The Saas Revolution Show

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

On this week’s episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, I talk with Jonathan Kim, CEO and Founder of Appcues about the user onboarding that acquires, wins and retains customers. While working as a front-end engineer at HubSpot, Jonathan got increasingly frustrated by the fact that B2B companies didn’t have the sort of seamless self-service onboarding that the likes of Facebook or Twitter had. Whether it was salespeople, account managers or customer success reps, they all did the same thing day in and day out manually onboarding users. Before long Jonathan decided to leave HubSpot and pursue finding a solution on his own, fulfilling his dream to be an entrepreneur. That was five years ago and Appcues was born. Today, the company based out of Boston has 55 employees and has just raised a Series A funding. Listen on to hear: Why user onboarding is important How to go about creating great user onboarding What are the effects of good user onboarding Appcues Director of Marketing, Ty Magnin will be joining us on the

On this week’s episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, Stan Massueras, Intercom EMEA Sales Director talks about sales and customer acquisition at Intercom. Born and raised in a small village in France, as soon as Stan Massueras graduated college he decided Dublin was the place to be. He bought a one-way ticket and with a thousand euros in his back pocket he went on to experience the booming tech scene in the Irish capital. That was back in 2004 and Stan immediately fell in love with Dublin and has never looked back. His career path has passed through Xerox, HP, Facebook and Twitter before joining Intercom. In each of these companies, he has built European sales operations from the ground up, never expecting the successes they would reach. When he joined Intercom, there was already a small Sales team but Stan ramped up the EMEA sales efforts to new highs. The conversation traces back how Intercom’s sales thinking has evolved and how currently Stan enables everyone to do the best work they can. Listen on to hear:

Andrus Purde, Founder and CEO of Outfunnel has been a marketer for 21 years. Yet he would tell you he is only getting the grips of it now. That, though, is more humbleness than reality as he has been instrumental to the growth of Pipedrive where he was the VP of Marketing for 7 years and helped the company reach 70,000 customers. Before he knew what Outfunnel would become, he embarked on a massive customer development exercise. Listen on to hear: How Andrus conducted his customer development interviews What were some of the biggest challenges on the way How he gathered everything he knew about marketing to kickstart Outfunnel’s GTM strategy Andrus is one of many speakers we will welcome to SaaStock18 where he will give us a live update of where Outfunnel is. We released our agenda last week so check out the myriad of keynotes, bootcamps and fun loving opportunities that await you for three days in Dublin. https://www.saastock.com/agenda We still have a few discounted tickets available for you, our devoted l

This week of the SaaS Revolution Show, we devote the entire episode to Customer Success. Alex Theuma takes you on a journey that spans from the stages of SaaStock 16 and 17 through to SaaStock on Tour Helsinki and New York to pick up some of the best stories and advice from Customer Success practitioners. The episode is divided into four parts. The first part defines Customer Success, helps you figure out when is the best time to start with it, and looks at how companies like Slack and Drift kicked it off. In the second part, our speakers cover how to build and scale a customer success team and how to figure out the compensation for CSMs. We then look at the all important metrics that measure the efforts and help you adjust. Finally, the episode brings you ideas about what customer success programs could look like and how to enable them. Some obvious, some not so. Throughout the episode, you will hear quotes and excerpts from Dan Steinman from Gainsight, David Apple from Typeform, Rav Dhaliwal from Slack, Jul

Workplace by Facebook was launched in October 2016. Heading it was Julien Codorniou in London, who had been working with Facebook since 2011. On this week's episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we sat with Julien, to get a unique peek into the workings of how a company such as Facebook operates in the SaaS B2B scene and the ways it breaks and reinvents the B2B sales and marketing rules. Listen on to hear: How Julien and Workplace turned the marketing and sales playbook upside down How they sell into giant corporations such as Walmart How the vision of a company can sell the product Julien is one of many speakers we will welcome to SaaStock18. We are excited to release our full agenda next week. Head over to https://www.saastock.com and sign up to be the first one to get a sneak peek at it.