective on the industry's real problems. He's a practical entrepreneur who's obsessed with simplicity and hates wasted effort. When in 2016, eight years after iPhones hit the market, shop owners still couldn't leverage that technology to run their business, Sunil decided to be the one to change that.

And this inspired me to invite Sunil to my podcast. We explore how breaking industry norms and staying true to first principles creates remarkable companies. Sunil shares hard truths about why they turned down big clients, cut all marketing spending to zero, and raised the least funding in the industry - yet still became the market leader and only profitable one. You'll discover the counterintuitive decision that shocked his competitors but doubled customer loyalty overnight.

Here's one of Sunil's quotes that captures his business philosophy:

"We used first principles thinking. Everybody in our space wants to copy features from one another. Their sales team says 'we can't win against Tekmetric because they have these features' and they try to emulate what we've built. I don't approach development that way. I want to figure out what we're trying to solve."

By listening to this podcast you'll learn:

• Why maintaining the right departmental hierarchy prevents overselling and product gaps
• What approach led Sunil to solve in one click what competitors needed 60-80 clicks for
• When saying "no" to customers with big wallets and long wishlists makes you more money
• Why hiring the right people trumps everything else in scaling a business

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Sunil Patel

Website: https://www.tekmetric.com/

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to discovering powerful strategic frameworks through trial and error. My guest is Sharat Potharaju, CEO of Uniqode.

Sharat is a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of experience. He navigated through a decade of ventures that didn't scale before founding Uniqode in 2019. His company has since grown to serve over 50,000 businesses worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, by creating innovative technology that connects physical and digital worlds through mobile experiences.

What makes Sharat's story remarkable is his methodical approach to business building, where he combines weekly deep strategic thinking with rapid experimentation frameworks, always maintaining that impact—both for employees and customers—is what drives his entrepreneurial energy.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Sharat to my podcast. We explore how an entrepreneur's decade of failures can become the foundation for remarkable success. Sharat challenges conventional wisdom by dedicating specific time each week for deep thinking about long-term strategy while handling day-to-day operations. He reveals why being selective about advice is crucial for maintaining entrepreneurial confidence, and how balancing luck with persistence creates the conditions for breakthrough success. His approach makes products dead-simple for users while sticking to strict testing methods to know what works.

Here is a quote that captures one of Sharat's most striking business lessons:

"It's important to love your product, but it's even more important to be obsessed about the problem that you're trying to solve. Because if you're not obsessed about the problem, eventually you'll just fall in love with your product and lose your focus on vision."

By listening to this podcast you will learn:

• Why entrepreneurial success typically takes a decade, not overnight, and how to mentally prepare for this reality
• How to implement a "Wednesday deep thinking" practice that balances long-term vision with short-term execution
• The secret to filtering advice from well-meaning investors, mentors, and colleagues without losing your entrepreneurial confidence
• How to create frameworks for experimentation that prevent chaos while maximizing learning

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: ⁠Sharat Potharaju ⁠

Website: ⁠uniqode.com

After leading a high eight-figure exit at Instapage as COO, Imran witnessed how misalignment among leadership destroyed tens of millions in enterprise value during a failed product launch.

Instead of moving on, this failure became his obsession. He spent six months deeply researching why people stay at or leave organizations before founding Hatchproof, creating a company built around the belief that work should have purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Imran to my podcast. We explore the counterintuitive approach of obsessing over problems rather than solutions, and why most entrepreneurs get this backward. Imran challenges conventional wisdom about scaling teams, explaining why the future belongs to smaller, tightly-aligned organizations rather than sprawling enterprises. His approach turns traditional metrics upside down, focusing on revenue per employee over headcount growth, and demonstrates how creating clear value frameworks enables sustainable business decisions.

Here is a quote that captures one of Imran's most striking business lessons:

"You have to have an obsession with the problem, not the solution. A lot of entrepreneurs are very anchored on their solution, and they struggle when the market tells them something different. If you obsess with the problem, you'll find the solution—it may not be the first one, but you'll eventually get to it."

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

• How to distinguish between an "itch" and a "burning desire" when evaluating startup ideas
• Why investing six months in problem research before building anything created Imran's foundation for success
• How creating a simple four-value framework dramatically improves decision-making and prevents feature bloat
• Why revenue per employee is becoming the critical metric for AI-era companies, replacing the traditional focus on headcount growth

For more information about the guest from this week:

Imran Syed

Website: hatchproof.com

With over a decade of experience in open-source software development, Zach helped create the widely-adopted OSquery project at Facebook in 2014, which has since become an industry standard for device visibility and is now governed by the Linux Foundation. After transitioning through a role at Kolide (later acquired by 1Password), Zach became the maintainer of a project that would eventually evolve into Fleet.

Throughout his entrepreneurial journey, Zach discovered that what truly energizes him is "building software that's making someone's life better" - specifically IT administrators and security professionals who manage company devices. This human-centered approach led him to transform a personal passion project into a rapidly growing company that's challenging traditional business models in enterprise software

This inspired me to invite Zach to my podcast. We explore how being open source gives Fleet a strategic edge. His approach rejects the common belief that enterprise sales requires complexity and secrecy. We discuss how community building leads to faster adoption and better results than traditional sales tactics. The formula is simple: be transparent, earn trust, and close deals faster.

Here's one of his quotes:

"The best way to lose a deal is to our own open source product, because those people remain prime prospective customers that we really need to continue to understand and figure out how we are going to build enough new value in that premium product for them to want to pay for it."

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

• How building on existing open source foundations can give startups immediate credibility with enterprise customers
• Why passionate early adopters can close deals remarkably easily compared to traditional prospects
• The entrepreneurial wisdom of identifying and connecting with actual budget holders while still maintaining engineer enthusiasm
• How customer-driven unexpected use cases can dramatically expand your market vision and product roadmap

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Zach Wasserman

Website: fleetdm.com

In 2011, after years in the media industry during its technological disruption, Jan witnessed firsthand how stress and resistance to change were devastating careers and organizations. Despite having no background in technology or clinical work, she made the bold decision to create a software solution when she barely understood what a software application was.

For the first five years, she and her team worked for almost nothing, deliberately avoiding the tempting direct-to-consumer route that was attracting massive funding for competitors, instead patiently building a B2B model that would prove more sustainable long-term.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jan to my podcast. We explore the counterintuitive leadership decisions that led to her company's success while competitors faltered. Her approach challenges conventional wisdom in three critical areas:

1. Avoiding the "capital trap" of raising too much money too early,
2. Resisting the temptation to pursue direct-to-consumer strategies despite industry hype,
3. Having the patience to discover your true value proposition through customer insights rather than preconceived notions.

Jan's leadership journey reveals that sometimes the most profitable path is the one where you say "no" to what everyone else is saying "yes" to.

Here is a quote that captures one of Jan's most striking business lessons:

"There was a time when there were a lot of we had potential competitors entering in the direct to consumer space, and they were raising a lot of money, which, as you know, from a tech perspective, capital can deliver speed to build. And so there's always that temptation to, well, should we do it to get the money? But we didn't do it, and it was the right thing to do."

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

• How to achieve "funding freedom" by bootstrapping until investors need you more than you need them
• Why saying "no" to popular market trends can create a sustainable competitive advantage
• How to discover your true value proposition by listening to customers rather than industry hype
• The leadership mindset required to build a profitable software company when you have no technology background

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Jan Bruce

Website: meQuilibrium.com

After bootstrapping Evidencity as his fourth venture, Samuel Logan has spent a decade building a company with a profound mission: creating transparency to eliminate modern slavery in global supply chains. His journey began by addressing a critical gap in the market—helping multinational corporations access reliable data about their suppliers in regions where information wasn't available online. What started as a network of people physically retrieving documents in over 80 countries evolved into a sophisticated data platform that now helps uncover hidden networks facilitating forced labor. Samuel's commitment to transparency goes beyond simple compliance, focusing on the 30% of companies truly willing to "lift up the rocks and see what's underneath" their supply chains.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Samuel to my podcast. We explore the counterintuitive decisions that transform good companies into remarkable ones. His approach challenges the "move fast and break things" mentality that dominates the startup world. Samuel reveals why the hardest business choices often aren't about what to do, but about what to stop doing—especially when everyone around you expects the opposite. We discuss why sometimes you need to step back and work "under the hood" of your business rather than racing forward, and how what seems like an obvious path in the market can often be a "mirage." Throughout our conversation, Samuel shares the moments where slowing down actually accelerated his success and why rebuilding foundations allowed him to capitalize on opportunities his competitors couldn't see.

Here is a quote that captures one of Samuel's most striking business lessons:

"If we had not made the decision around the data schema that we made, we would today not be in the position that we're in to leverage the AI technology that's in the market. Frankly, we need to leverage that to keep up with the pace at which things are moving right now."

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

• How to recognize when your business needs to take two steps back to ultimately move ten steps forward
• Why your first hires post-funding should focus on leverage points rather than immediate revenue generation
• How implementing "user manuals" for leadership creates vulnerability and clarity that transforms team dynamics
• How to structure pipeline confidence-weighting systems that prevent optimism bias in your forecasting

For more information about the guest from this week:

Samuel Logan

Website: Evidencity.com

Rich has been building tech companies since 1993. In 2003, while running an ad network with his wife, clients began complaining about traffic quality issues. When he discovered no commercial fraud detection solutions existed, he reluctantly built one himself. Years later during an M&A process, potential acquirers showed minimal interest in his primary business but significant interest in this internal tool he'd developed. The rest is history.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rich to my podcast. We explore the practical realities of identifying your most valuable product, even when it's not what you initially set out to build. Rich shares how he tested his solution against market leaders before spinning it off as a standalone company, and why focusing on measurable results rather than flashy features has been crucial to his success.

Here is a quote that captures one of Rich’s most practical business decisions:

“We added a guarantee to Anura for two key reasons: First, our accuracy is not a gimmick. It’s the real deal. Second, because no one else in the industry is willing to address false positives – real people misidentified as fraud. It’s usually the number one issue that clients have with a fraud solution. We are so confident in our solution; we have no problem guaranteeing it.”

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

• How to recognize when your side project has more market value than your core business
• Why solving measurable problems creates stronger differentiation than marketing hype
• When to build technology in-house versus partnering with others
• The practical challenges of scaling a technical business in a constantly evolving landscape

For more information about the guest from this week:

Rich Kahn

Website: anura.io

After three decades as a successful restaurateur who owned one of San Francisco's top four restaurants, Geordy sold his business and relocated to Florida. Despite having no software background, he identified a critical gap in the market while cycling one morning in 2014.

Inspired by Steve Jobs' philosophy that "if you can identify a problem and solve that problem, you have opportunity," Geordy founded Fobesoft with a vision to change how restaurants manage finance. What started as a self-funded venture with manual data entry evolved through persistence, strategic pivoting during COVID, and finding the right technology partnerships.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Geordy to my podcast. We explore the counterintuitive approach he took to scaling a vertical SaaS business when everything seemed to collapse. While many companies cut back during COVID, Geordy doubled down on technology investments after securing angel funding. His journey reveals how industry expertise combined with technological innovation created a solution that convinces the moment people see it. His methods challenge conventional wisdom about rapid customer acquisition and demonstrate how focused simplicity beats feature complexity, especially in specialized verticals.

Here is a quote that captures one of Geordy's most striking business lessons:

"Years ago, I read an article that when there's a downturn, so many companies start cutting, cutting, cutting. But the ones that survive and come out when the economy comes back up are those that didn't cut. They spend a little more, look for another opportunity - and that puts you ahead of all the competition."

By listening to this podcast you will learn:

• How deep vertical expertise can compensate for lack of software industry experience when building a SaaS company
• Why doubling down on product quality during market downturns positions you for accelerated growth afterwards
• How to create a systematic "customer journey" that increases retention after experiencing rapid growth challenges
• Why understanding your ideal customer profile prevents wasting resources on prospects that can't benefit from your solution

For more information about the guest from this week:

Geordy Murphy

Website: fobesoft.com

After working at Google, Max and his co-founders quit their jobs to start a company with what he calls "the world's worst idea" - Tinder for co-founders.

What makes his journey fascinating is how he navigated through six pivots over three years, each time confronting the challenges of product-market fit, customer alignment, and sustainable growth.

Throughout this process, Max grappled with the central question many founders face: when to explore new ideas and when to commit fully to execution.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore the challenges of finding focus in startup chaos, the tension between vision and execution, and the counterintuitive reality that momentum often precedes perfection. Max's leadership principles cut through typical startup fluff with refreshing directness, challenging conventional wisdom about when to sell, how to pivot, and what metrics truly matter for early-stage companies.

Here is one of his quotes

“In any company revenue is oxygen, and you need oxygen to live and to succeed. And so as we were starting to make money and make money fast, [..] we saw a excitement in the company and a devotion to work harder that we had never seen in our earlier six pivots. That's one of the most critical things: having momentum gets everyone excited to keep pushing along.”

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

• The hidden pitfalls of pursuing product-market fit over generating actual revenue
• Why standard metrics often mislead early-stage founders away from what truly matters
• The real challenge of knowing when to stay the course versus when to pivot
• Why some customers might be holding back your company's growth potential

For more information about the guest from this week:

Maximus Greenwald

Website: warmly.ai

Ash took the helm of Workzone in December 2023 after the company was acquired by Big Band Software. Despite being profitable with a sticky customer base (7-year average customer lifetime), long-tenured employees (9-year average), and a must-have product, Workzone had been experiencing a six-year decline in revenue. Instead of the typical turnaround approach of immediate disruption, Ash took a counterintuitive path - learning first, focusing on existing strengths, and engaging deeply with customers before making changes.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ash to my podcast. We explore what it takes to reverse a multi-year revenue decline while maintaining 40%+ EBITDA margins in a highly commoditized market. Ash shares how he challenged the conventional wisdom about business turnarounds by taking a path few would dare to follow. His counterintuitive approach transformed not only the company's financial trajectory but also reshaped how the entire team viewed their mission, their customers, and their path to growth.

Here is a quote that captures one of Ash's most striking business lessons:

"Throwing money at a problem can get you short-term results. It will not get you long-term sustainability. And so again, one of the thesis here was because we want to grow in a sustainable fashion while also improving our EBITDA margins, in some ways that acted as a forcing function, which is despite the fact that we were profitable, we did not want to tap into the profit pool and start deploying investments before identifying levers of growth that already existed."

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

1. How to turn around a declining SaaS business without sacrificing profitability or disrupting what works
2. Why deep customer understanding can be more valuable than new feature development
3. How to create organizational focus through a single metric that aligns every team member
4. The power of planning for multiple contingencies (Plans A, B, C, and D) in sales and go-to-market

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ash Didwania

Website: workzone.com

From his early days as one of VMware's first support engineers, Krishna discovered something the industry had missed - the most valuable customer insights were being lost in departmental silos. Yet instead of accepting conventional solutions, he chose to build something the market initially rejected but customers immediately embraced.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Krishna to my podcast. We explore the counterintuitive approach of building a B2B software company by deliberately ignoring what investors and the market considered essential. His journey reveals how challenging established industry assumptions can uncover massive business opportunities that others miss, while creating natural barriers to competition through a unique product philosophy.

Here is a quote that captures one of Krishna's most striking business lessons:

"If customers are excited and investors are not seeing it, this is the right opportunity to go after, because this is an opportunity they're not going to fund."

By listening to this podcast, you will learn:

• How to identify massive market opportunities in the disconnect between investor skepticism and customer excitement
• Why focusing on six wildly successful customers yields better results than chasing rapid-scale
• When deliberately ignoring industry "must-haves" creates stronger market positioning
• How to turn early customer enthusiasm into effortless enterprise sales

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Krishna Raj Raja
• Website: supportlogic.com
• Book: supportexperience.ai

After growing Three Pillar Global to 2000 employees across nine countries, David learned that sometimes the best way to scale is to deliberately slow down. During COVID, he made the bold choice to retain all employees despite revenue decline - a decision that led to tripling the business within a year. Now with Knownwell, he's applying these scaling lessons to build an AI company with intention, starting with 500 customer interviews before writing a single line of code.

Their mission: To help professional services firms prevent "surprise churn” by elevating human relationships and experiences.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited David to my podcast. We explore what it really takes to build an AI company that elevates rather than replaces human relationships. His approach challenges conventional wisdom about scaling, product development, and leadership - drawing from lessons that helped him grow his previous company from startup to 2000 employees and survive multiple market crises. But what's most fascinating is how he's applying these insights to tackle one of the biggest pain points in professional services: the struggle to see relationship problems before they become relationship crises.

Here's a quote from David:

We had an inbound lead that found us through the podcast and ended up signing a rather large contract before we even not only wrote a line of code, but before we had an engineer on staff.

By listening to this podcast you will learn:

• How to secure major contracts before writing a single line of code (and why this might be smarter than building first)
• Why CEOs should never delegate customer relationships, even when scaling rapidly
• How staking your brand position before having a product can accelerate your go-to-market strategy
• Why implementing lightweight business systems early gives you an unfair advantage in scaling

For more information about the guest from this week:

David DeWolf

Website: knownwell.com

Nick is a marketing veteran turned CEO with an entrepreneurial mindset shaped by working closely with founders. Previously, as employee #12 at Fulcrum, he experienced rapid-growth dynamics firsthand. His diverse background spans manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and global consulting – driven by an insatiable curiosity to understand how different businesses work.

In June 2023, he became the CEO at Cludo. Their mission: To get website visitors of critical organizations the most relevant, timely, and trusted answers.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Nick to my podcast. We explore his strategic decisions in his first 90 days. He shares how he's transforming Cludo's approach from serving everyone to deliberately focusing on specific customer segments where they can deliver the most value. Last but not least, he shares his insights on how understanding the hidden patterns in customer behavior shapes both product development and go-to-market strategy.

Here's one of his quotes:

“If I were going to start from the beginning, I wouldn't say 'let's have 27 different industry categories.' We would pick one and build a product that was amazing for them, and then pick another, and then broaden out from there. That's an easy mistake - your eyes get pretty big, especially in a solution set like ours. Some amount of it is universal and universally applicable - but you still have to close the niche down and find your way that way.”

By listening to this podcast, you will learn the following:

• The importance of aligning your solution with your customer's top priorities rather than trying to elevate the priority of your specific solution
• Where he's investing his marketing budget to solve the current challenges of trying to make outbound work in complex B2B sales
• The strategic advantage of focusing on input metrics that drive outcomes rather than just measuring outputs
• The importance of building strengths in areas outside your comfort zone to drive business growth

For more information about the guest from this week:

Nick Wassenberg

Website: cludo.com

Smadar Tadmor is a visionary leader who's on a mission to change the way organizations develop their managers. With over 30 years in HR and organizational development, she founded three successful consulting companies before spotting a critical gap: most leadership development programs weren't driving real behavior change.

This insight led her to found Claro Mentor in 2022, creating a platform that makes personalized leadership guidance available for every layer of an organization.

What makes her story particularly compelling is her transition at this stage in her career - moving from being a top-tier consultant to a first-time tech startup CEO, embracing a beginner's mindset while leveraging decades of domain expertise.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Smadar to my podcast. We explore her remarkable transition from successful consultant to first-time tech CEO, where she had to unlearn decades of habits to build something entirely new. She shares candid insights about the struggles of perfectionism, the surprises of product-market fit, and how bootstrapping forced tough but transformative decisions that shaped their innovative approach to leadership development.

Here's one of her quotes:

“I left behind an amazing 30 years of career where I was top-notch consultant, well known... and start from a place where I know nothing. And it's very humbling to be at this point. From that perspective, I could be very open to explore and take risks that I think in a different way I wouldn't be doing.”

By listening to this podcast, you will learn the following:

1. Why starting with 'knowing nothing' became Smadar's biggest advantage
2. The surprising reason their initial AI coaching approach failed - and what insight changed everything
3. How bootstrapping revealed a truth about their product they wouldn't have discovered otherwise
4. The counterintuitive approach that doubled their customer adoption

For more information about the guest from this week:

Smadar Tadmor

Website: claromentor.com

Robbert Lodewijks is an entrepreneur who understands the delicate balance between patience and ambition. His journey began with a profound realization during his studies in Taiwan - that impact requires more than just good technology.

What makes Robbert's story intriguing is his methodical approach: spending four years in research before launching, then bootstrapping to validate, and only then accelerating with venture funding. This disciplined progression showcases a rare blend of scientific rigor and entrepreneurial instinct.

And this inspired me, and hence, I invited Robbert to my podcast. We explore how early-stage founders can build confidence through validation rather than rushing to scale. His insights reveal how methodical customer development, thoughtful bootstrapping, and strategic timing of funding can create a stronger foundation for growth. What's particularly fascinating is his scientific approach to sales and his insights on avoiding the common pitfalls of enterprise customer development.

Here's one of his quotes:

"We have one really clear definition [of success], and that is in the amount of water that we have saved. In the end, that relates to all our goals, because if we save so many Olympic-sized swimming pools of drinking water, which is 4 million (our BHAG), then it also means that we will probably build a very profitable company and make a huge impact on the world.”

By listening to this podcast, you will learn the following:

• That patient validation beats premature scaling because it builds stronger foundations.
• How to avoid pure sales hustle and having to rely on individual talent to secure the growth of your SaaS business.
• How to get everyone aligned in your company to create business velocity (not just departmental speed)
• Why you should always start your validation processes with end-users rather than just decision-makers.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Robbert Lodewijks

Website: hulo.ai

Marco is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He's a former Taekwondo champion who transformed his athletic discipline into entrepreneurial success.

At just 22 years old (while still in college), he and his co-founder built a machine learning system for hospitals, which they successfully sold in 2006. This got him involved in clinical research - thereby working for pharmaceutical giants like Roche and Novartis. This is where stumbled across big challenges that were caused by the absence of enough meaningful health data.

And this became the founding idea behind ROOK, which he founded in June 2017. What began as a heart rate monitoring platform in 2018 evolved into a sophisticated B2B platform that now integrates with over 300 wearable devices.

Their vision: to create a healthier world by making health data accessible and meaningful.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Marco to my podcast. We explore the journey of building a groundbreaking health data platform. Marco tells the story how COVID destroyed their fitness-center business model, and what lessons he learned in the process of pivoting. He shares his insights on enterprise sales cycles, pricing strategy, and team building. Last but not least he explains how he's deliberately portraying the startup's challenges to find the right cultural fit and his mantra of "cut through the noise and keep walking" when it comes to facing tough decisions.

Here's one of his quotes

Once you switch your mind, instead of selling a product, you are selling data, and you are really selling a problem, that's when they put your price on you. Because if you are selling a very good solution to their problem, that's when they will say, ‘This is a no-brainer. I don't care how much you are going to charge me.’

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What insights changed their ability to charge premium prices in enterprise deals?
2. What's he's doubling down on successfully to shorten the typically long sales cycles.
3. Why he emphasizes radical transparency, sharing financials and challenges with potential hires.
4. His secrets to staying persistent and disciplined, even when facing doubts or lack of motivation

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Marco Benitez
• Website: Rook

Mark is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He has a passion for building things from scratch. He specifically prefers going from "zero to one" rather than maintaining existing systems, describing himself as someone who enjoys "bushwhacking through the jungle" and forging new trails.

His entrepreneurial journey includes diverse experiences:

He co-founded Tryhard Games LLC. Led sales at App Academy, a coding bootcamp, and has a remarkable history of taking on challenging situations. At Citrix, he volunteered to manage their worst-performing sales team - one where no one was making quota. Within 6-9 months, he transformed it into a top-three revenue-producing vertical.

In Jun 2019, Mark founded Recapped, a customer collaboration platform that helps B2B sellers work more effectively with buyers.

Their mission: to solve the "messy middle" of sales and change the way B2B sales teams collaborate with buyers and close deals.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Mark to my podcast. We explore how he transformed Recapped from a side project into a game-changing deal collaboration platform, achieving a remarkable 44% win rate for customers - far above the industry standard of 15-18%. He reveals counterintuitive insights from his sales process optimization at Citrix and elaborates on his approach to building a remarkable software company. Last but not least, he shares his unusual incentive approach that helped him and his team to significantly grow a high-quality pipeline.

Here's one of his quotes

I fundamentally believe 90% of your Salesforce data should be client-facing and should be shared with the prospect... if you're not on the same page, get them out of your pipeline and go focus on deals that are actually going to move the needle.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

• Why he would split the focus 50/50 between product and distribution if he would ever start again?
• How he's increased close rates by deliberately blending in more professional services
• How 10% of features but 10x the marketing can outperform having more features but less visibility
• How the science of selling is 80-90% of success, while art is only 10-20% - making the process repeatable matters more than individual talent

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Mark Fershteyn
• Website: Recapped

My guest is Randy Wootton, CEO of Maxio.

Randy is a serial CEO. Before becoming CEO, he held senior positions at industry giants like Microsoft and Salesforce, where he led sales, service, and marketing teams.

His career has given him a truly global outlook. He has worked internationally, opening up divisions in England and Australia, and has hired teams across multiple countries, including France, the UK, the US, Japan, and Australia.

In March 2015, he moved to Rocket Fuel, a first-generation AI company. He started as their CRO, quickly turned CEO, and took the company private 2 years later.

He then became the CEO of Percolate, where he led the company's transformation from a mid-market social media product to an industry-leading content marketing platform.

And now, since May 2022, he is the CEO of Maxio, a billing and finance operations platform for B2B SaaS companies.

Their mission: to help its customers amplify their recurring revenue and decipher their next stage of growth.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Randy to my podcast. He provides invaluable insights for B2B SaaS CEOs navigating growth and mergers by sharing candid experiences from this process. He discusses his strategic decision-making frameworks and highlights the challenges of brand management post-merger and the complexities of transitioning from sales-led to product-led growth. He also zooms into the complexities of expanding into new markets and how to go about that. He ends with advice on fostering innovation, managing stakeholder expectations, and personal development.

Here's one of his quotes

As you think about your expansion strategy and your growth agenda, there's going to be a set of things you're just going to grow within your current segment. But then you're going to think about which category we should explore next. But as you start, you've got to get really clear about what you do better than anyone else.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The four key support pillars for B2B SaaS CEOs.
2. How to go about merging distinct company cultures so the business becomes stronger and keeps delivering on growth expectations.
3. What he would have done differently if he could deal with the branding opportunity again.
4. His framework for evaluating expansion opportunities to find the next area of growth for the company.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Randy Wootton
• Website: Maxio

My guest is Evan Huck, Co-founder and CEO of UserEvidence.

Evan's journey in the tech industry is a testament to his entrepreneurial spirit and sales acumen. He started his career as an SDR (Sales Development Representative) in 2010, joining TechValidate as their first sales employee. This early experience laid the foundation for his future success.

What's remarkable about Evan's career trajectory is how he rapidly climbed the ranks in sales leadership. At TechValidate, he built and managed the sales organization, growing it to a 50-person team. His success in this role led to TechValidate's acquisition by SurveyMonkey in 2015, where Evan continued to excel in enterprise sales leadership positions.

Despite his success in larger companies, Evan's passion for early-stage startups led him to co-found UserEvidence in August 2020. This move was inspired by his firsthand experience of the pain points in B2B sales and marketing, particularly the challenge of creating and leveraging customer stories at scale.

Their mission: Helping quality software vendors with satisfied customers stand out in a noisy marketplace.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Evan to my podcast. We explore how the process of collecting quality customer evidence is still broken. Evan explains how they're approaching the problem in a way that was unthinkable before. He shares strategies for cutting through the intense market noise today. Last but not least, he elaborates his lessons learned from building successful sales teams from the ground up with junior talent.

Here's one of his quotes:

What we're trying to do is introduce some truth or scientific rigor or data driven approach to helping buyers assess the value that a vendor is delivering.

I'd argue that the stakes are getting a little bit higher today, where there is a big cost if you get something wrong. Without infinite budgets now and infinite VC funding like you kind of got to get it right.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What's working well for UserEvidence's own growth and pipeline generation when it comes to reaching the right buyer via outbound.
2. Why Evan's deliberately choosing to organize his business around sales-led growth, not product-led growth.
3. What non-obvious opportunity many companies have when they centralize and democratize customer feedback across company functions
4. Why he'd focus on more durable categories like vertical SaaS over crowded go-to-market tools if he'd had the chance next time.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Evan Huck
• Website: UserEvidence

Wes is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of the product-led growth movement, challenging an entire industry to rethink their approach to SaaS growth.

In 2016, he introduced a freemium product at Vidyard that gained over 100,000 users in less than 12 months, sparking his passion for PLG.

He's a Bestselling Author: His book "Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself" has sold over 100,000 copies globally, primarily through word-of-mouth.

Meanwhile, he has partnered with 408+ SaaS companies to generate over $1bn in self-serve revenue.

Based on that experience, he recently released his new book, The Product-Led Playbook, to discover a simple system to scale your SaaS to 7, 8, or even 9 figures in self-serve revenue with a small team.

His vision: For every company to have a free product experience that enables them to serve before they sell.

This inspired me, and hence, I invited Wes to my podcast. We explore the critical differences between successful and unsuccessful PLG implementations. He highlights the importance of treating PLG as a comprehensive business strategy, not merely a product or marketing tactic. We discuss the importance of choosing the right go-to-market strategy based on product complexity and value addition. I.e., when to opt for Sales-led Growth, and when for Product-Led growth. Last but not least, he shares his framework for deciding what to offer at no cost.

Here's one of his quotes:

What separates the companies that really see success with product-led growth versus the ones that don't? ... They are thinking about product-led growth not just as a product thing; they are treating it as a company thing. They are actually building a product-led business.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What key questions to ask to determine which approach fits your SaaS company better
2. What's required to be crystal clear about before implementing PLG?
3. Why he believes a hybrid PLG + Sales-led growth approach will become dominant (60%+) for B2B SaaS, with pure PLG and pure sales-led each around 20%
4. What we can learn from PLG when it comes to building better websites?

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Wes Bush
• Website: Productled.com

Aytekin founded Jotform in 2006, creating a pioneering WYSIWYG online form builder that has grown to serve over 25 million users worldwide today.

What's remarkable is that he bootstrapped the company from the ground up. This allowed Jotform to remain 100% independent and define its own rules and company culture as it grew.

Under his leadership, Jotform has experienced impressive international growth, with offices in seven different cities around the world. Their growth and style were recognized as Jotform was named one of the "Best Privately-Owned Companies in America" by Entrepreneur Magazine.

Aytekin is not just a successful entrepreneur but also an automation enthusiast. He recently published a book titled "Automate Your Busywork. His book shares his insights on the automation philosophy he applied to grow Jotform.

This inspired me, so I invited Aytekin to my podcast. We explore his biggest lessons learned from bootstrapping a form-building tool to leading a global company with 25 million users. He elaborates on his approach around continuous innovation and maintaining momentum (rather than worrying about competitors) and shares his insights on prioritizing product development and growth. Last but not least, he talks about how he recently gave new meaning to his 'Founder’ role and why every SaaS entrepreneur should do that.

Here's one of his quotes

Being a founder is not just about leading a team, coaching a team, managing a team. But it's also about improving myself, growing myself. Because being a founder is about growth. It's about growth mindset. It's about growing yourself with the company. It's about growing your company. And it requires some dedication to do that - growing knowledge and learning.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he's working with customers to ensure JotForm's success
2. His first principles for managing growth and avoiding getting bogged down in busy work.
3. How he's organized his development teams and their rituals to ensure momentum on the one hand and optimal alignment on the other hand.
4. How he approached competition from Google Forms to come out stronger themselves.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Aytekin Tank
• Website: Jotform

Ozan has had an unconventional career path that spans multiple disciplines. He started as a nanoscientist and researcher before transitioning into the tech world.

His professional journey includes roles at major tech companies. He worked as a Software Development Lead and Program Manager at Microsoft, and as a Senior Solutions Architect at Sumo Logic.

In September 2018, he founded Edge Delta after recognizing the need for a new approach to handling the exponential growth of data in modern organizations.

Their mission: Change the way enterprises manage their data - particularly in mission-critical systems.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ozan to my podcast. We explore what it takes to navigate the complexities of building a successful B2B SaaS company in a competitive landscape. He elaborates on his approach to solving mission-critical problems and building credibility in deep-tech enterprise markets around a new category. Ozan also shares how he's maintaining a long-term vision while addressing urgent needs - and what he's doing differently to assemble and align a world-class team. Lastly, he discusses the challenges of market education, gaining early adopters, and scaling efficiently.

Here's one of his quotes:

If you're at an early-stage startup, look at how you're solving problems. Don't put more problems on other people's plates. Say, “Hey, this is how I'm solving a problem. This is what I think is the best approach.” And if people disagree with you, just make sure you're walking away with a mutual commitment.

We do this all the time, whether it's myself or someone else at the company where you say, You know what, I disagree, but I'm committed. Let's go do it that way.

That's super important because when you're dealing with companies that make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits a day, that is very hard to fight against if you aren't all in lockstep and marching forward.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What he learned from their rapid growth period (6x employees in one year) and what he'd do differently next time.
2. Why he's saying no to companies like Apple (even though they might be able to help them).
3. Why he continues to focus on solving big technical problems rather than taking an easier route.
4. What he's done to build credibility and trust in the market.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ozan Unlu
• Website: Edge Delta

Daniel's entrepreneurial journey has deep roots in a 100-year-old family business. He grew up in Niagara Falls, Canada, where his family owned a furniture store founded by his great-great-grandparents in 1908.

However, the 2009 recession forced the century-old family business to close, which became a pivotal moment in Daniel's life. Instead of lamenting the loss, he was inspired to explore how technology could have saved small businesses like his family's store.

This experience led him to co-found AppDirect, a B2B subscription commerce platform that grew to generate over $3 billion in annual transaction revenue.

In May 2023, he co-founded Landbase, which he leads as the CEO. He sees Landbase as his "second business" with a continued mission of "helping B2B businesses or entrepreneurs thrive." This time, the focus is on applying agentic AI to go-to-market strategies.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Daniel to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way companies still automate today. Daniel shares a compelling vision for the future of B2B SaaS powered by agentic AI, creating a 5x larger market than today's software industry. He discusses how companies can achieve significantly better results while allowing executives to "reclaim their day." He also explains how this new technology can help build digital credibility, which is essential for companies to stand out.

Here's one of his quotes

I think that the era of software, including business software, was all driven by what is the amount of hours someone spends on your tool. And I think those are all the wrong metrics. My kind of goals with Landbase and agentic AI is the opposite. It's actually how little amount of time a human has to spend in the software, but how much impact the software makes for the human so they can have more time to do what they love.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What he's doing differently to create defensible differentiation.
2. His approach to helping his customers avoid waste of resources and money as they speed up their Go-to-Market activities.
3. Why he advises against imposing previous playbooks/values on new ventures.
4. What he learned from speaking to customers about their biggest pain points and how it helped him to build far better products.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Daniel Saks
• Website: Landbase

Mark is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. A big mission. He's a sales expert who played a crucial role in helping scale Outreach from zero to over $230 million in revenue in just 8-years.

Being part of the rising growth of sales automation, Mark realizes how too much automation and the mantra of Growth at all Costs has wrecked outbound. It's created a massive problem, which he refers to as ‘The Great Ignore.’

This inspired the idea of founding an operator in April 2024.

Their mission is to make outreach more human, insightful, and valuable for both sellers and buyers.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Mark to my podcast. We explore how The Great Ignore has not only created a sales execution problem for all of us - but has also fueled a much larger Societal problem. He shares a masterclass on the art of what effective sales is really all about. He elaborates on what he's done differently to build rapid traction - with buyers that stay and become fans from the start. Last but not least, he talks about his lessons learned in harmonizing work-life priorities.

Here's one of his quotes

"Most platforms, good advice is the antithesis of how they create revenue. So if I'm like a ZoomInfo or someone like that, I make money by people buying more accounts and more contacts. Therefore, for me to suggest something that would require less contacts and less companies would be the antithesis of what I'm supposed to be doing, which is growing my business."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What sales skills to home in on to succeed in the evolving sales landscape
2. How he's staying sane, flexible and performing better in the crazy world of building a startup in a market that's overwhelmingly crowded.
3. How his Waitlist grew to 1,500 people within 24 hours of announcement.
4. How building a personal brand is of value to any sales to stand out - not only top management.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Mark Kosoglow
• Website: Operator

Griffin Parry is a serial Entrepreneur. In 2013, he founded GameSparks, a backend-as-a-service platform for video games, which he sold to Amazon in 2017.

Combining his firsthand experience with the challenges of usage-based pricing at GameSparks with the problems he encountered at a much larger scale at AWS became the founding idea behind m3ter.

He founded m3ter in October 2020 - it's a platform that helps B2B Software companies manage complex pricing and automate complex billing calculations.

Their mission: To enable B2B Software companies to deploy and manage usage-based pricing intelligently.

This inspired me, and hence, I invited Griffin to my podcast. We explore what it takes to build a successful pricing and billing infrastructure company. Griffin shares his experience identifying and solving real market problems. He talks about the importance of a strong founding thesis and continuous iteration and why he opted to build for operational complexity and enterprise integration from the start. Last but not least, he shares some of his big lessons on how he defined his ideal customers and what not to do when approaching those customers if you want to gain traction.

Here's one of his quotes

Early on, we overdid it. We would go, 'We are revolutionizing your pricing. And they go, 'Okay, why?' And we go, 'It's going to allow you to ship product faster because you're gonna have more pricing agility. We just weren't talking the same language as them. We just pulled it back, pulled it back, simplified the story, and now we meet them where they are. We go, 'Billing operations is a real pain point for you, isn't it? And they go, 'YES.'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Griffins' 3 success factors in growing his business.
2. How he's building trust with his ideal customers from the start.
3. What he's doing differently to give development a headstart when it comes to building new products.
4. Why he hired a data scientist from day one - and why you should possibly too.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Griffin Parry
• Website: m3ter

Hadassah has nursing roots: She started her career as a registered nurse and has built hands-on experience in emergency room and hospice care.

This clinical background gives her unique insights into the challenges faced by frontline healthcare workers.

Besides that, she holds a master's degree in public health policy and management from Columbia University.

At this intersection, the big idea for Guardoc was born - which she founded in July 2021 - in the middle of COVID-19.

Guardoc is a clinical data integrity solution that uses artificial intelligence to address nursing challenges.

Their mission: to prevent medical errors, reduce wasted nursing hours, and improve care for chronically ill older adults.

And this inspired me, so I invited Hadassah to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to supporting nurses in preventing medical errors. Hadassah shares her vision of how to solve it and how she bootstrapped her way to delivering a solution that nurses just kept talking about. She elaborates on some of her big lessons learned (and the resilience needed) in getting traction and attracting funding. Last but not least, she advises on building momentum through laser-sharp focus and smart product development decisions.

Here's one of her quotes:

We have apps streaming to our phones. You can watch your kids on your phone remotely. You can open doors and close doors and lock people out. There are all these things - but we still haven't figured out how to help what, to me, is the most important workforce. Because they really deliver holistic care to patients so that they can provide the care that they were trained to do and that they want to do. And so that really compelled me to ask: why isn't there a solution that captures mistakes?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why taking a 'user-centric' approach is not enough to succeed in building a successful software business.
2. How she started to deliver remarkable value without having built any product yet - and how that helped accelerate the journey.
3. What she did differently to put a flywheel for growth in motion for her business - in a world that requires a high-touch GTM approach.
4. How she's built a resilient mindset to navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship successfully.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Hadassah Backman
• Website: Guardoc Health

Dan has had an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. He was a Dot-com era pioneer: During college, he founded Mixture.com, a platform that was ahead of its time and preceded social media giants like Myspace.

After working in tech, including a stint at Myspace, he made a dramatic career pivot by opening his own CrossFit gym.

He quickly got frustrated with the poor software options available for gym management.

So in January 2012, he leveraged his tech background to create PushPress and rebel against manual paperwork and complicated, overpriced software.

Their mission: to make gym management
the easiest part of starting a fitness business.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Dan to my podcast. We explore his journey from MySpace coder to gym owner to software entrepreneur. Dan shares his insights on what it takes to create a competitive advantage that's hard to beat. He elaborates on empathy-driven support, value-based pricing, and the "layer cake" approach that makes his SaaS products invaluable. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on customer value over traditional SaaS metrics and shares innovative strategies to outmaneuver competitors. Last but not least, he shares his data-driven decision-making framework and lessons on team building.

Here's one of his quotes:

"Money is an output. It's the result of energy spent somewhere else. So the problem is, a lot of people build those businesses around money. How do I make more money? How do I generate more money? How do I increase my top line? Or bottom line? The reality is that's an output, and you can never affect an output. You can only affect the input. And the input is the order of magnitude and the sheer volume of value you provide to customers. That's what you got to focus on."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he's tuning his product strategy to grow a highly defensible position against competitors.
2. His framework for building conviction and speeding up decision-making in feature development
3. How he overcame the balancing act of horizontal feature breadth with vertical depth improvements
4. His approach to innovating pricing models to outmaneuver competitors and accelerate growth.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dan Uyemura
• Website: Pushpress

Victor is a fascinating individual with a unique blend of academic excellence, entrepreneurial spirit, and a passion for leveraging technology to enhance democratic processes.

He holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, where he developed algorithms and statistical models to study human behavior within social and political systems.

That research became the foundational idea behind DemoSquare, a SaaS startup he co-founded in November 2022.

Their mission: to "democratize democracy" by making political and regulatory data more transparent and accessible with artificial intelligence.

It will change how companies and their public affairs teams navigate the complex world of politics and regulation and, potentially, how citizens engage with democracy.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Victor to my podcast. We explore the journey of transforming academic research into a change-making political data platform. Kristof shares his lessons learned by doing customer interviews and pivoting in the right direction. He highlights the value of sharing ideas openly, adapting to constant change, and maintaining resilience in the face of rejection. Last but not least, he offers practical advice on investor relationships, sales strategies, and personal stress management.

Here's one of his quotes

I've heard several times people saying, "I have this super cool idea. I don't want to share it with anyone until I do it. I had the complete opposite experience. Even when it wasn't completely ready, we were not selling it, just talking about it to people, not even in a professional or formal context. You go to a party, you go to a family gathering, and you meet with some friends. You just share your ideas and see what's happening. The most important feedback I got came from these informal discussions. I cannot count how many introductions to potential customers I've gotten through these informal discussions.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to gather feedback and validate your idea - and use both positive and negative feedback to refine (or even pivot) your product.
2. How finding the right co-founder can have a multiplicative effect on your business.
3. How to stay resilient in the Face of Rejection from both customers and investors.
4. What to look for to select investors who will make a difference for your business.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Victor Kristof
• Website: DemoSquare

Joaquim is a tech entrepreneur on a big mission, bringing over 20 years of experience in high-growth companies. He started his career in M&A, strategy, and financial advisory. In 2012 he joined the tech world as the CFO of Socialpoint, a world-renowned mobile game developer, later taking on the role of Chief Operating Officer.

In 2018 he joined Typeform as Chief Operating Officer and quickly rose to become the CEO. Their mission: to create a world where conversations drive action and meaningful connections.

Under his leadership, Typeform has grown impressively (+$1B valuation), now serving well over 150,000 paying customers worldwide and achieving profitability. He recently got recognized as one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs of 2023 by The Software Report.

This inspired me, so I invited Joachim to my podcast. We explore what it takes to profitably scale a SaaS business as it experiences rapid growth. He discusses what fueled their initial growth and what strategic changes he had to make to ensure growth won't stall. Last but not least he offers practical wisdom on product development, customer-centric innovation, and maintaining resilience in the face of challenges.

Here's one of his quotes:

I was coming from games. I had not heard from those types of products so many times the word 'Love'. People love Typeform. So my most immediate reaction to all of that is, how can we make more people aware of this great product?

And I even thought, since I come from a financial type of background; 'if we can find that scalable with quick feedback loop type of motion, and in addition to that, it's got a less than 12 month payback period. Then we can fund it.'

So with that in mind, we got to work. We grew our customer base by 2.5x and our revenue by almost 4x.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to ensure your pricing reflects the true value your product provides to customers - so you don't undervalue your offering.
2. How to choose marketing and sales approaches that can bring in thousands of new customers and provide quick feedback loops.
3. How he found a segment in the market where Typeform provided the most value - and what that meant to their growth trajectory..
4. What to focus operations and hiring strategy on - if you aim to create a sustainable, resilient, and easily scalable business over time.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Joaquim Lecha
• Website: Typeform

Bridget has had three distinct careers, showcasing her versatility and adaptability: She started in the television and film industry. Then, transitioned to politics, serving as a political advisor focusing on constitutional reform and the House of Lords. Her political career culminated in a role as an advisor to the UK Deputy Prime Minister. Finally, she co-founded YouCanBook.Me, where she now serves as CEO.

Their mission: To provide the best booking experience for businesses' clients and customers.

Under Bridget's leadership, YouCanBook.Me has achieved impressive growth: The company has reached $5 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) without external funding. That route was a deliberate one. She decided from day one to avoid external funding that might have distorted business priorities, saying "I'd rather make a million dollars slowly than lose a million dollars fast",

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Bridget to my podcast. We explore her bootstrapping journey over the past 12 years. She shares how she's successfully competing in a saturated market against well-funded competitors and tech giants like Google and Calendly. She elaborates on how she's maintaining a customer-centric approach while managing limited resources. Last but not least, she shares insights on how she overcame the challenges of pricing, overcoming feature bloat, refactoring legacy code, and adapting to market change.

Here's one of her quotes

Feature bloat is real. You can say, 'Let's be really generous about our free tool and have loads of features in the free tool.' All you're doing is confusing free users who need a really simple tool and don't want to think because they're not paying for the software. So they just literally want it to work.

So if you have a problem that your free users can't contact support, it means that your free tool is more complicated than it needs to be.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How she's aligning her entire team so they deliver on time and grow an eagerness to go above and beyond.
2. What she learned from refactoring their pricing approach and the lessons nobody talks about is that
3. How to avoid feature bloat in your development process.
4. What she's doing differently to create the best customer experience.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Bridget Harris
• Website: You Can Book Me
• Bootstrappers Manual

Caitlin MacGregor co-founded Plum in 2012 and has been an earlier guest on my podcast (#54 in February 2019).

She was voted "most likely to save the world" in her high school yearbook, foreshadowing her future as an innovative entrepreneur.

Before founding Plum, Caitlin built two other businesses, which gave her insights into the need for change around talent processes in the age of automation.

Fast forward, she was recently selected for the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women™ North America Class of 2024, a program that supports high-potential women entrepreneurs.

Caitlin's drive to democratize access to psychometric data so that no one would have to rely on luck for someone to realize their superpower still underpins the core of the company - although how this is brought to market has evolved a lot.

And it's noticed - HR Tech voted Plum the best Talent Intelligence solution in the market in 2023

This inspired me, and hence I invited Caitlin back to my podcast. We explore the journey over the past 5 years. How did the market change in general - in particular in relation to how we attract and manage talent? She also shares what this means to all of us in the coming years. She then drills into how this has changed their priorities around product strategy and Go To Market. As we discuss this, she reveals some valuable lessons learned in product development, positioning, and segmentation, and how her role as CEO changed in this period of rapid change.

Here's one of her quotes

12 months ago, we were working on how we best resonate. It was really just about how you get to that Aha moment, and it really has nothing to do with the product and the solution. It was really like the Why. Why should you care about Plum? How do we align to a top three boardroom problem? And how do we connect to that strategic problem [....] so we were able to get into a strategic conversation with the right people that had the power to decide to do things differently.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How Plum expanded from talent acquisition to full employee lifecycle management
2. What made them decide to bet on Enterprise instead of SMBs
3. What internal capabilities organizations need to develop and prioritize to gain competitive advantage and become the winners of the future?
4. How her role as a CEO had to change to effectively lead the rapidly growing organization that Plum is today.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Caitlin MacGregor
• Website: Plum
• Plum Flourish Assessment

Matt has a diverse background spanning law, consulting, education, and tech, and he has held leadership roles at edtech and govtech companies like Social Solutions, and PeopleAdmin.

He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School after studying history at Swarthmore College. He's also a thought leader on the impact and responsible adoption of AI in the tech industry. This multidisciplinary experience gives him a unique perspective as a tech founder and CEO.

In September 2017, he founded Sema, a codebase scanning tool.

Their mission: to bridge the gap between the technical and non-technical worlds, particularly in the context of software development.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore how most tech organizations carry more debt in their codebase - and the business risks that brings. Matt shares his vision of how to solve this - in a world where AI-generated code and Open Source are rapidly gaining popularity. He discusses the learning process he had as a founder in creating a singular, non-consensus vision for the company - and how their unusual approach upfront helped them gain deep differentiation and first-mover advantage.

Here's one of his quotes

What I know now that I didn't know as a baby entrepreneur was there are so many different versions of 'No,' except 'Here is some money.' Everything else is 'No'

"I love it. So interesting. I can really see this helping. This is a pain point. Yes, I want to pilot Yes, I want to tell my friends." That's all No. It's all versions of No, except "here is some money."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he uncovered a new, totally overlooked, target market where his product quickly became mission-critical, rather than a nice-to-have.
2. Why he's prioritizing building trust-based relationships with key players in the industry and how he's achieving this.
3. What he's doing differently around creating a team that is more than the sum of its parts.
4. His recommendations on choosing your business model wisely.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matt Van Itallie
• Website: Sema

Christian is a global citizen, entrepreneur, podcast host, and B2B branding expert with over 13 years of experience across diverse markets. Throughout his career, he worked with major global brands like Philips, Caterpillar, Samsung, and Logitech.

He is a true "third-culture kid." He grew up in Austria, the Philippines, Singapore and China - and is currently living in Canada, giving him a multicultural perspective and ability to bridge East and West.

In 2019, Christian took a leap of faith and co-founded his own B2B branding and marketing consulting firm called EINBLICK. He's also the host of the popular "B2B Marketers on a Mission" podcast, where he interviews talented professionals in the B2B space and provides a platform for sharing cutting-edge insights with the B2B community.

Being a regular listener of his podcast inspired me to invite Christian to my podcast. We explore why marketing isn't optimally leveraged inside many B2B SaaS companies. He shares insights from well over 100 podcasts on what marketers should do differently to increase alignment and buy-in across the organization to make a larger impact. Last but not least, he explains how to avoid complacency in marketing and how, by leveraging different perspectives, the company can stand out more and increase resilience to adapt faster to market change.

Here's one of his quotes

The way that marketers need to deal with addressing buy-in is they need to understand how their organization works. How does your company generate revenue? Where is the most revenue coming from? Which industries? Which customers? Do you understand what EBITDA is? Because if you don't understand, you better start learning about it quickly because that's what your board cares about.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to turn marketing into a core driver for the business.
2. How to get insights that matter beyond just interviewing customers.
3. How to approach podcasting strategically, get instant value, and what to prioritize first to get going.
4. How to go about analyzing competitors' strategies to further strengthen differentiation.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Christian Klepp
• Website: EINBLICK
• B2B Marketing on a Mission Podcast (Spotify / Apple)

Thomas and his co-founder, Daniel, previously worked as consultants in the data space before founding Less. Their experiences and frustrations in this role inspired them to create an analytics product for people like themselves.

And that led to the birth of Less in September 2022. The name "Less" embodies their goal of stripping away complexities to build a product that focuses on the end goal and takes care of the technical aspects behind the scenes.

Their mission: Set doers free to do what they do best: Roll up their sleeves and solve problems.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Thomas to my podcast. We explore what, after decades of development, is still broken in the Business Analytics solutions market. Thomas shares his lessons learned from steering Less' journey as a customer-funded startup. He shares how he got early traction with paying customers and how he's creating a culture of analogical thinking to solve problems in creative ways. Last but not least, he'll inspire you with his fresh perspective on crafting a compelling narrative that sells.

Here's one of his quotes

"We've been focusing more on the persona than on the sector or industry. We call them doers. People who are curious by nature, frustrated with being dependent on other people, and want to build cool things that they can show to other people in their teams drive that change internally."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Where he finds inspiration from taking Storytelling for his business to the next level.
2. What he's done differently from the start to get traction and stay in control as the business grows.
3. How he ensures everyone understands what's important, and does the right things right to create fans from the start.
4. Why he embraces being "customer funded" rather than just bootstrapped.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Thomas Wulff Wilhelmsen
• Website: Less

Angelo is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and exited multiple companies.

In 2017, he co-founded Zakeke, an AI Visual Commerce platform. It's doing groundbreaking work in transforming the B2B customer journey and shopping experience. With this focus, it's now serving 10,000+ eCommerce brands worldwide across 400+ industries

Their mission: To improve the industry's environmental footprint through the use of technology in the display process, the shopping experience, and the purchasing experience.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Angelo to my podcast. We explore how the shopping experience is still broken today - and why. Angelo shares his how he's building an organization to fix this and shares anecdotes about his lessons learned in choosing the right team, fostering a culture of innovation, and setting ambitious long-term goals. He then elaborates on creating resilience across the business, customer-centric product development, and how strategic acquisitions and investment in eco-system helped to scale their business.

Here's one of his quotes

I wanted to create a company that was totally based on a long-term vision. This is one of the most difficult choices to make when you start because it means you burn more money in the first years of the company. My opinion is that if you don't start as a long tail business, it's difficult to transform a company with 200 or 300 big customers into a company able to serve 1000s of customers, maybe most of them small customers.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why have a global mindset from day 1.
2. Why focus on product excellence first before you consider a marketing push?
3. What Angelo specifically prioritizes when it comes to hiring the right people that will help the company grow in good and tough times.
4. The strategies he applied to establish trust and leverage their growth opportunity via the e-commerce ecosystem.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Angelo Coletta
• Website: Zakeke

Matthew is a tech- entrepreneur on a big mission. He has held tech leadership roles: IT Director at Logicalis, Director Managed Services at Acora, and Managing Director at Carrenza (a cloud service provider acquired by Six Degrees Group),

In the period from July 2018 and September 2020 he took a break from his corporate life to become a House Husband. In that period he developed a passion for using AI to drive positive change.

That led him to cofound Arwen AI in September 2020. Arwen AI is a platform that helps its customers actively moderate and manage their community, across both paid and organic.

Their mission: to make social media a more positive place by filtering out hate speech and toxicity.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matthew to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's Social Media world. Matthew shares his vision to make Social a place without toxicity and spam. He then elaborates on his hard-won lessons from his journey to speed up direct sales and benefit from using ecosystems to grow even faster. Last but not least, he shares his framework to increase resilience across the organization.

Here's one of his quotes:

I thought, 'This is great, we'll create some technology, fix the problem and everyone will buy it.' I was so wrong on that part. I got to about demo number 200, it was with a US broadcast news organization. And the head of digital said, 'Listen, I'm protected by the First Amendment, I can let anything go up on my channels. I don't have to get rid of it. You're giving me an extra job to do. An extra cost. Tell me why this is valuable to my business. Tell me how it makes me money or saves me money.'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he gained traction in a market where customers resisted to buy because they saw the solution as an extra job and an extra cost.
2. What he did differently to gain technical and commercial momentum.
3. What he invested in early on to get access to strategic accounts and speed up the commercial contracting process in enterprise sales situations.
4. How he goes about to keep the business humming, and keeping everyone aligned and motivated - especially in tough times.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matthew McGrory
• Website: Arwen AI

Josh has over 15 years of experience leading successful go-to-market (GTM) functions at high-growth SaaS companies like Metalogix, Qualtrics, and OpenGov. This extensive background gives him unique insights into scaling SaaS businesses.

In 2021, he founded Patri, which was rebranded OpenGTM in 2023. OpenGTM is a platform to create content buyers love, capture high-intent leads, and uncover the truth behind your buyers and pipeline.

Its mission: to unite sales, marketing, customer success, and product around the attributes of highly-retained customers in order to boost revenue and retention.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Josh to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's world of Go-to-Market (GTM). Josh shares his wealth of experience in scaling SaaS businesses. He emphasizes the importance of the "sell, design, build" methodology, where market demand pulls product development. He also explains, how their approach helps companies cut through the noise of the crowded go-to-market tech landscape. And last but not least he shares some big lessons learned on differentiation and growing efficiently.

Here's one of his quotes:

Too often in Go To Market and in company building in general, we're driven by product market fit. And that's wonderful. But a big portion of that is really identifying: Is there security and regulatory fit? Is there a financial fit? Can we get some sort of return out of this investment we're making in this customer? And I absolutely saw that I had to learn the hard way and lose some very large deals. That got me thinking that I think there's a better way to to vet these opportunities.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What B2B SaaS companies should look for beyond product-market fit to grow more efficiently.
2. What framework they use to drive their product strategy to build remarkable products.
3. How they avoid getting caught up in tech-stack rationalization.
4. How to expand market scope gradually while maintaining a narrow focus on the ideal buyer profile.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Josh Ellars
• Website: OpenGTM

Niklas is a tech entrepreneur on a Mission. He was an idealist punk who turned lawyer, then SaaS founder. He's got deep expertise in data privacy, compliance, and agile product development. And entered the prestigious Top 40 under 40 list by Capital Magazine in November 2023.

Over the years, he grew the belief that while data protection and compliance requirements are important, the implementation should not become a stumbling block for companies.

And that became the big idea behind SECJUR, an AI-driven compliance automation platform, which he founded in December 2017.

Their vision: A world where businesses are always compliant, but never have to think about it.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Niklas to my podcast. We explore how personal tragedy grew into entrepreneurial drive. He shares how he bootstrapped the company towards growth, navigated fundraising during a recession, and built a resilient team culture from the start. Beyond that, he elaborates on his frameworks for strategic decision-making, hiring for values fit, and relentlessly delivering customer value. Last but not least he shares practical advice on how to stay motivated and sane in the crazy world of building a software business.

Here's one of his quotes:

"Bootstrapping was definitely something that made us successful because we had time to really focus on the business and not focus on fundraising, on report creating reports and stuff like this. So we learned a lot about what customers really want in that time, because we could spend all our time with customers."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How Bootstrapping gave him an advantage you cannot get when you start your venture with VC backing.
2. His approach to staying ahead of the competition as the market gets more crowded.
3. His advice (having been a lawyer himself) on how to go about committing to contracts
4. His 3-step framework for hiring talent

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Niklas Hanitsch
• Website: SECJUR

Matt has a diverse background in product development and design.

He was a principal at design agency FortySix, working with clients like Disney, BBC, Expedia, and the University of Pennsylvania, and held product roles at Custora (acquired by Amperity) and LayerVault (acquired by Tiny Capital).

He has a lifelong obsession with the craft of design, sparked by childhood curiosity about why certain objects elicit feelings of joy. This led him to question the status quo in relationship management software - and that's how the vision behind Clay was born.

In 2018, he and his co-founder, Zach Hamed, founded the company, an app for managing personal and professional relationships.

Their mission: to help people be more thoughtful and helpful with their relationships, ultimately helping them achieve more and be happier by putting others first.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore his journey of building Clay. Matt shares how he and his team create meaningful differentiation beyond just solid functionality. He elaborates how they gained early traction and created strong organic growth that enables them to now manage over 100 million relationships. Last but not least, Matt shares his insights on navigating tradeoffs, maintaining confidence in decision-making, and staying true to company values while scaling rapidly.

Here's one of his quotes:

Be very clear about the values and the lines that you will cross and won't cross because when things start speeding up, momentum is something very precious.

When you move really fast, you have to move with confidence. And if you don't have the confidence and that foundation, you're not going to be able to make decisions rapidly.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. His unconventional approach towards creating a "minimum remarkable product" instead of a "minimum viable product"
2. How they strengthen their differentiation by focusing on things other than just functionality, and where he focuses to find inspiration.
3. How they've managed to achieve all their growth to be entirely organic and driven by word-of-mouth
4. What signals, he in hindsight, wishes they had paid more attention to in order to grow even more.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matt Achariam
• Website: Clay

Lee is a visionary culture leader with over a decade of experience in B2B sales. In 2014 she founded Wekudo - a remote corporate event planning agency. The idea behind it came while working at ZocDoc, where she struggled with the bureaucracy and logistics of planning team-building events.

Soon after that, she founded Confetti, realizing that the problem could only be solved through a combination of technology and people (not just people).

Under Lee's leadership, Confetti achieved exponential 600% growth during the COVID-19 pandemic and grew it as the leading solution for virtual team-building through a relentless focus on quality experiences.

Their mission: to simplify event planning while empowering organizations to build stronger, happier, and more holistic teams through unforgettable shared experiences that make work life more memorable.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lee to my podcast. We explore her journey to build a successful B2B SaaS company in a period when most of her competitors ceased to exist. Lee shares her story about a remarkable pivot during Covid, and why she decided to do nothing when "back to work" kicked in again. She also shares how she wasted 3 valuable years at the start, and what she could have done differently to avoid that. Last but not least, she elaborates on what ingredients she doubles down on to build a product people just keep talking about.

Here's one of her quotes:

The main contributor to our success is that we built a platform that had a very strong form of agility. The platform can support various different use cases if we really want it to. It allowed us to pivot super quickly [during Covid]. The last invoice that we got from an in-person event and the first invoice that we got for a virtual was 10 days. We didn't spend time sitting in sadness that our events business was in shambles. We got right back to the drawing board, back to playing and having fun and trying to see what sticks - and the virtual events stuck.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What she has done differently to survive during & post-COVID when other competitors closed their doors.
2. How she managed to pivot her entire business in less than 10 days when Covid started.
3. What she learned from niching down, where everyone else was widening the net - and how that played to their advantage.
4. How she's embedded delivering "wow factor" in every aspect of her company - and why this has become unnegotiable for her.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Lee Rubin
• Website: Confetti

Emeric is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in social media and SaaS. He co-founded affinitiz, one of the first modern social network SaaS platforms in France in the early 2000s.

In 2010, he founded Agorapulse, a social media platform. He grew it from generating €150,000 in annual revenue to achieving the same figure every two days, without taking significant outside funding.

This makes Agorapulse an inspiring bootstrapped SaaS success story. Hence, I invited Emeric to my podcast. We explore his insights on what it takes to create a successful B2B SaaS company without having to rely on external funding. He shares his big lessons learned running the business through a PLG motion and explains why they've pivoted to a sales-led SaaS motion, thereby moving up the market. Last but not least, he elaborates on his approach to customer segmentation, creating measurable business value, and how to enable constant evolution

Here's one of his quotes:

"Do not raise money. VC firms and investors are going to tell you that you're going to get more than money... if you don't know how to leverage that money, you're basically just giving away part of your company for something that you're not going to get value from."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why you should prioritize investing in amazing customer support, especially when bootstrapping and the product is still evolving
2. How to go about hiring people that have the highest chance to bring your company success
3. What to focus on when you want to transition from PLG to a sales-led motion
4. His first principle when it comes to prioritizing features to create products people start talking about and keep talking about.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Emeric Ernoult
• Website: Agora Pulse

Jim Yu is the visionary. He started his career at Mercator Software (now IBM), serving as Director of Product Development, and then moved to Salesforce.com, where he was a Director of Product Management.

He graduated from university when he was 16 years old, and holds an MBA from Stanford University, a Master's in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Dakota.

In 2007, he founded BrightEdge, where he's been at the helm as CEO for 16 years. He grew BrightEdge into a global leader, helping more than 8,500 of the world's largest brands drive measurable, predictable revenue from their websites and search engines

Their mission: to help marketers deliver content that resonates with their audience and drives business impact. More specifically, BrightEdge aims to transform online content into tangible business results, such as traffic, revenue, and engagement.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jim to my podcast. We explore his journey of building BrightEdge into a successful SaaS company that crossed the $100M ARR bar. He elaborates on his first principles when it comes to building core differentiators, being intentional about market choices, and setting clear milestones for each growth stage. Lastly, he shares his advice on managing go-to-market investments and staying driven by a strong mission to scale intelligently.

Here's one of his quotes

What really paid off was when we found the big box retail segment. So if you think about social networks, they have a lot of web pages that represent musicians or people or things like that. But on the retail side, they have a lot of products, they have a lot of categories. And if those show up well on search, it leads directly to purchases and revenue.

So the next use case we built into our technology was connecting the dots back to purchases and orders. And so then you could see, as you optimize for organic search, what was the impact on revenue, and then that's when we started to really get forth. We ended up getting most of the big retailers.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why he has been intentional about certain GTM techniques and how he's picked his verticals to bet on.
2. His first principle on making strategic choices that are aligned with the core capabilities and DNA of the company.
3. His approach to scaling, and when to step on the gas and when not.
4. How he defined their unfair advantage and what makes them different as a company

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jim on LinkedIn
• Jim on Twitter
• Website: BrightEdge

Max is a mechanical engineer. In 2014, he was a founding member of HackZurich, the largest hackathon Switzerland has ever seen.

In 2015, he co-founded Actyx and digitized 40+ factories. In this startup, he led product management, sales, and marketing teams.

Meanwhile, he has established himself as a thought leader in the space of digital transformation for the factory floor.

In November 2022, Max founded Deltia, a startup focused on helping factory operators track, analyze and improve efficiency by identifying the best possible processes and assisting workers with digital tools.

Their mission: to make human work in manufacturing more productive and less error-prone by taking out the guesswork.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore what's broken in identifying productivity opportunities in manufacturing. Max explains how for the first time ever - this is possible. He shares some of his big lessons on building the company, especially when it comes to foundational questions like "who's it for" and 'what's it for' - and how that helped them remain highly focused.

He elaborates on his first principles for building the platform and how that helps them stay resilient and offer scalable solutions.

Here's one of his quotes

There are a lot of decisions that you take both on the technical level and what customers you're serving. Who is the user that you're trying to focus on? We decided quite early on to not specifically target the Toyota's of this world. The automotive OEMs are basically the best-run manufacturing companies in the world. There are use cases, obviously, also for technology, no doubt about that. But I think a big opportunity is to help the 98% of other factories to come to a similar level to where Toyota of Volkswagen are today.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why functionality is important - but not as important as system design
2. How to go about building for business scalability rather than just technical scalability of your solution.
3. Why the dream is not to help Toyota or Volkswagen - but companies much smaller and weaker than those brands.
4. What they are doing differently to accelerate stakeholder buy-in from IT, legal, and Unions.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Max Fischer
• Website: Deltia

Ruban is a serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience building technology products that solve real-world problems. He's written books about AI and holds several patents in this field.

He was part of Yahoo's first data scientist team, collaborating closely with co-founder David Filo to use data to address complex business problems.

In 2005, he co-founded Bixee.com, India's first vertical search engine employing patented technology. This company then merged with market leader MakeMyTrip and DataRPM, a pioneering Enterprise AI platform for industrial IoT, which was then acquired by Progress Software in 2017.

In 2019, he co-founded GoodTrade.AI, an asset management and investment analysis platform centred around Generative AI.

Most recently, he co-founded GoodGist, an AI startup for upskilling and research that tackles the challenges of scaling corporate skill development.

Their mission: To organize the world's knowledge and make it universally accessible, conversational, and digestible in bite-sized chunks on demand.

Their belief is that this creates a significant moat for their clients against competitors in today's fast-paced landscape,

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ruban to my podcast. We explore the challenges of continuous learning in today's fast-paced technological environment.

He explains his first principles for making his strategic bets and why he opts to take a platform approach rather than a point solution approach. Last but not least, he explains his lessons from niching down and verticalizing his GTM approach around the platform.

Here's one of his quotes:

We don't try to build a custom solution for a custom problem. We try to look at the problem and say, 'Okay, so we are not trying to only solve for a gas turbine failure, how do we build that technology, so that now instead of just only solving for data coming out of gas turbines, it can also look at data coming out of smart cars? How can it also handle data coming out of smart televisions? So, the focus has always been in trying to understand the problem and try to generalize, so that it can solve more business use cases, without having to recreate something new every single time.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he's accelerating traction by packaging his horizontal platform around highly valuable & business-critical problems.
2. How he goes about successfully serving the mid-market and large enterprise companies in their own unique ways.
3. His approach to identifying new value possibilities in the market that are worth building solutions for.
4. How he makes decisions on what to invest in, and what not.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ruban Phukan
• Website: Goodgist

Ryan has over 10 years of experience in an executive role in technology and commercial real estate (CRE) investment and development.

Having worked at Hudson Capital Investments and as an Investment Analyst at Ram Real Estate, he has a strong background in CRE valuation, underwriting, asset management, and private equity.

In July 2018, he co-founded Obie, a Y Combinator-backed startup that's set out to make some waves in insurance technology.

Their mission: To provide a simple, affordable, and transparent insurance experience for landlords and real estate investors.

This inspired me, and hence, I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of insurance, particularly when it relates to Real Estate. He shares his experiences and big lessons learned from having to pivot the business. He elaborates on what he did wrong, and the courage it took to correct course - the then turn that into a growth engine that is hard to stop. Last but not least, he talks about some of the essential traits to develop to build a business that lasts.

Here's one of his quotes

Insurance is an admin nightmare for them [Lenders] during the closing process. We provide them with technology and tools as it relates to insurance for their consumers so that mistakes are not made. And ultimately, for a lender, this help that we provide them ultimately unlocks a ton of customers for us. In fact, we have lenders that will charge their customer base a fee, if they don't use us.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What traits to look for in employees if you want to attract people who can solve customer problems and provide great experiences.
2. What to do differently if you want your customers to make your solution mandatory for anyone they do business with.
3. His learnings on growing confidence and commitment from others.
4. What he's learned to be critical behaviors to adhere to in a company if you want to build a business that lasts.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ryan Letzeiser
• Website: Obie Insurance

Ed started his career in wholesale distribution and has extensive international experience in Supply Chain across Australia, Singapore, United States, and Canada.

In 2004, he co-founded VirtualStock. During this period, the company pioneered new ways for retailers to expand their product range, increase transparency with suppliers, and provide detailed order information for customers.

It made the product evolve into a global drop shipping and marketplace SaaS platform

Today, the company has 20 years of experience in logistics, supply chains and e-commerce, as well as an extensive roster of blue-chip clients.

Their mission: Sell more products online, without the risk

This inspired me, and hence, I invited Ed to my podcast. We explore the 20-year journey of building a lasting SaaS business. Ed shares what worked and what didn't, how he managed to grow the business without external capital, and how working with the largest retailers in the UK enabled this. He elaborates on why he's keeping the organization lean, and how that helped to create meaningful and durable differentiation, survive major setbacks, and win the bulk of the UK retail market as a customer.

Here's one of his quotes:

People will always buy from people. And so it's all got to do with understanding the customer. In our world, that means two things: our customer is the retailer, but we need to understand their customer, who is the consumer. And so if you get those two things right, if you really have that knowledge, and you care about their business, and you care about their customer, then the rest will follow.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How one customer can accelerate the trajectory of your business.
2. Why he'd opt for bootstrapping the business again if he ever got the choice.
3. How to keep your organization lean - and why that helps to grow defensible differentiation.
4. How he survived a major crisis in the business, and how this made them come out stronger.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ed Bradley
• Website: Virtualstock

Ryan is a serial entrepreneur and visionary leader in data analytics and AI. He brings experience from previous roles at Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Private Equity and venture Capital funds, and Ex Quanta: AI Studio, giving him a strong background in AI and data analytics.

His time in the VC world likely gave him valuable insights into what investors look for, how to pitch effectively, and how to strategically scale a business.

All his hands-on experience led him to co-found Zenlytic in July 2020. It's a BI tool for commerce brands and DTC businesses.

Their mission: making data insights accessible and actionable for everyone.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what's still broken in enabling non-data scientists to create unique insights to compete with the largest brands in the world. Ryan shares his big lessons learned in building a company that pioneered the promise of generative AI. He elaborates on his first principles around value creation and what he's doing differently to stay lean while delivering high performance as a business. Last but not least he shares his tips on being able to prioritize long-term thinking as the company grows and create a business that lasts.

Here's one of his quotes

I think the real winners will be the people that are building nimbly. The people that are applying creative uses of this tech and finding creative new ways to deliver value that doesn't look very much like the generation of software that preceded them.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What you can do differently to ensure faster development and better quality with a lean team.
2. Why you should break predictability to find new growth opportunities.
3. How you can outcompete much larger big companies on their own strength.
4. When you have lots of leads the challenge is not how to close them - but how you qualify them

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ryan Janssen
• Website: Zenlytic

Zach Barney is an experienced SaaS sales leader and entrepreneur. He has been building and leading SaaS sales teams since 2010 at companies like Vehlo, Nearmap, Teem, and HireVue. Over his career, he has personally closed over $4 million in ARR and his teams have closed over $40 million.

In 2023, he co-founded Mobly to reduce the high percentage (+25%) of sales activity that never gets logged into CRM systems.

Their mission: To redefine lead capture and qualification for event marketers.

This inspired me, and hence, I invited Zach to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the lead generation process at in-person events. Zach explains his journey with Mobly to solve this problem and elaborates on how this fits in a much broader vision. He elaborates on the big lessons he learned around gaining traction and using pricing as a lever for growth. Lastly, he elaborates on how he's building a moat around his product.

Here's one of his quotes:

We learned that we needed to change our pricing model. Our first handful of customers we were grossly under-charging them and it was largely due to the fact that we were pricing based on the number of seats. Somebody would openly tell us 'Yeah, well this person can share the license with this person.' So, we realized 'I guess we made a mistake on how we price this because this should be like a $20,000 contract and you're telling me that you're gonna pay 2000…'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he and his co-founder managed to get very comfortable doubling down on building a product without hardly spending anything.
2. What he changed to his pricing strategy to increase average deal-size AND make grow each customer account from there onwards.
3. What strategic choices he made around phasing his product strategy to ensure they got traction as early as possible - and keep growing it.
4. Why he's decided to build defensible differentiation around data and not features.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Zach Barney
• Website: Mobly

JJ (Projjal) is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He held business leadership roles across technology (Uber), management consulting (Accenture Strategy) and corporate development (Essar Capital). Besides that, he's a proud naturalized Singaporean, SMU Scholar, Stanford MBA, and awarded World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2022.

In 2020, JJ founded OnLoop in an attempt to solve a problem he'd experienced throughout his career: How hard it is for managers to turn high potential individuals into high performing teams.

Their mission: Convert every manager in the world into a great manager.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited JJ to my podcast. We explore the broken world of employee & team performance. JJ shares his journey of solving this problem by driving everyday habits and feedback rather than mere documentation. He shares his biggest lessons on creating product market fit, demand generation, and how to strategically prioritize your focus as a CEO as your company evolves. Lastly, he elaborates on his approach to challenge the status quo and outcompete established players.

Here's one of his quotes:

Most enterprise software is built as a System of Record. So if you look at employee engagement software, what it is, is a quarterly survey, which is then creating dashboards and data. And so it's a System of Record, not a System of Action.

What you need to drive behavior is a System of Action. So if you think about it from another analogy, people understand is, you don't get fit by doing an annual health checkup every three months. You get fit by going to the gym. And actually 10,000 steps is the best thing that happened to fitness because it made it very easy to drive a system of action. And we think about team health and team performance in the exact same way

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The framework JJ is using to help him ensure he's focused on the most impactful priority on his list - every day.
2. That founders should focus on creating value, and salespeople on capturing value. And why it will hurt you if you mix this up.
3. His perspective on identifying their ideal customer segment to capture value and scale revenue in a predictable, repeatable way.
4. His first principles when it comes to building remarkable products.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• JJ (Projjal) Ghatak
• Website: OnLoop

Jon Gillham is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. Before he started his SaaS business, he ran a content marketing agency.

Having been one of the earliest adopters of generative AI through his agency, he understood the wave of plagiarism problems that was coming, even before ChatGPT and GPT-4 were released.

That became the founding idea behind Originality AI - a company he founded in November 2022.

Their mission: help Web Publishers be sure they are producing Original Content and can hit publish with integrity.

This means: publishing unique, Human-Created content ... the kind Google and we, the readers, want!

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of AI-generated content -and how this impacts trust. Jon shares the challenges he's faced on his journey to solve the problem. He also explains why he decided to focus on a very specific niche and not education, while he was offered contracts with brand names as big as Harvard and Purdue. Lastly, he elaborates how they are able to build extremely competitive products with just 1 simple organizational tweak.

Here's one of his quotes:

We built and ended up launching the weekend before ChatGPT launched. And when ChatGPT launched, it kind of blew things up. We had people coming from all different parts of the world. Academia was coming our way. User-generated sites were coming our way to say - this is now a problem that we need to wrestle with.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What to do / not to do when you want to create defensible differentiation with your product.
2. Why he turned away very big sales opportunities - and why that was a critical, but right choice.
3. How he maintained a good work-life balance (and what he learned from that in hind-sight).
4. How to outperform all your competitors on review sites.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jon Gillham
• Website: Originality AI

Theo is a Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineer (M.Eng, University of Warwick), with a background in defense, laser-based metals 3D printing research at Warwick Manufacturing Group, and sales.

He entered metals 3D printing expecting to be able to harness a technology ready to disrupt manufacturing but gradually became disillusioned with the state and future applicability of the technology.

When he was exposed to CNC machining, he quickly realized its disruptive potential if it could be automated to the same degree as plastic 3D printing.

And that led him to co-found CloudNC in 2015.

Their mission: to make single-click manufacturing a reality.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Theo to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's manufacturing world and how that's growing to a $400 billion industry. Theo shares his journey of solving a complex problem in a very unusual - but effective way. He elaborates how they're looking for leverage in everything - and how that's led to using video marketing to get over 10M+ impressions a month - showcasing software to automate machines. Last but not least, he stresses the importance of setting clear objectives - especially as your startup scales.

Here's one of his quotes:

The idea was to first build software that makes it automatic to program these machines. And we raised our seed rounds on the basis of that. We realized after, I think, two or three years that it would take 10 years to actually build software that was capable enough to be saleable to any factory with these machines, there's just too much variation from factory to factory. So we went, I know, let's reduce the complexity of the problem. Let's build our own factory, make it really simple and standardized, and then copy and paste factories, and in that way, disrupt the industry.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How they pivoted from selling a new platform to individual manufacturers to a model where they simply plug in what they already use.
2. What made them decide to move from a product-led sales approach to an eco-system-led sales approach?
3. How they created defensible differentiation and a unique value proposition in the very crowded market for manufacturing software.
4. What unusual opportunities niching down has provided them.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Theo Saville
• Website: CloudNC

Harpreet is an entrepreneur, innovator, developer, creative product leader, and seasoned DevOps leader who has dedicated his life to building new solutions for software teams. He's got extensive product marketing & Product management experience at Sun Microsystems. Then helped CloudBees find product market fit and create a business based on OSS that scaled to multi-millions in ARR. Then moved to Atlassian, where he became the GM for Atlassian Bitbucket, where he helped set the blueprint of what became the strategy at Atlassian to embrace DevOps tools in the market.

In September 2019, he co-founded Launchable and shares the CEO role.

Their mission: Help dev teams launch fearlessly. Their point of view: 80% of software tests are pointless. We’ll help you see the 20% that matters most.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Harpreet to my podcast. We explore what's broken around software testing these days. Harpreet provides his vision of how to address this. He elaborates on the journey of building an AI-powered software delivery platform and shares his most valuable go-to-market lessons - particularly why he didn't opt for a product-led growth motion and how he avoided getting stuck in red oceans. Last but not least, he shares his advice to peer SaaS CEOs on scaling their businesses while staying true to their core mission.

Here's one of his quotes:

I spent a year and a half at Atlassian. They are the Gurus of product lead growth. So I got to see that close enough. And I came in and said we should probably do this. And I came to the realization that it's not one size fits all. Different teams have different needs, and the kinds we are serving have very different needs, then this product led growth.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. His lessons on how to simplify customer communication so it resonates optimally.
2. His advise on how to go beyond the obvious and find the biggest possible problem to solve for your ideal customers.
3. How to choose your Go-to-Market model and what specifics to look for
4. How he landed BMW as one of his early customers and what that taught him.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Harpreet Singh
• Website: Launchable

Oscar is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. A massive mission. He's founded and led multiple companies since 2010 - and has also gained experience as an investment analyst and head of growth and digital experience in online retail.

In September 2023, he co-founded eComID - based on negative trend he saw developing after COVID in online retail: A rapidly growing global returns problem.

Their mission: To help the fashion industry reduce online product returns, shrink the environmental footprint, and guide shoppers to discover and buy products they'll truly love.

This inspired me, and hence, I invited Oscar to my podcast. We explore how online shopping is broken and created a massive global retail returns problem - both in cost, waste and emissions. Oscar explains his vision of how to solve this with technology and by getting an entire industry to work together in new ways. He then shares his first principles for building a lean SaaS business that moves the needle impact-wise. Lastly, he elaborates on his lessons learned to stay nimble and avoid making fatal mistakes.

Here's one of his quotes

Coming from the industry, we managed to take the right decisions often. But we did it by taking a lot of bad decisions, but we found them really fast. So, what we do is that we explore a lot of different things. When we have something, for example, a feature idea, let's imagine that we explore 50 different ideas at the same time, but then we always keep the retailers very close. So we have weekly meetings with all of the retailers that we work with right now to always validate and align the need.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to get an entire industry to collaborate on solving the same problem.
2. Why he doesn't fear competition, and is actually cheering them to take on the opportunity.
3. His first principle on keeping the focus on moving the needle in the leanest possible way.
4. Different ways to build trust with organizations that are 1000+ times the size of your startup.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Oscar Rundqvist
• Website: eComID

JB is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He's had an impressive career in B2B SaaS Sales and has advised multiple tech companies for well over a decade.

He's addicted to endurance sports and has finished multiple marathons, ultra-running, ultra-cycling, and IRONMAN races. He also knows what it is to stand out from the crowd. His LinkedIn profile is testimony to that: He eats SaaS for breakfast, B2B Sales for lunch, and AI+Data for dinner. And he likes his food spicy!

In that spirit, he founded Evergrowth in December 2015. It started as a consulting business and turned into a B2B SaaS business, pioneering the Future of Account-Based Sales.

Their mission: To elevate the sales profession by empowering businesses with AI-driven strategies that are as human as they are smart.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited JB to my podcast. We explore how the B2B sales process is deteriorating and what needs to be done to fix it. We explore the big lessons learned from turning a consulting into a SaaS business. JB shares how his first principles as a consultancy helped them create defensible differentiation - and use AI to further expand that. He also explains how he's positioning his business to attract the right deals - and why everything in his business is designed around one customer success template.

Here's one of his quotes

Salespeople never had a good reputation. And I think it didn't get better because of the noise that was created by all the tools-driven approaches. So they need to acknowledge this and understand that in order now to have meaningful conversations and create meaningful pipelines, they need to understand how to speak their customer's language better than their competitors and better than their customers themselves. I'm super biased on having that opinion, but that's really the only way to win in 2024.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How JB managed to create defensible differentiation - and how he's using AI to grow it.
2. How to avoid your SaaS business ends up in the graveyard of the market.
3. How to turn engineering, marketing, sales, business operations, and customer success into an unbeatable engine for your business.
4. How endurance training helps you become a high-performing leader that doesn't break down.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• JB Daguené
• Website: Evergrowth

After receiving her PhD in aerospace engineering, Dr. Petrova spent 15+ years in the engineering simulation and design software industry, including holding global marketing executive roles at Ansys, Altium LLC, and IncMSC Software. She also worked at three simulation software start-ups, all of which were acquired by Ansys Inc. in the last 10 years.

In January 2023, she co-founded Nullspace - a spin-off from a Defense contractor business. Their mission: To solve the fast-worsening shortage of electromagnetic engineers needed to meet today’s radiofrequency technology demands.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Masha to my podcast. We explore the lessons learned from spinning off a software product from a Defense Contractor business and to build a SaaS business. Masha emphasizes the importance of co-founder chemistry, and shares the unexpected lessons learned from her fund-raising process. She shares her insights on how to adapt sales and marketing strategies for the conservative engineering fields. Last but not least she elaborates why solving a highly valuable problem through product innovation alone is not enough to succeed.

Here's one of her quotes:

Sure, we could have grown by sales only, or by raising angel funding. But what we really want is, because we know that our solution is viable and Product Market Fit has already been tested, we really want to push the button on sales and marketing.

And right now this space is very hot. There's been a whole bunch of unprecedented acquisitions and engineering software that happened recently. There is a company that just announced coming out of stealth with 115 million in VC funding. Not series A or Series B, out of stealth …. in this engineering software space that no one usually talks about unless you're an engineer.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to navigate Fundraising successfully by embracing some valuable lessons in communication and resilience.
2. How to win over conservative, facts-oriented engineers when marketing your SaaS product and optimally enable your team.
3. How to use pricing as a key element of differentiation for your SaaS offering.
4. How to avoid having to pivot at the moment of launching your SaaS product because of missing some technical details.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Masha Petrova Ph.D.
• Website: Nullspace

Slava is a driven innovator with +25 years of international experience and thought leader in the space of environmental sustainability in industrial facilities. He has a PhD in Environmental Engineering, and has spent his entire career focused on water technology and its impact on the industry.

He leads teams in Ultra Pure Water, industrial water treatment, and facilities technology development, thereby challenging conventional thinking to drive progress.

In May 2017, he founded FTD Solutions - a Digital Twin platform with embedded expertise to enable new standards of sustainability in industrial facilities

Their mission: To redefine the way these industrial facilities approach solving problems and drive sustainability performance.

And this triggered me, and hence I invited Slava to my podcast. We explore the seven-year journey of transitioning from a consulting firm to a pioneering B2B SaaS company. Slava shared his big lessons learned on the importance of aligning product development with market needs and the sequencing and focusing of his go-to-market strategy. He elaborates how traction changed when they shifted from a transaction-oriented approach to a value-/outcome based approach. Last but not least, he shares how emphasizing mission, principles, and value helped with alignment and keeping the organization lean.

Here's one of his quotes

When we try to help companies minimize their expenses, they ask the question, 'Okay, so what does your enrollment mean from the expense point of view?'

So, our focus is on value creation. We believe that if we can create significant value for our customers, then the question of monetization and expenses will not be a roadblock. And in reality, that's the case.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why he decided to focus the business on the most complex type of customer segment first and how that paid off.
2. Why it's so beneficial to search for unique dynamics at your customers when seeking ways to differentiate your SaaS product.
3. What approach he's using so that everyone in the company lives the company values - every single day.
4. Why he does't deal with weaknesses in his business.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Slava Libman
• Website: FTD Solutions

Pete Christothoulou is a serial entrepreneur. In 2003, he co-founded Marche, a publicly traded conversational analytics business.

In November 2020, he founded Xembly - The first automated chief of staff.

Its mission: Ensure your company isn't left behind as we're entering a new era of productivity.

This inspired me, so I invited Pete to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of increasing knowledge worker productivity. Pete shares his vision for reclaiming 44 billion hours annually in the US alone. He elaborates on how he accelerated his way to product-market fit and, from there, predictable traction. Last but not least, he shares what he'd do again if he ever started another Startup.

Here's one of his quotes

I agree with everyone that we have a transformative opportunity. So I think that's obvious. Where I don't agree is here: if we're not careful, AI will actually create more distraction for us and more pain as consumers, if we're not mindful.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to gather crucial feedback, even if your product isn't fully developed.
2. Why he chose to focus on enterprise customers instead of a potentially much larger SMB market.
3. What single metric he's staring at all day to see whether they make a difference
4. What's the difference between a co-pilot and an auto-pilot, and why this distinction could also affect your SaaS business?

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Pete Christothoulou
• Website: Xembly

Vinnie has become a regular guest on my podcast. This is the fourth time over the past 7 seasons. He’s the founder of Deal Architect – a Technology strategy and negotiation firm, a former Gartner analyst, and the author of Silicon Collar, SAP Nation, The New Polymath, and The New Technology Elite - which emphasize technology-enabled innovation using lots of case studies and use cases across industries and countries

He's also the prime interviewer/curator of thought leadership books for C-level executives at technology vendors SAP, Software AG, and IFS

In this podcast, we explore the evolving landscape of SaaS businesses together. We delve into the future of SaaS for 2024, discussing optimistic and rational viewpoints on market trends, highlighting the most important metrics to give extra focus, and discussing the shift towards customer-centric revenue models over traditional funding avenues.

We also address the untapped potential of generative AI and operational automation to enhance productivity and innovation in the B2B SaaS space. Furthermore, we explore what muscles to build to stay relevant in this rapidly changing and evolving market of Software as a Service.

Here's one of Vinnie's quotes:

Investors are sometimes fashion-driven. They follow what their colleagues tell them is predictable. So you don't often get the best advice by listening to investors. You have to go to the edge of the enterprise, to the remote parts of the world, sometimes to find opportunities.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why creating Funding freedom is essential for long-term SaaS success.
2. Which metrics to embrace to keep your SaaS business healthy as customer expectations evolve.
3. What routes to consider to access new technologies and markets with more speed.
4. Where to focus to seize growth opportunities beyond traditional markets

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Vinnie Mirchandani
• His blog: New Florence. New Renaissance
• Website: Deal Architect

Dean has over 34 years of experience as a CEO and founder of Infragistics, a user interface development tools platform, and an expert in User-Centered Design.

He scaled the business globally across 6 countries with a client roster that includes 100% of the S&P 500.

What is special is that he guided Infragistics to withstand a series of tumultuous moments in the Internet’s ongoing evolution (think: the dot-com tech bubble of the late 90s, the explosion of the Internet, and the 2008 recession).

Not that he got lucky– or happened to be in the right place at the right time, or worked harder than the next guy. He did it by crystallizing the insights at each key moment along the way–from common growing pains to completely unpredictable challenges–into a hard-won philosophy.

All his lessons are now bundled in his new book, “When Grit is Not Enough.”

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Dean to my podcast. We explore an inspiring journey of resilience of running a successful software business for +34 years. Dean talks about his near failures and shares the big lessons he learned to come out stronger, again and again. He digs into the fundamentals to build a resilient software business and how he's incorporating that into the day-to-day work, so it's lived to the fullest.

Here's one of his quotes:

There's nothing like the fear of going out of business to sit in your brain, "how can you do this better next time?" And, what it comes down to is really early investment is making bets on the future where you think the future is, and spending your money there. Even though if you report to others who want to have better financial performance, you have to always keep investing in the future and refreshing your technology. And like there's this great analogy that software's like lettuce it, as soon as you have it, it's already wilting.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to achieve the financial resilience to be able to don't fall behind.
2. What to prioritize to ensure culture stays healthy and everyone stays on track with the direction?
3. What two simple instruments Dean uses to navigate tough times.
4. How to build trust in periods where you have to lay off people.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dean Guida
• Website: Infragistics
• Dean's book: When Grit is Not Enough

When Justin and his co-founder, John Li, were working on another business they disagreed and wanted a fast, informed way to break the tie.

Being software engineers, they built it - and that is what sparked the big idea behind PickFu.

Although it stayed on the back burner for years, like all the best treasures on the internet, people discovered it. Customers used the polling platform and shared it with their friends. Then, in 2018, they started to see increased attention from e-commerce conferences and podcasts, which is where they realized they had built something truly useful.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore what's broken in consumer research. Justin takes us through his journey to the moment they decided to go all in. He explains why he decided to niche down - and what criteria appeared to be really important to get traction. He elaborates on how they're creating defensible differentiation. Last but not least, he explains how they're designing for stickiness across product, customer success, and marketing.

Here's one of his quotes:

The focus on industries is super important. Because it's really hard to market a general-purpose tool. But when you're able to speak directly to people about their problems, and their use cases, it resonates so much more quickly. So, for E-commerce and gaming, doing the marketing and starting to tailor the product much more specifically to those industries has been really important to getting our traction

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How often the best solutions are not the ones that help you do the task correctly, but giving confidence to even consider doing the task at all.
2. That even if companies have sorted your problem higher in the organization, it doesn't mean everyone has access to that.
3. How focusing on habit building helped to make the product mission-critical for some verticals - and reduce churn.
4. What adjustments he's making to make NRR calculation more reliable and relevant.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Justin Chen
• Website: PickFu

Rory is a Serial entrepreneur. He cofounded Flixtreme in 2013, founded Slyce Tech in 2015, and founded WeDelight in 2018.

In October 2019, he founded Trust Keith, a company that's dedicated to helping companies effortlessly manage their data protection and data compliance.

Their mission: to change the "boring" and "unsexy" stereotypes of data compliance to make data protection simple, easy to understand, and an enabler for businesses.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rory to my podcast. We explore what it takes to build a B2B SaaS business that stands the test of time. Rory elaborates on his big lessons from founding 3 other companies - and in particular what must be true. He shares the reasoning to shift focus from a product strategy perspective and how that strengthened their position. Last but not least, he shares how to turn even the most boring domain into something you can stand out and proudly own.

Here's one of his quotes:

By being high touch right now, we're just pulling so much better insights from our customers. I don't want to go and rush this, like 'Let's sprint to get arm's length away from our customers so that we can talk having a plg motion. We're not solving for investment. We're solving for customer retention, customer value, and revenue growth.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What questions to ask to build a business that has the foundation to last.
2. What product strategy battles you should have internally to become mission critical to the right segment of the market?
3. How to optimize your company for benchmark gross margin - without cutting corners.
4. How to align every aspect of your business to become 'the one' in your segment of the market.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Rory Codrington
• Website: Trust Keith

Ron's a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He's got close to 3 decades of experience in sales, product management, and marketing of highly technical software products. He's worked for Mercury Interactive, Symantec, and Automic Sofware (acquired by CA)

The technical scaling challenges he experienced on his journey inspired him to start xtype in April 2021. Their mission: to help ServiceNow development teams to deliver at speed the business demands without compromising quality or compliance.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ron to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to scaling and building large enterprise systems. Ron explains why he decided to bet on ServiceNow (instead of staying platform agnostic). He elaborates on why he decided to target the largest organizations in the world first. He shares some big lessons on becoming a platform player that gets noticed and what he had to do differently to gain the traction he aspired to.

Here's one of his quotes:

Coming from that space, you think, 'Hey, I can retrofit the toolchain and just build some integrations from Salesforce from ServiceNow. And I'll just run the tools that already exist. That is a huge mistake. Not because it doesn't work technically, technically you could probably do it, but because that overlooks the power of the ecosystem itself. There is a reason why Salesforce folks love Salesforce. There is a huge reason why ServiceNow folks love ServiceNow.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What it takes to build traction momentum in a platform-centric eco-system.
2. How to get attention from the largest companies in the world when you're building a new product.
3. What to never do when you're building a product that's dedicated to one specific platform.
4. Ron's first principles when it comes to funding or no funding.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ron Gidron
• Website: Xtype

Jason built four technology startups, both bootstrapped and funded, both alone and with co-founders. He grew all of them to more than $1M in annual revenue and has sold two.

Beyond that, he's been an angel investor and a founding member of Capital Factory, an Austin-based incubator and co-working space since 2009.

Since 2007, he's been documenting his experiences and thoughts about early-stage startups on his blog: A Smart Bear.

Based on his experiences and the challenges he faced as the blog grew, he founded WPEngine in 2010. It's a platform that provides brands with the solutions they need to create remarkable sites and apps on WordPress that drive their business forward faster.

Their mission: To help customers win online.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jason to my podcast. We explore his lessons in building successful companies. He elaborates on the importance of getting the problem definition right and understanding what moves potential customers to buy. He shares his views on how to select your market and betting a super-specific niche. He talks in detail about his rules for attracting funding (or not) - and what WPEngine did during COVID-19 to keep growing.

Here's one of his quotes:

The question is, what can you learn from customer interviews? I don't think you can use customer reviews to know, 'Can I build this? Would you buy this feature?'

But I do think you can use customer interviews for stuff like: What is their life like? What do they care about already, or not? What do they do? What are their workflows? Do they see this problem? Or don't they? Are these compelling?

These are things where if you build the product, you don't learn those things. Ask the customer, they actually can tell you because they're not solving the problem for you. They're not building the product for you. They're just telling you about themselves. That they can do.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What questions to ask to start your business with a solid foundation for long-term success
2. What makes hyper-specific SaaS companies grow faster
3. His first principle for thinking about raising funds that helps you to stay in control.
4. What he's looking for when making big bets when it comes to profitability.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jason Cohen
• Website: WPEngine
• Blog: A Smart Bear

Because this is a big milestone on the journey, I didn’t want to devote this podcast to one guest – instead, I got 23 B2B SaaS CEOs on the mic.

A big element of every single episode of the podcast is my question at the end of each episode.

What would be a Do or a Don't that you'd like to share with other SaaS entrepreneurs?

And so, I’ve made a hand-picked selection of these Do's & Don'ts from the last 100 podcast episodes

Let's start with the Don'ts

1. Neta Meidav, CEO Vault Platform: Don't take other entrepreneurs' advice on face value.
2. Melissa Kwan, CEO eWebinar: Don't start a business that you hate, even if it has success.
3. Emil Jimenez, CEO Mindbank AI: Don't think about the money
4. Aleks Gollu, CEO 11Sight: Don't bother people will steal your idea
5. Toni Hohlbein, CEO Growblocks: Don't forget where you are in the process
6. Sunny Han, CEO Fulcrum: Don't allow comfort to take over
7. Jon Ricketts, CEO Writerly: Don't limit yourself in your thinking
8. Patrick Woods, CEO Orbit: Don't ignore yourself
9. Charlotte Melkert, CEO Equalture: Don't think you need to be in control of everything
10. Antony Thomson, former CEO Loopin: Don't bring new people on unless you're 100% oversubscribed.
11. Barrett King, Sr. Manager Global GTM Strategy, Partner Ecosystem Hubspot: Don't use the sentence: I'm gonna build a partner program
12. Christian Owens, CEO Paddle: Don't malign yourself with having 2 different interpretations of what a good outcome looks like

And now over to the Do's

1. Melissa Kwan, CEO eWebinar: Do create your own definition of success
2. Amir Konigsberg, CEO Pragma: Do something that can be genuinely valuable for someone else
3. Lars van Wieren, CEO Starred: Do walk the walk and talk the talk
4. Patrick Woods, CEO Orbit: Do aggressively communicate - keep everyone on the same page
5. Christine Tao, CEO Sounding Board: Do ask for what you need

...

Matt Holland is an authority in the cybersecurity industry. He started his career at the Communications Security Establishment in 1999 as a leading security researcher for top-secret projects in the Five Eyes community. In 2007, he co-founded Linchpin Labs because he saw the opportunity to provide better solutions to democratic governments and corporate clients globally. The company was sold to L3 in 2018.

In January 2020, he co-founded Field Effect, which he leads as the CEO. Their mission: To turn the global cybersecurity landscape on its head by creating the technology and tradecraft to protect underserved small & medium-sized businesses from modern cybersecurity threats.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the cybersecurity industry, in particular for small and medium-sized businesses. Matt elaborates on the strategic choices he made early on to differentiate the business - being able to offer his solution at a fraction of the price of traditional players. He also shares his formula to build a sustainable business that can successfully compete with very large competitors.

Here's one of his quotes:

The mission of the company to protect small and medium businesses around the world is a really neat thing to see in action. We have stopped some incredibly challenging ransomware attacks. And when you think about it, if we weren't there, it would potentially be a business-ending event for the customer. It could potentially shut down a medical facility.

When it comes to job satisfaction, […] It's like a passion flywheel that feeds right back into it to make the entire product and service even better.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How Matt found the underserved markets he could serve like no one else.
2. How he's able to offer game-changing pricing in a very competitive market.
3. What he's steering for to increase the effectiveness of product development
4. What ingredients he's looking for to keep growing in challenging times.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matt Holland
• Website Field Effect

Aditya Varanasi is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He started his career at Frito-Lay as an engineer but quickly grew into a brand manager. After 8 years, he then moved to PepsiCo, where he worked for 14 years pioneering new ways to amplify the power of digital media across brands, including Cheetos, Cracker Jack, and Lays Stax.

He never dreamed of being an entrepreneur until he was faced with a choice: take a risk or sink back into Corporate America.

This sparked the idea and the courage to found Awarity in 2016.

Their mission: World-class marketing should be affordable to everyone.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Aditya to my podcast. We explore the journey to realize the mission to help small businesses compete with the big brands when it comes to marketing. Aditya elaborates on the initial struggles he experienced to get traction, and what he did differently to fix that. He also shares a framework for making conscious product strategy decisions so that value, stickiness, and differentiation increase. And last but not least, he shares his principles for aligning everyone and growing in a responsible way.

Here's one of his quotes:

I spoke to the co-founder of a large electronic medical records company in the US. And he gave me some feedback. He said, hey, look, if you can price this at $299 a month and guarantee what they're going to get, I think you've got something.

So I took that feedback very seriously. By the second week of December, we updated the website with a new pricing and value proposition. By the middle of December, we had signed up our first two doctors; by the end of January, we had about 25 doctors signed up. I said, Okay, there may be something here. We still had the same idea. But it was productizing it to something that was a value proposition that was overwhelming. That ultimately helped us get some traction.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to gain traction in a market that wants what you offer badly but can't afford it?
2. What principles Aditya uses to continue to bootstrap the business for as long as possible.
3. The four attributes he is using to score everything on his product roadmap.
4. The pragmatic approach he's using to keep everyone in the company aligned on the voice of the customer

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Aditya Varanasi
• Website Awarity

Jonny White started his career as a software engineer, building websites for clients. On his journey, he spotted a gap in the market for ticketing systems. That became the founding idea behind Ticket Tailor, which he founded in 2011. It started a wild entrepreneurial ride. He achieved product market fit and decided to sell his company after about 2 years. This made him an employee for the first time ever - but only for a short time, since he bought his company back only a few years later.

The next period, he ran it as a lifetime business to then realize its unique growth potential. The rest is history.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonny to my podcast. We explore the valuable insights Jonny learned from transitioning from a bespoke to a subscription model. He elaborates on the three things that make his company sustainable: the importance of simplicity, creating cycles of positivity, and tightly integrating social and business impact. Last but not least, he talks about how he remained resilient during the COVID turbulence and managed to come out as a stronger company.

Here's one of his quotes:

Keeping things simple is a very hard thing to do. But if you can do it, you can move mountains. Keeping things simple often gets confused with ignoring complexity. It's about unpacking that complexity and really understanding it as core. And then we're like, which is the one that's going to be simple, not in terms of this decision, but what's the one that makes it simple in terms of the long term for us, so that we're not compensating for that in the future?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to sell your SaaS business and then buy it back only a few years later, coming out stronger.
2. The methodology he used to gain the confidence to make some fundamental decisions for his business
3. How he doubled down on purpose helped double the business, grow NPS and eNPS scores to benchmark levels, stay very lean, and maintain a healthy profit.
4. Why obsessing over revenue and financials is not the leading thing if you want to build a business with staying power.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jonny White
• Website: Ticket Tailor

Mads Wedderkopp has been running SaaS companies for nearly a decade now. Mads started his career early at the age of 17. By age 18 he was managing 120 sales reps. After his early success, he founded his own SaaS company, which he scaled from 0 to 70+ employees and 7M USD ARR.

In July 2022, he was appointed CEO of Dreaminfluence, owned by Blazar Capital, where he has turned around the business and grown it from 360k USD ARR to +1M USD ARR in less than a year.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Mads to my podcast. We explore what Mads changed to create a cohesive culture to succeed. He then elaborates on the counterintuitive actions he took to battle the too-high churn numbers. He shares his secrets to building a healthy inbound funnel of talent. Last but not least, he explains how he's been able to 5x pricing AND introduce contractual commitments from customers as a means to further expand the fanbase.

Here's one of his quotes:

There is learning for everybody that sometimes you have to dare to invest in the right places, even though it doesn't necessarily yield an immediate return on investment. But that investment in product is what has helped us bring churn even further down. And enabled us to raise prices over and over again.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What questions to ask to reduce churn in your company.
2. Why you should prioritize cash over MRR in your early-stage SaaS journey.
3. How to increase the quality of your customer base.
4. Why customers should pay for onboarding - and how to get them to do so.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Mads Wedderkopp
• Website Dreaminfluence

Aaron is a tech entrepreneur on an ambitious mission. He's got over eight years of experience in sales and sales management. Working for companies like Qualtrics, Octa, and Lacework gave him a proven track record of leading and growing sales teams in various markets, such as enterprise, corporate, and international. The challenges he faced during that period inspired him and his co-founder to found Alisio in October 2022.

Their mission: to empower sales professionals with the tools and insights they need to achieve their goals and refine their Sales teams.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Aaron to my podcast. We explore why, instead of building a tool primarily for revenue operations, he decided to bet on the end-users (sales reps), thereby challenging the traditional approach of building tools for Sales backend operations. We discuss the toughest challenges he had to overcome early on his journey, thereby prioritizing the success of the business over personal considerations. He elaborates on his 'Minimalist Funding Approach' - acknowledging the necessity of funding, but still advocating for a lean approach. And last but not least, he explains why he and his team decided to take AI off their roadmap.

Here's one of his quotes:

We see, in the future, essentially a three-legged stool. And to us, that three-legged stool is comprised of the three most important parts of any sales organization: customers, revenue, and people. And so you talk about customer data: Salesforce HubSpot. You talk about revenue data: Clari, Gong, Outreach. And then, when you talk about the people, 'How do you understand the people who are your most important asset and most valuable asset?', that's almost always where the crickets come up.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he identified a gap in sales tools despite using all the popular ones.
2. How they are creating a market perception to be a much bigger company than they really are.
3. Aaron's leadership style to use humility to make up for the things he doesn't know as a SaaS CEO.
4. Why he's focused on understanding and rewarding individual sales performance, challenging the norm of board, organization-level metrics.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Aaron McReynolds
• Website Alysio

Sharekh is a 2X founder in the human capital and the future of workspace. He has successfully created businesses that have generated $ multi-million in sales.

Sharekh’s story is about an immigrant’s Silicon Valley dream. He has lived and worked in 4 different countries and traveled to over 35 countries. He spends most of his time understanding how people collaborate and share knowledge in different contexts of work.

Before becoming a tech entrepreneur, Sharekh worked with Gartner. He helped them build programs so technology leaders across industries could collaborate with each other in a trusted space.

The challenges he had to overcome in that period inspired him to found CleverX in January 2020.

Their mission: To make human knowledge accessible to all and be your trusted place to build real relationships and get work done.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Sharekh to my podcast. We explore the journey of building a solution for the broken B2B market in commercial research. Sharek digs into the critical choices he made early on and explains his first principles for creating a SaaS business that people find worth making a remark about. He shares his views on avoiding dependence on venture capital and getting pricing right from the start. Last but not least, he shares what it takes to navigate various company phases successfully.

Here's one of his quotes:

Finding a specific set of customers is really, really valuable rather than trying to go after five different people. Because your product can serve five people. It's not like we won't. But where does it really solve a pain where people are excited and ready to give you the money right away? That is what you should be looking for.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why he doesn't believe in Minimum Viable Product and what he did instead to drive success early in the process.
2. Why he'd explore more verticals at the same time - if he'd ever get the chance.
3. How he's testing whether he's on the right track with his product fit and strategy.
4. What he's doing differently to get feedback that translates directly into his development choices.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Sharekh Shaikh
• Website: CleverX

Patrick Oehler was born in Munich, Germany. After graduating from high school, he studied information-oriented business administration at the University of Augsburg and Management & Strategy at the London School of Economics (LSE). Subsequently, he completed his doctorate in Organizational Research at the Technical University of Munich, where he researched behavioral patterns in organizations. This is where he and his co-founder and co-CEO, Christoph Hohenberger, stumbled upon a big idea that would spark the birth of Retorio.

Retorio is on a mission to create a world where people feel accepted, satisfied, and fulfilled in their work, relationships, and company culture. How? By spotting success patterns in teams, hiring matching talents, and developing them into top performers.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Patrick to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we do recruitment today, particularly in large organizations. Patrick shares how 'simply' changing the order of doing creates a revolution - one that creates unbeatable organizations. He digs into how he created traction by niching down and homing in on the most valuable and critical use case. He shares a fascinating story about how he ignored advice from investors on who to target/ not to target - and with that, found a market that's prepared to pay a premium and now represents 80% of the revenue. Last but not least, he shares his experience on what it takes to create a software business that cannot be ignored.

Here's one of his quotes

"Our investor told us 'don't sell to these clients because they're way too big, they're way too complicated - don't do enterprise sales. You don't know how to do that. You must go for the small ones, this way you can scale way more quickly.' And we always tried to do that, but then once again, the enterprise clients signed up and they were like, 'We're gonna pay more, and we're gonna pay more.' And they offered us big amounts of money to use the technology. And at some point, we said, okay, maybe we should stop resisting.'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How flipping the process can be the key to creating a product that creates a revolutionary impact
2. How a compelling vision can attract critical resources to your startup that are even prepared to work for free
3. How to break the barriers to getting customers to sign up for demos
4. Why your go-to-market should be ultra specific, even though your platform can support 100s of use cases

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dr. Patrick Oehler
• Website Retorio

Juha Berghäll is a visionary leader and a serial entrepreneur with a wealth of experience in the IT domain. His background spans over 20 years in enterprise service management.

Throughout his career, Juha has held pivotal roles, from being the Chairman of the Board and a Founding Partner at Verco Oy to serving as the Director of Marketing & Partners at Efecte Corp.

Juha's passion lies in tackling the biggest bottleneck of enterprise digitalization - integrations. He understands the challenges faced by Large Enterprise IT service providers who strive to collaborate with teams, vendors, suppliers, partners, and subcontractors on different platforms.

That's where Juha and ONEiO come in. He envisions an industrial revolution in the enterprise integration space, moving from a hand-made approach to an industrialized, automated, and cloud-based model.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Juha to my podcast. We explore the shift from one-stop shops to best-of-breed providers and what challenges that gives to managing IT supply chains in a changing business landscape. He shares how he made hard choices on his business model, thereby avoiding consultancy temptation. He then elaborates on the big lessons he learned from international expansion, the impact of VC funding, and his evolving go-to-market strategies.

Here's one of his quotes:

We really changed the game. We wanted to move away from the traditional red ocean of projects, integration projects, and technologies and platforms and provide something that focuses on the end result.

​​This is a really new and different approach for this industry. It required, of course, a quite drastic change in that we cannibalized our own business.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why he decided to cannibalize his business and what it meant to succeed in doing so.
2. Why he decided to bootstrap the company instead of immediately jumping into the venture capital train
3. Why he'd opt to internationalize the business earlier if he'd do it again
4. How niching down his target market helped to increase deal size by 5x.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Juha Berghäll
• Website: ONEiO

Guy is a tech entrepreneur on a big mission. He has worked for three companies in his career. From 2011 to 2013, they worked at Morgan Stanley in the RVR Group. From 2013 to 2015, they worked at Seeking Alpha as the Director of Business Development and Business Development.

During that period, he faced a number of repeating problems and started to look for solutions. The result: He and his co-founder started Wonder in 2015.

Their mission: to make the world a little more curious.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Guy to my podcast. We explore the profound link between curiosity and business success. Guy shares the pitfalls of not asking the right questions and how that sparked the idea to founding Wonder. He shares why he chose the route of augmenting human potential and how he helped create defensible differentiation. He also elaborates on the challenges they faced getting traction and what he needed to change to accelerate momentum.

Here's one of his quotes:

Every LLM and every AI right now is trained in the way that schools train us, which is to lead to a solution to lead to an answer. We took a very different approach. We've been answering professional questions for the better part of eight years, what we've learned is that the initial question you pose is seven degrees removed from the actual things you need to know. And the only way to get to the right set of questions is to ask more clarifying questions. So we built a clarification engine called Claire, short for clarity.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why most failures and how are related to money are a consequence of not being curious enough.
2. How blending technology with a human element has helped them to deliver value no other company can.
3. Why, if he could rewind the clock and do something differently, he'd choose to narrow the aperture of who they are serving and why.
4. How fear inhibits the asking of essential questions and hindering progress - and how to overcome that.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Guy Cohen
• Website: Wonder
• Try Wonder for Free

Graham is an authority on Sales AI, the author of "Seeing Around Corners", and an industry tech leader with more than 10 years of commercial experience.

He started his career as a UK Commando Forces Officer. During this career, he realized the power of simulations and how this was a very good way to help teams respond positively to transformation.

This sparked the idea to found see6 in 2014 - which he leads as the CEO.

Their mission: help organizations, teams and individuals prepare for tomorrow.

Their promise: Help sales teams go 6X faster.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Graham to my podcast. We explore how sales is evolving as a skill - and what's required to succeed. Graham shares his vision to enable this in CPG. He also explains why he decided to niche down (and say no to very big markets) and how that's made a meaningful difference in the traction they're creating. He also shares his framework for making the best product strategy decisions. Last but not least, he shares how he avoids his teams to become too internally focused - and how that helped them to become a Remarkable SaaS business.

Here's one of his quotes:

Relationship-based selling isn't really relevant in this new environment. The real skill for sales teams to turn it going forward, is actually a writing skill. Their ability to construct compelling sales narratives. This whole relationship-based, 'Hey, buddy, how are you doing and taking you out?' that's not what buyers want anymore. They want much more. They want insight. They want that consumer category lens so that they can see around the corner and what's coming next for their shoppers.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why a very important decision was to not work with marketing, but sales instead.
2. Why he discarded Pharma as a market as 'way too big' - and how that made everything easier.
3. How he tested for Problem Market Fit - and how that accelerated Product Market Fit.
4. How See6 is leveraging first-mover advantage in the Generative AI world.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Graham Hogg
• Website: See6

Joe Lewin is a two-time SaaS founder who successfully sold his first business in 2022. Since selling his company, his vocation has been to modernize the antiquated M&A process for other tech founders.

The demand for a modernized exit process has been accelerated by the turbulence in the tech sector and the broader economy, especially now that it's become harder to raise funding. However, founders face a bottleneck issue because most investment banks and advisory firms primarily focus on serving the most prominent companies (i.e., £15m+ in revenue). Foundry is focusing on the bottom 90% of companies.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Joe to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the SaaS M&A market. Joe shares his vision and the change he's committed to creating. He talks about the fundamental decisions he made and the mindset he follows to create a business that lasts. He elaborates on his learnings on how they created early momentum - and how that's now accelerated through word of mouth. Last but not least, he shares what he learned from the mistakes he made in hiring.

Here's one of his quotes:

I've met hundreds and hundreds of founders now, even those that may raise double-digit VC funding, and a lot of them really do not have the knowledge or insight on how to maximize their valuation upon an exit. And they haven't laid the foundations to build that deep-rooted value

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why community-led growth is underrated - especially as a way to get people committed and create viral benefits.
2. The viability of your SaaS business isn't what you say yes to, but who you say no to.
3. The sticky part of your SaaS business doesn't necessarily have to be the product you create.
4. The value your customers love you for isn't often coming from the software but from the life-changing moments.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Joe Lewin
• Website: Foundy

George has been a business/tech/design geek for a long time. That's manifested in a career that started as a web designer and has culminated in him being the co-founder of a few really great companies.

In October 2011, he became the CEO of Opal, a platform Built for Marketers

Their mission: To enable marketing teams to spend less effort maintaining internal alignment and more time doing the work that matters.

George led Opal till July 2016 - stepped down as the CEO - to then take back the scepter in January 2021.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited George to my podcast. We explore the 12-year journey of Opal and what have been the fundamental choices to grow the business to where it is today. We discuss the lessons he learned from stepping down as the CEO - seeing things from a different perspective - and what that meant when he took on the CEO role again halfway through the pandemic. He also elaborates on the challenges he faced managing two innovation S-curves in the business. Last but not least, he shares his secret to create a business people want to fight for.

Here's one of his quotes:

As a startup person, you had an initial jump, and your ego is like, 'Yeah, we could do anything, we're so great.' The idea of a slowdown is not even in your mind at all. And so, there's a lot of hubris that happens when you craft all these parts of your product, they are your darlings, and then you have to kill them in order to get to the 'What's next'. You've got to admit failure first.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The one thing George tests every time to know they're making the right product strategy decisions
2. How the pandemic - and NOT being in the CEO seat gave him the clarity it was time to reinvent themselves.
3. What George learned from managing the company through a period of two overlapping S-curves - and what he'd do differently next time.
4. What signals to watch for to uncover 'the rotten core' problem and realize you've entered a dead-end road.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• George Huff
• Website: Opal

Jon's career in the SaaS industry spans over 12 years. He has established himself in the field of artificial intelligence and business innovation. Jon’s journey as an entrepreneur began as an early employee at Transcard, a pioneering fintech company specializing in payment processing.

In June 2022, he co-founded Writerly, which he leads as the CEO.

Their mission: to make it easy for creators – both individual and enterprise – to leverage sophisticated AI to supercharge their productivity.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore what it takes to build a successful Generative AI startup in a period where a tsunami of companies is coming to market every single day. Jon shares how he started the business without a clear idea of what problem to solve and how he found his sweetspot. He then elaborates on what techniques he uses to build defensible differentiation and stand out in the market. Last but not least, he shares his secrets on how to stay nimble as the business grows.

Here's one of his quotes:

The hardest part about being in a generative AI market and seeing the tsunami of companies that are being released is just simply being patient. You try to weaponize speed, speed in terms of development, speed in terms of commercial marketing and sales. But the faster you move, the further back you fall.

Because when you see something that you would like to replicate this week. Well, by the time your engineers and developers have completed, you've done your testing, and you're moving from staging to production, guess what's happened: someone else has come out and made that essentially obsolete.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How being intentionally patient can become your biggest value driver in a crazy Generative AI market.
2. Where Jon is looking for signals on what to build and how to sell.
3. How Jon found his sweetspot - even though it didn't look attractive at all.
4. How to design your business intentionally to create defensible differentiation.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jon Ricketts
• Website: Writerly

Melissa is a 3rd-time bootstrapped founder. Her previous company, Spacio (real estate tech), was acquired in 2019.

eWebinar was the product she always dreamt about because she was drowning in sales demos, onboarding, and training webinars every day for 5 years.

So, in March 2019, she made the jump and founded the eWebinar.

Her mission: to give people their time back so they can do something else more fun because that's what life is about.

We don't need to work harder; we need to work more creatively.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Melissa to my podcast. We explore how she built a $1M ARR business from scratch - deliberately going the bootstrapped way. Melissa elaborates on her experiences in building software that helps her customers provide experiences that their customers love to engage with. She talks about how getting her first 200 customers was easy but how growing beyond that became a big challenge - and how she overcame that. Last but not least, she shares some of her secrets to creating a SaaS business without getting into the vicious cycle of desperately chasing funding.

Here's one of her quotes:

The toughest nut to crack is not getting it launched and adopted with your first 200 customers. The toughest stuff to crack is what happens after you've exhausted your entire network and their friends.

That was a huge reality check for me. Because that didn't happen until about a year after launch. Because all I know is sales, I didn't realize that what I need for this business is marketing.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why she's (being an automation-passionate) is betting on SEO and LinkedIn content creation instead of cold outreach automation?
2. What's her secret to creating predictable traction (knowing there are no shortcuts)?
3. How doubling her prices became a blessing for her business in many different ways
4. Why she'd opt for bootstrapping her company again if she'd had the choice again?

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Melissa Kwan
• Website: eWebinar

Yoav is a remarkable tech entrepreneur. He was the founder of one of the world’s first tech marketing companies that helped 600 startups grow and a founding CMO of an anti-bullying startup.

He has been active as a startup mentor with accelerators by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and the U.N. and as a writer for top outlets such as Inc Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, Entrepreneur, and more.

In August 2020, he co-founded Walnut - which he leads as the CEO.

With Walnut - they pioneered a category that enables sales pros to deliver interactive and unbreakable product demos.

Then they launched a movement for prospects that had to suffer through frustrating sales processes that took forever.

And then reinvented SaaS sales - by enabling interactive product demos that focus on value at any stage of the sales process.

Their mission: To solve the pain of buying software and create a way for prospects to fall in love with your product.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Yoav to my podcast. We explore the journey of a startup that rapidly gained traction in the market. Yoav explains why he prioritized brand building from day one and how that helped them differentiate themselves in the saturated sales product market. Last but not least, he elaborates on the power of creating a movement - not only incorporating your ideal customers - but also their ideal customers.

Here's one of his quotes:

Every time that we're working on a new video, we say, 'Let's just push it and see if people are sick of it.' It just helps us tell the story in a way that no other company is able to do it. And so every time we push the limits and boundaries, we just find out that the experiment has been successful.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That you can capture immense value from the market even at the MVP stage.
2. How you can get potential customers to commit before you've even fully explained your product
3. Yoav's lessons about how he leveraged external funding in a way that only created winners.
4. Why they took an aggressive approach to show as little as they could to prospects - and why that paid off.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Yoav Vilner
• Website: Walnut

Doug Camplejohn is a Tech-Entrepreneur on a Mission. Before his entrepreneurial ventures, he was VP of Marketing and Product Management at enterprise (Epiphany), security (Vontu), and consumer (Apple) companies.

Then he founded and became the CEO of three startup companies. Myplay, which was acquired by Bertelsmann. Mi5 Networks, which was acquired by Symantec. And finally, Fliptop, which was acquired by LinkedIn. In January 2020, he left LinkedIn to become the EVP and GM of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

In July 2021, he founded Airspeed, a suite of Slack and mobile apps that provide fun and simple ways to connect with your teammates. Their mission: to help employees feel connected and celebrated

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Doug to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses build culture in a remote-first world. Doug shares his vision of how to fix this by means of technology - creating an operating system for culture. As we discuss his journey, he explains what early decisions had been fundamental to avoid having to do a complete rebuild when his product hypothesis appeared wrong. He also dives into how he arrived at the perfect shipping cadence for his business and his customers, and how he embraced a language to encourage everyone to push the art of the possible. Last but not least, he shares their approach to creating momentum by leveraging customer stories.

Here's one of his quotes:

We've seen tremendous traction, thousands of companies, and tens of thousands of users on the apps in the first few weeks. It's all about this understanding that employee connectedness is either the number one cause of retention if you're happy and you're really feeling connected to the team and the mission, or the number one cause of unhappiness and people departing when it's not. And so this is really about reinforcing that.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How do you build tremendous traction at the launch stage of your SaaS product
2. Why you should be firm on the destination but flexible on the path.
3. Why everyone should be involved in product - not only the product department - and everyone should be looking at the metrics.
4. How to accelerate growth by leveraging tech to serve product-qualified leads to Sales

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Doug Camplejohn
• Website Airspeed

Josh Haynam is a life-long entrepreneur, having started his first company at the age of 15 and never held a full-time job outside of entrepreneurship.

In June 2014, he and his co-founder started Interact, a company that's all about connecting brands and customers at a human level

They bootstrapped the company up to this point, and have helped more than 150,000 customers generate over 21 million leads and counting for their businesses.

Their mission: to empower digital entrepreneurs, creators, and brands to grow their business through empathetic listening, deeper understanding, and true connection.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Josh to my podcast. We explore his bootstrapped journey and the critical choices he and his co-founder had to make along the journey. Josh explains how he's been able to create defensible differentiation from the start. He shares his big lessons learned to accelerate profitability. Last but not least, he explains how COVID led to a big spike in revenue, that quickly became the worst thing that could ever happen to his company - and the counterintuitive thing he's done to come out stronger.

Here's one of his quotes:

There's always this difficulty around like, we could go faster, or we could build more or we could compete better if we were to have funding or if we would just be able to hire these people.

What I always end up remembering is: There are no shortcuts. We're seeing now a lot of our competition shedding users, because they acquired them in a way that wasn't profitable. And so now they have to get rid of them. And that's just like doubly wasting money because it costs money to acquire that user. And then they're also going to be a detractor for your business. It doesn't actually work. It's just really tempting.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What to stay true to when you want to build a SaaS business that lasts.
2. The power of credibly detracting customers you don't want.
3. What to do when you're overwhelmed by a flood of better-funded competitors.
4. His tips about the best way to build marketing that works

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Josh Haynam
• Website Interact

Joel loves building businesses and has 20+ years of experience doing just that. He built a supply chain business from $2MM to $30MM, a B2C eCommerce business from $50MM to $100MM, and a B2B business, from scratch to several hundred million. He earned a BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Yale School of Management.

In March 2017, he joined Yesware as their SVP of Sales & Marketing. He then transitioned into the COO role - and today, he's the CEO.

Their mission: To help sales professionals deliver positive buying experiences and build the valuable relationships their customers deserve.

This inspired me, and hence, I invited Joel to my podcast. We explore Joel's journey with Yesware and the challenges he had to overcome growing it in an extremely dense market with many better-funded competitors. We discussed how he'd carved out his niche and what that meant for product strategy, marketing, and sales. Joel then elaborates on how a rise in prices during COVID-19 had an unexpected positive effect on the overall quality of the business. Lastly, we discuss the effects of the merger with Vendasta.

Here's one of his quotes:

A lot of our early value as a company was driven because we have a very good Salesforce integration. But the peril with that strategy was that with Salesforce as a system of record, we're effectively putting all of our data inside of Salesforce.

And then if somebody decides that they're unhappy with Yesware, for whatever reason [...] it doesn't end up becoming that difficult to switch.

And so I wish we would have done earlier what we're doing now - is completing the story where Yesware becomes more of the system of record. I think that would have massively increased our stickiness. The promise of product-led is easy acquisition. The peril of product-led is retention. And that was the thing that we had to keep working on.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can create meaningful differentiation in an extremely dense market
2. The true value of your saas is often about what you offer, but how and where you offer it. It's all about context.
3. How one simple (but controversial) change can help attract much better quality customers
4. The power of reflecting on the potential of the success of your SaaS business - and taking an open mindset (without ego) on how to achieve it.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Joel Stevenson
• Website Yesware

Stijn Hendrikse is a serial entrepreneur and author and has been a growth leader with over 20 years of experience in both SaaS and AI industries. Early in his career, He was a GM at Microsoft and then served as CMO and CEO for multiple B2B SaaS companies, including MightyCall and Acumatica.

Then he founded Kalungi, a growth-as-a-service provider, and wrote T2D3 (Triple, Triple, Double, Double, Double), a book on how to scale SaaS businesses after finding product-market fit.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Stijn to my podcast. We explore the big lessons Stijn learned in growing a range of B2B SaaS businesses - and dig into the typical mistakes companies make trying to scale their business too early, too fast.

Stijn discusses his 10-step framework to measure whether you've received product market fit and shares his assessment technique to understand whether a SaaS company has future potential or not. Last but not least, we discuss the art of segmentation, particularly if you're addressing a totally new market.

Here's one of his quotes:

If you're a CEO or founder, it's your number one job to answer two questions. Who's it for, and what's it for? What's the value proposition that you're bringing to the markets? And why is that important for the people that you're trying to serve? You cannot delegate those two questions to anybody else.

And a great way to test your theory: if you're unable to articulate that in some content, either a podcast episode like this or in a blog article, you're really not ready to scale your company.

During this interview, you will learn five things:

1. What's the most important indicator of long-term success for a B2B SaaS company?
2. The 10 steps to measure whether you have product market fit - or not.
3. Three of most important questions a B2B SaaS CEO needs to answer after finding product market fit.
4. The three things to nail if you're looking to attract investors for your SaaS business
5. How to go about segmentation if there's no market yet

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Stijn Hendrikse
• Website T2D3
• 10 steps to measure product market fit

Kelsey is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. She started her career as an employee in early-stage startups. She is also an angel investor in companies that include Primer, Roster, Alongside Finance, Noula Health, Candid Health, Taiyaki, Areyo (acq. Zillow), and Channeled.

Throughout her career, she worked on teams that felt like magic and worked on teams where that wasn't the case. Curious as she was, she started digging into why that was the case.

But getting visibility on how a team really works together is hard. Tools like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are cluttered with spam, virtue-signaling, and fake or toxic profiles.

So, without finding a solution, she decided to create one herself and founded Candor in May 2021.

Their mission: help people find belonging at work. Candor believes true job satisfaction in tech comes when you can be yourself in a team where you are included and accepted.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Kelsey to my podcast. We explore what's so hard about qualifying cultures inside organizations. Kelsey then shares the steps that were critical on her journey to get the company off the ground without a tech team and obtain the funding to accelerate its growth. She then elaborates on what she did differently to make users come back every single day to build the culture they desire. Lastly, she explains how she's able to grow the business without spending anything on marketing - purely leveraging the remarkable effect.

Here's one of her quotes:

We're building some of those tools for day-to-day culture. What we hear from users is, 'A profile is great for onboarding or for this one moment, but company culture happens every single day. And so candor actually can help you manage how you celebrate your people, how you do retros, how you do one-on-ones. All of these moments that require intentionality. And on the flip side, startups usually get them wrong. They're not thinking about this stuff every single day. And when you don't think about it, you usually let it fall by the wayside, and you get it wrong.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. You can start a successful Tech Startup and your first raving fans without a tech team.
2. Delivering your promises to investors is about doing what makes value sense to your customers and the business - even if this means delaying or even abandoning the original vision you promised them.
3. Finding your sweetspot starts with finding the people that care about the same.
4. The reason why people fall in love with your product is not what it does but how it will make them feel.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Kelsey Bishop
• Website Candor

Guillaume is a prototype of a tech entrepreneur on a mission.

In the last 3.5 years, Guillaume Moubeche has founded 2 businesses. One that he grew to $600,000 ARR and sold. The other, Lempire, he is currently growing past $10M+ ARR and +20.000 customers worldwide - all without funding.

The fact his business is now valued at more than $150,000,000 inspired him to write the book titled "The $150M Secret" - and with that, he follows one the core principles that got him where he is today: share knowledge with as many people as possible.

Lempire is a group of passionate and curious individuals who have a very healthy obsession with building the world’s finest products and helping entrepreneurs worldwide grow profitable and successful businesses.

Their mission: help 1,000,000 entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses by 2025.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Guillaume to my podcast. We explore his approach to building a successful SaaS business with a bootstrapped mindset. He shares how, in anything he does, community is a fundamental pillar of his approach. He talks about how, over time, he has mastered taking something that doesn't exist off the ground. Last but not least, he elaborates on how he's been able to successfully overcome some extreme throwbacks in his entrepreneurial life - such as his two co-founders leaving the business without notice - and how this has made him and the business stronger.

Here's one of his quotes:

It took us maybe two years to go from zero to 1 million in annual recurring revenue. But after two years, I realized in the community that people were struggling with their emails, ending up in spam. I was like, 'I can automate that.' And that's when I launched Lemwarm, which was a new product to help people get the best email deliverability possible.

It's quite funny to see how things work. Because if you're very close to your customers, and you're listening carefully to what they're saying and what is the real struggle, then it's a lot easier to actually build a solution from it.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The power of community - and how this helps build momentum across product, marketing, and sales.
2. How he's creating differentiated power over his competitors beyond his products.
3. The secret behind Guillaume's formula: Growth = Speed * Momentum
4. Why he's for perfect execution and not for perfect process - and how that helped him.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Guillaume Moubeche
• Website Lempire

Rachel Renock has held various positions in the creative industry since 2009. Digital Design Intern at VOX Global. Associate Art Director at G2 Worldwide. Art Director and Visual Designer at Havas Worldwide and, ultimately, in 2015, a freelance role as a Photographer/ Designer at OPAM.

After quitting her job in advertising to pursue more meaningful work, she co-founded a freelance studio to put together project-based teams for nonprofit organizations. In just 18 months, this generated $1.4 million in gross revenue and deployed over 150 diverse creative teams of the best and brightest.

But with their fast growth came the chaos of scale and a mountain of spreadsheets. From figuring out what to charge to putting scopes of work together to managing invoices and payments to collaborators, the paperwork never seemed to end.

This became the founding idea for Wethos, which she leads as the CEO.

Wethos is solving arguably the most difficult challenge in the freelance economy.

Vision: Put more money into the pockets of independents everywhere

Their mission: make it easier for founders to start and scale their freelance businesses and help more people break 6-figures.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rachel to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way freelancers manage their business. Rachel shares her vision of how to solve this. She then elaborates on how she's been addressing the problem radically differently from the start - and how that helped to create strong momentum, growing from serving 100 freelancers in 2020, to well over 80.000 businesses today. She shares her lessons learned, what to pay attention to (and what not). Last but not least, she shares her perspective on creating a SaaS business people start talking about and keep talking about.

Here's one of her quotes:

One thing that we were really cognizant of is making sure that we were focusing on profitability and not productivity, I think there is a challenge there. There is a lot of productivity software. There are a lot of software providers out there that are going to tell you, we're going to save you my time, we're gonna make you more efficient.

With our software, we want it to help freelancers make more money, we wanted to help them to capture more margin, and we wanted it to help them figure out how much we should charge for this thing.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Not every business is managed equally - and that's a massive opportunity to create durable differentiation.
2. Many SaaS founders become a magnet for competition just by selecting the problem they solve for.
3. How to solidly embed your vision into every decision made inside your SaaS business.
4. Some simple secrets to creating a messaging that resonates

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Rachel Renock
• Website Wethos

Brett is a serial entrepreneur. He began his career on Wall Street as an equity research analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, Since then, he has spent his entire career building or investing in technology startups, including stints as an EIR at PrimaryVC, Co-Founder of Switchapp and Sonar (pioneering location-based social network), Director of Investments at Appfund and Vice.

Today, he's the President & Co-Founder of Kumospace, the virtual office platform where teams show up.

When the pandemic hit, he quickly realized the technology for hosting immersive virtual events was pretty terrible. He knew there had to be a better way. And thus, Kumospace was born.

Their mission: to make online connections more meaningful by building the most human spaces on the internet.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we enable remote work these days. Brett shares his vision on creating solutions that are game-changers in this space. Then he talks about how the biggest hurdle in going to market is not so much selling the product but selling the organizational transformation that's required - and how they go about solving this. Last but not least, he talks about the biggest lessons he learned around go-to-market and scaling his organization- and how to avoid making the same mistakes next time.

Here's one of his quotes:

Truly disruptive tools usually compete on a completely different axis than what they've replaced. So they're not just cheaper or faster, but they're actually qualitatively different in a way. That changes the game.

Virtual offices, like Kumospace, have that characteristic. Sure, there's no substitute for truly being in person with other people. What I can say is that by working remotely, there are all these crazy benefits that you could never get if you tried to co-locate everywhere in one city.

You don't have to pay hundreds of 1000s of dollars for office space. You can hire the best people from anywhere in the world. You can give your people the flexibility to choose where in the world they work. You can give them time flexibility. That changes the game. And but I am a believer in anything that can be done over the Internet will eventually be done over the Internet.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The principles Brett used to narrow down the focus of his SaaS business
2. How to go about gaining traction if the sales is not about your product, but about getting people to gain a leap of faith
3. The secret behind Kumospace's 'crazy high' retention rates
4. Brett's secret (today) to hit the numbers predictably.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Brett Martin
• Website: Kumospace

Toni has spent the last decade growing B2B SaaS startups successfully as a CRO, leading to two exits.

He discovered that revenue planning and execution was fundamentally broken. The old approach is finance-heavy and is skipping over a ton of important details CROs need to know to hit their revenue targets.

So he started working on a solution and created an operating model that help the business he was working for hit target 12 quarters in a row.

He learned that other startups had the same problem, which sparked the idea to create Growblocks together with his cofounders Olafur & Andrew.

The mission: help organizations unlock their revenue potential.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Toni to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses run revenue operations. Toni shares his vision of how to solve this - based on an approach that delivered remarkable results at his previous company - helping them grow from €10 to €50 million in 12 straight quarters. He shares the big lessons learned in taking his startup from idea to ready for primetime and outlines what ingredients have been fundamental to get right from the start. Last but not least, he shares what he's specifically steering for to create a SaaS business people will start talking about and keep talking about.

Here's one of his quotes:

We are not a forecasting tool that tells you which number you're going to hit in q1. We're helping you to figure out what number you are gonna hit at the end of the year. What are the long-term revenue goals you want to achieve?

Then you start executing. And what you then very quickly see is that some part of the engine is going to veer off course. Otherwise, you would have probably seen this in the post-mortem that you have in your quarterly business review in three and a half months from now. We ping you if something is off. We give you a root cause analysis of why it is off. And then you can fix it. And that is a very nice, straightforward, you could even say, agile cycle that we are enabling organizations to do in real-time instead of having quarterly business reviews to then tweak something.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to go about challenging the status quo in a mature market
2. How changing one word in your positioning can change everything for the traction you experience
3. How to empower your champions to drive the buying process from the inside
4. The mistakes many startups make that put their buyers in a disagreeing spiral, instead of a nodding spiral
5. How to spark word-of-mouth if you're selling big enterprise SaaS tools

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Toni Hohlbein
• Website Growblocks

Jason is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He inherited his single mother’s work ethic as he worked various blue-collar jobs to fund his education. He started his career at McKinsey & Company. He then became an entrepreneur and joined the early days of Uber, where he launched and grew cities in the western US as a Regional General Manager. Fast forward to today, and Jason has built multiple tech unicorns, including rideshare giant 99. His latest venture, Sh1ft, helps remove friction from employment across frontline labor industries such as manufacturing and healthcare.

He is passionate about using technology to empower and uplift the frontline workforce, which he believes is the backbone of the economy and society.

That became the trigger to found Movo in early 2019 to address the challenges and opportunities of this segment, which is often overlooked and underserved by traditional HR solutions.

Their mission: To improve the gig economy by making it as good for employees as it has been for employers.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jason to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way the market has access to talent. Jason puts his finger on the opportunity HRTech vendors have failed to address and shares his vision of how to solve this global problem by taking a fresh approach. He shares his big lessons learned on how and when to scale the business. And last but not least, the tells a story about how they created remarkable differentiation when the market needed it most.

Here's one of his quotes:

We can replace Workday for massive employers. That's what we're gunning for.

Just our philosophy towards sharing, It's been almost an afterthought by the HR tech industry to have your workforce talking to each other and sharing with other people. We think people should share, and you should be able to follow people who are in your profession in other countries, and you should be able to have casual mentoring and casual interactions outside of work. And it's kind of the antithesis of where traditionally, HR software has been.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can gain instant differentiation by creating the antithesis of the accepted traditional approach
2. That augmenting your tech with human touch can mean your breakthrough
3. How adding cross-company community-building components to connect peers can become the stickiness factor your solution has been waiting for.
4. How to deal with advice from investors - especially when it's extremely tempting.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jason Radisson
• Website Movo

Ken Babcock spent most of his career in the Bay Area at Uber, where he held roles in Launch Operations, Data Science, and Product Strategy from 2014 to 2018. In 2019, he decided to do his MBA at Harvard Business School. But shortly in, he and his co-founders, Brian Shultz and Dan Giovacchini, dropped out of Harvard during the pandemic to start Tango.

Today, he's the Co-founder and CEO of Tango, which takes the pain out of documenting processes by automatically generating how-to guides while you work.

Since then, the company has grown to over 350,000 users and is trusted by people and teams at organizations, including Netflix, IBM, Salesforce, Nike, and more.

Tango has been recognized as a finalist for Product Hunt’s Product of the Year, Google's 12 Favorite Chrome Extensions of 2022, and Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech for 2022. They have raised $19.7M in venture capital funding to date.

Their mission: building a future of work where processes are easier to document and faster to follow.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ken to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we capture and transfer knowledge. Ken shares how the company went from idea to GTM in literally months due to how the problem was exposed during COVID. He shares stories about how he overcame their biggest hurdle for growth: how to market their solution. And he shares some of Tango's secrets to spark viral growth and increase conversion from free to paid plans.

Here's one of his quotes:

What we saw with a lot of our users is that their prior way of doing something was taking screenshots, manually going in and annotating the screenshots, dumping them into a Word doc, and typing it all up. And so the old way of doing things was so clunky. It wasn't anything that was rocket science. But it was extremely tedious.

And what we found with the market is that everybody knows that this is a problem. What we realized was that people actually didn't know that there would be a solution out there.

So that was the hardest part: How do we shift our marketing strategy, knowing that our best users, the people that are doing things the old way, aren't even going to know that they can solve their own problems?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why putting all functionality in your Free plan is a good thing
2. That product market fit is an illusion, and how to go about that
3. How to stay ahead of the market and user expectations
4. What's the magic combo of core principles to create alignment and scale in your organization

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ken Babcock
• Website Tango

Ryan has always been fascinated by what makes people tick and what makes them perform optimally. He’s been frustrated at the slow pace of change when it comes to education and learning. To address that, he created a learning consultancy, Hi-Performance Learning, that aimed to push the boundaries of organizational learning through e-learning, gamification, and expert systems.

To then remove the constraints by tech. bandwidth, he founded CUDA Technologies.

Yet no matter how they optimized formal learning, a core problem remained. People still had to memorize and repeat complex decision formulas in a world that was accelerating. It was time for a complete rethink. This was the starting point for CLEVVA back in June 2011. In the meantime, CLEVVA has been in business for well over 12 years, and five years have passed since Ryan was on my podcast last.

This interview inspired me in many ways, and parts of it ended up in chapter 1 of my book, "The Remarkable Effect". Since so many things have happened since I decided to invite Ryan back on my podcast, we explore the big lessons Ryan learned over the last five years. He shares a story about what made him realize they competed for the wrong business in the wrong market. He then explains what he changed from a mindset perspective and how that helped them get remarkable traction in a completely new category - thereby attracting the right customers and the right partners. Last but not least, he shares his experiences in how to create funding freedom for the business - and how that liberates them to do the right thing.

Here's one of his quotes:

We took ownership of the outcome. So we didn't put on a lens of a Software as a Service company. We put on the lens as a solution as a service company. So we actually then got teams to be able to specialize in these conversations. And so that we could not just say to our customer, here's the software, I'll teach you how to build that conversation; we said we will deliver a virtual agent having those conversations, and it will be up and running in four weeks. And we will take ownership of that and be accountable for the performance. And so what changed as well is, is our customers didn't feel we were having to convince them on our software. What we were showcasing is we actually were selling an outcome, a measurable outcome that would have conversations that mattered.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That even if you add significant value, it doesn't mean it will help you scale
2. The importance of clarifying what business you're really in (and how that changes everything)
3. How changing one small thing can move you from nice to have to ultra-sticky and mission-critical
4. When you know the moment is right to build an ecosystem

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ryan Falkenberg
• Website CLEVVA

Matt is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He's addicted to building technology for the creative class and passionate about the intersection between design and technology.

Matt has spent his entire career building technologies to empower creative professionals. Matt was head of product for the LA-based talent agency Wasserman. His career also includes product leadership positions with Awesomeness, a multi-media platform company, and the global media company Fullscreen.

He co-founded Boulevard in 2016 as he and his co-founder realized this industry - the professionals who help us look and feel our best - has traditionally been underserved when it comes to tech and support.

So their mission is to change that by enabling their customers to give their clients more of the magical moments that matter.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore how the company evolved from a scheduling solution into a complete experience platform, positioning for the salon and spa industry.

Matt explains how they carved out their niche and how early architectural design now provides them with a multi-year competitive advantage. helping them stand out from competitors who added these features later. He elaborates on how they accelerated growth and reduced CAC by leveraging the power of network effects and customer referrals.

He shares his story of how brand trust, design, and community have become core differentiators for the company, thereby creating a magnetic effect. Last but not least, he explains how the company achieved minimal customer churn during COVID, and was able to add well over 600 customers in a market that was effectively closed.

Here's one of his quotes:

The hardest nut to crack over time has been our go-to market motion. My co-founder and I were both engineers. And so, learning how to sell a product was entirely new territory for us. And there's this perception out there from some founders if you build it, they'll come. That never happens. And so you have to be so intentional about your go-to market. You have to be very, very focused on what's your ideal customer profile. That is something that we continue to refine on a quarterly basis, Who are we best set up to support? Who do we have pricing power over?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What it really means to understand a problem in its full depth - and why that makes all the difference for your success
2. What it takes to find the sweetspot where you have pricing power
3. What they did differently that gave them defensible differentiation from day one
4. Why we should think differently about product market fit

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matt Danna
• Website: Boulevard

​​Barrett is a highly motivated and results-driven professional with over 10 years of experience in building partnerships and executing go-to-market strategies for SaaS companies.

He's the host of the Outcomes Podcast - Where Partnership & SaaS meet - and Senior Manager for Go-to-Market strategies for the Global Partner Ecosystem at Hubspot.

It's that combination that triggered me to invite him to my podcast. We explore the art of building and managing partnerships in B2B SaaS organizations. Barrett elaborates on the critical components to focus on throughout the acquisition, onboarding, and lifecycle stages of partners. He shares his experience in concurring the complexity of managing partnerships as businesses evolve and the necessity of diversifying these partnerships for mutual benefit. Lastly, he addresses how to overcome the personnel challenges in various stages of a partnership program, underlining the importance of specialization as the program matures.

Here's one of his quotes:

Folks will always say things like: "We want to go and build an ecosystem."

You're saying the wrong thing. We want to build a partner program, you're not even thinking about it the right way. I always stopped them there, and I say: "Think about your customer needs first that you don't deliver. That's where your opportunities lie."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why you should consider shifting from partnership for revenue to partnerships for customer value
2. What to do / no to do when you want partnerships to play a vital role in scaling your SaaS business organizations
3. Where to make concessions around successful partnerships if you want to deliver the most value to the customer.
4. How to go about managing partnerships that lead to mutual benefits, increased leverage and enhanced reach and value delivery.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Barrett King
• Podcast: Outcomes - Where Partnership & SaaS Meet

Andrew Yates formerly led ads ranking, auction, and marketplace engineering and research teams at Facebook and Pinterest. He specializes in designing billion-dollar content marketplaces that maximize long-term revenue while protecting both seller and user experiences. Andrew has published over a dozen patents in online advertising optimization.

Andrew met his co-founder at Pinterest. That's where they built Pinterest ads together and realized they could unify ideas from ads and search engineering to make all commercial media better. This became the founding idea behind Promoted, which they started in April 2020

Their mission: to match every buyer with every seller across every app.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Andrew to my podcast. We explore Andrews's entrepreneurial journey and ideas and what challenges he had to overcome around go-to-market, winning over the biggest skeptics, and creating a revenue flywheel. He explains how breaking away from existing structures and established norms has helped them to break through. Last but not least, his lessons learned around product strategy - and how he arrived at his first principles to drive remarkable value in the shortest amount of time.

Here's one of his quotes:

We didn't have an open-source philosophy when we first started. Our original philosophy was: Make sure it works. Make sure you build something valuable, put it into production, and make sure that it works and test it against good engineering teams that have the resources, time, and attention to build a similar system and it needs to outperform them.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to break into an industry by introducing a business model that emphasizes customer collaboration and ownership
2. How to create a shift in value by applying a proven model that's remarkable in one category on a different problem in a different category.
3. How a development team of <10 FTE can consistently outperform teams of +100 FTE
4. How going against the common notion of comprehensive and fully-featured product launches has helped them in surprising ways.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Andrew Yates
• Website Promoted

Gijs and Jan share a long history together. They started their first company, Greenwheels, together in 1995.

Together they're captivated by new technologies that can change the world, dreaming about how it can be easier, better, and especially without hassle.

With Greenwheels, this meant innovating car rental into a 24/7 self-service concept. And today, with Ease2pay (which they founded in 2017), they are gradually making that dream a reality again, enabling managers of gas stations, charging stations, parking garages, camper sites, marinas, inland ports, and truck parks to turn their location into a self-service site.

In this way, they are making the energy transition easy for everyone.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited both Gijs and Jan to my podcast. We explore what stands in the way of making the rapid transition to electronic vehicles happening. The two founders discuss their journey of building the business from scratch, and how they accelerated this by leveraging M&A from the start. They share insights about the complexities of merging companies and the potential losses in synergy if done improperly. They also discuss some of the mistakes they've made along the way, including delayed integration of acquisitions and changes to pricing systems without careful consideration.

Here's one of their quotes:

We are facilitating the energy transition. Ton, you didn't make the transition yet yourself. I didn't make that transition myself, actually. So why don't people make that transition to battery electric cars? Because it's a lot of hassle. You need to have three plastic cards if you want to go on holiday. But most people have multiple cards, and then the card doesn't work here, and it is not bookable, so you drive to France, arrive at the station to charge, and there are three people waiting in front of you. So Book, Park, Charge, and pay at the base, we think there's an innovation to be done to facilitate people. And that would drive the adoption of battery electric cars - but also ships, boats, and trucks.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to create a work environment where the team becomes your advantage.
2. How to accelerate the process of gaining a multi-year headstart advantage and gaining product traction fast.
3. What they've learned from launching a new B2B concept into a market that's dominated by multinationals.
4. What they believe is the formula to being ready for the market and shaping a sustainable business with long-term success.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Gijs van Lookeren Campagne
• Jan Borghuis
• Website Ease2pay

Erdem Gelal has a wealth of work experience, beginning with an internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2010, Accenture in 2011 and a Financial Analyst role at Procter & Gamble the same year. His entrepreneurial journey started when he co-founded cubic.fm in 2013 and ProceedLabs in 2015. ProceedLabs was acquired in 2018. This didn't stop his passion for exploration. In 2020, he co-founded TalentGrid, and in 2022, Flowla, where he's currently the CEO.

Flowla is on a mission to build an outstanding & frictionless way to get deals done. Because it's time we all should stop relying on emails to do that.

They believe B2B processes deserve a consumer-grade approach, so closing B2B deals can be as easy as checking out a cat litter box on Amazon.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Erdem to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the B2B SaaS sales process. Erdem explains the fundamental decisions that helped take the company from its idea to where they are today, why he doubled down on a bottom-up PLG approach, and what he's learned to get traction going. We discuss his big learnings to drive the adoption of the solution and to spark word-of-mouth recommendations. Last but not least, he shares how their mantra to build 100 true fans has helped to be remarkable from the start.

Here's one of his quotes:

When we ask our users: 'What do you like most about Flowla?', the top answer we get is: Standing out from the crowd.

They like the idea of making a difference to stand out in the noisy inbox, and increase win-win rates, not only because everything is just in one place, but also because they can reduce ghosting. It definitely crosses a certain threshold when it comes to an inbox with 100s of unread emails.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to leverage AI to prepopulate templates to scale conversion, and boost user adoption
2. How having a helpful conversation helped them to close more business
3. How to accelerate your journey toward product-market fit
4. How he's leveraging internal champions to do the upwards selling within their organization.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Erdem Gelal
• Website Flowla

Joran is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. Back in 2020, he was an affiliate for 80+ SaaS tools and was generating an average of 30k in organic visits each month. Due to the issues he experienced with the current affiliate management software tools, it never resulted in the passive income he was hoping for.

After getting frustrated time & time again by the clunky affiliate management software and losing precious affiliate revenue, he decided to solve the problem at the core. This is how Reditus was born. Their mantra: When the affiliate does well, so will B2B SaaS companies; in the end, so will Reditus.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Joran to my podcast. We explore his journey into affiliate marketing and the founding of his B2B SaaS company. He shares his biggest challenges on his early journey, such as a complete rebuild of his platform - and discusses how tuning segmentation has helped to optimize traction. He also reveals the secrets to helping his customers, B2B SaaS companies, get irresistible value from his platform. Last but not least, he provides two pieces of advice that peer B2B SaaS CEOs can take advantage of.

Here's one of his quotes:

What we're trying to build is a huge network with people who have access to your ideal customer profile. So it's not just building a network of affiliates. It's also knowing what kind of reach they have and where they have their reach so you can really tap into their market. The ideal world is that they have a channel where they don't have to pay upfront costs to actually do marketing because that's the huge benefit of affiliate marketing.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why the definition of a Minimum Viable Product puts you on a dangerous path as a startup.
2. His first principles (one being prioritizing quality over quantity) to create leveraged results
3. What are the critical ingredients to get right if you want to grow your business through affiliation
4. How adopting a freemium model with an affiliate program can be an effective way to encourage user adoption, revenue generation and competitive advantage.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Joran Hofman
• Website Reditus
• Grow your B2B SaaS podcast

Sebastian is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He was a Director with Simon-Kucher & Partners, where I worked with leading international companies on pricing and portfolio structure. That's where the idea sparked for Buynomics.

In July 2018, he co-founded Buynomics. Buynomics employs large-scale simulation technologies to digitize customers and predict their behavior. Their mission: to enable companies to answer all their market-facing questions, including pricing, product offers, and promotions.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Sebastian to my podcast. We explore why it is so hard to get pricing right. And then Sebastian digs into the different ways we have to approach it and why. He shares his first principles when it comes to product development and elaborates on what he learned from initially going to market with far too broad segmentation. Last but not least, he shares a do and a don't based on what he learned in the last 5 years.

Here's one of his quotes:

Key questions about revenue management are always the same. They're the same if you're Coca-Cola or if you're running a lemonade stand. But they are extremely hard to answer. What is the right price? What is the right promotion? And they have a gigantic impact.

What makes it really difficult to think about it is one thing and one thing only: You don't know how your customers will react.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. His take on building a category-defining product
2. What rules to apply before considering building a partner channel
3. His lessons learned from niching down towards the optimum
4. Why he didn't follow the guidance from VC and expert consultants to embrace a more aggressive go-to-market motion

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Sebastian Baier
• Website: Buynomics

Jonathan Anderson is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He loves tech but can’t write a line of code. He's passionate about product-led selling and has launched services, strategy, operations, and analytics teams at venture-backed SaaS startups, including InsightSquared and LaunchDarkly.

Prior to startups, Jonathan worked at Bain & Company and he has a B.S. and M.S.Eng from Stanford University.

In September 2018, he co-founded Candu - a no-code tool that allows teams to collaboratively build the UI components needed to encourage the adoption of features, onboard users, and announce product news on a day-to-day basis.

It's not just for the pure-play product-led companies, like Atlassian, Notion, and Loom — it's for the 'strivers' who are trying to figure out how to adjust their go-to-market motion for this new world order.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonathan to my podcast. We explore what's holding a lot of software vendors back from shipping products to market and achieving high adoption rates. Jonathan shares his vision of how he aims to change that for good. He elaborates on the challenges he had to overcome to build traction and what that took from a product investment perspective in terms of first principles, focus, and grid. Lastly, he shares a do and a don't for B2B SaaS CEOs based on his most powerful learnings.

Here's one of his quotes:

We're changing the way that a business thinks about building its product. A single person, a single growth PM, can actually define an experiment in their head, grab a template, customize it, inject it into an application, preview it, and QA it themselves. So it really collapses what is basically a growth team into a single person. That makes it radically less expensive and also much, much, much faster.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. His approach to convincing a user/ buyer that Candu is exactly what they need
2. How to approach getting users to start using your product and become addicted
3. Their approach to turn their user base into their best sales force
4. What Candu did differently by giving their ideal customers a 'name' that makes them instantly recognize if it's for them or not

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jonathan Anderson
• Website Candu

Andy has spent his career building sales and marketing engines for world-beating companies. He created and scaled a customer success operations team to drive operational improvements for all post-sale services at Box. And in May 2017, he became the Vice President of GTM Operations & Growth Marketing at Culture Amp, where he drove 10x growth in ARR.

He's completed an MBA at Stanford and has a BA degree in International Economics from Princeton University.

In June 2021, he co-founded Gated, which he leads as its CEO. Their mission: to fix digital overload for both buyers AND sellers.... and to do some good for the world.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Andy to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way they use email and social channels. Andy explains his vision of how he can give everyone control back and make real communication happen.

He shares the big lessons learned on taking Gated from zero to where it is today -growing at 20% per month. He elaborates on his approach to monetization, to keep the tool free for those that get the most value - and how that creates network effects. Lastly, he talks about crossing the chasm and what big lessons that told him.

Here's one of his quotes:

There are 10,000 tools helping sellers and marketers pummel buyers. We are not building the 10,001st tool. We're building the first tool for buyers.

Building a trusted brand is a tremendous opportunity. I believe that the world needs what we're doing, especially when you think about ChatGPT and how more and more emails are sent every day. Imagine a world where, instead of 100 emails getting sent and two replies, 10 emails get sent and five replies. It's a world that's better for everybody.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What remarkable solutions we can create when we take the viewpoint of the underserved receiver of your service outputs?
2. Why you cannot start early enough thinking about building virality in your product
3. How to build a movement around your startup
4. Why it's critical to cast a vision that doesn't lock you in - and how to go about that.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Andy Mowat
• Website Gated

Antony has spent a lifetime in service of others, first as a Royal Marine Commando and then as a business consultant focused on creating incredible value for the teams he worked with. After leaving the Marines, he spent time as a management consultant; fulfilling the role of a reporting manager on a £5bn infrastructure portfolio. In May 2018, he founded Vanguard Global Solutions focused on delivering people strategies, encompassing coaching, workshops, and programs.

But then COVID kicked in - completely disrupting their business model. And that event sparked the idea behind Loopin, which he and his co-founder Ben, founded in June 2020.

Their 2030 mission: provide 1 million managers the ability to reduce burnout and attrition in their teams.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Antony to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge so burnout and attrition in the market and why traditional solutions can only help us come so far. Antony then shares what needs to change and why given their experiences from the Marines and the characteristics they've uncovered about what creates high-performing overachievers.

He talks about the lessons learned from the pivot they needed to pull through. And lastly, he shares what it takes to build a successful startup and why ego doesn't have a place in that.

Here's one of his quotes:

One of the things which we conceptualized was this bubble idea where this bubble would rise to the top of the platform. We said, look, that's the most important thing that you as the business leader need to do today because that's the thing that's going to turn the needle. And it was with that mindset: It's all about getting the quality in engagement, surveys don't work. They're lagging indicators. Maybe there's an opportunity to create something which is a leading indicator that gives you some foresight. We're very good at doing financial forecasting. But what if we could do people or human forecasting…

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why are we leaning too much toward lagging indicators when we should be focused on leading indicators
2. What the three ingredients are for high performance, and which one, in particular, to double down on
3. How to separate the false signs of success from the real ones
4. How to go about having the courage to have the really difficult conversations

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Antony Thompson
• Website: Loopin

Nayan is a Chartered Accountant by Qualification and an entrepreneur from heart.

Early in his career, he grew from Account Executive to Finance Director. The idea of doing his own start-up came out of a logistical problem they faced in the business.

It led him to co-found Shipyaari in 2013.

However, that was not enough to support a single bread-earning member, so he kept his corporate job and later moved to his next corporate job at WPP.

Shipyaari has been a hustling start-up for close to 7 years but came into a sustainable and scaling phase in the pandemic, which appeared to be a blessing in disguise. The growth he saw during this period forced the entrepreneur in Nayan to go full-time on this and leave his high-paying job.

Their vision is to create a world that's enabled by better-controlled operations that can deliver products with commitment and guarantee.

Their mission: To transform the last-mile delivery experience of the end consumers.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Nayan to my podcast. We explore how Nayan has been able to build a successful logistics tech business without any logistical experience. He shares how he's been able to scale his business from 20 to 100 FTE in under 2.5 years and what first principle thinking enabled them to spark growth while the world got into lockdown. Last but not least, he shares advice on what mentality to develop to stay resilient and build a business that has staying power without desperately chasing funding.

Here's one of his quotes:

COVID was unfortunate for many, but it was fortunate for us. We got a blessing in disguise. During that period. Initially, when India went into lockdown, everybody was curious about what is happening, what needs to be done, what did not need to be done, and all the chaos around the regulations and everything was happening.

So we took time for two or three months to evolve our system, evolve our technology, and evolve our process. That helped us in scaling up the business because when the machinery is running, you never got time to think about it.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to go about approaching the problem you solve in a way that creates defensible differentiation
2. How to prepare yourself to succeed in expanding your business internationally
3. Why being a novice in a particular domain can be a big advantage to creating a successful business
4. What human skills are required to build remarkable traction

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Nayan Ratandhayara
• Website Shipyaari

Derek Osgood is a former marketing exec turned founder. Prior to founding Ignition, he was an early hire at Rippling where he stood up the Product Marketing function and helped scale the company to $20M in ARR. As a Product Marketing leader everywhere from startups to major brands like PlayStation, Derek has launched over 100 products and his products have generated over $1B in revenue.

In February 2021, he decided it was time to build the platform he wished he had along the way - and founded Ignition.

Its mission: To launch every product to otherworldly success, through world-class strategic marketing…. And to boldly go where no marketer has gone before.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Derek to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the Product Launch process and how this is hurting businesses. Derek takes us on a journey of how he's built the company and shares the critical lessons he learned. He explains what difference positioning has made and how important it's been to nail the essential details in messaging and product to grow momentum.

Here's one of his quotes:

Inherently, the key thing that people are in their head assuming is the primary thing they're going to drive is efficiency and time savings. However, once they have implemented all that stuff, the value that they really start seeing is now suddenly we have more effective launches. Now we're like breaking through the noise more, and they're basically just seeing, you know, higher revenue performance from the launches that they're creating.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What to do differently to increase the success of your product launches
2. Why classic Silicon Valley thinking sometimes works counterintuitive to break through
3. How to avoid getting sucked down into a rabbit hole of undifferentiated stuff
4. Why our messaging is often 180 different from what it needs to be and how to avoid that.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Derek Osgood
• Website: Ignition

Neta is a tech entrepreneur on a very big mission. She started her career at Ofgem as manager of European Strategy and then moved to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, responsible as their Climate Change Negotiator.

In 2017, inspired by the #MeToo movement and her own experiences with harassment, she left her job as a UK climate adviser - to solve this growing global problem.

Her own experiences sparked the big idea behind the Vault platform, which she co-founded in 2018 and leads as the CEO.

Their mission: help companies worldwide become the best and most ethical versions of themselves - thereby creating a world in which every working environment is inclusive, diverse, productive, and safe.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Neta to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of misconduct reporting. Neta shares her vision of how to solve this problem for good and why that needs a radically different approach. She elaborates on the lessons learned from the pivots she had to undergo, how that turned their entire GTM on its head, and what it took to create a dent in a market that's dominated by very large companies. Lastly, she shares her secrets on how to turn every employee, their family, and their friends into advocates for the mission.

Here's one of her quotes:

Many of them [competitors] have taken kind of the old analog way of internal reporting, taking it away from a hotline and creating a digital experience. But this is not what Vault is about. This is about truly using technology to unlock new ways of reporting that weren't there before. And by doing so, changing human behavior.

It's not about an app. And it's not about an interface. And it's not even about accessibility, though; all of those things matter greatly. It's about leveraging technology to do something very, very different. It's a completely new way of coming forward.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How showing up differently can be your weapon to outperform the largest competitors.
2. Why the best solutions out there are not about making legacy a digital experience but about changing human behavior.
3. How to find out as early as possible your SaaS business needs to pivot.
4. How to create a SaaS business that remains relevant at all times

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Neta Meidav
• Website Vault Platform

Max is a prototype of a tech entrepreneur on a mission. A massive mission. By training, he is an experimental physicist with a strong background in materials science, computational physics, image processing, methodology development, and the ingestion of scientific work into applications.

In April 2020, he co-founded constellr, a German deep-tech company at the interface between agriculture and space. Max is the inventor of constellr’s core technology and holds several patents.

Their mission: the provision of a robust data basis to drive 'more crop per drop' and help feed 10 billion people by 2050.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore the challenges Max has been going through to convince the nay-sayers and what he has learned from that. He explains what they have done to break a huge global problem into a manageable structure - and what choices have been fundamental to deliver remarkable impact - and grow remarkable traction. Last but not least he shares his recommendations for building a Software business that has staying power.

Here's one of his quotes:

What we were looking at were two things. It was impacting on the one-hand side, so what are the biggest challenges? But then also the timescale, i.e., when will these challenges have a really big effect? And that's the reason why we then started with water because carbon, for example, is magnificent in scale. The amplitude of this problem is just amazingly large. However, water will probably overtake carbon in a few years, so now in terms of amplitude and it will be a lot more severe, a lot earlier.

It's a lot shorter timescale; we're not looking at 2050, we're not looking at 2070, we're looking at seven harvests from now. So, if we don't have a good solution implemented, the world will, I wouldn't say be on fire, but we'll definitely live in a lot more stressful world.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why getting everyone to see and acknowledge the severity of the problem doesn't mean they'll buy or invest
2. How to approach a problem that's beyond imagination in size
3. How to go about segmenting the market when no-one 'owns' the problem you solve best
4. How to leverage positioning to grow momentum when the market doesn't see the urgency of the problem yet

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Max Gulde
• Website constellr

Dror is a finance expert and a neurotechnology, robotics, and Deep Learning enthusiast.

Throughout his career, he's been a finance innovator, management consultant, senior project manager at the Israeli Military Intelligence, and the former CEO and co-founder of RAS robotics.

This has brought him proven experience in building companies from an idea through bootstrapping to capital raising.

In 2020, he co-founded NeuroBrave, a platform to provide access to real-time cognitive and emotional states through everyday wearable devices.

Its mission: To help people better understand themselves, cope better with day-to-day challenges, and have better control over their time and productivity.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Dror to my podcast. We dig into the opportunity we have when we can understand the human brain in a better way. Dror shares his experiences of building the company, and what impossible obstacles he had to overcome. He shares his lessons to gain traction and convince even the most skeptical experts. Last but not least he shares his experiences on what it requires to defensible differentiation and turn that into something remarkable.

Here's one of his quotes:

Most of the wearable companies today will give you stress tracking. It's a number between zero to 100% that says, "What is your stress right now?"

All right, what do you do with it? Like, my stress level is 74 now. Wow. So, basically what we are building is a recommendation system based on AI processing that tells you what to do with it.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to disrupt an industry that can leverage 100 years of research, employs the smartest people, can leverage the best physicians?
2. Insights on how to get the fastest to product market fit
3. Why most value in your product strategy is in use cases that prevent a problem instead of cases that cure a problem
4. What characteristic beyond resilience you need to build a SaaS business that has staying power?

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dror Talisman
• Website Neurobrave

James is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He went to theater school and worked as a bellboy before he fell in love with tech. Working in the logistics tech space since 2009, he has helped create a variety of enterprise shipping technology. He spearheaded the design of an award-winning multi-carrier TMS.

In 2018, he co-founded Paccurate, which he leads as the CEO. Their mission: To make shipping more sustainable for your business and the planet.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited James to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way logistics companies approach packaging. James shares his vision of how to take cost-efficiency in packaging to a totally new level while at the same time making a significant global impact on the environment. He shares his big learning on getting traction in the market and what changes have been fundamental in that process. Lastly, he shares his advice on what to do / not to do to create a SaaS business that lasts.

Here's one of his quotes:

Our kind of biggest innovation or differentiator is that we look at the problem differently than all the others did. We're looking at optimizing for cost, whereas the other solutions were just looking to make things smaller. Which is a nice stand-in for the lowest cost, but it's not perfect.

And so, being able to make a packing decision based on the incentives that are baked into your negotiated rate table, your labor costs or your material costs - that is really about going down the rabbit hole on this problem.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to succeed in a market where everyone advises you 'stay out.'
2. What you can do to accelerate the sales process in a market that is known for extreme long sales cycles
3. What to do differently when promising a $10 million dollar savings doesn't get you the deal, or not even a meeting.
4. How being a micro pessimist and a macro optimist is all you need to move the needle

For more information about the guest from this week:

• James Malley
• Website Paccurate

Payman is an avid technologist. He loves new trends and tries to keep up with the ever-evolving internet. His background in Biology has led him to truly believe in the art of evolution. Everything changes in time. You either follow or create new trends or will be left behind.

He started HindSite Interactive with a mere $170 to pay his way through College and over the last 16 years that followed he and his team worked with over 300 companies large and small from all walks of life.

Frustrated with the lack of easy-to-use tools for non-designers to create compelling visual content, he went on to create Visme.

Their belief: everyone should be able to create beautiful content with no design experience and minimal effort.

Their mission: To empower the world to speak loudly by speaking visually.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Payman to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we can communicate value and ideas. Payman shares the big lessons learned in taking his business from scratch to profitability within 18 months. He also digs into some of the internal beliefs they had to eliminate that harmed even faster growth of the business. We discuss how they selected their sweetspot in the market and what it took to create remarkable traction.

Here's one of his quotes:

The bar has been raised today on what is expected of people and businesses. So when we say Speak Loudly, it means you can stand over the crowd. And by Speak Visually, you have the capacity to communicate visually and improve information retention

As humans, we are used to seeing things visually, when you see a chart, you can remember and absorb that information much more than if you just saw it, as a set of numbers and stats that are nested on top of each other.

We believe that every individual is a great storyteller, even if you think you're not. And so our platform has the means to allow them to be able to take their information and data and ideas and be able to bring them to the forefront in a more meaningful manner.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to rapidly grow market share and create defensible differentiation in a market that's always been dominated by very large vendors
2. What to do differently to grow purely by word-of-mouth
3. How to structure your product strategy for impact when everyone can technically use your solution and all have feedback
4. Why Payman decided not to raise external funding to grow the business - and why he'd start any new business bootstrapped again.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Payman Taei
• Website Visme

Rutger is a serial entrepreneur and ex-strategy consultant. He founded 24sessions in March 2015 after realizing that it would never work to completely hand off customer communication to tech. Sometimes, you need a personal advisor to help you out.

Rutger painfully experienced that when he needed a mortgage for his new home. Finding the right advisor, making an appointment, and meeting the mortgage advisor in person was still a long, offline, and frustrating process.

He decided to solve this global problem - and embarked on a mission to reinvent the way businesses engage with customers.

He successfully sold his business in March 2021, and eventually stepped out in November 2022.

The reason why I invited Ruther is to explore the big lessons learned on his journey. Rutger talks about how the initial idea to build a marketplace became a complete failure and what he learned from that. He then explained the pivot and what was required to make that a success. Why COVID was a double-edged sword for the business, what critical lessons this taught them, and how they were able to not only survive but come out stronger altogether.

Here's one of his quotes:

Almost until the last day, everybody in the company knew how much money we had in the bank accounts. It really helped, it made so many things easier if people have almost the same amount of knowledge as you have on the state of the business, on the stuff that scares you, on the stuff that you feel we're great at. That transparency really helps.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why very often we do strategic validation wrong - and how to avoid that.
2. How to win a customer for life, even if they say your chances are 1%
3. Why you should let everyone in your company know how much money is in the bank
4. What's the golden combination to building belonging around your business and employees who are 100% committed

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Rutger Teunissen
• Website 24Sessions

Rafi started his career as a Financial Controller at Beiersdorf and Lufthansa Technik in Germany and the US. He then finished his PhD Degree on the topic "Impact of Digitization and AI on Controlling and FP&A".

In this period, he built a proven track record in turnaround situations. Rafi has a deep understanding of KPIs and how to cascade them throughout an organization. He's a strategic thinker who is able to see the big picture and develop creative solutions to complex problems.

During his career, he experienced how hard it is to find accurate answers to financial controlling questions such as why the company is losing money, or what could be the year-end profit. Using Excel and heavy ERP tools was sometimes a nightmare. To provide timely and accurate information to stakeholders, he and his co-founder built themselves software that equipped management with the correct answers in real-time and the company made a turnaround. Stargazr was born.

Stargazr is on a mission to help manufacturing companies' profitability by removing gut feelings and providing forward-looking insights and intelligent recommendations.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rafi to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way manufacturing companies make decisions. Rafi shares his lessons learned on creating remarkable traction in the highly competitive category of FP&A. He tells stories about how niching down helped scale faster and help deliver remarkable results in a matter of 30 days. Last but not least, he elaborates on how they can constantly raise the bar and get ahead of the market.

Here's one of his quotes:

We like to call our tool a data-driven employee. That was always the way I was seeing Stargazer and trying to build it. However, I knew that the prescriptive part was a super complex approach.

For us, it was clear that we, first of all, need a framework for that. But we also use a customer advisory board to ensure that this whole model with the prescriptive analytics works. Our customers did a 30-day POC, and the result was awesome. We could see our tool was identifying and recommending solutions how to solve bottlenecks, which were in the six digits in terms of profit.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How verticalization will help to create traction and rapidly grow it
2. What questions to ask in order to understand whether you are on to something with your startup idea
3. How slicing implementation time can give you a major long-term sales advantage
4. What to get right to drive a successful fundraising round

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Rafi Wadan
• Website Stargazr

Lars is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He started his career at Google, and in 2013, he founded Starred - made tons of mistakes, chased shiny objects - and then restarted the same company in 2019.

His mission: to shake up an area of recruitment that was broken. He found out that candidate experience feedback can be super impactful for candidates of all walks of life to share their voices, as well as helping to combat issues with diversity and inclusion bias in the hiring process.

As such, Starred wants to give people a voice to improve their candidate experience, creating a happier workforce in the long term.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lars to my podcast. We explore how the recruitment experience is broken and what consequences this has on companies. Lars shares some of the biggest mistakes he made in taking Starred where it is today. He explains what made him decide to restart the company and say goodbye to 80%-90% of the revenue. He then elaborates on how he used the momentum of the fresh start as the mechanism to dominate the right segments of the market.

Here's one of his quotes:

It's a lot of fun when you start to start saying no. So, in the beginning, we went after every opportunity. I often compare it to Philippine dynamite fishing. Just throw some dynamite in the water, and some fish will come up, but you don't know which fish.

What we're doing today is looking at our most successful clients and finding similar companies in the market. Once you know your target audience, it's much more fun to target those companies because you can spend more money to make it far more personal to reach out to them.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The signals to pay attention to understand you're positioned too broadly
2. Why you should consider opting for stable slow-growth markets over extreme high-growth markets to grow fast
3. That defensible differentiation is not about having most features and functions
4. What metrics to hit before going into the next market

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Lars van Wieren
• Website Starred

After 11 years of sales experience in IT, Telecoms & Cloud, Alex started a blog on SaaS called SaaScribe. This soon caught on, and he built a powerful network across the SaaS founder and investor community. The blog soon led to the creation of the first-ever podcast on B2B SaaS, called The SaaS Revolution show, which led to the first exclusively SaaS-themed meetups in London, Dublin, and Berlin. In 2015, SaaStock was founded on the back of that, which, in the meantime, has become the world’s most impactful conference for SaaS founders on the journey to $10M+ ARR and beyond.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Alex to my podcast. We explore what Alex sees as key criteria to succeed in B2B SaaS. We discuss how to start off on the right foundation, what to bet on, and what not, and how to avoid making the costly mistakes other SaaS founders made.

Here's one of his quotes:

I speak to people that have been running a business for like two years and are struggling, and they're still trying to figure out their ICP. So try to figure it out super early - maybe even before you launch your product. Another bonus one is positioning. We've seen how that's transformed companies.

An example of that would be DocSend (bought by Dropbox). The thing that really created the inflection point for them after many years was when they nailed their positioning. That caused them to get the hockey stick growth.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why segmentation and positioning are wrongly undervalued
2. What signals to look for from customers to know you're on the right track
3. Why each B2B SaaS Founder should build a personal brand
4. What to do and avoid doing to prevent ending up in the valleys of death

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Alex Theuma
• Website: SaaStock

Christian Owens is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He learned to build websites when he was 12 years old. He dropped out of school when I was 16 and started his first software company. That grew to be a £3-4m business in 18 months. It was through running that business that I encountered the problem that we try and solve at Paddle.

In 2012, Christian founded Paddle with his co-founder, Harrison. Its mission: To help SaaS companies navigate the revenue journey at every stage.

Paddle offers SaaS companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, Paddle acts as a merchant of record for its customers, taking away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, simpler, and above all, way better. This is the short story of a company that grew its valuation to $1.4B in just ten years.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Christian to my podcast. We explore the journey Christian went through to claim Unicorn status. Christian elaborates on the holistic mission principles that underpin his business and how that has helped to build defensible differentiation and the foundation to scale from the start. Lastly, he talks about what it takes to get customers happily pay a premium for products that are not exactly sexy.

Here's one of his quotes:

If the whole crux of like why your product is valuable, or your business is valuable, is dependent on a single feature, that's really dangerous. However, if it's dependent on a fundamentally different way of thinking about doing your thing. That's great. That gives you a clear, strong differentiation between those folks to be able to go and compete. But there is a difference between competing on that feature function kind of "oh, we have the magic bullet", which is a complete myth and never exists. Versus we're trying to take the same problem and almost just flip it on its head and think about it from a different direction.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to avoid your Marketing team writing checks that the product can't cash
2. Why you should avoid making the unsexy sexy if your product is not the coolest thing in the world
3. Why you should not focus on trying to create the one magic bullet of a feature - and what to do instead
4. How guarantees, where you promise to pay for damage, creates a mindset internally that can become your competitive advantage

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Christian Owens
• Website Paddle

Greg has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing. He holds two MA degrees: one in British Literature and Linguistics second in Business Management. His career started in marketing agencies in New York and London. For 6 years, held the position of Marketing Director at Comarch – one of the largest European IT solutions providers. In 2006, he was nominated as CEO of Interia, one of the largest horizontal internet portals in Europe listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, employing over 250 people.

Greg is the author of the widely popular book “Marketing Automation Revolution”. He is also a lecturer at Universities, helping other technology startups.

In 2008, he started as an entrepreneur creating software for marketing teams which led to founding SALESmanago Marketing Automation in 2011. Their mission: To enable every eCommerce team to be lean yet pragmatic and powerful and become the CEO's trusted revenue partner.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Greg to my podcast. We explore how Greg took his business to €22 million ARR in a completely bootstrapped way. He shares his big lessons learned to build a business with staying power, how to find your own way of doing it, and why you shouldn't blindly follow the advice and rules of people outside your company.

Here's a quote from him:

The early kind of growth was really about having complete freedom to experiment. And I think a team that is actually really open for change for experimentation for failures is not an obvious thing. People that were committing their lives. When you see a startup, you would have two, three, or at max five founders who work like crazy. I'd say, today we are almost 400 people in the business, and 30% of them work like founders.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why the essence of your SaaS product is not its features but the transformation it lets your users make
2. How going into countries no one considers can build you an interesting competitive position
3. How to create an organization where +30% of your employees showcase the determination of a founder
4. How to arrive at a position where you can start funding from a position of strength (not desperation)

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Greg Blazewicz
• Website SALESmanago

Devin is the former CEO of Animalz, a leading content marketing agency for B2B Saas companies.

Storytelling is at the root of Devin's passion for marketing. She founded The Master Slam, a poetry slam-style debate about startups and tech. She is also a TEDx organizer and speaker trainer and has competed in several storytelling competitions.

In September 2022, she posted a vulnerable LinkedIn post about stepping down as the CEO, thereby sharing her lessons learned not only to survive the company but actually grow it stronger during the pandemic and recent crisis.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Devin to my podcast. We explore the big lessons she learned taking over the CEO role at Animalz - and what it took to grow the business by 200% in two years of pandemic and economic crisis. She shares what appeared to be really important to keep and what not to keep - thereby reflecting on her misjudgments and traps she fell into without even realizing it.

Here's one of her quotes:

I learned this: it was more about consistency and reminding people of what the goal is that we're trying to accomplish, and therefore establishing that focus that keeps people relaxed.

During this interview, you will learn five things:

1. What's your number one job as a CEO in a period of crisis
2. The importance of setting first principles and sticking to them
3. How to avoid making fear-based decisions or becoming overconfident
4. How to keep everyone focused and committed when times are tough
5. What to do/avoid doing in marketing to make an impact

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Devin Bramhall
• Website: Animalz

Matt is an architect, creator, builder, and tech entrepreneur on a mission. He has founded four companies. First, in 2003, Submittal Exchange - a construction technology platform. He sold this company to Textura in 2011. He continued to grow the Submittal Exchange business unit by an average of 50% per year and served on the Textura executive team as the company completed a successful IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2013. In 2014, he founded CVG, a consulting company, and FunnelWise, a marketing and sales technology startup.

Matt knows the ins and outs of building successful and mission-driven businesses. He believes businesses can use social good to connect with their customers and employees on a deeper and stronger level.

Today, he's the founder and CEO of Grateful, a platform that helps socially good businesses participate in “Grateful Giving” by donating to their customers’ and employees’ favorite nonprofits.

Its mission is to transform charitable giving for nonprofits, businesses, and individual givers.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore what's missing in the way we build SaaS businesses. Matt shares his vision of how creating social and business impact amplifies each other when done well. He shares his lessons learned in creating successful SaaS businesses that leverage the power of the network effect. Last but not least, he provides his views on raising the bar for impact in SaaS companies.

Here's a quote from him:

I can tell you there are about 160 million people in the US that donate to charities every year. Those are people that care. When you ask them, 91% say they're more likely to do business with companies willing to support security that they personally care about. So there's a marketing and customer attraction value proposition with this. But we've seen with some of the companies we're working with already for the customers that participate in this type of customer giving program those customers spend 17% more with those businesses. So, it literally pays for itself.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What value we can create for our customers if we'd understand what their customers desire from them
2. You'll understand what to look for in customers to accelerate traction
3. How to engineer your solution, so it automatically brings you valuable leads
4. How to go about building a business that creates a remarkable network effect

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matt Ostanik
• Website: Grateful

Alex is a Tech Entrepreneur on a mission. He was a product manager at Personal and Thomson Reuters and then joined Handy (later acquired by ANGI) to lead growth and marketing. Alex grew up in New York and received his BA from Harvard.

While at Angi, he successfully drove top-of-funnel growth. But even after rolling out website optimization and email/SMS remarketing, only ~4 of 100 customers would convert. Surprisingly, he found that if they'd called the 96% “abandoned” customers and got them on the phone, they loved the attention and converted at double the rate.

In search of technology to scale this, he found only solutions around a basic, one-size-fits-all “call more” or “call faster” strategy, resulting in declining answer rates and a terrible customer experience.

Solving this problem sparked the idea to co-found Regal in October 2020 with Rebecca Green (CTO). They believe in the power of a personal touch in an increasingly digital world. In the meantime, they've built an outbound phone and SMS sales solution that helps many fast-growing B2C brands achieve their growth goals way faster.

Their mission: We believe in the power of a personal touch in an increasingly digital world.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Alex to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we sell online to B2C customers. Alex explains how there is a new playbook that requires a B2C sales team and how Regal.io helps B2C sales teams 3.5x their answer rate and drive more revenue than their website does. He shares some big lessons learned on how they grew rapidly to a double-digit million ARR in 2 years and had no sales or marketing team for the first year. Last but not least, he talks about why we should prioritize creating wealth for everyone in your company rather than glorifying fundraising.

Here's one of his quotes:

At bigger companies, you're taught the wrong thing. You're taught that the more people work for you, the more important you are. I think that results in bad outcomes for companies. We try to teach people that the most valuable people in the company are those that can make themselves completely redundant.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What you should be looking for in conversations about new products with customers
2. That you don't have to have a huge engineering team to build products that drive revenue from the start
3. How to successfully grow your SaaS business faster with fewer people
4. How to create a SaaS business that becomes critical infrastructure for your customers

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Alex Levin
• Website Regal

Johnathan is a true tech-entrepreneur‍ on a mission. His journey started in 2014 when his cousin, at the age of 17, got diagnosed with cancer, and he wanted to do something for her. Then, in preparation for an 850-person charity event with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, he recognized the many limitations of existing event technology and fundraising platforms.

And this sparked the idea to create a solution so fundraisers would never have to go through that experience again.

As such, he founded Accelevents in early 2015 and has been on a journey since to build a virtual & hybrid events platform. Its mission: help event organizers get some sleep the night before their event.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonathan to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of event automation and what can be if it's fixed. Jonathan shares what his business went through as their revenue 10Xed during the pandemic. He elaborates why he'd bootstrap his business again if he had to start again - and why he believes he should have taken bigger risks upfront on both product and positioning. Lastly, we talk about the critical choices he made during the Pandemic - and why without it, we wouldn't have had this conversation.

Here's a quote from him:

I built it nights and weekends for five years before actually going full-time with it. And as 2020 approached, we were much more focused on b2b events and for-profit events, starting to get into the world of conferences and starting to realize that technology was going to play a bigger role going forward. So we were starting to build toward this hybrid future. But it wasn't until March of 2020, when events evaporated overnight, that we knew we had to go all in on virtual. And we took our revenue from 375k in 2019 to over 3.4 million in 2020.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can create meaningful differentiation by deeply understanding the critical moments in your customers' business
2. Why your customers often aren't buying the right features but the right feeling
3. What traction can you spark if you figure out how to leverage the customers of your customers
4. Why he decided to stick to his core principles even though that meant growing at a slower rate

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jonathan Kazarian
• Website Accelevents

Sarah Hawley is a serial entrepreneur and investor in startups, having founded eight companies since 2009. She's personally fueled by a passion for challenging the status quo of how we work, conscious culture and leadership, community, diversity, and equality, and living life on one's own terms.

She's recognized as the IFA Thought Leader of the Year. Sarah was also named as one of Melbourne’s Top 100 most influential, inspiring, and creative citizens by The Age and listed in the Top 50 Female Entrepreneurs under 40 by Shoestring. She has completed the Entrepreneurial Master Program at MIT and holds a Bachelor of Business and several diplomas.

In August 2020, in the middle of the Pandemic, she founded Growmotely, an All-in-one platform for growing your remote-first company. Its mission: Redefining how we experience work by bringing culture-first companies and professionals together across the world to do great things.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Sarah to my podcast. We explore what's broken in getting remote work to work. Sarah share's her vision about what it's really like to create a remote-first business - and what needs to happen for it to come to fruition. She elaborates on the product strategy lessons she learned and what it took to bring her solution to the market in order to gain traction and start a movement. Last but not least, she explains why she dropped the idea of being venture-backed.

Here's one quote from her:

I see it all the time, people reach out to me. I see it on LinkedIn, where there's just a high level of frustration because companies are advertising remote jobs, and people are applying for them only to find out that it's remote, but you have to live in this country or this city. And so it's actually excluding most of the world from applying for that job. And people are frustrated because those of us who really are for remote work and really understand it in the context that I am talking about here today is: It's anywhere work. And it's equal opportunity for anyone in the world to access employment opportunities. And that's the world that I want to create.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What's needed beyond a strong vision to start a movement?
2. Why she opted to focus on organic growth through word of mouth instead of outbound sales?
3. What she did differently to achieve a 48% referral rate (and growing)
4. Why she pulled her business back to the mission and away from too much focus on growth numbers

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Sarah Hawley
• Website Growmotely

Shaunak is a true tech entrepreneur on a mission. The first decade of his career he spent advising global companies on technology, strategy, and growth.

In 2014, he knew he wanted to start a company that mattered. As he looked back on his own academic days as an undergrad at IIT Bombay, and postgrad at MIT, he realized that he learned as much from his peers as he did from his brilliant professors. Some of the bonds he created with his peers lasted well beyond those formative years, and morphed into lifelong friendships.

As Facebook and other social media technologies took over the social connectivity scene, he saw an opportunity to leverage this idea of social sharing through technology, but specifically in the area of sharing academic ideas and knowledge.

That became the big idea behind Yellowdig. The platform was built on three main pedagogical principles: Agency, Mastery, and Connectedness. Its mission: To make classroom learning more joyful, active, and engaging

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Shaunak to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we deliver education. Shaunuk shares his vision about how education can be more fun and impactful. He elaborates on the big lessons learned from making his idea a reality and gaining remarkable traction in a tough market. He shares his secrets on how to avoid failure and create a solution that users not only like, but love.

Here's one of his quotes:

When we sit in a classroom and try to learn, it's not just the lecture from the professor, but it's also the interaction that we're having. That's where the real learning happens. And even if I listen to the best professor in the world doesn't mean I'm going to be smart, like him or her. It's only when I try to apply that knowledge by discussing with people like me or going back to work and trying to connect with something I learned before, and those connections are where learning truly happens. And I think that's where technology has a huge role to play.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to create remarkable traction by leveraging existing technology investments and amplifying their value
2. The framework Shaunak is using to grow fast but mitigate the critical risks
3. What he learned from having to rebuild his entire stack - and how it helped them to build a viable company
4. What sales and pricing strategies work best if you aim to create momentum in traditionally conservative industries.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Shaunak Roy
• Website Yellowdig

Tina is a true tech entrepreneur on a mission. Her work as CEO and founder of ZWO, a national branding firm, provided her with decades of experience providing strategic counsel, marketing direction, and brand development to organizations that aspired to grow their businesses, reach emerging markets, and launch innovative projects and initiatives.

Her passion: developing the youth for middle-skills and STEM jobs, helping states meet their industry recruitment and economic development workforce needs, and helping manufacturers and other industries fill their talent gaps with skilled recruits.

She's focused her volunteer service efforts on young people -- helping them get the best start in life and grow into mature, valued young adults. And this work sparked the big idea behind Skillsgapp. Skillsgapp is on a mission to connect youth to life-changing careers through game-changing play. The platform is designed to attract and grow a sustainable workforce pipeline with the geo-specificity to meet a region’s and industry’s specific needs while providing the next workforce generation access to meaningful careers and pathways – even in underserved areas.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Tina to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we fill our workforce pipeline. Tina shares how, through technology, we can solve this problem at a global scale - in a way that's fun and ultra-precise. She shares her big lessons learned in creating a flywheel for growth by removing industry barriers. And last but not least, she shares her advice on creating a software business that people keep talking about.

Here's a quote from her:

In cyber, currently, there are 700,000 unfilled jobs. And in manufacturing, by 2025, there will be 3.4 million manufacturing jobs worldwide, and 2 million of those are going unfilled. But in Gen Z, there are 2 billion globally. So if you start to run the numbers, it's not a people problem. There is an awareness and access problem.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to find transformative innovation opportunities by zooming out to the global picture
2. How to create a flywheel for growth when there's no real owner of the problem
3. How you can solve a global challenge by approaching it locally
4. The power that unlocks when purpose and technology blend

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Tina Zwolinski
• Website Skillsgapp

Patrick Woods is a tech entrepreneur on a Mission. He has more than 10 years of marketing and customer success experience. He’s the co-creator of the Orbit Model, host of the Developer Love podcast, and is the author of the Brand Strategy Canvas. He co-founded Orbit in September 2019 on the strong belief that software is no longer sold - but adopted and that value creation beats value capture. The sales funnel is about extracting value, but that only works short-term. For sustainable growth, community can drive long-term adoption through value creation. And that's exactly the mission behind Orbit

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Patrick to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we think about community. Patrick shares his vision around the opportunity the SaaS industry has by becoming community-driven. He shares his big lessons learned to create bottom-up traction in an extremely fragmented market and how growth accelerated during Covid, purely fueled by their big idea, the Orbit Framework. Last but not least, he explains how having a compelling mission has helped them to attract the right talent.

Here's one of his quotes:

Late 2019, we raised our first capital because our theory was that we need to reimagine the go-to-market tech stack based on these new ideas, these new data models, and these new mental models. Nobody's done this, and somebody's going to figure out what CRM will look like in the context of community. If community-driven growth of product-led growth is real, how can we retool the tech stack to make that real? There's gonna be a retooling, but it needs to be reimagined from first principles. And the Orbit model is the thing that we're going to try to build this on.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How a healthy and growing community de-risks and accelerates every part of your business
2. How to create a self-sustaining flywheel for growth around your SaaS business purely driven by content - instead of big campaigns or outbound sales.
3. How to maximize your growth opportunity by balancing value capturing with value creation activities
4. That starting a successful community is not about the platform you choose but about articulating why anyone would care to join your community.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Patrick Woods
• Website Orbit

Arnold is a legal practitioner by heart; however, for the first 9 years of his career, Arnold operated in recruitment and training. During that time, he often met with Patrick Hoffman for a glass of beer - and that's where they ended up discussing how lawyers and tax advisors are often not able to use commonly accepted tools - and how that's holding them back. This fueled the big idea behind IURIO - which they cofounded in July 2017.

IURIO is on a mission to help lawyers and tax advisors grow profitably while working and communicating stress-free and confidently with clients.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Arnold to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way lawyers and tax professionals have to deliver their best work. Arnold shares how he took his business from idea to repeatable traction. He digs into the big lessons learned on their journey towards product-market fit, how this influenced the way they segment the market, and why he believes he should have started selling much earlier.

Here's one of his quotes:

'In hindsight, we could have probably done more research and try to find out whether this customer base would be big enough, but we took a little of risk and gut feeling and thought, 'Okay, let's just start this. We think the opportunity in the market as a whole is just very big because many products are already here. So and that's still what we experiencing - we don't have to pitch against another product.'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What to do differently to find a problem spot that's not solved before yet
2. How to go about creating traction within a segment of the market that's not willing to move
3. Why we often think we've niched down enough - but are still miles off
4. The value of starting to sell early - and how to avoid starting selling too late

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Arnold Scherabon
• Website IURIO

Charlotte has been recognized among the top 8 most talented female entrepreneurs of The Netherlands, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Sifted's top 14 European Gen Z Founders. She's been on her entrepreneurial journey together with her twin sister Fleur since June 2016. First, they started Female Investments to support high-potential female talent in the growth of their career. What they learned during that journey sparked the idea behind Equalture, which they founded in May 2018.

Equalture is on a mission to shape the world of unbiased hiring by merging the art of neuroscience and gamification.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Charlotte to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we recruit talent today and why we should not accept the biases of resume-based hiring anymore. Charlotte shares the big lessons from her journey to create meaningful change and thereby drills into the importance of being crystal clear on segmenting and ruthlessly aligning product strategy around a bold vision. Lastly, she also talks about her key takeaways from not only surviving the adversity of the recent pandemic but coming out stronger altogether.

Here's a quote from her:

Nowadays, with every single feature that we are building in the platform, the question is always: Is this feature in line with the mission statement that we have as a company? The statement is: We want to shape the world of unbiased hiring. So, is the feature that we're going to build in line with that statement, or are we just building a feature because we get some customers here and there that are asking for some useful feature?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That often, traction doesn't come from selling a product but by selling a mindset and using your product to put the mindset into practice
2. How to avoid losing valuable capacity in your R&D department due to feature bloat
3. Why rejecting or even firing a customer can be the best thing you can do to create a thriving business.
4. That we can leverage your product in more ways than you maybe are aware of to create meaningful value

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Charlotte Melkert
• Website: Equalture

Ahmed started his career at Cornell’s Autonomous Systems Laboratory, building algorithms for autonomous vehicles and human-robot interaction. He then joined Raytheon to develop AI algorithms for missile defense, focusing on tracking and discrimination.

In 2015, Ahmed joined WeWork as the first hire on their data team. He built their data engineering infrastructure and grew the team to forty data engineers and analysts.

As WeWork grew, its data became difficult to maintain, and the data team struggled to deliver work to stakeholders. Ahmed realized that a traditional data model designed for dashboards increases in complexity too quickly as a company scales.

And that sparked the idea of the founding of Narrator in 2017. It powers self-service analytics across all company data. It's on a mission to enable anyone to get answers in minutes instead of weeks.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ahmed to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of getting answers and how today's technology is holding us back. Ahmed is sharing his vision about the platform that he's creating to ask any question and have it answered in record time. He shares his big lessons in building a product designed to solve a problem that was perceived as impossible to solve. He digs into the messaging challenges he had to overcome to create predictable traction. Lastly, he shares how his drive to create something that's remembered and makes an impact serves everyone well: his customers, his employees, his business, and his investors.

Here is one of his quotes:

We started with a goal, but we had no idea about the implementation. And the goal was to ask the questions and give answers. And one of the things that I hated about the answers that we gave today was answers that are given in the form of dashboards. Dashboards are, I think, the worst way to communicate anything.

So how did we solve this problem before? And the answer was stories. Everyone who reads a story is able to understand. So I knew that whatever Narrative had to output when you are answering questions, we should be pushing people to create stories so people's opinions, people's thoughts, and people's thinking process is shared. Because sharing a chart doesn't mean anything, but sharing a story sharing your thinking, and sharing your process is key.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That you're off on building something remarkable when everyone thinks it's impossible … until it's not
2. That by looking at how we solved problems in ancient times can give you the answers to instantly turn customers into fans today
3. That the way to explain your solution most clearly is to have your fans do it
4. That what makes you a good company is not what makes you a good investment.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ahmed Elsamadisi
• Website Narrator AI

Aleks is a veteran of the Bay-Area venture/angel start-up eco-system with two positive exits working on his third. He's highly experienced in automated highways, telecommunications - especially real-time video, and supply chains. Aleks holds a B.S. degree from MIT and an M.S. and Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. He has also been granted 8 patents.

Over time, he built a passion for applying bleeding-edge software and system technologies to neglected or unnoticed complex business problems in diverse industries. And in his role as an entrepreneur and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, he uncovered how SaaS companies can shorten sales processes from 10 days to 15 minutes.

That became the founding idea behind his latest company: 11Sight. Their motto: "All it should take is 1 click"

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Aleks to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the B2B Sales process - especially when buying decisions take less than 30 days. Aleks shares his vision of how to dramatically shorten sales processes while increasing conversation. He elaborates on the principles he follows to build a unicorn business, how to avoid failure, and how to design the business to minimize dilution of ownership.

Here is one of his quotes:

The pandemic made everybody realize you need to be present online. And today, we are working on educating people that you can't just put unnecessary friction on customers who are trying to call you because they are qualified, especially in b2b. Nobody calls a business just to have a conversation. It's like, I have a problem, I did my homework, and you are a good candidate as a solution. But will you talk to me? And if you don't, then you lose that customer?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How optimizing your SaaS for the needs of your customer's customers can take impact to the next level
2. Why you should always be looking at the value you're creating for your customers and in particular how they perceive that value
3. How to leverage data across your solution to help your customers create a flywheel of value that encourages them to do more and more.
4. The critical filters you have to pass through to set out on your start-up journey

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Aleks Gollu
• Website: 11sight

Maarten is an experienced Strategy and Business Development manager with extensive knowledge and interest in entrepreneurial high-tech environments.

He received his Master's in Strategic Management in 2006 and worked at several business development and strategic leadership positions within Philips. In 2010, He founded Dimenco, where he acts as CEO and successfully exited the company in 2015 and led their management buy-in again in 2019.

Dimenco has been leading the spatial visualization market since 2010. Their mission is to push the boundaries to achieve the dream of simulated reality. They unite hardware, software, and technology to deliver fast, rich, and natural three-dimensional experiences – no wearables required.

Simulated Reality brings presence to what can't be present.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Maarten to my podcast. We explore the transformation in how we prefer to interact with technology, and what's standing in the way of meeting that need. Maarten shares his vision about creating experiences we cannot distinguish from reality. He talks about the lessons learned in creating scale and standardization to achieve his ambitious goals. Last but not least, he shares what it takes in mindset and style, to create a business the world talks about.

This is one of his quotes:

"We have to avoid that we're becoming a gadget. If you are becoming a gadget, make sure that you earn money for two years, sell the company and go sit on the island. That's not sustainable. You have to overcome the fact that you're not a gadget, but you really add something to the value proposition of the user. That's something that we continuously work on every day. Because if we are not able to prove that, then you have a very short life as a technology company."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why more is not always better - and how doing less can create unexpected breakthroughs
2. Why a design goal for your SaaS product should be to become 'normal'
3. That it's good for your customers to love your product when they see it - but that's really about the question: what's beyond loving it?
4. Why you should stop believing that you're the next unicorn

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Maarten Tobias
• Website Dimenco

Sunny is a serial entrepreneur. He founded Imperis in 2010 and co-founded Terran Logistics in 2012. He's a prototype of a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He founded Fulcrum in 2015, which he leads as their CEO to build a manufacturing platform for forward-thinking manufacturers.

Its mission: To deliver a connected future where frictionless manufacturing production and supply chains lead to faster and better product innovations.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Sunny to my podcast. We explore what supply chain should be about. Sunny shares his vision about the future of manufacturing, and how he's planning to make that a reality. He shares his big lessons learned in creating something that's 10x better and what that requires in terms of leadership, mindset, and structure. Lastly, he talks about what it means to create a generationally valuable software business.

Here is one of his quotes:

"The grandiose vision is that there are problems that are getting more and more complicated as we advance as a civilization. We're going to start yearning over time for higher and higher quality objects and things that we use. And that's naturally going to drive a difference in how quickly we need to be able to react to those changes in the production lifecycle."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to create breakthroughs in design and approach by taking a big-picture perspective of an industry.
2. How to convince yourself that you have to do the hard work when looking for the easy answers is the path of least resistance.
3. The power of creating an existential desire inside your business to build something that's still useful to people when we're dead.
4. What happens when you make your sales process more exclusive

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Sunny Han
• Website Fulcrum

MG has been obsessed with customer value for nearly 2 decades. Over the last 17 years, he's helped over 80 global B2B customers across manufacturing, distribution, high-tech, and software realize their monetization potential. In 2012, MG joined PROS, where he led the team in the development of customer value quantification tools and methodologies in response to the company's shift to a SaaS strategy. MG focused on increasing win rate, deal size, the average selling price of solutions, and maximizing customer retention rate.

As the software industry moved to SaaS, he recognized that the shift of power to the customer was inevitable.

This inflection point became the founding idea behind Cuvama, which MG co-founded in 2017, and leads as their CEO.

The belief: Successful relationships start with doing discovery right, by focusing on customer success outcomes. But this is easy to say, much harder to do. As such, Cuvama is on a mission to help B2B software companies sell outcomes, not products.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited MG to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we deal with selling and buying enterprise software. MG digs into the big lessons learned from his years in value engineering on the sales side, and how he found his breakthrough by flipping the focus to the buy side. Lastly, he shares his advice on creating a software business that the world will talk about - and his key takeaways on the do's & don'ts to make fundraising more effective and motivating.

Here's one of his quotes:

Before you think about b2b software sales cycles, it's hard. It's hard to sell, and it's hard to buy. And we want to make it easy. Now if you double-click on that, our belief is that majority of sales reps struggle to ask their prospects about value. When they do, we see that it dramatically reduces sales cycle lengths. By getting the multiple stakeholders aligned on the value we see deal sizes increasing, and win rates increasing, but the bigger impact would be: It's not just about landing that first deal. But how can you grow, expand, and retain that customer? So ultimately, all this would point to an uptick in your NDR or NRR, Net Dollar Retention, and Net revenue retention.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to discover and demonstrate value for your SaaS suite 24/7
2. That we're often optimizing our product roadmap for the wrong things - and how to go around that
3. That you can create defensible differentiation by not only focusing on your customers but on your customers' customers
4. That a solid way to differentiate yourself is in your ability to commit to the value you deliver, and engineer for that.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• MG Gurbaxani
• MG’s Musings blog
• Website Cuvama

Dimitri has over a decade of experience as a privacy expert and identity veteran and is an established serial entrepreneur, investor, mentor, and strategist. He is also recognized as one of the leading authorities in startups and company team building, receiving numerous recognitions, including being named an Entrepreneur of the Year finalist by Ernst & Young in 2021 (New York) and 2022 (Florida).

Dimitri holds an M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from The University of British Columbia and a B.Sc. Honors in Physics from McGill University.

Today, he's the CEO and co-founder of BigID, a modern data intelligence platform that helps customers solve data protection, privacy, and governance challenges. Their thinking: Data drives business. Data is a critical factor for all businesses – not just to persevere, but to continue to innovate. As such, BigID is on a mission to help every type of organization know their data, take action on their data, and unleash their data's value to do that.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Dmitri to my podcast. We explore the challenges companies face in rethinking their approach to data where they essentially have become the custodian, as opposed to the owner. Dmitri explains the novel approach they've taken to solve this. He shares his route towards product-market fit and carving out a business model that could fuel exponential growth. He tells about their approach to creating defensible differentiation, and an ability to expand their story ahead of the competition catching up. Last but not least, he shares his advice on creating a business software business that creates products that customers fall in love with.

Here's one of his quotes:

So early on, once we did our straw man strategy, we doubled down on one particular area. Once we found kind of a pressure point, we said, Okay, let's just focus on this and do a good job here. And so that's what got us through the first two years, I sometimes described that as a swim lane. We needed a clear definable swim lane that we could own, that was differentiated from other technology players. And we went down that path and invested in it, and it actually worked out for us. We were able to do the classic 5x revenue in year one. 3x revenue in year two.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to create your own blue ocean within a large red ocean
2. The single most important answer to look for when defining product strategy
3. When's the right moment to move on and expand your story
4. The things you should avoid doing as an early-stage B2B SaaS founder

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dimitri Sirota
• Website BigID

Yair is a tech entrepreneur with extensive experience in the international business development of technology-oriented companies. His tenure at Mul-T-Lock, where he was responsible for the development and introduction of their ENTR product, provided him with experience in corporate management, upstream and downstream marketing, product management & innovation & execution. The product was revolutionary in its category.

In May 2018, he co-founded Brain.Space, a startup that's literally opening the doors to the secrets of our brain. It's on a mission to overcome humanity's biggest health, societal and commercial challenges through Data-Driven Brain InsightsTM.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Yair to my podcast. We explore the opportunity to leverage brain insightsTM as a source of innovation. Yair explains his vision and defines the vision that has enabled them to achieve the unimaginable. He shares his big lessons learned in building his organization and what it took to establish a culture that's about support, critical feedback, and working together to move mountains. Last but not least, he provides his advice on building a technology business that the world talks about.

Here's a quote from him:

"To analyze people, you need to have diversity, you need to have big data, you need to have a lot of people. I'm not talking about hundreds or 1000s, you need to have millions of samples in order to really understand what's happening in the brain. Let me give you an example of what happened in the heart rate industry: when in the past, you had to have a special tool to stick to the chest, nowadays, you have a watch that is monitoring your wrist, and you have a heart rate analysis out of the cloud. So eventually, this is what we're going to do in the brain."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That achieving amazing achievements is about three things: Strong belief. Big Dream. And never look back.
2. What is the secret sauce of creating a good entrepreneurial venture
3. Where to find the best playground for your team of engineers to learn and what to aim for to achieve the goals
4. How to create the balance in your team to keep thinking out of the box, stabilize thoughts and create successful innovation

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Yair Levy
• Website Brain.Space

Matt is the founder and CEO of Bonjoro. He is a Britisch designer by trade and loves two things: building great products and building a great culture. He started as a designer, worked as a consultant, did his MBA in 2012, and then co-founded not-for-profit group XTech Sydney in 2013 and Verbate, a video insight agency in 2014. That's where he stumbled upon a problem with reaching overseas customers in a simple and impactful way.

What started as a sales hack for the Agency he was running, Bonjoro went from hack to side hustle to global business in 18 months, and now has a team across 5 continents.

Bonjoro is on a mission to create a world free of spamming - a world where we build trust and love amongst customers by sending something meaningful that converts them for life. It's driven by its ethos of “Automate processes, but never relationships.”

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore the art of spotting when a business idea has potential and which does not. Matt explains the journey of how Bonjoro was born - and how he took it from an idea to a business that grows through word of mouth and virality. He shares some of his big lessons learned on how to fill his product roadmap with smart investments that create both scale and customer value. Last but not least, he articulates the importance of creating a brand from the start - and how that increases your chances of success.

Here are some of his quotes:

"If every customer brings you two users, then you're like, 'Right - if we make them love us even more, and we activate them, then they'll bring us five."

But how do we do that? How do you get the funnel growing faster? And that's not product. It tends to be time and relationships and the loyalty part. If you're passive with a great product, that's awesome, but people's chances of inviting others in is much, much lower. When you're a small business, you have to be active. You can't passively expect this to happen."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to push your R&D department to focus on the desired outcome, not the obvious output
2. Why you should look at your customer funnel with a loyalty lens on, i.e., which customers can become a superfan - a micro-influencer
3. Sometimes your smallest customers can drive the biggest revenue impact for you - indirectly.
4. Why everyone on your team should feel the customer's pain - and how to go about that.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matt Barnett
• Website Bonjoro

Gorish is a self-made tech entrepreneur obsessed with solving hard problems. Throughout his career, he worked as a senior software engineer in the healthcare research team of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). He's an electrical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi and specializes in the field of ML and Signal Processing for neural and biomedical applications.

He loves working on projects which can address the real-world challenges of today and have the potential to create a meaningful impact in the lives of people.

Today, he's the Co-founder and CEO of Sybill. The big idea behind Sybill stems from his time lecturing at Stanford in the summer of 2020. Gorish firsthand faced the problem of gauging student engagement and sentiment in video calls. He decided to solve this problem for us and the world. Sybill is on a mission to introduce a new era in meeting intelligence, going beyond transcription and keyword searches and surfacing the aha! moments and buying intent of your prospects.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Gorish to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we leverage the value of video calls. Gorish shares his vision of how we can give Sales a competitive advantage by augmenting them with insights about the invisible behavior their customers showcase when meeting online. We dig into the big learnings and tough decisions that needed to be made in the development process and how that has panned out in stickiness and viral effects. Last but not least, he shares his advice on what it takes to build a software business that cannot be ignored.

Here's one of his quotes

"If we can quantify and track these behaviors, humans can actually level up their conversation. If they can get signals about their audience's mental state during the call, they can improve their presentation and their pitch to effectively take the audience from that point A to point B, which is the objective of most conversations.

For instance, if sales reps could understand that the prospect is disengaged during the most important section about the core offering, they could actually disqualify that prospect far earlier."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why niching down is essential to creating predictable traction
2. That 'cool' is not often valuable - and how that hurts adoption
3. How to go to market even faster - and gather critical information to gain an advantage.
4. How adding one simple feature can become the ice-breaker in every conversation - and drive word of mouth.

Justin Beals is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in AI, cybersecurity, and governance. He organizes strategic innovations at the crossroads of cybersecurity and compliance and focuses on helping customers get outsized value. In every startup he started, he focused on setting a foundational culture of employee growth. Based in Seattle, he previously served as the CTO of NextStep and Koru, which won the 2018 Most Impactful Startup award from Wharton People Analytics.

Justin is a board member for the Ada Developers Academy, VALID8 Financial, and Edify Software Consulting. He's also an author and the creator of the Training, Tracking & Placement System US Patent.

He's passionate about making arcane cybersecurity standards plain and simple to achieve. That drove him to co-found Strike Graph in February 2020 - which he leads as their CEO.

Strike Graph is on a mission to enable its customers to earn revenue faster by completing security audits successfully and quickly.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the security audit services market. Justin shares his lessons learned how he found a sizeable market that Strike Graph can dominate by developing a product that creates a shift in value by aiming to be different, not just better.

His story about articulating what business he's really in and how he measures progress is a textbook example of how to create a company that's resilient no matter what crisis it'll find on its path.

Here's one of his quotes:

"Every company is concerned with their revenue. We didn't want to be a security company. We wanted to be a revenue company. Our goal was to say close deals faster, with more confidence. And if we can shorten your time to close by 50 to 75%, you can imagine the amount of efficiency that an organization gets, you know, in revenue acquisition quarter over quarter, there are startups that I've worked at that that simple change would have saved us, we would have been a market leader."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That you create instant differentiation is you ensure the design of your solution amplifies the uniqueness of your ideal customer
2. Why your mission should be about 2 things: Immediate and apparent value for your customers
3. That a good exercise to repeat regularly is to start to look at what scales exponentially and what scales linearly
4. Why crystalizing what business you are really in can mean the difference between failing and becoming the market leader

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Justin Beals
• Website Strike Graph

Kirk Marple is a customer-focused technology leader. He has over 25 years of experience developing media management pipelines, leading DevOps at venture-backed companies, and structuring successful exits. He holds multiple patents and industry awards and has truly established himself as an industry leader.

Today, he's the CEO of Unstruk Data, a company that's on a mission empowering enterprises to transform unstructured data files into actionable intelligence about real-world assets to solve massive business, environmental and societal problems.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Kirk to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the data analytics market - and in particular, unstructured data. Kirk shares his journey of how he pivoted from building a podcast discovery tool to a data platform for real-world assets. He shares his big lessons learned about coming to market too early and how postponing the launch has been a valuable decision that made the company more recession-proof. Lastly, he shares his experience on what it takes to build a software business that's got staying power.

Here is one of his quotes:

"I think the volume of data is probably one of the big stopping points. Oil and gas companies probably spend millions of dollars to search the undersea floor of their oil pipelines. And now the data just sits in a bucket somewhere after they capture it, and they can't go back and find it, or reuse that data…"

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why the real user value with SaaS solutions virtually always happens in the last mile
2. That the thing that keeps founders awake at night is not the worry about having a compelling solution but how to attract companies that need it.
3. Why messaging is often the hardest thing - not the technology.
4. Why having an open platform can cause serious problems in sales

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Kirk Marple
• Website: Unstruk Data

Shikhar is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He builds and leads teams that invent new technologies that transform markets, all with the end goal of delivering magical outcomes for our customers.

After several years of R&D in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence in academia at Stanford and industry at Apple and Google, he realized that the reactive approach to security doesn’t work for today’s world.

That sparked the idea to found Ambient.ai in February of 2017.

Ambient.ai is a computer vision intelligence company. It's on a mission to transform security operations by preventing every security incident possible - without sacrificing privacy. They're building solutions for the world that we want to live in.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Shikhar to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of security prevention. Shikhar shares his vision to transform the industry and how the journey he's following to make the biggest possible impact. He explains what he's done differently to build traction momentum by creating a strong pull from the market. Lastly, he shares his big lessons learned from dealing with disbelief from customers, investors, and employees - and how to build a software business that cannot be ignored.

Here's one of his quotes:

"In the first phase, the only thing that really matters is getting to product market fit. And I think, over time, the success or failure of the company really depends on the strength of the product market fit.

You want to be able to answer this question, which is: what do you uniquely offer that someone desperately wants. And unique and desperate are really important words there because if it's not unique, other people will copy you, and the company is not really going to be valuable. And if the customers or prospects are not desperate to solve the problem, it's going to be very hard as a startup to convince anybody to buy the product."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to design for creating pull from the market
2. Why going against conventional wisdom is often the route to creating very defensible differentiation.
3. Why early disbelief is a precondition for a good entrepreneurial opportunity
4. Why companies should be built to be anti-fragile and how to go about that

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Shikhar Shrestha
• Website Ambient.ai

Chris started his career as an analyst at Forrester Research. He joined Microsoft in 2002, where - over a period of 18 years - he enjoyed several roles from Sr. Product Manager all the way up to Microsoft's Senior Director of Cloud ISVs and Startups. Here, he led the process of finding and making successful software companies building and running apps using Microsoft SQL, Azure, and Dynamics. He managed this innovation team across 12 European countries.

In December 2020, he co-founded Salutare, which he leads as the CEO. They believe that no patient should ever be lost. Every clinician and patient benefits when they are in dialogue together on the patient’s journey, and clinicians can be freed from performing many manual tasks. Salutare is on a mission to create online services where this dialogue happens and where the greatest improvements for healthcare can be made for better outcomes.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Chris to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the process of joining up healthcare - and why doing nothing is not an option. Chris shares his approach to making the impossible possible - and the lessons he learned to overcome the hurdles to gain traction.

He shares his advice to stay mentally sane in the day-to-day battle that startups face to create meaningful change. Lastly, he shares his secrets to creating software that people love to work with - every single day.

Here's one of his quotes:

It's extremely rewarding when you hear about these cases that you can make an impact. We had an early pilot participant in one of the hospitals, and she said, 'Saturday is my favorite working day. During the week, I've got to deal with all these other hospital systems. And then I work on your software. But on Saturday, I only work with your software, and it's a pleasure.'

And I was so touched by that. And I shared it with the team. And I said we have to aim for that nonstop every day. That's what we want people to say.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can create transformative change by addressing problems that cross silos
2. Why customer anecdotes of joy should be a must-have metric to track for every R&D department.
3. How to get customers to coach you to make the deal happen.
4. Why you should design both for adoption and diffusion momentum - and how

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Chris Dial
• Website Salutare

Harry is a hard-core developer turned into a tech entrepreneur. He worked at Shopify in numerous capacities, building and scaling Shopify's backend infrastructure, frontend technology stack, big data platform, and engineering organization.

Since leaving Shopify, Harry has built many other systems -- a note-taking tool, an automated vertical farm, a QA tool -- allowing him to gain first-hand experience with how repetitive software development can be. The made him ask the question: Why does it need to be this hard!

Today, Harry is the co-founder and CEO of Gadget, the serverless stack for eCommerce app developers. Harry and his team are on a mission to enable developers to build ambitious software ridiculously fast.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Harry to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to the speed by which we can develop business applications. Harry shares his vision about making the impossible possible for developers - and how this backs up his dream to be a company builder at the end of the day. He shares his hard lessons learned about what it took to build something that makes even the most critical developers advocates.

Here's one of his quotes:

"Have you ever heard the Marc Andreessen quote: Software is eating the world? We would say: It's not done yet. It's a very big meal, the world. And there are just a lot of unautomated business processes, and people sitting in cubicles copying and pasting data between different systems. We just believe that there's a huge number of problems that have yet to be solved with software, and we're excited about enabling those builders to do that."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can create a lot of interest and differentiation by creating a solution that's about uninteresting and undifferentiated stuff
2. That one way to create momentum is to help users create things they wouldn't be able to otherwise
3. That creating a remarkable SaaS product is not about everything the product does - but how it makes your users feel using it
4. The lessons he learned (and the tough decision he needed to make) in speeding up traction and adoption

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Harry Brundage
• Website Gadget

Ervin has a proven track record in product development, leadership, and corporate governance and has the capacity to attract, build and lead top-performing teams. He calls himself a digital-product-driven corporate opportunist.

In 2019, he co-founded Layerise, which he leads as its CEO. Layerise is on a mission to help companies make their products come alive.

Its vision is to create a world free from all the print and ink material used for consumer product and service onboarding. At its core, Layerise believes it can convert environmental positive impact into commercial growth for enterprises worldwide.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ervin to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the customer experience process when it comes to physical consumer goods. Ervin explains how he's found a way to transform a global industry and how he managed to turn a compliance requirement into a commercial engine. He also shares his tough lessons learned in taking the product to market and selling it to an audience that's going to love it in 5-10 years' time but is not aware it exists.

Last but not least, he sets apart what he believes is required to create a SaaS business that's worth making a remark about.

Here is one of his quotes:

We were not able to look at the market and say, Okay, this is a kind of an evolutionary step. We really had to envision a future. And a good way of predicting the future is actually by creating it. So we were looking far out and saying, okay, in 10 years' time, how is a modern hardware consumer goods manufacturer dealing with post-sales activities? Are they aware of who the customers are? Do they need to be in constant relationship with their customers? What are the factors of competitive advantage at that point for each brand? And then we looked at if those are actually to have the best customer experience, product, onboarding, customer relationship, what do we then need to do today?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

• What we need to do differently to create SaaS products that have a transformative impact, rather than just evolutionary
• How to package your SaaS products to wake up the market and make people think, 'holy moly - we definitely have to step up our game.'
• That if you don't do your product right, you end up spending all your budget on marketing.
• What mindset to embrace to ensure a lifelong competitive advantage

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ervin Draganovic
• Website Layerise

Lidia started her career in the Adtech space, where she gained sales experience with both PixFuture and StackAdapt. In 2018, she co-founded Briefbid, a two-sided marketplace where media teams can connect, plan and work together.

The insights she got there sparked the idea behind her new company.

Today, Lidia is a Co-founder & CEO at DeckLinks, a platform that empowers b2b sales teams to create the most personal buying experience with video sales decks.

DeckLinks is on a mission to make b2b sales more human. It's building a world where sales professionals can show their expertise and personality to create a deeper connection with the buyers at any stage of the sales cycle.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lidia to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of B2B sales when it comes to how we communicate. Lidia shares her vision of how companies can grow faster by making sales more human. She talks us through the big lessons she learned in her previous startup, and how the unique insights she gained firsthand gave her and her team a formula for success. Last but not least, she shares her advice on what it takes to build a SaaS business that's ultra-lean, remarkable, and able to compete with the 'big boys.'

Here's one of her quotes:

"This is how a buyer thinks. First they make a decision about you as a salesperson. Then they make a decision about the company. The offering, the value prop, everything else is after - but the first thing - the first 10 seconds is whether they like you, whether they trust you, and whether they want to work with you. These are the first three things they answer in their head in the first 10 seconds as they see you as a salesperson."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why deciding to automating everything can be the biggest mistake you ever made
2. How to win against competitors that have the biggest brand, the best product, and the best price
3. Why the number of customers that refuse to take your discount should be a key metric on your dashboard
4. Why designing for creating an organic network effect should be your biggest priority

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Lidia Vijga
• Website Decklinks

Nemo has traveled many paths driven by a passion to discover, understand, and solve worthy problems. From Mathematician to Logician to Flautist for the Danish Queen to Entrepreneur.

He was honored as the youngest-ever Goodwill Ambassador of Denmark, presenting joint ventures of world-leading companies internationally such as Maersk, Vestas, Grundfos, and Lego.

His constant passion for understanding and solving problems naturally led him down the path of Entrepreneurship. With passion and drive, Nemo decided to tackle the age-old problems of inefficiency, discrimination, and inaccuracy in recruitment and HR in general.

That's why he founded Sigma Polaris around a singular vision: Creating a world where HR analysis is based solely on meritocracy and where bias and discrimination are things of the past.

Its mission: To change the world of work and shift how companies build, engage, retain, and capitalize on the use of diverse teams in today’s workforce.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Nemo to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we recruit our talent today. That there isn't a talent problem, but a distribution problem - and how we can fix that with technology - in particular by removing bias and having to rely on intuition.

Nemo shares the most important lessons learned from his startup journey: that building a business requires much more than just an amazing product; what advantage leveraging diversity gives them; and why his business couldn't have been what it is today without investing time in exercise, i.e., taking care of himself.

Here's a quote from him:

There is a saying, 'you can get a book to be popular, by getting eight out of 10 people to like it, or by getting two out of 10 people to love it'. Now, when you are a giant, you need, most of the time, the eight out of 10. You need to be having almost all of the people you speak with think that at least you're interesting good. But I think as a startup, one of the things I've realized is this: we need to work with people that truly buy into it, the people that also believe in the mission. Because if you speak with them, sales cycles get shorter, and procurement gets easier. And all of a sudden, you get a reference, and you get a quote from every single client. And I think today, we've had a quote from almost every single client we have worked with because we choose clients that believe. Instead of trying to get tons of people interested, we try to get some people super excited.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. His strategy to be less 'all over the place'
2. How you can create a 300% impact difference in a matter of just 3 months
3. That you can get your product to be popular by getting 8 out of 10 people to like it or getting 2 out of 10 to love it
4. That it doesn't matter how good your pitch deck is if it doesn't get shared.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Nemo D'Qrill
• Website Sigma Polaris

Shay is a serial entrepreneur who brings many years of experience in dreaming up products and making them a reality: from concept to market, from slideware to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

He co-founded Kaltura, where he helped define the future of video - thereby taking responsibility as CRO, then GM, and today as a member of the Board.

Prior to that, he co-founded Destinator Technologies, a mobile-GPS-navigation software, and consulted on open systems to Fortune 500 companies

Today, he's the Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Retrain.AI, a company founded on the vision to make a measurable impact on global unemployment rates by helping 10+ million users find meaningful career opportunities and help enterprises future-proof their organizations. Their mission: To inform, empower and redefine the way enterprises hire, retain and grow their employees.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Shay to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the Talent Development market and why the best strategy for managing HR & talent management today sadly is: "We'll do tomorrow what we did yesterday". Shay shares his vision of how to solve the global talent problem at the core. He also shares his secrets on how to create a sustainable advantage and what needs to be in place to shape a software business that people not only start talking about but keep talking about.

Here's one of his quotes:

Let me ask you, for any organization that you ever worked for when was the last time you logged in to a corporate learning network and expected to actually learn something? The answer is that never happens. Right?

When was the last time that you get an email from HR that actually had important career advice for you? Again, that never happens.

When was the last time that a candidate that a company submitted a resume and got a call within 15 minutes saying we've processed your request, we think we understand who you are, we have two questions, and we want to schedule an interview for you for tomorrow? Again, that never happens.

But this is not a joke. This is a problem affecting billions of people every day, the systems that are intended to manage talent acquisition to manage talent organization, and learning and development, those systems are failing. And the cost of that failure is catastrophic.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why having a shared image with your customers about the future state of the world is critical to creating momentum
2. That a way to understand whether you are on the right track is to ask your customers to articulate in one sentence how you give them immediate value
3. Why it's not about finding product-market fit - but keeping product-market fit.
4. Why, in order to succeed, you shouldn't think about technology, regulations, or money. That always comes second

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Shay David
• Website Retrain AI

Throughout her career, a central theme for Christine has always been leadership development. She uncovered the power coaching could have on people when she acted in her role as Senior Vice President of Developer Relations at Tapjoy, a mobile advertising platform, where she led the growth of Tapjoy’s network business from 0 to more than $100 million in revenue in less than 3 years.

She experienced it from the other end when she advised several venture-backed startups including Flyby Media (acquired by Apple), Immersv, and Comprendi.

She realized firsthand that today's workforce is increasingly overwhelmed and stressed with increasing responsibilities and an always-on culture. This inspired her to do something about it.

Today, Christine is the CEO & Co-founder of Sounding Board, a company that was founded around the vision to make coaching accessible to leaders at all levels of the organization and break through the high-cost barriers that had made it impossible in the past. Its mission: Develop the world’s most impactful leaders.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Christine to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of leadership coaching and how this - by blending technology and people in the right way can be a thing of the past.

Christine further shares her big lessons learned during the pandemic - and how she and her team not only secured Sounding Board would survive but actually come out stronger as a company.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That the question in a Pandemic is not: 'where should we cut', but 'where can we continue to invest'
2. How to create an organization that's aligned and autonomous, and at the same time more creative and powerful
3. That the way to survive an existential crisis is not to increase focus on your own company, but on that of your customers
4. Why being bootstrapped - and being less well-capitalized than your competitors can be very helpful.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Christine Tao
• Website Sounding Board

Firaas is a tech entrepreneur on a mission, and one of his passions is Customer Success. He was CTO and Head of Customer Success (EMEA) at AppDynamics and helped it scale from $170m to $550m Annual Recurring Revenue in 2 years. Prior to that, he was a Director of IT at Credit Suisse.

Today, Firaas is the CEO of Hook to realize his mission to change the way Customer Success is run. Hook essentially empowers Customer Success teams with accurate revenue predictions and intelligent, actionable insights to secure renewals. It takes the guesswork out of their day-to-day - and helps them focus on spending their time where it matters.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Firaas to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of customer success. Firaas shares his experience around what it takes to answer the question "What makes customers renew, and what makes them churn?" He shares his journey of building a SaaS business that changes the way Customer Services is run and creates impact. In this conversation, he explains the counterintuitive lessons he learned and how that helped him create defensible differentiation from the start.

Here is one of his quotes:

People tend to focus on their loudest customers. I actually think the biggest problem is, the quiet customers, when you're running a SaaS business are the ones that are going to leave.

And the hard thing is, without looking at the data, you don't know who your quiet customers are because they're quiet.

When I was at AppDynamics, over the course of the couple of years that I was there, we started with very simple metrics. What we were able to find was that in none of those metrics that we looked at did sentiment make a positive or negative difference to whether or not someone renewed. Yet what we saw was that with engagement, there was a direct correlation in every number. If that number went down, the customer churned, if the number went up, they spent more money.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why do so many SaaS products suffer from the value gap - i.e. what the customer paid for on day zero, is far away from what they're getting.
2. What you can do differently in your product to minimize churn and increase net revenue retention
3. Why do you have to slow down the sales process in order to speed it up
4. The big lessons learned to create messaging that's humanly instantly understandable

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Firaas Rashid
• Website Hook

Amir is a Tel Aviv-based tech entrepreneur with vast experience seeding, building, and leading technology-driven companies, taking products to market, and growing them into multimillion-dollar revenue-generating global businesses.

He's founded, led, and held leadership roles at Twiggle, Israel Brain Technologies, mySupermarket, HourOne, CodeScan, Google, and General Motors. Amir holds a Ph.D. in Rationality and is the author of 18 US Patents.

Today, he's the CEO of Pragma AI, a startup that was founded to set the stage for a new way of selling. Their mission: keep sales human.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Amir to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we empower sales today to succeed in a remote-first world. We discuss the art of picking your niche, and what it requires to create something that's not only used but value-differentiated. Amir shares his experience in what it takes to get your messaging right and how to navigate between the signal and the noise as you scale your startup. Last but not least he reveals his insights on what it takes to create a SaaS business that cannot be ignored.

Here are some of his quotes:

"We work very, very closely with customers. And we try and listen as much as we can. And it's very difficult to do by the way. You say you're listening, but most of the time, you're actually you're looking to get a thumbs up for what you've done, because it's pretty painful when sometimes you don't hear that. Or sometimes you can hear 'Thumbs up' but it's kind of soft. And what we're basically looking for, as you do with every startup: 'We need this. When are you going to deliver this because we can't live without it!' "

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to go about crafting your message so that it resonates?
2. Why you should not rest until you're certain that what you're doing is distinct enough to be remarkable, and not just something that people use.
3. That running a SaaS business is a marathon, not a sprint - and how to go about sustaining yourself and your team to move mountains for a long time
4. How to find the nuggets to focus on that people are prepared to pay a premium for?

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Amir Konigsberg
• Website Pragma AI

Ariel has held various executive positions, including VP of New Markets and VP of Sales and Customer Success at Kaltura, where he ran global sales teams with dozens of reps

He's a tech entrepreneur drawing from experience in both the field and the lab. He's run global sales teams with dozens of reps; built playbooks and training sessions for sales as a product marketer; and earlier in his career, designed and developed multiple software product lines from the ground up, each generating tens of millions of recurring revenue, used by millions of consumers.

What he learned is that the key to success in scaling a sales organization is hiring the best people and coaching them to be even better.

That's why he co-founded Second Nature in 2018. Second Nature is on a mission to help make talking about your products as easy as second nature, to ace every sales call.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ariel to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we equip sales to deliver top performance. We discuss the disconnect between marketing and sales, and how things can change for the better if these departments would understand each other better. Ariel shares the big lessons learned from starting and gaining traction with a SaaS business in a very crowded market. Last but not least, he tells about the do's and don'ts to create a software business that no one can ignore.

Here are some of his quotes:

We're getting the materials and the kind of messaging from marketing. We're getting everything, here's our messaging. The reality is, nobody cares. Nobody cares about your messaging. Yeah. And now you have a very short time span, and you have to understand what do they care about at this point in time? What do I have to prove to them today? In 13 seconds, or five minutes or 25 minutes, if you're lucky? And how do I focus the conversation on that?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why many software vendors don't get the traction they hope for
2. How to overcome the cynicism in the market around embracing innovation
3. The best investments to make in the early stage of your product evolution
4. How to go about making big steps forward on your start-up journey without burning yourself out

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ariel Hitron
• Website Second Nature

Dan initially founded AppyParking after experiencing first-hand the pain of parking caused by a fragmented and broken market when trying to park near the Royal Albert Hall for a concert. From this was born the AppyParking mobile app, but more questions quickly arose...

What if we could digitise parking spaces? And not just spaces – but all of the UK’s kerbs? What opportunities would that unlock? How could a digitised, dynamic kerb not only meet the ever-growing demands of urban transport today – but shape that of tomorrow?

From that lightbulb moment onwards, Dan was hooked. He became unashamedly kerb obsessed and founded AppyWay, a startup that's on a mission to lead the charge to help cities thrive, from the kerb up.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Dan to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of parking. Dan shares his vision of how to make the kerbside a value driver and turn it into a positive revenue engine that benefits all of us. He shares how incredibly hard it has been to create momentum, and what he's done to create breakthroughs, momentum and secure defensible differentiation for his business. Last but not least, he shares his advice on what it takes to create a SaaS business that the world will talk about (and keep talking about).

Here are some of his quotes:

I pitched it to all the parking departments of London. And they looked at me like I was a lunatic. Basically, their business is to manage parking enforcement and make money from parking sessions. And I was trying to convince them: here's data to create better information to make sure people can get to the destination without a fine and reduce pollution.

And at that meeting, there was a guy from BT, who's in charge of a big 40.000 fleet of which 8000 operate in London, and he had a £3.6 million parking problem in London, and he asked, 'Can I have your data into my system, please, because this will help my drivers.' And I was like Ok, here's the opportunity.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How meaningful value can be created if we do the opposite of the norm and break the pattern
2. That extremely valuable innovation ideas are often right in front of us - we just need to develop an eye to spot it.
3. How to win governmental authorities to champion your idea and help realize it - even though they appear to be the biggest blocker at first sight
4. That momentum sparks when we start telling stories and paint a visual picture of 'what can be'

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dan Hubert
• Website: AppyWay

Tobias Konitzer is an academically trained entrepreneur who has a proven track record of turning research into technology and into a product that addresses ubiquitous pain points.

He worked for Facebook Research and completed a Ph.D. in computational social science at Stanford University. In 2017, he co-founded PredictWise, where he initially acted as Chief Scientist and became their CEO in 2020. PredictWise processed a large array of public opinion data collected from 260M+ Americans on hundreds of data points.

During his tenure at PredictWise, Tobias started to understand the value of this database in conjunction with modern machine learning for consumer-facing companies: Companies have a hard time optimizing over and understanding margins (LTV:CAC ratio) that is crucial for both profitability and accurate financial forecasting.

On this premise, Tobias founded Ocurate, empowering brands to focus on the right customer by predicting lifetime value, churn, conversion and growth at the individual level, with unprecedented accuracy.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Tobias to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the ability of many B2C companies to grow profitably. Tobias shares his big lessons learned in starting a revolution, and what it took to create solid traction. He touches upon the importance of investing in getting positioning right. Last but not least, he shares his advice on what it takes to build a SaaS business that cannot be ignored, and what mindset and habits to develop to not burn out from the many failures you'll have to deal with on your way.

Here are some of his quotes:

"I used to tell my investors, the vision is making a new way to thinking about efficient spending, the organizing principle of b2c companies. And this new way of of efficient spending, we call, folks call, lifetime value. And I want to say one more word here. The idea behind lifetime value is using AI to predict exactly how much profit, not revenue, but profit, every customer will bring to you as a company. And now, the big idea here is, if I would know that with 100% accuracy, all these other things all of a sudden are very, very easy."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to win more customers by getting on the same wavelength
2. Why valuing slowness can be the key to rapid growth
3. Why too many SaaS businesses don't have a product-market fit issue, but a positioning issue
4. Why you shouldn't found your SaaS business before you deeply understand the real pain point

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Tobias Konitzer, Phd
• Website Ocurate

He's an ex-lawyer who turned entrepreneur and tech enthusiast. This Henry Ford quoted what drives him the most:

“Anyone who stops learning is old – at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. Life is about keeping your mind young.”

Today, Baptiste is CEO and Co-Founder of Swapcard. He swapped his career in law to launch Swapcard alongside two childhood friends with a vision to change the way people network at events.

What's underpinning their vision is the belief in the impact of human-to-human interaction in a digital world. Swapcard is therefore on a mission to bridge the gap between the online and face-to-face world - thereby aiming to unlock meaningful encounters that have, until now, been impossible.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Baptiste to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the space where we make our biggest marketing investments: the world of events. How a lot of things have been solved on the process side - but not what's most valuable: Networking. Baptiste shares the big lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey. What was required to not only survive the Pandemic crisis but to actually come out stronger. The pivots he's led to move from 'nice to have' into the 'mission critical' domain. And what is required to build a SaaS business that the world talks about?

Here are some of his quotes:

"When you are an entrepreneur, you're building a future which doesn't exist. So if you're not curious, it's very hard to because there is no recipe and no one who can really help you. What you have to do is be very curious in terms of your reflection, the people you meet, and grab ideas from everything you do."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What skills to develop when you're building a future that doesn't exist - and there's no recipe.
2. What to do when everything you've done and all the value you build seems to become worthless
3. That even in the densest markets you have ample opportunity to dominate a niche
4. That a strong culture is the foundation to survive any crisis - and how to go about building one.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Baptiste Boulard
• Website Swapcard

John is a global tech entrepreneur and investor. While he's worked in tech, including retail, e-commerce, and real estate, the main focus has been based on his belief that training is the fastest way to move the needle in any organization and the right technology can make it move faster and be even more impactful.

This became the founding principle behind LUMA1, which he established in 2017. The company is on a mission to enable people and organizations to drive tangible improvements to training and communications by creating and delivering video experiences that today’s workers want.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited John to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's business world when it comes to transparent communication and sharing knowledge. We discuss how it holds organizations back when it comes to accelerating change, and what's missing to fix the problem. We discuss his big lessons learned in his attempt to embrace product-led growth and how he's steering product development to focus on what matters. Last but not least, John shares his views on what it takes to build a B2B SaaS product that makes people say, "I need to have that!"

Here are some of his quotes:

"The fastest way to move the needle in any business is knowledge flow. And that can be done through communications, or it can be done through formal learning, coaching, whatever it might be.

A lot of organizations just don't do it. I've visited a billion-dollar company that actually does no formal training. It's all done ad hoc, but it's got nothing to do with time, money and knowledge to do it. Oftentimes in businesses, there's this sort of black box, things are sort of cloaked in this mysterious thing."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That people need to feel cared about - and how to embrace that as a product concept
2. What we can learn from mistakes made in the eLearning space when it comes to getting users engaged and committed.
3. Why a critical design criteria in development needs to be how your product helps organizations move as fast as they need to move - without dependence
4. What it takes to spark arousal amongst users and customers

For more information about the guest from this week:

• John Hudson
• Website LumaOne

Ilia spent close to 15 years of his career at Nokia, ultimately as head of product & service innovation, Global Services. He then co-founded SafeRoom, a control center for Encrypted Data. In 2020, he co-founded Bitskout, which he's heading up as the CEO.

He's passionate about technology changing the world, excited to build Star Trek-like futures, and solving problems that matter.

What gets him out of bed every morning is his passion to help people become happier doing their work. The thought that 83% of people who go to work today are disengaged makes him triple his efforts.

Bitskout was founded to free people up to do creative and meaningful work and with that bring back passion and satisfaction to the job. Their mission is to give us the affordable tools to make it happen NOW.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ilia to my podcast. We explore what's broken in managing projects within small companies - and why we should not accept the waste that goes on with that. Ilia shares his vision about how to make the most advanced technology affordable and the journey he's on to turn his intelligence platform into an expert platform that could not only forecast your work but also check it later on as well.

We also dig into his first principles to create solutions that create a pull from users, i.e., a desire for more.

Here are some of his quotes

"What I did, I wrote every any crazy, stupid ideas that I had in my head for six months, five ideas per day, anything crazy. Anything that comes to mind. And eventually, what happened, you start noticing patterns, and you start noticing things, how they're connected. They came up with the problem, and it was a combination, a sequence of problems. So number one was building solutions to help deliver teams' projects faster. And I noticed that we couldn't breach a certain kind of project waste percentage. So we always were losing around 30% of the project times on some stupid things."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That the ability to invent something is a skill - a muscle that you can train
2. That the best roadmap choices start with minimum viable experiments
3. How to optimize your pricing strategy so it incentivizes desired behavior
4. That it takes the same amount of effort to do something great - so why settle for something mediocre

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Ilia Zelenkin
• Website Bitskout

Nimrod has been a software pioneer from the very first start. He's got over 20 years of experience in development, data science, and product management, and decided in 2019 it was time to make the jump to take on the entrepreneur role. He loves thinking about how we work and how we can make that experience better.

This is exactly why he started Cord. With a team of designers, engineers, and product craftspeople that have collected some secrets from their tenures at leading tech companies like Google, Facebook and Adobe - they are on a mission to leverage those secrets to make collaboration at work more effective.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Nimrod to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way SMEs can create true value from their ever-growing SaaS stack. We discuss the underlying problem and what needs to change in mindset of the SaaS Vendor community to cross the chasm that will bring more value for all. Lastly, Nimrod shares his views on what it takes to build a SaaS business that cannot be ignored.

Here are some of his quotes:

"The average SME today, Okta says, has over 90 different SaaS tools. So I saw how these companies work internally, with a lot of tools that are bought, not built-in, and don't have this 'connective tissue.' The tools are built single player and all the communication around them gets stuffed into Slack and inbox. I saw this as a problem because these are b2b SaaS vendors, and this is a problem for their clients."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why the winners in the next decade in SaaS will be the ones building collaboration in their tools
2. Why complacency in SaaS is the biggest risk of becoming irrelevant - and what to do about it.
3. How turning away a lot of business can be a very solid way to grow fast
4. A secret to creating a viral effect with the products you build

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Nimrod Priell
• Website Cord

Daniel has been active in software development since 2006. He took an untraditional path from most. Together with his co-founder, he skipped college altogether and, straight out of high school, created a consulting firm in Portland to help early-stage companies build their very first products, create MVPs, get their first users, and/or get their first investment.

After doing the same thing over and over again for clients as a consultant, he really wanted to dig into a longer-term problem. And being an early member of the Node.js community, where he helped organize a lot of conferences, got him an early engineering job at Yammer.

From there, he moved to Getable, where he was the CTO, and to Eaz,e where he was VP of Engineering. Today, he's the founder and CEO of Viable.

Viable is on a mission to help us better and more quickly understand what customers are telling us, so we can immediately find the most important things we should be working on.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Daniel to my podcast. We explore the challenges many SaaS businesses face in finding product-market fit. Daniel shares his experiences, and what's required to do / not to do in order to achieve this - whether you build a product from the ground up, or evolve an existing product. He also shares his experiences that not every product is fit for a product-led growth approach, and what it takes to spark adoption and to grow meaningful traction. Last but not least, he leaves his views on what it takes to build a software business the world talks about.

Here are some of his quotes:

"It actually came from my time at Gettable. And I spent four years there, trying to find product-market fit, and never quite found. But I did learn a lot about collecting customer feedback and using customer feedback to guide a roadmap. And it just kind of got me obsessed with this idea of using customer feedback to build a really great product.

So I started actually looking around on that one and came up with this idea to go tackle that. So the initial spark was actually solving my own problem. It was I knew I was going to have to solve the product-market fit problem at some point. And I knew that customer feedback was the best way to improve a product. I actually came across a blog post from Rahul Vora about how Superhuman found product-market fit, I applied some of those ideas to the system. And then went off to the races from there and quickly realized that this was a larger problem than early-stage startups."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That it can take years to find product-market-fit if you are not making some critical choices
2. Why it's way easier to design and build a remarkable product when you got a very specific user in mind.
3. How to create products that result in jaw-drop moments every time you demo them.
4. That just solving a customers problem doesn't mean that you're going to have a product that grows

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Daniel Erickson
• Website Viable

Over the past 8 years, Scott has worked with over 1000 early-stage founders and startups, helping them build the foundations of successful products, companies, and teams.

He's passionate about building awesome new products and creating amazing employee experiences. Another aspect he's fascinated about is: Remote work

So much that he's hosting a podcast, Leading from afar, that's all about remote leadership ad sharing experiences, wisdom, and tools to make remote successful at companies all around the world.

And this inspired him to start his own Startup, Spontaneousli - A company that's on a mission to make remote work more awesome.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Scott to my podcast. We explore how switching to a remote-first world has created a range of new challenges - some very valuable to solve. Just think about the Great Resignation. We discuss the innovation opportunity ahead - and how big impact can be created with seemingly very simple solutions. Scott shares how complacency and comfort in sticking to traditional thinking can put the best companies in harmful situations. Last but not least, he shares his views on creating a remarkable software business and why bootstrapping should be considered by more SaaS companies.

Here are some of his quotes:

If you read articles around remote work or the future of work, many of the companies have been very positive, saying: Productivity has been through the roof. We can get work done. Everything's fantastic on the work side, but we want to get people back into the office because we're missing out on the engagement and the happiness and those bursts of inspiration. I see it is really a lacking of tools.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That we often make the mistake of creating solutions that literally mimic what we think needs to be done, without thinking about what it needs to achieve.
2. Why often it's not the quality of the solution that prevents creating traction, but our inability to change human behaviors
3. Why we shouldn't be obsessed with Product-Market fit, but with Problem-Market fit.
4. Why avoid going the funding route and focus on building a SaaS business that's sustainable.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Scott Markovits
• Website Spontaneousli

Rami is a founder and entrepreneur in digital technology for the enterprise and B2B segment. He has a deep understanding of business growth and scale strategy. He's an expert in workforce management and digitalization of the field operation and beyond that, he has a deep understanding of mobility in the enterprise.

In 2011, he founded Arrow Labs, a company that's on a mission to provide companies pioneering and reliable workforce management solutions that impact their people and operations in a meaningful way.

It envisions a world where employees can connect, collaborate and perform at their highest potential, with minimal intervention to their workday.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rami to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of the desk-less worker and how this negatively impacts efficiency, accuracy, customer service, and safety. Rami shares the approach they've taken to enable field workers to deliver their best work in the toughest conditions. He also details what they did to not only survive the pandemic but come out stronger altogether. Last but not least, he shares his experiences in creating momentum, especially in a market that doesn't have a change or growth mindset.

Here are some of his quotes:

I used to work for fortune 500, corporate companies in the tech space. And I was working on large projects that would cover an entire city, for example, a safe city project or an integrated city project. And we have a lot of tools, everything from video wall tools to access to databases and information in real-time.

But when you're doing a large city-type project, you're interacting with the real world. You're not sitting in a bubble, you're interacting with people, workers in the street, frontline people that either are providing you valuable information, or you need to provide them valuable information. What I realized while I was doing that was: Oh my God,...as soon as we want to get information out to the front line or get information from the frontline back into the HQ, everything stops being digital became manual.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to avoid wasting lots of energy, time, and money by focusing your efforts on people who believe what you believe
2. Why you should always strategize about the two or three moves ahead - plan early - do a lot of smaller executive steps ahead of time
3. That there's a fine line between being capital efficient and missing an opportunity - take chances.
4. Why every opportunity should start with the simple question: Do I firmly believe in it?

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Rami Darwish
• Website Arrow Labs

Adam has worked my entire career in the technology industry. His specialty is building companies and organizations that sell and deliver enterprise software and solutions in the B2B space.

All of the companies that he helped found were focused on dramatically improving their operations. Two of these companies went public, and two of them were successfully sold at favorable valuations.

Although much has changed in the technology business since he started his career, he believes a few things always remain the same: it's all about the business outcomes and not the technology itself. And you can never go wrong telling the truth. It's never worth it to work with a jerk. And being the category king should always be your goal.

After watching the movie 'Her', which shares a vision of artificial intelligence, played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson, guiding sales reps to larger commission checks, he knew it was time to transform CRM and deliver the outcomes the world had been waiting for.

Today, he's the CEO of Spiro, a proactive relationship management platform. Spiro is on a mission to end an era where companies waste millions of dollars on CRM. How? By creating a platform that works for Salespeople, instead of the other way around.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Adam to my podcast. We explore what's broken in CRM and how the things CRM demands its users to do is fundamentally flawed. Adam shares why the problem won't be solved by making existing solutions look nicer, but that the solution is in doing things completely differently.

We dig into the journey Spiro has been through to get traction and how it overcame the tough battle to get people to adopt new technologies. He also shares the big lessons learned in deeply understanding the real outcomes customers want to solve and what it requires to build a software business that stands out in a dense market.

Here are some of his quotes:

Really good salespeople are really good 'in the moment'. Having the conversation really listening well, understanding what's happening. They're not the same people who are good at then typing all of that up. It's just it's a different skill. And so the things that CRM asks them to do are the things that they're bad at. It's structurally flawed. And so, the salespeople who are really good at updating the CRM are the really bad salespeople. I had one sales VP telling me when he takes over a new job as a VP of sales, he looks to see who does the best job at CRM, and he fires those salespeople. Crazy.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why we have to stop creating solutions that demand users to do things they're not good at and principally despise. Focus on what they need to be successful instead.
2. That often the only way to deliver remarkable impact is doing the hard things first.
3. Why we should do away with the preconceived notion we know our domain like no one else - it can seriously get you stuck in sales
4. Why it's key to set your ego aside as a CEO and invest time listening to your customers. Not leadership, but actual users. Not once, but weekly.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Adam Honig
• Website Spiro AI

Greg was the former CMO of Lifelock, and the founder of Qual & Quant, a full-service strategy, finance, and marketing agency. He combines his background in finance and marketing and believes that great marketing is the perfect combination of math and magic. He likes to challenge the status quo - and for one the market believes that a 3% conversion rate is normal in digital marketing.

This is why he co-founded Persosa in 2016, a startup that's on a mission to solve the challenge of creating media experiences consumers love without them feeling interrupted by the information they’re not interested in, and doing this all while continuing to bring in needed revenue and keeping advertisers happy.

And that inspired me, and hence I invited Gregory to my podcast. We explore what's broken in digital marketing and how the disconnect with what's normal in the real world is leading to many inconvenient and often creepy experiences. He shares the big idea behind his company and how this will help brands to have more organic, natural conversations with their clients - leading to higher and faster conversion. He also shares the big lessons learned in building his company, what's been instrumental to where Persosa is right now, and what he'd do differently next time.

Here are some of his quotes:

"Just recently, we started focusing on building partnerships with these large media companies, specifically in TV and web publishing. So an example today is: you're watching television, you see an ad for a Ford F150 truck. Like most Americans, 97% of people watch TV with a second device in their hand. You see this great ad for a truck. You say: I want to learn more about it. You go to ford.com, and they show you a minivan. That's a real lost opportunity. Not only for the company, but it's a disconnected conversation with the consumer."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That building a product that drives transformative change is not enough. The other thing is how to remove all critical barriers to adopting it.
2. How critical it is to understand what your customers want, but then layer in your vision and give them something beyond what they're asking for.
3. Be aggressive in those areas where you can learn what resonates with your customers instead of burning your marketing budgets (how conservative they might be)
4. How getting to Break Even first opens a lot of doors and opportunities to control your growth rate and gives leverage when you talk to investors.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Gregory Lim
• Website Persosa

Emil Jimenez is a marketing expert with over 18 years working on global campaigns. He started working in the communications industry as a web designer in NYC. In 2009, he opened Passion Communications in Prague with the vision of building a brand empire for himself and his clients.

Since 2020, Emil has set out to produce the most transformational idea of his life. This was the birth of Mind Bank AI - a company that's on a mission to allow humanity to go beyond their limits and live forever through data.

What started as daddy’s quest for immortality has expanded into something bigger for humanity because the next personal computer is you.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Emil to my podcast. We explore how observing his little daughter sparked an idea that turned into a vision that could potentially solve some of the world's biggest problems. Preventing Mental health issues by increasing mental strength, providing education and access to expert knowledge for those that need it most, new ways of knowledge monetization, and even immortality.

Emil shares the insights from the journey he's been on to bring this from idea to reality. Last but not least, he explains his secrets to creating a software business that we'd miss if it were gone.

Here are some of his quotes:

So Mind Bank is a platform for you to create a digital twin of yourself. We want to make a platform for people to bridge AI, and move humanity to what we call AI-enhanced humanity.

It's not about the metaverse because the MetaVerse is all about living in another place. Now we're more concerned about ThisVerse. How do I take the AI and data and all the sides that we have to make me or make you a better person and help you in your personal development?