In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Brendan Sweeney (@popmenu.com), CEO and Co-Founder of Popmenu, a restaurant technology company. He talks about product market fit by sharing the story of Popmenu and finding success in an obvious place: the online experience of restaurants. “We started off with delivering to restaurants a dynamic menu that they control... gave consumers all the criteria they want to make their dining decision - photos, reviews, ratings, social validation, interactivity, all of that.”Brendan details Popmenu’s approach to staying close to the customers, their consumers, and the data. He covers the positive and negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant and hospitality industry and what to expect from Popmenu in the future. “Delivering that initial product actually opened us up to a whole world of other opportunities for the product. We’re lucky that the beginning of our product market fit journey was something that restaurants responded to, our target market responded to instantly.”Brendan started Popmenu in December 2015 with several leadership roles under his belt. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Product and Marketing at the SaaS Real Estate Marketing and CRM Platform Commissions Inc. and served as the VP of Product Development at CareerBuilder.“Now, I understand how you can use SaaS... to help a small local business kind of take some control back from large technically sophisticated third-party platforms, which is clearly the dynamic in the restaurant space just like it was in real estate.”Brendan has demonstrated success driving product, marketing, and UX innovation scaling high-growth businesses.Topics covered in this episode:Why restaurants need a more compelling tool than PDFs to present offeringsThe beloved topic of finding product market fitBrendan's take on how to design features for your customersThe adoption SaaS and the buying habits of buyers in new and different industriesHow to help small businesses take back control from big platformsLinks and Resources:PopmenuBrendan Sweeney on LinkedInCommissions Inc.CareerBuilderOpenTableInstacartChartMogulListen to the episodeAs always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!

We're back with a new season of SaaS Open Mic. To kick things off, I talk to Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki), former CEO of Bizness Apps & Altcoin (both acquired). His most recent venture is MicroAquire, a marketplace designed to help startups get acquired. Andrew shares his goal to make a thousand millionaires by helping entrepreneurs exit.“The genesis of the idea was, I looked at the market, I saw a lot of options for startups looking to sell.”Tune in for advice about building, selling, and still loving your SaaS businesses.Also, Andrew pushes a competition with the Hustle to give away a SaaS business up to $25,000.Topics covered in this episode include:How Andrew got the idea to start MicroAcquireWhy you shouldn't go all in on starting a company until it starts to workWho acquires startups and how that's changedWhat is due diligence, how to value a SaaS company, how to negotiate a LOIStrategies to attract buyersThe 3 stages of SaaS: invention, go-to-market models, and building your brandUnderstanding and storytelling with SaaS metrics (Net Cash Flow, Churn, CAC, LTV)Links and Resources: Win a SaaS Business Valued At Up To $25k From MicroAcquireHow to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition - blog post by AndrewIt's F***ing ChartMogul - blog post about viral marketingDriftCopy.aiListen to the episodeAs always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!

This interview is with one of my most-requested guests and someone who’s had an outsized influence on my thinking about SaaS metrics and the wider SaaS industry. David Skok is a former entrepreneur turned VC, who founded four companies before he turned his focus to investing. He’s now General Partner at Matrix Partners. David was thinking about SaaS metrics before I was even starting out on my career. His industry-defining post, SaaS Metrics 2.0 is the go-to reference for entrepreneurs and VCs alike, and serves as a guiding light for anyone who has a need to understand the principles and measurements behind a SaaS business. This conversation was recorded at this year’s SaaStock conference in Dublin, where I was super excited to sit down with David in the SaaStock podcasting studio. There’s so much in here for anyone building or growing a SaaS business, we dive deep on certain metrics and measurements, we talk about why some metrics are only useful at specific stages of growth, and what’s relevant for businesses in 2019.

Receptive is a SaaS company helping businesses build better products by collecting and acting on customer feedback more effectively. Hannah Chaplin founded the company, along with her co-founder Dan, back in 2015. Like many other B2B SaaS products, Receptive began its life as a project inside of an existing organization that was eventually spun out into a full-scale business. Hannah and Dan found that they'd struck a chord with businesses that were really struggling with capturing, prioritising and acting on customer feedback to try and answer a critical question: What should we build? In this conversation, we discuss: How you can balance product vision with feature requests Some common Common mistakes companies make with feedback Tools and strategies for prioritizing input from customers ...and much more! As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!

Christoph Janz (@chrija) is managing partner at Point Nine Capital — a venture capital firm that's highly prevalent in the world of SaaS. After founding several internet businesses in the 90s and early 2000s, Christoph converted to a career in venture capital and made several early investments in companies such as Zendesk, FreeAgent and Geckoboard. Today, Point Nine invests in early stage companies with a focus on SaaS and marketplaces. If you're not a regular reader, make sure you check out the team's excellent thought leadership content! In this episode, the pair covered: What it takes for SaaS startups today to raise venture capital Whether you should aim to create a moat of defensibility How startups should be using data today Whether startups should aim to dominate a niche before expanding to wider market segments How Point Nine Capital is making fundraising suck less for founders Whether it's possible for startups to shift from linear to exponential growth And much more!

If you’ve ever thought about bootstrapping your own side project to meaningful revenue and scale, this episode is for you. Today I’m talking to Maxime Berthelot of Buffer and PixelMe. PixelMe was conceived next to a pool in Bali, but this is not a digital nomad story — both founders are based in France. In fact, Maxime didn’t even quit his day job as Product Manager of Growth at Buffer. Yet the pair have managed to validate their concept and reach $5K in monthly recurring revenue. I spoke with Max about: Validating the product without writing code Hacking his way to those first few paying customers The radical transparency at both Buffer and PixelMe Balancing time on his side project with his primary job …and much, much more!

We all know that SaaS companies should be collecting customer feedback. But how you should actually manage, process, quantify, categorize and action that feedback data is far from simple. Especially when you’re operating at scale. Canny Co-Founders Sarah and Andrew left their jobs at Facebook to bootstrap Canny as a SaaS business, because they believe there was a better way to handle customer feedback and feature requests. I’m really happy that I could pick their brains on a lot of best practices for making feedback more valuable within a business.

When Max Seelemann (@macguru17) and his team at Ulyssess announced their pivot to a subscription model in August 2017, they knew it would cause some controversy among users and the wider tech industry. In fact, Max wanted to create a wave in the industry and the operation was poised to make the most of any resulting publicity. "For us as developers, it’s important that we have the freedom to experiment and try things out. Recurring payments give us planning security and enable deep thought. We are less rushed to release features, and we are more inclined to iterate on them, if we do so on a sound financial basis." Sitting down with Max at the team's headquarters in Leipzig, Germany, it would be easy for him to look back on the period and say everything went as planned -- there were certainly some surprises -- but it's hard to argue that shifting Ulysses to a subscription-based product wasn't a big success overall. Topics covered This chat with Max is a must listen for anyone evaluating the subscription model for their own business. In this conversation, we discuss: The carefully planned process of announcing subscriptions, and the following media buzz How Max and his team finally made the decision to go ahead with the move The economics of perpetual licensing vs. subscriptions Some unexpected impact from the move Finding optimal pricing for the subscription plans How the team plans to measure success in the subscription world I'd like to extend a huge thanks to Max and the Ulysses team for hosting me at their beautiful office in Leipzig! (and for letting me drool over that 2016 Apple Design Award trophy...) Check out Ulysses at https://ulyssesapp.com/

One of the biggest barriers to SaaS businesses going truly global from day one is localization. That is, the process of adapting your product to meet the language and cultural requirements of a specific target market. Vasco Pedro is Founder and CEO of Unbabel, a company helping businesses go global from day one through both AI and human-powered translation as a service.

Welcome back to this new season of SaaS Open Mic! In this first episode I'm talking to Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi of Forget The Funnel -- both strong proponents of a more holistic approach to modern SaaS marketing.