The Saas Revolution Show

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.

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,