The Saas Revolution Show

This week’s guest on the SaaS Revolution Show, hailing all the way from Brazil, is Diego Gomes, CEO of content marketing platform and SaaS-enabled marketplace Rock Content. Alex and Diego talk about the content marketing strategy the company has executed for their blog to reach 2 million unique visits and 50K new subscribers each month and help the company on the way to $12mm ARR. An entrepreneur by heart, Diego started Rock Content with two other co-founders, nearly six years ago. At the time they had no idea they were building a SaaS company, what made a subscription-based company successful or who else was building SaaS in Brazil. What they knew was to blog about marketing. Marketers became their core audience. Currently, at $12M in ARR, the company employs 300 people and has been profitable for three years in a row. Listen on to learn: How the customer acquisition strategy is reflected in the content marketing of Rock content What are the pillars of a truly successful content marketing strategy Whether y

The guest on the second episode of the Struggle is Emeric Ernoult, CEO and Co-founder of social media platform AgoraPulse. On that subset of the show, we aim to tell the part of the SaaS journey often omitted: the struggle to get traction. A struggle which sometimes ends in success but other times in failure. His story of struggle dates back to July of 2000 when as a successful business lawyer, Emeric found first hand a fundamental truth about the human existence - money alone will never make you happy. Earning close to €17,000 euros a month at the age of 27, Emeric was already destined for a comfortable and wealthy life. But his heart said no to that comfortable perspective. Instead, he wanted to build his own company. He started a business on the side with a friend of his. The idea they were working on was a social network, not too different from Facebook which launched 4 years later. But as it can sometimes be the case, for one company and idea to lift off, timing is key. With the dot-com crash about to ha

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we take you back to the SaaStock18 stage for a panel on the role of the B2B SaaS CMO. Moderated by Eileen O'Mara, EMEA CMO, it features Heather Zynczak, CMO at Pluralsight, Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at MongoDB, and Ryan Carlson, CMO at Okta. Their insightful conversation covers a large array of topics, on which, sometimes, their opinion differ. From how their companies stay more customer focused, what their marketing tech stack looks, and how they help their teams be on the cutting edge of MarTech all the way to what room there is for branding, creativity, and knowing your own weaknesses. What you will learn from them: What is the best B2B lead generation program How to hire and retain great marketing talent How to think about social media in an industry obsessed with ROI Beyond this panel, during the two days of SaaStock18, we packed a lot of SaaS marketing content. Invaluable advice from April Dunford on how to position products better, Kieran Flanagan expla

In just a couple of weeks, on December 6th, we will be bringing the SaaStock experience all the way to SaaStock Oceania in Sydney. On this week's episode, we bring you another great speaker we will host there - Ashik Ahmed, CEO and CTO of Deputy.  Ashik will talk about the shit he wishes he knew as he was growing the company. One of the central themes in that is the learning curve in making better decisions, which is the subject of this week's podcast.    Ashik and his co-founder Steve Shelley founded Deputy ten years ago after grappling with scaling issues at Steve’s previous company where Ashik worked. As they fixed a lot of the problems, many people in Ashik's network would enquire how it had happened. The problem of managing work and workers was huge so they decided to fix it.  Bootstrapped for 8 years they relied on whatever they were earning in MRR to grow the company, which called for a specific kind of decisions making - never too long term but always fast-paced. Two years ago, they signed a term shee

The latest guest on the SaaS Revolution Show is Alex Fala, CEO of New Zealand company Vend. One of the speakers at SaaStock Oceania, which takes place on December 6th in Sydney, he gives a taster of the topic he will cover extensively at the event: how to hire executives without using the Silicon Valley playbook, which Alex deems irrelevant unless you are the hottest company in the Bay area. Vend was founded in 2011 and Alex joined in March 2015 as VP of Strategy. Three months later he became CFO. In both roles, he focused on the business and commercial side of things. By February 2016, then CEO and sole founder Vaughan Rowsell decided it was time to let someone else lead the company while he focused on the product side of things, which was his passion to begin with. Alex was put in place as acting CEO while the board searched for a permanent one. Four months into the search and Alex’s tenure, they figured he was the best person for the job and kept him. First order of business for Alex was pivoting the compa

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, Alex Theuma takes a break from hosting and Irina Dzhambazova takes over, recording live at the Podcast Studio at SaaStock18. The guest is Tae Hea Nahm, co-founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures. We talk about his book "Survival to Thrival: A guidebook for building enterprise companies and leaders” which he co-authored with Bob Tinker. The book combines Tae Hea's perspective as a VC and board member and Bob's perspective as a founder/CEO and aims to provide advice to founders who want to grow. The book, split into two parts, focuses on the frameworks surrounding a successful growth and in particular what Tae Hea and Bob call the search for Go-to-market fit, and the more personal challenges associated with growing a company, namely the change of responsibilities that the CEO and VP will undergo and the loneliness that every CEO inevitably will have to face and how to counteract that. The conversation mostly focuses on the first part of the book and e

The first guest on our new series, The Struggle, is Clay Smith, CEO and co-founder of Akita. Started five years ago as part of the Launchpad program at NDRC in Dublin, the company earned its first 50 dollars in revenue last year. As Clay puts it, they became ramen profitable. The instant kind. It took 4 years, two pivots, consulting on the side, being creative about rent and possessing a dancing goat to make it through. Clay told this story at the SaaStock18 stage but also separately sat for a chat with Alex Theuma before the conference. As you will hear he never quite lost hope and kept on pushing through. In retrospect, some tough situations were avoidable, others were inevitable. If you have a story of struggle you would like to share with us, get in touch by emailing podcast@saastock.com You can watch Clay’s entire presentation where he has a picture of the dancing goat, as well as 40 hours of recorded content from 130 speakers, by getting our SaaStock18 on demand bundle. You have until the end of today,

We want to tell you about a new series that we are starting as part of the SaaS Revolution Show that will be dropping in this very feed starting this Thursday. It’s called The Struggle and it aims to showcase the story not told often enough. Once a month we will share stories of companies and founders who have a particularly difficult time in finding their way to traction. Sometimes they find their way through it. Sometimes they don’t. No matter how difficult and painful, every story carries lessons and takeouts which are as valuable to those who were part of the story as they are to the community. There are mistakes that can be avoided which our guests are kind enough to share for everyone. And there are tips on how to keep going through the tough times. Subscribe to the Saas Revolution Show if you haven’t already, on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast to get The Struggle episodes. The first episode coming this Thursday.

During SaaStock18, alongside three tracks and a Startup Pitch stage, we ran a podcast studio. During the two days of the conference, Inside Intercom, Nathan Latka, Growth Everywhere, Build by Openview, Open SaaS Mic, The Startup Chat, and 14 Minutes of SaaS all recorded interviews with our speakers, which they will be releasing in the following weeks. We too recorded three episodes of the SaaS Revolution Show, which we look forward to publishing in the coming weeks. This week we are bringing you the first of those, a conversation with Corey Thomas, CEO of Rapid7. When he joined 10 years ago, the company was just about making 5 million in revenue and employed about 50 people. By the time Corey became the CEO, 5 years later, the revenue was 40 million. In 2015 the company went public. This year it is forecasted to reach 250 million in revenue. When asked how all that came about Corey says it was a lot of people, figuring out a lot of complicated stuff non-stop. As the CEO, Corey has a clear plan in place how th

On this week’s episode,  we host one the SaaStock Oceania speakers - Dale Clareburt, CEO and Co-founder of Weirdly to talk about diversity and inclusion. We just launched our very own diversity and inclusion pledge in partnership with Zendesk. Learn more about the #TakingStockPledge Weirdly hails from Auckland, New Zealand and was started 4.5 years ago to help businesses and people stay aligned with their quirky and even weird characteristics in place. It had taken Dale and her three co-founders 3 months to come up with the name of the company. Dale has spent 20 years in the recruitment industry and has an incredibly deep and genuine interest in people. In her time spent working in agencies and services for the recruitment, she found most processes lifeless and unengaging. Weirdly was an antidote to that. Listen on to learn: The most important value behind a diverse and inclusive culture How should companies hire with fair representation in mind, yet make sure the best candidate is chosen What organisations

With SaaStock18 in just a few days and to get you even more excited and pumped, this week’s conversations is especially useful and interesting. Alex chats with Eric Siu, CEO of SaaS marketing agency Single Grain on all things content marketing. Eric is the host of not one but two podcasts - Growth Everywhere, which gets 100,000 downloads a month and The Marketing School co-hosted with Neil Patel, which is well on track for reaching a million downloads a month. Aside from speaking at SaaStock, Eric will also be recording a few live episodes of Growth Everywhere at our podcast stage, which will host 8 different podcasters for the duration of the conference. You can see the full line up on our event app. We will have limited seating available for people who would like to listen in. The podcast stage is one of many exciting things that come with a SaaStock ticket. In case you don’t have one, we have very very few remaining ones available before we sell out. Get one using code ALEXT20 for a 20% discount. Eric Siu

Jada Balster, VP Marketing of Workfront is the latest guest on the SaaS revolution Show. She has been in the B2B Marketing space for over 12 years, focusing on demand generation. She has built and led teams in a few SaaS companies in that time and currently heads Workfront’s EMEA marketing and account development teams. When she joined Workfront nearly 5 years ago, the company was 300 people. It is now touching 1000 and In this time she has had to shift her thinking from solely focusing on demand generation to also incorporating the more fluffy parts of marketing such as brand and story. Combining them together has allowed the company to scale and become a category leader. Listen on to learn: How Workfront does demand generation Why the business imperative behind creating a category is essential How to direct the organisation to scale and create a category Jada is joining us for SaaStock to talk in detail what it takes to become a category leader. According to her, it’s never too early to start on that jour

Patrick Campbell is something of a pricing guru in the SaaS world. He wasn’t always though. It was a job he had for a short period after he had spent time in Google and the Intelligence services in Washington DC, that showed clearly to him the sort of impact even small price alterations can have on the bottom line. A statement more valid than ever in the subscription economy. So six years ago, young and without family commitments, Patrick decided to give entrepreneurship a go and see what he could build with his background in econometrics and math and curiosity for price elasticity. Price Intelligently was born. Patrick gave himself 9 months to see if there was something and he could make a viable business out of it. Six years later, the company has rebranded to ProfitWell and is going from strength to strength. Listen on to learn: Why professional services and product need to go hand in hand What has been the evolution of ProfitWell Why ProfitWell relies on a freemium model Patrick is joining us for SaaSto

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Jessica Weisz, COO of SoapBox, a meeting platform that helps managers and companies have better conversations. Jessica joined SoapBox as employee number 5 and her role was to take care of customers. Five years on, she has transitioned through several roles with her current being COO. As she says it, it’s the role of making sure shit gets done, which complements very well the visionary nature of her CEO. At the start of the year, the company completely revamped its business model moving from enterprise sales to freemium and has seen great take up since. In the heart of what SoapBox does is the notion that better conversations between managers and employees is the most essential thing for the business to succeed. Listen on to learn: What is the essence of the 1-1 conversation How 1-1s differ depending on the cadence How to tactfully address negative feedback at 1-1s On last week’s episode, we introduced a special raffle we are running for listen

For one time only, Alex Theuma sits in the interviewee seat and tells Irina Dzhambazova who are the speakers he would be most bummed about if they didn't show up. It's one of the nightmares he has been having for the past couple of weeks and probably will have all the way to SaaStock18. You have a little over a day left to sign up for the SaaS Revolution Raffle and win a ticket for SaaStock18 so you don't miss any of the 129 speakers. The winner also gets an invite to our speaker's dinner. Head over to saasrevolution.show For everyone who joins, Alex promises to reveal his favourite pubs for a perfectly poured pint of Guinness. To grab tickets, head over to https://www.saastock.com/tickets/

It was early on in his time at Salesforce that Frederic Kerrest knew SaaS was going to be huge. On paper, enterprise on-premise software ruled the world, banking $500B in revenue a year. In comparison, Salesforce, which in 2002 was the only one charging on a subscription basis, had an ARR of around $25M. But Frederic knew that was destined to change. The tables would turn. He spent five years at Salesforce, working in sales and business development. He started and built the Latin America sales organization, Mobile group and OEM / Reseller programs. This week’s guest on the SaaS Revolution Show, Frederic Kerrest, left Salesforce when he had learned a huge amount about SaaS and in 2009 co-founded Okta, a company that brought identity management to the cloud. The company went public last year on NASDAQ, an experience Frederic covers extensively on the podcast. Listen on to learn: What the road to IPO has been like for Frederic and Okta What is essential in the preparation for it What has played the biggest role

On this week’s episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, we take you back to the SaaStock New York stage. David Skok, Managing Partner, Matrix Partners is in conversation with Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor, which was recently acquired by WeWork. They chat about the journey of 10 years to get to this exit. Speaking of journeys - our own SaaStock journey is only 6 weeks away from hitting a major milestone - our 3rd annual conference! There are still a few passes available so grab yours at saastock.com if you haven’t yet, it’s going to be epic. When WeWork acquired Conductor, Seth mentioned to WeWork’s CEO, Adam Neumann that he Adam may have built a billion dollar company very fast but Seth had made many more mistakes than him. He wasn’t exaggerating. Starting Conductor straight out of college, Seth messed up in a myriad of ways and had on many occasions almost given up and closed the company. Almost. But he never actually gave up. Seth has learned to play the long game and it paid off for him. Sitting for a chat

On this week’s episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Lidia Lüttin, VP Marketing at Happeo, a company hailing from Helsinki, which aims to connect the global workforce of enterprises. Lidia has always been a marketer. The kind that prefers the early scrappy days of starting up than the arguably settled clear days of scaling up. It’s why she recently moved from 300-person Bynder to the 20-person Happeo, formerly known as Universe. It was the employee count plus the vision of the CEO that convinced Lidia to join the company. However, there was also a drive in her to implement what she calls revenue-driven marketing from scratch. At Bynder, Lidia had learned that just looking after vanity metrics such as lead numbers, engagement and awareness was not a way to have a real impact on the business. Rather it had to be directly connected to revenue, something she now is fully subscribed to. Listen on to learn: What is revenue-driven marketing What does the marketing team focus on when doing revenue-driven

After he left Eloqua and before starting Influitive, Mark Organ tried really hard not to go back to SaaS. The experience of seeing Eloqua, the company he had built with his two hands, go public without him as the CEO had been too painful. He didn’t want to inflict that sort of pain on himself once again. No matter what he tried, it never really brought him contentment. So he decided to do it once again. But do it right. The start of Influitive was slow as they were introducing a completely new category but once it took off it really took off. For awhile Influitive was one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world. There was a time their LTV to CAC ratio was 6 to 1. Everything was going stellar until it stopped. Just like that. Influitive hit a ceiling, which as it turns out is a common occurrence for many other MarTech SaaS companies. It was time for some major changes. Employees had to be let go, perks had to be stripped down, costs reduced severely. But to truly survive and prevail, Mark had to im

On this week’s episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2Crowd talks about empowering the voice of the customer in marketing activities. Before Ryan headed the marketing activities of G2Crowd, he used it as one of two main sources of figuring out whether to apply for a certain company. The kind of reviews a company got was a clear indication of upward growth or lack thereof. This is how he would determine if it was worth the leap. Ryan career choices have taken him from ExactTarget and Salesforce all the way to HubSpot and now, G2Crowd. Through all that he has tasted very different flavours of marketing - from spending big enterprise budgets to building a frugality ROI muscle in SMBs. As a marketplace which is as much about B2C as it is about B2B, in G2Crowd Ryan gets to combine skills from each of his jobs. And he loves it. What unites his efforts is empowering the voice of the customer through reviews. Listen on to hear: How the customer voice evolves as a company grows and how to be pre