The Saas Revolution Show

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

The guest on the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show is Ashley Murphy, Director of Growth at OpenView Ventures. She shares insights about the benefits of product-led growth and how to go about implementing it in your company. Ashley has spent the last two and a half years helping the OpenView portfolio companies with their go to market strategy including product led growth. The unique model that the Boston-based VC firm has is to provide strong support to companies post their investment to help them refine business models, pricing, marketing so they can ultimately scale. Prior to joining OpenView, Ashley cut her teeth in Wayfair.com where she executed their expansion into B2B. As the company grew, Ashley found herself craving the early days of figuring GTM from scratch. OpenView and their great portfolio of companies such as Expensify, Calendly, Datadog and many others was the perfect ground for that. In the last year or so, OpenView have been on the forefront of product led growth and its benefits to

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we take you back to the SaaStock18 stage for a panel discussion on what growth investors look for. Jos White, General Partner at Notion Capital, moderates the panel featuring Nicola McClafferty, Investment Director at Draper Esprit, Michael Brown, General Partner at Battery Ventures, and Tom Mendoza, Venture Investor at EQT Ventures. Growth investors like Jos, Nicola, Michael, and Tom look through a different lens for Series B/C rounds as compared to earlier stage venture investors. How they make decisions and what they see as the key drivers of a high-quality growth round tends to be different at this stage where they expect millions in ARR, a solid product-market fit and an international outlook. They share views on: Growth round readiness and what needs to be in place to even start thinking about Series B Their own key considerations, including metrics and parameters How investors make sure Series B funds will be spend the right way Bringing investors li

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