The SaaS Revolution Show

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, which is currently at $5 million in ARR. Listen on to hear: What is the key ingredient to making a remote organisation effective How to create the right processes One unexpected and eye-opening tactic for hiring a healthier organisation Wherever in the world you are based, SaaStock will be landing on your continent in 2019. Unless you are in Antarctica. Just like Liam, we are not fans of thumbs-falling-off kind of freezing weather. Pick your destination. From Sao Paulo to Hong Kong and San Francisco to Sydney, we will be within a short flight at most from you so join us to learn from experienced SaaS practitioners such as Liam who are open to sharing their pitfalls, connect with peers and potential partners. And have fun, which as Liam argues is the most important thing to stay sane on this journey.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 in a conference aiming to address this, SaaS was where they saw incredible uptake. Both Anna and Kristen are equality champions but as business strategists, they inherently believe that the topic of Diversity and Inclusion is a business objective above all and it needs to be approached as such. In that, every company should start with Why.   Listen on to learn: What problems SaaS leaders experience when it comes to D&I Why diversity and inclusion remains an unsolved issue How should each business get to a clear Why diversity matters to our business? which will be more effective in bringing improved results Improving the diversity and Inclusion at both SaaStock and SaaS is something we will be putting much more effort in 2019. By our side, we have Zendesk, our Global Diversity and Inclusion partner. We already have started the #TakingStockPledge, and look forward to doing many more initiatives throughout the year so stay tuned.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 of very valuable advice from Ben Gateley, COO and co-founder of CharlieHR how to know it was time to fold, an experience which wasn’t easy but Rory handled with grace. Rory’s story is both inspiring and humble, filled with powerful lessons and we hope you will enjoy listening to it. If you have a story of struggle you would like to share with us, get in touch by emailing podcast@saastock.com.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 best way to track the effect of repositioning You can watch April's talk from SaaStock18 where she gets into much more details on all of these subjects by getting one of our SaaStock on Demand pack.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 you should be worried about the over saturation of content Diego is one of many speakers we will host at SaaStock LatAm on April 23-25th 2019 in Sao Paulo. He will be joined by Renata Centurión, from Winning by Design who will help you make sales a team sport within the organisation, Lauren Vaccarello, VP Marketing, Box who will share how to do marketing at scale, André Baldini, CEO, Superlógica Tecnologias who will walk you through how to grow 10x in three years and reach profitability and many others. Grab a ticket at a Super Early Bird rate until Friday, December 21st.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 happen, Emeric and his co-founder had picked the wrong year to start a web business. What has followed are 15 years of playing around with different ideas, going back and forth between his law career and the business, with the struggle never really subsiding, until AgoraPulse began to take shape but it would still take a lot of time to make it work. At times it felt excruciating and Emeric’s personal life would take the toll on this. But he couldn't let it go. This is the story of AgoraPulse: 18 years in the making. To hear more about the early years of AgoraPulse, listen back to the episode we recorded with Emeric in 2016. You can also watch his very candid presentation from SaaStock17.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 explaining how to run growth-minded teams, and David Gerhard telling how to make the brand the biggest revenue generator were just a few of the highly tactical and practical sessions we held. What these speakers and other marketing professionals shared will advise how you think about SaaS marketing and help you implement cutting-edge practices to improve your activities. If you didn’t get a chance to see these and all the other talks at SaaStock18, we have recordings of all of them, which you can binge watch.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 sheet with OpenView and have been doubling in size each year since.   Listen on to learn: The most impactful advice Ashik ever got about making decisions What aside from applying that framework is essential for making good decisions in a fast-growing SaaS company An example of how Ashik made the decision to go with Openview after pitching to 27 other VC companies On December 6th in Sydney, Ashik will be joined by other exciting speakers such as Alex Fala, CEO, VendHQ, Luke Anear, CEO, Safety Culture and Kirsti Grant, CEO Populate and HOP Ventures. You can use discount code ALEXT30 for 30% off tickets. Get one now.    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

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 company structure to fit the different go-to-market strategy he believed was necessary to truly scale the company. Two and a half years later, the company is 250 people strong with half of the team based in its HQ in Auckland, New Zealand and the rest spread in offices in London, Toronto, San Francisco, Melbourne, and a few other places. Alex has successfully hired 7 of his 9 direct reports in the last year. Listen on to learn: Why he so steadfastly believes that the more traditional, Silicon Valley, playbook does not work outside How Alex approached hiring instead What are the things that have helped Alex the most to keep people aligned throughout all the different offices Make sure you grab a ticket to see Alex Fala live in Sydney on December 6th. He will be joined by 20 other speakers who will cover topics like the future of B2B marketing, building true diverse cultures, strategies for global success from a local start and many others. Grab a ticket now    Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, IrelandBook tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, TexasBook tickets: https://saastock-usa.com/🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)