The Saas Revolution Show

Bjoern Zinssmeister is the co-founder and CEO of Templarbit, a San Francisco-based developer-oriented security platform. Started less than a year ago, it has already been through Y Combinator, has raised $3 million in funding and is successfully conquering the Asian market, starting with Japan. Bjoern left Germany for San Francisco as soon as he graduated university. In 2010 there simply wasn’t enough interesting tech coming from Europe to keep him around. It was all in Silicon Valley. Before he founded Templarbit, a developer-oriented security platform, Bjoern took seven years to learn the trades of building and running tech companies. His journey started at Match.com up and concluded in Design Inc where he was the CTO. Listen on to hear: How to pitch to Y Combinator with confidence Does going to Y Combinator help  How to go global as an early stage company How to conquer the Asian market Why closing a company even with a million in the bank may be the right thing to do P.S. Bjoern is one of many speakers

Dave Grow always considered himself an operator. When he joined Lucidchart seven years ago, shortly after co-founders Karl Sun and Ben Dilts had built the product, he was there to take care of the business side of things. From answering customer support tickets and doing digital marketing to hiring and setting up partnerships, Dave did it all. Currently the company's COO and President, back then he did not dare put a C-level title in front of his name. “I was always convinced that someone more experienced will come down the line who will take it over,” he says. As COO and President, Dave has seen the transformation Lucidchart underwent, from offering freemium plans to single users all the way to signing up Enterprise customers such as Box, Dropbox, Accenture, and Groupon. Listen on to hear: How the pricing plans have evolved to reach 10 million users What are the different GTM strategies to get to that sort of scale and what has worked for Lucidchart? Should SaaS companies nowadays have a Freemium model? How

On this week’s episode, we take you back to one of the panels we hosted on the SaaStock17 stage. Benedicte de Raphelis Soissan, founder of Clustree, Phil Chambers, CEO and co-founder of Peakon, and Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall discus the power of people, and how to hire, keep and develop people for the success of the company. Benedicte shares how she has grown Clustree to 25 people in the past three years, carefully crafting a hiring plan and an idea who is a right fit. Phil eludes to the importance of alignment, which Peakon has aimed to get from the first moment and has scaled to 70 people spread between three offices. Jonathan shares how Aircall has developed an outcome based onboarding process, where every employee has a bespoke and detailed plan, making sure that they get quickly on track with everything they need to know and be able to execute. Listen on to hear: What are the recruiting processes of three of the most exciting European SaaS companies How to onboard people so they fee

Kyle Poyar is a self-professed pricing and growth nerd. The latest guest on the SaaS Revolution Show, Kyle is Senior Director of Market Strategy at Openview, one of many speakers we will welcome in Dublin for SaaStock18. His passion lays in seeing how packaging and pricing have the power to build large and enduring business. Kyle helps OpenView’s portfolio companies accelerate to top-line growth through deep insights into their market landscape and customers. Kyle recently published an article studying the price changes Netflix introduced https://labs.openviewpartners.com/netflix-pricing-strategy/#.Wnx15pOFjOQ. The point he was making there, as he does so on the podcast as well, is that few companies understand the true effect price increases have on a company’s bottom line, a contributing factor to the reluctance of many SaaS founders to charge more. Kyle is also the author of a comprehensive pricing e-book - Mastering SaaS Pricing. http://offers.openviewpartners.com/mastering-saas-pricing Listen on to learn

Few people grow up deciding sales will be their career. Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware, is no exception. The latest guest on the Saas Revolution Show, he is something of an accidental salesman. It never was the plan but as soon as Matthew began working he figured that was where he could be of best use to a business. Through the years he got into more managerial roles and eventually became a VP of Sales. After a few years on the job, however, he got fired from it. It was the last straw. For years he had experienced challenges doing his job. It was time he addressed them. Nothing had felt as painful as presenting the quarterly forecast to the board. It had been impossible to gather all the information from the reps to have any certainty in his numbers. Software could help, Matthew was convinced. In 2011 Yesware was born. Seven years later, Yesware currently has over 60,000 paying customers and $20 million in ARR and to date has raised $38 million in VC funding. In this candid interview Matthew shares many valu

Bridget Harris, CEO and co-founder of youcanbook.me, had initially assumed she would be raising money for the online scheduling tool she was building with her co-founder. Bridget and Keith Harris spoke to many investors, looked at many term sheets and soon began grasping a peculiar fact - running a company with VC funding doesn’t make things easier, if anything, it may make them more difficult. The latest guest on the SaaS Revolution Show, Bridget has been bootstrapping youcanbook.me for the past six years. While the bootstrapped route is not for the faint-hearted, it allowed them to grow as fast as they wanted, even if that required expert knowledge of the difference between cash flow and actual income The company now employs 13 people and recently reached $2 million in ARR and is well on track to get to $3 million by the end of the year. Listen on to learn: How you learn to determine which expense makes sense and which doesn’t What made Bridget well suited for the bootstrapped path How to know when to take

Paddle's traction and growth is the stuff of dreams. A company helping software creators sell since 2012, it has been recognised by Deloitte as the fastest growing software company in the UK. With hundreds of customers and a recent $12.5 million Series B round, the company has remained under the radar most of this time. How does that happen? On this episode, Christian Owens, Paddle's CEO gives a very clear explanation. In the heart of the growth are the sincere customer relationships that Christian and his co-founder Harrison have been building and maintaining since day 1. The two co-founders fostered genuine friendships with their first hundred customers by trying to deeply understand their challenges and building Paddle together. Christian and Harrison approached these people as human beings they admired rather than businesses they sold to. Their belief was, if Paddle was the right tool to address their challenges, they could become customers one day. Listen on to learn: How Paddle approached people initia

Fred Shilmover, CEO of InsightSquared, shares how he has grown the company the past 7 years by staying laser-focused and not expanding globally. It has been there since day -1, back when Fred applied for an MBA to figure out what SaaS company he wanted to create. Fred did a proper research what would be of most value to people. Eventually, he figured that to deliver the best value to customers and not have a bloated product, the focus should be only on revenue. A lucky early sale to a cohort of similar companies showed a pattern that what they were onto made sense. Fred created a prototype putting together loads of spreadsheets and gave that to his co-founders to build a product. In the first year, he made all the sales. Somewhere there Fred made the decision that sales efforts would be focused solely on The North American market. With that geographical focus, InsightSquared now has close to 1000 customers, has banked $27 million in funding and employs 130 people. In that, he is a prime example that to grow,

As is often the case in tech, timing is crucial. It’s hitting the sweet spot of offering a solution when a market is just ready but not overflowing with competitors. Hanno Renner, CEO and co-founder of German HR solution Personio, and the latest guest on the SaaS Revolution Show got his timing just right. He launched the company two and a half years ago in Munich at a time when the HR industry in Europe was ripe for digitization. In fact, it was so ripe in the small and medium businesses segment that to this day Hanno hasn’t had to do a cold call to sell his product. 30% of prospects still come from organic referrals. However, there is more to scaling and success than timing and luck. In Personio’s case, the hardest thing has been growing the organisation that supports the somewhat easier product adoption. Listen on to hear: How to interview candidates for fit How to avoid making hiring decisions out of necessity What guiding principles to use when setting an organisation Why you should seek the advice of bu

Peter Holten Mühlmann, CEO of Trustpilot, an online review community, talks with Alex Theuma on the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show and offers practical wisdom such as when is the right time to go international, how to fundraise and what is the question every CEO needs to be answering as a company scales. Trustpilot’s story began ten years ago in Copenhagen when Peter decided all companies with online presence deserved to show they have happy customers through reviews and ratings. Peter initially had a very naive idea how he was going to build an Internet company and what his business model would be. Get on the front page of every paper in Denmark, become viral and make money from AdWords. After this business model earned €4 to the company, Peter figured he had to find a better way. Hundreds of cold calls and asks for people to review every site they had ever used later, Trustpilot began to gather momentum. Approaching unicorn status today, the company operates from 7 offices around the world, but

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show Alex is joined by Chris Hall, CEO at Dutch marketing tech company Bynder. In the conversation they touch on the pillars that define the journey of a CEO - from scaling and growing the company, its culture and its people to the personal transformation a CEO undergoes and how to deal with it. One key lesson he has picked on the way is that the most satisfying thing about being a CEO is seeing every person succeed in the right role. Founded in 2013, Bynder was a spin-off from Label A, a web development agency Chris ran with his co-founders Roland Keijzer and Stefan Pelders. The company bootstrapped its way to $10 million ARR in the following three years. “When you are bootstrapped, your only problem is cash,” Chris says. “Every purchase you make feels like it’s coming from your pocket.” To seize the potential Bynder had for growth, it needed the sort of cash injection that comes with VC funding. By August 2016, Bynder secured a $20 million Series A round. Chris h

Eric Santos, CEO and Co-Founder of Resultados Digitais, the leading marketing automation tool in Brazil and Latin America joins Alex for a conversation about the steps to convincing a market of the value of a product that it doesn’t understand, how to build an audience and develop customer discovery before a single line of code is written, how to create a “Disneyland-like" user conferences. Eric has been a tech entrepreneur for the past 15 years and founded Resultados Digitais in 2011. The idea behind the company dates back to 10 years ago when he first discovered online marketing and its power. What he found frustrating was that to make the most of it, he had to use a number of disconnected tools. By 2011 he decided to build a product a unified product. He ran into a problem, though. Very few marketers in Brazil were familiar with online marketing or its benefits. No one was doing digital. So in order to launch his marketing automation product he first had to educate the entire market about the benefits

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show Alex Theuma takes you to sunny Lisbon and Web Summit where he caught up with Ashley Carroll, Partner at Social Capital. Their conversation is about metrics and why user engagement is the most important one in her book. Chatting amidst the Web Summit crowds, they cover lessons she has learned working at SurveyMonkey, Optimizely and DocuSign, what is a big mistake every company should avoid when it comes to product management and what is the one product she has a serious crush on that has transformed how Social Capital works. A business and data-driven person, Ashley narrowed on B2B SaaS early on in her career. She was an early employee at SurveyMonkey where she went through the tumultuous journey from MVP to product/market fit. She then joined Optimizely to lead product management. From then on she jumped to growth at DocuSign where she worked to open the self-service acquisition channel. She is currently a partner in Social Capital. Listen on to hear what metr

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, Alex takes you to the SaaStock17 Scale stage where Christoph Janz, Managing Partner of Point Nine Capital sat down with Des Traynor, Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer and VP of Marketing of Intercom. They talk building and managing product and the importance of saying "No", as well as marketing and the channels that have been most beneficial to Intercom. You can read a short write up of the episode - https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/high-and-lows-in-product-and-marketing-with-des-traynor

Patrick Barnes, CEO and co-founder of Advocately, an advocate marketing platform for B2B companies, shares with Alex the GTM strategy that got him to $7K MRR. He answers key questions such as how he figured out who his perfect customers are, what MarTech tools he uses throughout the buying journey and why he isn't too hung up on pricing at this stage. You can read a short post from the episode - https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/inside-a-7k-mrr-saas-business-getting-traction-in-a-new-category

Ronan Perceval, CEO and founder of Phorest, a SaaS company providing solutions to salons, shares with Alex Theuma how he sells to the SMB market, keeps customers happy and successful, and maintains low churn rates. Check out the accompanying blog post to find all the links mentioned during the podcast including a 20% discount code for SaaStock 17 https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/the-no-bs-guide-to-achieving-45k-ltv-and-sub-5-churn-with-ronan-perceval Ronan Perceval is one of 120 speakers coming to SaaStock 2017, which takes place in Dublin, Septemeber 18-20.

In the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, Alex plays back a panel discussion held at SaaStock 16 on the fuzzy subject of hiring during growth. Probably among the toughest things for any founder and CEO to figure out, finding the right people at the right time and keeping them happy and engaged is the make or break for many companies. The panel includes Michelle Williamson, CEO and co-founder of Kommol, Michelle Coventry, talent advisor at Spring Partners, Ryan Burke, SVP Sales at InVisionApp, Rob Long, VP of Product Marketing at Workable. Hiring is one of many tough subjects we will cover at SaaStock 17. Get your ticket now before they run out - https://ti.to/saastock/saastock-2017 Listeners get a special 20% discount by using the code saasrevolution

Scott Heimes, CMO of SendGrid shares with Alex Theuma data insights and customer examples to reveal the 5 rules for building a strong and effective email program. Check out the accompanying blog post to find all the links mentioned during the podcast including a 20% discount code for SaaStock 17 https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/5-keys-for-driving-growth-engagement-via-email Scott Heimes is one of 120 speakers coming to SaaStock 2017, which takes place in Dublin, Septemeber 18-20.

Tope Awotona, CEO of Calendly talks with Alex Theuma about positioning your SaaS and figuring out the messaging, ideal customers, and company structure that come with it. Check out the accompanying blog post to find all the links mentioned during the podcast including a 20% discount code for SaaStock 17 https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/how-to-position-your-saas-with-tope-awotona

Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel, talks with Alex Theuma about the art of going international, why the world is the market every SaaS company should be after, and how to go about it. Check out the accompanying blog post to find all the links mentioned during the podcast including a 20% discount code for SaaStock 17 https://www.saastock.com/blog/view/the-accel-playbook-for-internationalisation