The Saas Revolution Show

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.

On this week’s episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, we take you to the SaaStock on Tour New York stage for what was one of the most entertaining and well-received panels on the day. Ben Hindman, CEO of Splash talks with Tomer Tagrin, CEO of Yotpo and Alexis Le Quoc, CTO of Datadog about some of the fundamental challenges they have faced in the course of growing their companies and how they have addressed them. Listen on to hear: What is the right set up for scaling a company? What is the main job of the leader of a scaling company? How to fundraise and stay frugal at the same time? One of the benefits to being based in New York rather than Silicon Valley is the fact that founders don’t have to spend crazy money on having the most impressive conference rooms and perks in the neighbourhood to attract talent. A sentiment valid for many other places in the world where founders and executives built their companies without unnecessary bells and whistles. We will gather 3000 of them from over 50 countries in Dubli

In September 2016, Adrien Menard, CEO of Paris-born Botify packed his bags and moved together with his wife and two kids to New York to open Botify's US office. He had chosen New York mainly due to the slightly shorter time difference with Paris in comparison to the much more unsurmountable 9 hours with the West coast. Adrien was leaving 24 employees behind and venturing into the new world all by himself. Visas took more time, the advice his lawyer gave him was wrong multiple times, and Adrien would have to reinvent overnight how Botify communicated and made decisions. Despite all that, there was not a grain of doubt that he was doing the right thing. He had a $7 million Series A funding round and a 10% US-based customer base to give him confidence as the going got tough. Fast forward almost two years later after Adrien moved to New York, US customers now represent 60% of the revenue, and the Botify employee count has risen to 100 with 25 of them based in the New York office. How did all that work out? Listen

On this week’s episode, as part of The SaaS Revolution Show Episode 100 special, we are taking you to that SaaStock New York stage for the chat Nic Poulos, Partner at Bowery Capital had with David Cancel, CEO of Drift about the stellar journey of reaching 70,000 customers in three years in an incredibly oversaturated vertical. David Cancel needs no introduction. The five-time founder who has achieved 4 exits in his 20-year career had three options in front of him as he left HubSpot where he served as Chief Product Officer. He could do nothing, he could get into the venture capital world or he could do the whole rollercoaster ride one more time. He opted for the third and Drift was born. What it has grown to be is a whole new category of conversational marketing, shifting the buying process in B2C and B2B. Inherently slow and passive, Drift is turning it into a real-time two-sided conversation. David and Nic’s conversation is a treasure trove of insights about hyper growing, something possible and attainable e

For the past three years and 99 episodes, we have talked to the founders, operators and investors leading the SaaS Revolution around the world. In that time, we have seen it get stronger and more impressive in an incredible fashion. The SaaS Revolution Show has aimed to showcase their achievements and unravel the story behind the growing momentum of SaaS with vital lessons and tactics attached. For this 100th episode, we are taking you back to some of our pivotal episodes and the practical advice bursting from them. After careful selection, we chose seven of them, picked the key pieces of advice from them, and montaged them together to create what is the ultimate audio guide on How to grow your SaaS. We feature Mark Roberge, Pieterjan Bouten, April Dunford, Nadim Hossein, Neeraj Agrawal, Eric Santos, and Laura Roeder. Listen on to hear: How to build successful sales organisations How to set up marketing teams and do demand generation right How to do positioning right How to set up organisations for growth Ho

On this week’s episode of The SaaS Revolution Show we take you to the SaaStock Paris stage where Rachel Delacour, VP Startups at Zendesk talks with Marie-Hortense Varin, Principal at Partech Ventures, Samantha Jerusalmy, Partner at Elaia and Evgenia Plotnikova, Principal at Dawn Capital about what it takes to become a billion-dollar company and what’s the role of the VC in this beyond funding the journey. With many promising companies coming out of Europe, there are important things to keep in mind on the road to scaling successfully, which Samantha, Marie-Hortense and Evgenia have picked and share on the panel. Listen on to hear: While there is no science to becoming a unicorn, there are patterns. What are they? What are the signs a company has unicorn potential? What is the role of the VC in helping a company grow to a billion dollar? As Marie-Hortense mentiones in the end, if your VC isn’t helping you hire your SVP, you should get another VC partner. We will tackle the topic of finding the right VC partn

What does it take to build global SaaS companies? With 13 years of experience in the VC world and having invested in some of the greatest SaaS companies out there, Alex Ferrara is one to say. Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, based out in New York City, Alex has worked with companies such as Shopify, Wix and Pipedrive. Bessemer itself has been investing in companies in over a 100 years and has over 100 SaaS investments to date. Throughout the experience Alex has seen what constitutes a global company and how it makes decisions about the when and where of scaling. That has given him an uncanny view of what makes companies successful when they cross borders, oceans and continents in any direction. Listen on to hear: What are the features of truly global companies The trouble with moving to the US too late When does it make sense for US companies to open offices overseas As part of our upcoming Episode 100 anniversary, we will be recording a live podcast with David Cancel of Drift during SaaStock New York.

Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss, CEO and Co-founder of omni:us, learned very early on she was destined to build companies. She had the knack for it as well as the determination. It's how she built three companies before founding omni:us. But it is her latest that is the one she is determined to really grow and scale. With four co-founders and a new address in Berlin, the Viennese entrepreneur began her journey into AI. As important as it was to train her bots to "read" digital documents, what was even more key was finding the use cases and product-market fit that would allow her to monetize omni:us. It took selling into two industries before finding the one, which would truly benefit from the value proposition of omni:us - making sense of and structuring digital documents. Finding it was a combination of listening to inbound signals and being disciplined to apply the criteria that helps rule out the unfit choices. Listen on to hear: The criteria to find product-market fit A key learning Sofie picked about

When Jack Beaman, CEO and Co-founder at Syft, decided to disrupt the temp worker industry, he thought he would be building a marketplace. He started off with a clear idea - create a marketplace where hospitality industry employers and temp workers would be able to find each other. What he didn’t suspect was that they would find each other so efficiently that employers would experience 400% increase in workers. And they would need new efficient ways to manage them. An invaluable opportunity to create a SaaS platform they were prepared to pay for presented itself on a silver platter. Entrepreneurial Jack jumped on. Listen on to hear: How to sell and get customers in traditional industries What has helped with the adoption of tech Does traditional advertising work in SaaS Jack is one of many speakers that we will host in Dublin this October at SaaStock18. He will be joined by the likes of Corey Thomas, CEO of Rapid7, David Skok, Managing Partner at Matrix Partners and Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB. As we ar

Canadian Dan Martell believes that the three least boring things on the planet are growth, happiness and influence. As such, a road paved with frameworks and processes to reach them is anything but boring. It is a road he has been navigating and paving with 5 companies, 3 exits and 39 angel investments. One of the things he has perfected throughout his experience is the art of the product demo, which he talks about extensively on this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show. Listen on to hear: What almost everyone gets wrong when it comes to product demos What is a simple framework for executing a product demo How to ask for a close with confidence What is the impact on the business when you don’t ask for a close on the call How to deal with objections After you have listened to it, download Dan’s rocket demo framework https://www.danmartell.com/saasrevolution Dan is one of many speakers that we will host in Dublin this October. In his own words, “There is nothing more powerful than meeting many founders who ar

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Marta Sjögren, Partner at Northzone, one of Europe’s oldest VC companies. Having been around for a few decades, Northzone has had a chance to put bets on many companies that are now bright tech superstars. Many of them are SaaS. Trustpilot, StepStone and HappyOrNot are just a few notable examples. Marta has been with Northzone for almost 6 years. In the conversation, Marta covers a lot of the valuable lessons that lay in Spotify’s story that can be applied to B2B companies, from fundraising to pricing, packaging and scaling. Listen on to hear: What it means to be a "Born Global" company and how the home market should be used Key lessons from Spotify’s pricing and packaging The secret to scaling successfully as Spotify At SaaStock on Tour Helsinki, Marta will host a fireside chat with the CEO of HappyOrNot, one of her portfolio companies. They will talk about the fascinating story in building a Hardware-first SaaS company. On the day, she w