The Saas Revolution Show

On this week’s episode, we host with Hande Cilingir, Co-founder and CEO of Insider, a Growth Management category creator, hailing all the way from Singapore.Originally Turkish, Hande divides her time between Turkey, Singapore and 17 other Insider offices, in order to manage what has become a 400-people company. Started by Hande and five co-founders six years ago, it has been global since day 1. While the US would have been a tempting location to expand to, Insider is only now beginning to consider it. At the beginning it was all about Europe and APAC, regions typically seen as more difficult, not as primed for adoption of SaaS. Yet, the lack of competition made them far more exciting regions, especially Asia. Tapping into it, Insider has become a trailblazer in the region, seeing 3x growth since last year alone.What has made Insider successful in markets like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond has been laser focused local approach to each of them. If you are in any way thinking of expanding into Asia,

On this week’s episode, we take you back to the SaaStock18 Scale stage for a panel discussion of what is arguably one of our favorite topics - European SaaS companies succeeding on a global stage. The panel brings together two SaaStock regulars - Martin Henk, Co-founder of Pipedrive and Christian Owens, Founder and CEO of Paddle who chat about their experiences starting up in Europe and then taking their businesses global. Interviewing them is Teddie Wardi, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners. As you will hear, the two companies had a very different approach - Pipedrive opened international offices early on while Paddle kept a single base in Europe for quite a while. Supporting entrepreneurs like them and seeing them grow successfully is one of the chief reasons we started SaaStock over 3 years ago. Every story of success makes everything we do that much more meaningful. Martin and Christian get into detail about many aspects of going global including: Advice on the timing of when to go global Strate

On this month’s episode of The Struggle, we host Jakob Marovt, a serial SaaS product builder and Growth consultant. In the last 10, years he has worked for and with around 15 SaaS companies, co-founding one of them - Pipetop. A computer science graduate by education, Jakob never actually practiced it professionally. Instead his fascination early on was with product and growth and Jakob naturally evolved into a technical growth expert. This isn't the first time we host Jakob. Back in 2015, Alex spoke with him when he was about a year into his Pipetop experience. At the time things were going great. As we find in the conversation for this episode, making the lead generation SaaS database work as a business model was already showing as tough at the time. He and his co-founder persisted for another six months but as Jakob admits in retrospect, they let it linger on for too long. Eventually they folded the company. On this episode, Jakob tells us in detail about the Pipetop story and what he has learned from the e

On this week's regular episode of the show, Alex chats with Aaron Krall, Founder of the SaaS Accelerator and the SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook Group. Aaron spends his time helping SaaS companies operating a trial to paid model get more traffic, increase conversions and reduce churn. In the last over 2 years, Aaron has managed to help 80+ SaaS companies with their onboarding initiatives, bringing as much as 300% improvement in conversions. To get that good at onboarding and emails, Aaron has had to learn a lot about the art of emails, onboarding or else. When he started, his emails were according to him, flops. To learn better Aaron wrote onboarding emails for companies, asking founders and marketers for feedback in exchange. With time he got better and came up with frameworks that he now uses extensively. He still steadfastly believes in treating every person who receives an email as a VIP. Listen on to hear What are the most common mistakes companies do with onboarding emails and how to fix them What ground wo

Tune in for an extra bonus episode hosting SaaStock LatAm speaker André Baldini, CEO of Superlógica. Superlogica was started back in 2001 as an ERP software for condominiums. André Baldini started out as VP of Sales In 2017 he was promoted to CEO. Previously his career path had traversed a variety of industries including banking, health and EdTech. The common denominator between each was the use of technology and making an impact on people’s lives. He has certainly had a massive impact on Superlógica. In the last three years, it has grown from 60 to 225 in headcount, 10x in revenue and now serves 4 different verticals. The biggest reason behind that growth is a switch to a full blown SaaS model starting in 2016. In my conversation with Andre we get deep into the story behind that switch, how pricing plans were created and the pitch adjusted. André is one of the speakers we will host in São Paulo for SaaStock LatAm on April 23-24th. There, he will be joined by speakers such as Aaron Ross, Co-CEO of Predictable

The guest on the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show is Ashley Murphy, Director of Growth at OpenView Ventures. She shares insights about the benefits of product-led growth and how to go about implementing it in your company. Ashley has spent the last two and a half years helping the OpenView portfolio companies with their go to market strategy including product led growth. The unique model that the Boston-based VC firm has is to provide strong support to companies post their investment to help them refine business models, pricing, marketing so they can ultimately scale. Prior to joining OpenView, Ashley cut her teeth in Wayfair.com where she executed their expansion into B2B. As the company grew, Ashley found herself craving the early days of figuring GTM from scratch. OpenView and their great portfolio of companies such as Expensify, Calendly, Datadog and many others was the perfect ground for that. In the last year or so, OpenView have been on the forefront of product led growth and its benefits to

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we take you back to the SaaStock18 stage for a panel discussion on what growth investors look for. Jos White, General Partner at Notion Capital, moderates the panel featuring Nicola McClafferty, Investment Director at Draper Esprit, Michael Brown, General Partner at Battery Ventures, and Tom Mendoza, Venture Investor at EQT Ventures. Growth investors like Jos, Nicola, Michael, and Tom look through a different lens for Series B/C rounds as compared to earlier stage venture investors. How they make decisions and what they see as the key drivers of a high-quality growth round tends to be different at this stage where they expect millions in ARR, a solid product-market fit and an international outlook. They share views on: Growth round readiness and what needs to be in place to even start thinking about Series B Their own key considerations, including metrics and parameters How investors make sure Series B funds will be spend the right way Bringing investors li

On this month’s episode, Alex speaks with Hannah Chaplin, Co-Founder, and CEO of Receptive, a SaaS company that helps other SaaS companies make the most of the product feedback they get and turn it into insights that can help them grow. Receptive is Hannah’s fourth company, the second which is SaaS. She has been an entrepreneur since the age of 21 and knows all too well the struggles of starting a company. But also the exhilaration. Her first Saas company, Order Harmony, was her learning ground about all things SaaS - from the basic metrics to the marketing, pricing, running a product and gathering feedback. The experience was priceless but the company never really took off. Four years ago, it morphed into Receptive. Her greatest challenge has been the nagging question whether “a product feedback platform is a sustainable business.” Even as customers signed up for Receptive, Hannah still struggled with the doubts if this was a viable idea. What helped her was the numbness to negative feelings she had develope

On this episode of the show, we host with Dave Gerhardt, VP Marketing at Drift, and talk about the importance of brand in B2B and how to go about creating an awesome one. Dave joined Drift at the very start as the first marketer. When I asked him whether it had been his impressive resume, featuring names such as HubSpot and Constant Contact that got him the job, Dave admitted it was actually his side project, the Tech in Boston podcast, slack channel and email list that had caught the attention of David Cancel. Dave’s experience is particularly interesting because he has always marketed to other marketers. He says he has learned the most in the past 3 and a half years, where the heart of the marketing operations has been the unique Drift brand. That has helped Dave and the company to create a new category of conversational marketing, sign up over 150K customers and become incredibly distinct in their marketing. Listen on to hear: How to win the hearts of customers How Drift approached building its brand How

Today we bring you the first of our extended podcast episodes, where Alex gets to ask the nitty-gritty details he usually doesn’t have time for. These hour-long episodes offer a well-rounded insight into the workings of some of the most successful SaaS founders and their companies. The guest this week is John Thompson, a Co-Founder and a CEO who has taken 2 businesses from zero ARR through seed and A rounds. His first company Commerce Decisions was an early SaaS exit back in 2008. Today he is the Chairman of Wax and ProspectSoft - two later stage PE-backed SaaS companies. He also works closely with Forward Partners, a London-based seed stage VC fund advising their B2B SaaS portfolio companies on sales and growth. As he told me in the interview - he has 8-9 SaaS CEOs in his life every week. Listen on to learn: The fundamentals of building a strong SaaS company, and the most important elements for success, What has made John a successful CEO What was the wake-up call for him to start taking care of his mental

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Max Armbruster,  Founder of Talkpush, about being truly global from day 1. It’s a topic that fits Max all too well as he would easily qualify as a global citizen of the world. Having lived pretty much everywhere around the globe, his current home is Hong Kong. Talkpush is his fourth company, which he started in 2014. While the HQ of the company is technically Hong Kong where Max sits with two other people, the reality is that the conversational Candidate Relationship Management system has been global from day 1 and has 5 homes. That wasn’t the advice Max had received at the beginning. Instead of focusing on one market alone and growing slowly, Max decided to approach growth differently - working with enterprise customers he would follow existing customers around the world and expand in each market where they were present rather than seek to find new customers in one place. The plan has worked out well and Talkpush currently employs 45 people and after

On this month’s episode of the Struggle, Alex speaks with Yesware co-founder and chairman of the Board, Matthew Bellows. He interviewed him a year ago for another episode of the SaaS Revolution Show where the focus was on the part of the story that showcased Yesware’s success to date. Today they take a step back and, in the spirit of The Struggle,  chat about the myriad of struggles that Matthew has been through, that isn’t often discussed, on the way to that success. Matthew started Yesware in 2010 together with his co-founder and CTO Cashman Andrus. The plan was to bootstrap but as demand for engineering talent increased while savings were drying up very quickly, Matthew and Cashman decided to fundraise. According to the blog posts, they had read it was meant to be easy. The reality turned out anything but. While the experience was difficult, Matthew believes that for Yesware it was the right thing to do. It also served as an important gut check - Do we actually want to run this company and build this produ

On this episode of the show, we chat with Kieran Flanagan, VP Marketing at HubSpot, about the essentials of product qualified leads. A software engineer by education, Kieran very quickly figured out that he would be average at best when it came to building software products. Where he go excited was in getting people to use them, and grow that usage. Kieran’s path in figuring that out has seen him go through companies like Salesforce and Marketo, finally landing at HubSpot 6 years ago. Such a long tenure is unusual for people like Kieran who get easily bored but HubSpot has proved an incredibly interesting playground for experiments that he hasn’t been tempted to leave. In the past two years, he has been in charge of the entire top of the marketing funnel, which represents all the demand created through users and leads. A lot of that has been led by trials and use of freemium products. Listen on to hear: What is a product qualified lead How to know if a product-led strategy makes sense for your business How t

On this bonus episode of the show, we bring you the keynote that Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP Marketing at HubSpot, gave at last year’s SaaStock on Tour in New York. Meghan goes in great detail on the year-long traffic plateau HubSpot’s blog went through in 2017 and how after the initial heart palpitations, the team upended the editorial strategy and are stronger than ever today. A creative writing major, Meghan joined HubSpot in 2011 when the growth graph of the blog looked like any content marketers dream - a hockey stick. That lasted for a few years until in 2017 it hit a plateau. In the first few months, Meghan and the team ascribed it to seasonality but as months went by with no changes they began to worry. As they would find out, many other companies were reporting similar results, and named that year, the great flattening of 2017. The journey to get out of the plateau began. Listen on to hear: Why were all companies seeing the plateau at that time? What was the first thing HubSpot did to accommodate to

On this week’s podcast, we talk with Cristina Vila, Founder of Cledara, which was crowned the Best SaaS Startup of 2018 during SaaStock18 in Dublin last year. Cristina grew up in Spain and from a young age enjoyed the dinner conversations with her dad, in which he would speak about running his business. The aptitude for entrepreneurship only increased from there, and on June 30th, 2018, Cristina left the startup she had been working for to start her own. The problem she had decided to solve was managing the abundance of SaaS products that companies were using. She had faced that very issue and upon failing to find a solution to help her, she decided to build one. Cristina raised a small angel round, employed the services of a dev agency and applied for the SaaStock Best SaaS Startup of 2018 competition as her master plan for launch. What followed were a chain of smart decisions and hard work, which led her to ultimately winning the title. Listen on to hear: How one single event determined their go to market

On this week’s podcast, we talk with Liam Martin, Co-founder of Time Doctor and staff.com and organiser of Running Remote, a conference devoted to leaders and executives from companies with remote work culture. We chat about hiring well and creating a healthy and strong culture remotely. Time Doctor measures remote employee productivity and staff.com acts as a two-sided marketplace for hiring remote workers. Liam eats his own dog food and both organisations are entirely remote with 100 employees spread between 26 countries worldwide. Liam started Time Doctor back in 2012 when very few companies were making the move to go for a fully remote organisation. But Liam had a perfectly good reason - the weather in Canada in winter time, which he really wanted to escape from. To make remote work, Liam has had to put in a lot of processes in place and has had to accept the reality that VC investors would not agree to fund him with such a spread organisation. Liam and his business partner have bootstrapped the company,

In December of last year, we attended the first ever SaaS E[quality] unconference, organised by the Women’s Work Institute and held in Toronto, Canada. In a room of about 100 D&I champions and leaders, we had a day of fascinating stories, provocative ideas and discussions around Diversity and inclusion challenges in SaaS. On the day after the conference, I sat down for a chat with the founders of the Women’s Work Institute, Kristen Liesch and Anna Dewar Gully to hear their thoughts from all the interactions and to lay down some steps for pushing diversity and inclusion forward. A conversation we are bringing to this week's SaaS Revolution Show. Without prior experience in SaaS, Anna and Kristen approached the industry for two very specific reasons. One is that they believe the intersection of services and tech is where the best results can be achieved in terms of fixing diversity issues but also because as they reached out to leaders in different spaces to see if they would be interested in participating

The guest on this month's episode of The Struggle is Rory Codrington, founder of WeDelight, a customer rewards platform. His entrepreneurial journey began in 2014 when straight out of college he started the holding company that would become WeDelight. At the time his product was an action sports meetup app. After a couple of years, Rory and his CTO figured the idea wasn’t going to take off so they pivoted to WeDelight. They first operated a pay-as-you-go model and eventually switched to a subscription model. Rory still keeps a screenshot of the first Stripe payment that came through from his first customer, CharlieHR. WeDelight’s go-to-market model was simple. A focus on outbound, mainly done through email and Linkedin and this way he managed to sign some pretty notable clients. Things were trickling along but as he realised not fast enough. It was something very difficult and frustrating to deal with as he was too close to the ground and had been at it for too long to just give up. Eventually, he got a piece

This is a reply of our most popular episode of 2018, hosting April Dunford. Seven startups. All seven of them acquired. 16 launched products. All 16 of them repositioned. Roles as varied as CEO, CMO and COO. There has never been a dull moment in April Dunford’s career. Throughout all that, she has become the world’s foremost expert on positioning. Improving the context a product creates for its customers became April’s lifelong passion. It’s why she has taken on seemingly very different roles in the various startups and their acquirers she joined. As she puts it, positioning encompasses the entire organisation. Currently, April is working on a book, which she hopes will offer the first scalable methodology for doing positioning right. Listen on to hear: Why so many startups and companies fail at positioning What are the signs you are having a positioning problem How to start fixing your positioning and create the right context for your customers Examples of product repositions April has executed What is the

On this short bonus episode, we take you back to our podcast stage at SaaStock18 for a chat with Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog. Alex and Olivier talk about how he has been hiring for hypergrowth. Originally French, Olivier moved to the US in 1999. Eight years ago he co-founded Datadog and the journey has been exhilarating and scary in equal measure. Datadog has been doubling its workforce every year and currently employs 800 people. Hiring has been one of Olivier’s main responsibilities and as he says his ability to hire has been the best predictor of future success. Datadog has a 9 figure ARR and has raised 140 million in funding. You will hear more about the founding story of the company, how Olivier has managed to double the workforce each year, how setting a clear focus early on has allowed for this and much more.