The Saas Revolution Show

On this month’s episode of the Struggle, with talk with Joachim Klein, President of ThreeKit. Originally from Germany, Joachim has been living in San Francisco for the past three years.  ThreeKit is Joachim’s fourth foray into Enterprise SaaS, a field he is fully subscribed to at this point. He started off his path in a company called BigMachines, the subject of the conversation on this episode.   Joachim joined it in September 2000 as EMEA MD, nine months after BigMachines had been started. The startup helped manufacturing companies provide the best possible quotes for their big machines. Joachim remembers the first year as particularly exhilarating. They were receiving a lot of interest from prospects, had many great conversations with them and all in all got a lot of praise for the problem they were tackling. On top of that, they had raised $30 million in funding so there was plenty of money in the bank. Bullish about the future of the company, BigMachines hired a lot of people that year, preparing for the

This week’s guest on the SaaS Revolution Show is John Doran, Director of Engineering at Phorest Salon Software, a cloud-based management solution and marketing suite for salons and spas.  Born and bred in Dublin, John has always loved building product and iteratively improving it. Phorest is the first SaaS product he was involved with, jumping in from professional services. which he found far more unsatisfactory. When John joined Phorest four years ago, there were only 5-6 engineers who all reported to Ronan Perceval, CEO and Founder of Phorest.  Two years into his tenure, John became the Director of Engineering. For a while, he continued operating under the flat structure he inherited but quickly that began to cause problems. Individually siloed and not in sync, the engineering development suffered. John and his team began to experiment with changes and are on a journey of continuous improvement. Listen on to learn: The warning signs that the engineering team will need to be restructured One change John and

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show we chat with SalesLoft CMO, Sydney Sloan. She shares lessons from her vast experience in customer-focused marketing and the metrics she has learned to swear by and report.  Sydney has always been customer focused. Even back in the 90s when there were no CRM systems and no one spoke about the importance of myopically focusing on the customer. At the time she was doing what would end up a 15 year stint at Adobe - the place Sydney says she grew up in a way. At trade shows she would stand beside her sales colleague and have long conversations with people who visited their booth about their problems and challenges. Towards the end of her time in Adobe, she finally had a more customer experience role, leading the Customer Marketing. From then on, there was no going back. Her career would see her work for companies such as Jive Software and Alfresco. A little over a year ago, she joined Salesloft where she has been building a strong relationship between Marketing and

This week’s guest on the SaaS Revolution Show is Sophia Eng, VP of Growth Marketing at Trade the Fifth and Founder of Women in Growth, a support group for female executives. In August 2017 an article she wrote in response to an internal memo that a Google engineer had written to discredit the ability of women to be in STEM careers, became viral overnight. Quoting outdated facts, the internal memo was leaked to the public and as soon as Sophia read it, she wrote a manifesto to urge women and other minorities to speak up and tell their stories so the facts can be straightened.  On the episode, Sophia shares more about the experience and what has happened since. She talks in detail about the continued importance that people of diverse backgrounds tell their story, how vital it is not too give up on efforts to bring more diversity and inclusion in tech as we are only at the tip of the speer and one characteristic that women and other minorities possess that is essential for innovation. A child of Vietnamese immig

The start of Dan Martell entrepreneurial path has all the markings of a Hollywood film - driving a stolen car, chased by police, with a gun beside him. The latest guest on the Struggle, the Canadian 5-time founder has quite the story of trials, tribulations on the way to success. Beyond being a dad, a husband and a Canadian, Dan would tell you that his defining characteristics are someone who is driven, someone who constantly asks what is possible and what does he need to do to fulfill his dreams and goals. We know where, when and how his entrepreneurial story begins but what has followed since is as interesting, tough and educational. A lot of it was, in his words, soul crushing. It took him nearly 10 years and 2 failed companies to get a better idea of how to do business right. That coupled with coming across the book “Love is the killer app” gave him the knowledge to be successful. 15 years and three more companies after, Dan has managed to achieve successful exits all the while learning a massive amount o

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Rory O’Driscoll, Partner of Scale Venture Partners and talk about the things he believes SaaS entrepreneurs should be mindful of even as the SaaS industry seems to be thriving. Originally from Ireland, Rory moved to California 28 years ago. For 25 of those, he has been investing in enterprise software with Scale Venture Partners and its predecessor. In that time he has learned a lot of things about the world of venture funding, starting with the fact of just how deceivingly easy all of it seems, yet how difficult it is to make the right decisions about entrepreneurs and their companies and have the conviction to see them through the tough times.   Rory has also learned to count his blessings and remember that a lot of the successful bets he has made have a lot to do with luck. That humbleness is what keeps him cautious even in the best of times for SaaS and in this interview he shares some of his reservations about valuations, market saturation, the i

One of the last sessions at SaaStock18 was a bonus chat that brought a double dose of Canadian accents - April Dunford, the world’s foremost expert on positioning sat for a conversation with Mark Organ, CEO and founder of Influitive. Even though they spoke at 4;20 on the day weed was legalised in Toronto, the topic they covered on the day was slightly different - category creation. On this week’s episode we are bringing you their entire chat. Category creation had been coming up again and again during the two days of the conference. It’s something that Mark, who has started 7 companies in his career, two of which category creators, is all too familiar with. His first one was Eloqua, which he founded 20 years ago and the second is his current company, Influitive, which he started 8 years ago. In their conversation, April and Mark talk about the origin story of each, to what extend Mark realized he was creating categories at the time, how he sold the idea to funders and customers, and many other. Both agree jus

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we speak with Alison Murdock, CMO of SocialChorus, a platform for planning, creating, publishing, and measuring employee communications. Alison has spent the last 25 years in Silicon Valley working in a variety of media and SaaS companies. She started her career wanting to be a writer and her very first job was writing for a magazine in Paris. As she transitioned more into marketing, writing remained a fundamental skill for her and to this day, Alison believes that what companies choose to write or speak about matters most. Everywhere she has worked, she has always aimed to find the crux of the issue that companies are trying to nail with content and the story they are trying to tell. When it comes to Social Chorus that is a particularly important thing to focus on as they sell to a plethora of companies, that are often undergoing digital transformation. In this interview Alison shares many nuggets from her experience including: How to stand out in the sea o

On this month’s episode of the Struggle, Alex Theuma speaks with Liam Boogar-Azoulay, Head of Marketing at MadKudu, a predictive lead scoring solution for SaaS companies. Liam has had somewhat of an unusual path professionally and personally. When everyone was moving to Silicon Valley, he moved away from it, landing in Paris. While most people would hone their skills in a particular area first and then dare to start their own company, Liam’s first job was starting Rude Baguette, a blog devoted to startups.   He had started it almost as soon as he moved to Paris. Rude Baguette would end up being one of the biggest startup publications in France, which employed 10 people. That is until Liam brought it to bankruptcy, a slow one as you will hear him describe in this interview, but a bankruptcy nevertheless. In retrospect, he knows exactly what went wrong but at the time some of his flaws were hidden. One thing he realized from the experience is that he had enjoyed building the brand far more than being a CEO. Wit

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with SaaStock East Coast speaker Eran Ben Shushan. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Bizzabo, a holistic event management platform, and shares how to make better hiring decisions​ as a company grows. Originally from Tel Aviv, Israel, Eran moved to New York, three and a half years ago, as soon as the company found product-market fit. A former air force officer and a system’s engineer, Eran had his first experience with the magic and challenge of events over 12 years ago. His fascination with events was so intense that he decided to dip his toe in building a platform for them. He started Bizzabo with two other co-founders 7 years ago. Initially it was improving networking at events and aiming to engineer serendipity for attendees. However, early on, Eran and his two co-founders saw a far bigger opportunity. Nowadays Bizzabo boast two offices, an employee count of 120 and has to date raised $57 million in VC funding. The growth has been tremendous but what Er

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show we speak with Diane Adams, Chief Culture and Talent Officer at Sprinklr and author of the book It Takes More than Casual Fridays and Free Coffee. Diane has devoted her career to building and studying the role of culture in a company’s success. As the Chief Culture and Talent Officer at Sprinklr, Diane and her team are charting the course for building a high-performing and inclusive culture. No wonder then that the word her colleagues would use to describe her is obsessive in relation to figuring the puzzle that is company culture. When asked what company culture is, Diane says it’s the consistent set of behaviours displayed inside an organization, rather than the words, the culture decks or the free coffees. Actual culture starts by understanding what people truly care about. When she first joined Sprinklr over a year ago, she found a situation often observed in high-growth companies. The company culture had been great until it wasn’t anymore. Diane rolled he

On this month’s episode of The Struggle, we speak with Janna Bastow, Co-Founder and CEO of ProdPad, a SaaS platform for product management that helps product managers develop product strategy. It took Janna about a week on the job as a product manager to realize that she didn’t have the tools necessary to do her job. Creating roadmaps, managing a backlog of features and writing specs was all done in Powerpoint and Excel, tools never created for such purposes. Yet for two years that is exactly what Janna used. Until one day she decided she had had enough of waiting for better tools and together with what would become her co-founder, Simon Cast, began building the tool she never had. Initially, Janna and Simon used it just for themselves but it didn’t take long until they realized that many other product managers just like them would find it useful. In 2012 they quit their jobs and in February 2013 ProdPad was officially launched. They signed their first customer within the month, a customer that is still with

On this week's episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we are bringing you the Growth Stage fireside chat Nathan latka had with Adrien Menard, CEO and Co-Founder of Botify. Adrien unravels a host of interesting data behind Botify’s growth - when they became profitable, what is their ACV and net churn, how their sales and customer success organizations look like and many other.  Botify is a search engine optimization platform designed to optimize websites for Googlebot. Started in 2012 in Paris, the company currently has 450 customers and is spread between three offices. Adrien established the New York HQ. He moved there in 2016. We spoke with him about the experience of moving there and establishing US operations about a year ago on the podcast. Have a listen. Nathan Latka has an unmatched ability to extract data and information from SaaS founders and has over 3000 podcast episodes under his belt, making him incredibly knowledgeable on the subject of what it takes to be a successful SaaS company. It’s why we are

To mark the launch of our fourth flagship conference, SaaStock19, we are bringing a special radio hour episode collating the wisdom from 5 speakers we hosted at SaaStock18, who will be joining us again at SaaStock19. We have gathered tactical advice from Patrick Campbell, CEO and founder of ProfitWell, April Dunford, Founder of Ambient Strategy, Bridget Harris, CEO and Co-Founder of youcanbook.me, Eris Siu, CEO of Single Grain, and Steli Efti, CEO and Founder of Close.io who in different ways and for different reasons would agree on the essential importance of speaking to customers. As you are listening it may seem like they are talking about something completely separate, yet they always get to the same conclusion: whatever the challenge, part or the resolution is directly connected with talking to your customers. That is as valid for building better products and improving them, as it is to positioning your product better, getting more traffic to your website and improving your sales emails. Super early bird

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, fresh off the SaaStock LatAm stage, we bring you one of the favourite panels of the day - best practices in hiring for culture creation. Maira Gracini, LatAm Marketing Director at Zendesk moderates the panel, which hosts Valeria Porto, HR Director at PayPal, Gabriela Viana, LatAm Marketing Director for Adobe and Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. They share how their respective organizations are rethinking their recruitment process: opening up candidate pools to cater to diverse groups, from ethnicity through gender, and all the way to ability and neurodiversity. What they share, clearly proves how hiring with diversity in mind, shortens recruitment cycles and creates tangible benefits to both company culture and the bottom line. Among other powerful nuggets, you will learn how and why Zoho abandoned the requirement for college degrees, why referral programs are the best way to recruit according to PayPal, why Adobe was the first company in Silicon Vall

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