The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable all of us to collaborate, build culture, and thrive together - remotely. My guest is Brett Martin, Co-founder and President at Kumospace. Brett is a serial entrepreneur. He began his career on Wall Street as an equity research analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, Since then, he has spent his entire career building or investing in technology startups, including stints as an EIR at PrimaryVC, Co-Founder of Switchapp and Sonar (pioneering location-based social network), Director of Investments at Appfund and Vice. Today he's the President & Co-Founder of Kumospace, the virtual office platform where teams show up. When the pandemic hit, he quickly realized the technology for hosting immersive virtual events was pretty terrible. He knew there had to be a better way. And thus, Kumospace was born. Their mission: to make online connections more meaningful by building the most human spaces on the internet. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the ay we enable remote work these days. Brett shares his vision on creating solutions that are game-changers in this space. Then he talks about how the biggest hurdle in going to market is not so much selling the product but selling the organizational transformation that's required - and how they go about solving this. Last but not least, he talks about the biggest lessons he learned around go-to-market and scaling his organization- and how to avoid making the same mistakes next time. Here's one of his quotes Truly disruptive tools usually compete on a completely different axis than what they've replaced. So they're not just cheaper or faster, but they're actually qualitatively different in a way. That changes the game.  Virtual offices, like Kumospace, have that characteristic. Sure, there's no substitute for truly being in person with other people. What I can say is that by working remotely, there are all these crazy benefits that you could never get if you tried to co-locate everywhere in one city.  You don't have to pay hundreds of 1000s of dollars for office space. You can hire the best people from anywhere in the world. You can give your people the flexibility to choose where in the world they work. You can give them time flexibility. That changes the game. And but I am a believer in anything that can be done over the Internet will eventually be done over the Internet.  During this interview, you will learn four things: The principles Brett used to narrow down the focus of his SaaS business How to go about gaining traction if the sales is not about your product, but about getting people to gain a leap of faith The secret behind Kumospace' 'crazy high' retention rates Brett's secret (today) to hit the numbers predictably.  For more information about the guest from this week: Brett Martin Website: Kumospace Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give revenue teams a scientific approach to revenue and stop flying in the dark. My guest is Toni Hohlbein, Co-founder and CEO of Growthblocks. Toni has spent the last decade growing B2B SaaS startups successfully as a CRO, leading to two exits. He discovered that revenue planning and execution was fundamentally broken. The old approach is finance-heavy and is skipping over a ton of important details CROs need to know to hit their revenue targets.  So he started working on a solution and created an operating model that help the business he was working for hit target 12 quarters in a row. He learned that other startups had the same problem, which sparked the idea to create Growblocks together with his cofounders Olafur & Andrew. The mission: help organizations unlock their revenue potential. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Toni to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses run revenue operations. Toni shares his vision of how to solve this - based on an approach that delivered remarkable results at his previous company - helping them grow from €10 to €50 million in 12 straight quarters. He shares the big lessons learned in taking his startup from idea to ready for primetime and outlines what ingredients have been fundamental to get right from the start. Last but not least, he shares what he's specifically steering for to create a SaaS business people will start talking about and keep talking about.  Here's one of his quotes We are not a forecasting tool that tells you which number you're going to hit in q1. We're helping you to figure out what number you are gonna hit at the end of the year. What are the long-term revenue goals you want to achieve?  Then you start executing. And what you then very quickly see is that some part of the engine is going to veer off course. Otherwise, you would have probably seen this in the post-mortem that you have in your quarterly business review in three and a half months from now. We ping you if something is off. We give you a root cause analysis of why it is off. And then you can fix it. And that is a very nice, straightforward, you could even say, agile cycle that we are enabling organizations to do in real-time instead of having quarterly business reviews to then tweak something. During this interview, you will learn four things: How to go about challenging the status quo in a mature market How changing one word in your positioning can change everything for the traction you experience  How to empower your champions to drive the buying process from the inside The mistakes many startups make that put their buyers in a disagreeing spiral, instead of a nodding spiral How to spark word-of-mouth if you're selling big enterprise SaaS tools For more information about the guest from this week: Toni Hohlbein Website Growthblocks Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to build organizational superpowers. My guest is Jason Radisson, Founder and CEO of Movo. Jason is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He inherited his single mother’s work ethic as he worked various blue-collar jobs to fund his education. He started his career at McKinsey & Company. He then became an entrepreneur and joined the early days of Uber, where he launched and grew cities in the western US as a Regional General Manager. Fast forward to today, and Jason has built multiple tech unicorns, including rideshare giant 99. His latest venture, Sh1ft helps remove friction from employment across frontline labor industries such as manufacturing and healthcare.  He is passionate about using technology to empower and uplift the frontline workforce, which he believes is the backbone of the economy and society.  That became the trigger to found Movo in early 2019 to address the challenges and opportunities of this segment, which is often overlooked and underserved by traditional HR solutions. Their mission: To improve the gig economy by making it as good for employees as it has been for employers.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jason to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way the market has access to talent. Jason puts his finger on the opportunity HRTech vendors have failed to address and shares his vision of how to solve this global problem by taking a fresh approach. He shares his big lessons learned on how and when to scale the business. And last but not least, the tells a story about how they created remarkable differentiation when the market needed it most. Here's one of his quotes We can replace Workday for massive employers. That's what we're gunning for.  Just our philosophy towards sharing, It's been almost an afterthought by the HR tech industry to have your workforce talking to each other and sharing with other people. We think people should share, and you should be able to follow people who are in your profession in other countries, and you should be able to have casual mentoring and casual interactions outside of work. And it's kind of the antithesis of where traditionally, HR software has been. During this interview, you will learn four things: How you can gain instant differentiation by creating the antithesis of the accepted traditional approach That augmenting your tech with human touch can mean your breakthrough How adding cross-company community-building components to connect peers can become the stickiness factor your solution has been waiting for. How to deal with advice from investors - especially when it's extremely tempting.  For more information about the guest from this week: Jason Radisson Website Movo Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take the pain out of software training. My guest is Ken Babcock, Co-founder and CEO of Tango. Ken Babcock spent most of his career in the Bay Area at Uber, where he held roles in Launch Operations, Data Science, and Product Strategy from 2014 to 2018. In 2019 he decide to do his MBA at Harvard Business School. But shortly in, he and his co-founders, Brian Shultz and Dan Giovacchini, dropped out of Harvard during the pandemic to start Tango. Today he's the  Co-founder and CEO of Tango, which takes the pain out of documenting processes by automatically generating how-to guides while you work. Since then, the company has grown to over 350,000 users and is trusted by people and teams at organizations, including Netflix, IBM, Salesforce, Nike, and more. Tango has been recognized as a finalist for Product Hunt’s Product of the Year, Google's 12 Favorite Chrome Extensions of 2022, and Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech for 2022. They have raised $19.7M in venture capital funding to date.  Their mission: building a future of work where processes are easier to document and faster to follow.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ken to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we capture and transfer knowledge. Ken shares how the company went from idea to GTM in literally months due to how the problem was exposed during Covid. He shares stories about how he overcame their biggest hurdle for growth: how to market their solution. And he shares some of Tango's secrets to spark viral growth and increase conversion from free to paid plans. Here's one of his quotes What we saw with a lot of our users is that their prior way of doing something was taking screenshots, manually going in and annotating the screenshots, dumping them into a Word doc, and typing it all up. And so the old way of doing things was so clunky. It wasn't anything that was rocket science. But it was extremely tedious.  And what we found with the market is everybody knows that this is a problem. What we realized was that people actually didn't know that there would be a solution out there.  So that was the hardest part: How do we shift our marketing strategy, knowing that our best users, the people that are doing things the old way, aren't even going to know that they can solve their own problems? During this interview, you will learn four things: Why putting all functionality in your Free plan is a good thing That product market fit is an illusion, and how to go about that How to stay ahead of the market and user expectations What's the magic combo of core principles to create alignment and scale in your organization  For more information about the guest from this week: Ken Babcock  Website Tango Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on exploring the biggest business lessons learned after our last podcast interview 5 years ago. My guest is Ryan Falkenberg, Co-founder and Co-CEO of CLEVVA. Ryan has always been fascinated by what makes people tick and what makes them perform optimally. He’s been frustrated at the slow pace of change when it comes to education and learning. To address that, he created a learning consultancy, Hi-Performance Learning, that aimed to push the boundaries of organizational learning through e-learning, gamification, and expert systems. To then remove the constraints by tech. bandwidth, he founded CUDA Technologies. Yet no matter how they optimized formal learning, a core problem remained. People still had to memorize and repeat complex decision formulas in a world that was accelerating. It was time for a complete rethink. This was the starting point for CLEVVA back in June 2011. In the meantime, CLEVVA has been in business for well over 12 years, and five years have passed since Ryan was on my podcast last. This interview inspired me in many ways, and parts of it ended up in chapter 1 of my book, "The Remarkable Effect." Since so many things happened since I decided to invite Ryan back on my podcast. We explore the big lessons Ryan learned over the last five years. He shares a story about what made him realize they competed for the wrong business in the wrong market. He then explains what he changed from a mindset perspective and how that helped them get remarkable traction in a completely new category - thereby attracting the right customers and the right partners. Last but not least, he shares his experiences in how to create funding freedom for the business - and how that liberates them to do the right thing. Here's one of his quotes We took ownership of the outcome. So we didn't put on a lens of a Software as a Service company. We put on the lens as a solution as a service company. So we actually then got teams to be able to specialize in these conversations. And so that we could not just say to our customer, here's the software, I'll teach you how to build that conversation; we said we will deliver a virtual agent having those conversations, and it will be up and running in four weeks. And we will take ownership of that and be accountable for the performance. And so what changed as well is, is our customers didn't feel we were having to convince them on our software. What we were showcasing is we actually were selling an outcome, a measurable outcome that would have conversations that mattered.  During this interview, you will learn four things: That even if you add significant value, it doesn't mean it will help you scale  The importance of clarifying what business you're really in (and how that changes everything) How changing one small thing can move you from nice to have to ultra-sticky and mission-critical When you know the moment is right to build an ecosystem For more information about the guest from this week: Ryan Falkenberg Website CLEVVA Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give self-care businesses give their clients more of the magical moments that matter. My guest is Matt Danna, CEO of Boulevard.  Matt is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He's addicted to building technology for the creative class and passionate about the intersection between design and technology.  Matt has spent his entire career building technologies to empower creative professionals., Matt was head of product for the LA-based talent agency Wasserman. His career also includes product leadership positions with Awesomeness, a multi-media platform company, and the global media company Fullscreen.  He co-founding Boulevard in 2016 as he and his co-founder realized this industry - the professionals who help us look and feel our best - has traditionally been underserved when it comes to tech and support.  So their mission is to change that by enabling their customers to give their clients more of the magical moments that matter. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore how the company evolved from a scheduling solution into a complete experience platform, positioning for the salon and spa industry.  Matt explains how they carved out their niche and how early architectural design now provides them with a multi-year competitive advantage. helping them stand out from competitors who added these features later. He elaborates on how they accelerated growth and reduced CAC by leveraging the power of network effects and customer referrals. He shares his story of how brand trust, design, and community have become core differentiators for the company, thereby creating a magnetic effect. Last but not least, he explains how the company achieved minimal customer churn during covid, and was able to add well over 600 customers in a market that was effectively closed.  Here's one of his quotes The hardest nut to crack over time has been our go-to market motion. My co-founder and I were both engineers. And so, learning how to sell a product was entirely new territory for us. And there's this perception out there from some founders if you build it, they'll come. That never happens. And so you have to be so intentional about your go-to market. You have to be very, very focused on what's your ideal customer profile. That is something that we continue to refine on a quarterly basis, Who are we best set up to support? Who do we have pricing power over? During this interview, you will learn four things: What it really means to understand a problem in its full depth - and why that makes all the difference for your success  What it takes to find the sweetspot where you have pricing power What they did differently that gave them defensible differentiation from day one Why we should think differently about product market fit For more information about the guest from this week: Matt Danna Website: Boulevard Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on what it takes to scale the growth of your SaaS business by establishing a remarkable ecosystem. My guest is Barrett King, Sr. Manager - Global GTM Strategy, Partner Ecosystem at Hubspot and host of the Outcomes Podcast.  ​​Barrett is a highly motivated and results-driven professional with over 10 years of experience in building partnerships and executing go-to-market strategies for SaaS companies.  He's the host of the Outcomes Podcast - Where Partnership & SaaS meet - and Senior Manager for Go-to-Market strategies for the Global Partner Ecosystem at Hubspot.  It's that combination that triggered me to invite him to my podcast. We explore the art of building and managing partnerships in B2B SaaS organizations. Barrett elaborates on the critical components to focus on throughout the acquisition, onboarding, and lifecycle stages of partners. He shares his experience in concurring the complexity of managing partnerships as businesses evolve and the necessity of diversifying these partnerships for mutual benefit. Lastly, he addresses how to overcome the personnel challenges in various stages of a partnership program, underlining the importance of specialization as the program matures.  Here's one of his quotes Folks will always say things like: "We want to go and build an ecosystem." You're saying the wrong thing. We want to build a partner program, you're not even thinking about it the right way. I always stopped them there, and I say: "Think about your customer needs first that you don't deliver. That's where your opportunities lie." During this interview, you will learn four things: Why you should consider shifting from partnership for revenue to partnerships for customer value  What to do / no to do when you want partnerships to play a vital role in scaling your SaaS business organizations Where to make concessions around successful partnerships if you want to deliver the most value to the customer. How to go about managing partnerships that lead to mutual benefits, increased leverage and enhanced reach and value delivery. For more information about the guest from this week: Barrett King Podcast: Outcomes - Where Partnership & SaaS Meet Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to +10% revenue from better search, feed, and ads ranking. My guest is Andrew Yates, Co-founder and CEO of Promoted. Andrew Yates formerly led ads ranking, auction, and marketplace engineering and research teams at Facebook and Pinterest. He specializes in designing billion-dollar content marketplaces that maximize long-term revenue while protecting both seller and user experiences. Andrew has published over a dozen patents in online advertising optimization. Andrew met his co-founder at Pinterest. That's where they built Pinterest ads together and realized they could unify ideas from ads and search engineering to make all commercial media better. This became the founding idea behind Promoted, which they started in April 2020 Their mission:  to match every buyer with every seller across every app. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Andrew to my podcast. We explore Andrews's entrepreneurial journey and ideas and what challenges he had to overcome around go-to-market, winning over the biggest skeptics, and creating a revenue flywheel. He explains how breaking away from existing structures and established norms has helped them to break through. Last but not least, his lessons learned around product strategy - and how he arrived at his first principles to drive remarkable value in the shortest amount of time.  Here's one of his quotes We didn't have an open-source philosophy when we first started. Our original philosophy was: Make sure it works. Make sure you build something valuable, put it into production, and make sure that it works and test it against good engineering teams that have the resources, time, and attention to build a similar system and it needs to outperform them.  During this interview, you will learn four things: How to break into an industry by introducing a business model that emphasizes customer collaboration and ownership How to create a shift in value by applying a proven model that's remarkable in one category on a different problem in a different category. How a development team of

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to ensure everyone with an electric car to always have access to services on the go. My guests are Gijs van Lookeren Campagne and Jan Borghuis, co-CEOs at Ease2pay. Gijs and Jan share a long history together. They started their first company, Greenwheels, together in 1995.  Together they're captivated by new technologies that can change the world, dreaming about how it can be easier, better, and especially without hassle.  With Greenwheels, this meant innovating car rental into a 24/7 self-service concept. And today, with Ease2pay (which they founded in 2017)  they are gradually making that dream a reality again, enabling managers of gas stations, charging stations, parking garages, camper sites, marinas, inland ports, and truck parks to turn their location into a self-service site. In this way, they are making the energy transition easy for everyone. And this inspired me, and hence I invited both Gijs and Jan to my podcast. We explore what stands in the way of making the rapid transition to electronic vehicles happening. The two founders discuss their journey of building the business from scratch, and how the accelerated this by leveraging M&A from the start. They share insights about the complexities of merging companies and the potential losses in synergy if done improperly. They also discuss some of the mistakes they've made along the way, including delayed integration of acquisitions and changes to pricing systems without careful consideration. Here's one of their quotes We are facilitating the energy transition. Ton, you didn't make the transition yet yourself. I didn't make that transition myself, actually. So why people don't do that transition to battery electric cars? Because it's a lot of hassle. You need to have three plastic cards if you want to go on holiday. But most people have multiple cards, and then the card doesn't work here, and it is not bookable, so you drive to France, arrive at the station to charge, and there are three people waiting in front of you. So Book, Park, Charge, and pay at the base, we think there's an innovation to be done to facilitate people. And that would drive the adoption of battery electric cars - but also ships, boats, and trucks. During this interview, you will learn four things: How to create a work environment where the team becomes your advantage. How to accelerate the process of gaining a multi-year headstart advantage and gaining product traction fast.  What they've learned from launching a new B2B concept into a market that's dominated by multinationals. What they believe is the formula to being ready for the market and shaping a sustainable business with long-term success.  For more information about the guest from this week: Gijs van Lookeren Campagne Jan Borghuis Website Ease2pay Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us all deliver a buyer experience that wins deals. My guest is Erdem Gelal, Co-founder and CEO of Flowla.  Erdem Gelal has a wealth of work experience, beginning with an internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2010, Accenture in 2011 and a Financial Analyst role at Procter & Gamble the same year. His entrepreneurial journey started when he co-founded cubic.fm in 2013 and ProceedLabs in 2015. ProceedLabs was acquired in 2018. This didn't stop his passion for exploration. In 2020, he co-founded TalentGrid, and in 2022 Flowla, where he's currently the CEO. Flowla is on a mission to build an outstanding & frictionless way to get deals done. Because it's time we all should stop relying on emails to do that. They believe B2B processes deserve a consumer-grade approach, so closing B2B deals can be as easy as checking out a cat litter box on Amazon. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Erdem to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the B2B SaaS sales process. Erdem explains the fundamental decisions that helped take the company from its idea to where they are today, why he doubled down on a bottom-up PLG approach, and what he's learned to get traction going. We discuss his big learnings to drive the adoption of the solution and to spark word-of-mouth recommendations. Last but not least, he shares how their mantra to build 100 true fans has helped to be remarkable from the start.  Here's one of his quotes When we ask our users: 'What do you like most about Flowla,' the top answer we get is: Standing out from the crowd. They like the idea of making a difference to stand out in the noisy inbox, and increase win-win rates, not only because everything is just in one place, but also because they can reduce ghosting. It definitely crosses a certain threshold when it comes to an inbox with 100s of unread emails. During this interview, you will learn four things: How to leverage AI to prepopulate templates to scale conversion, and boost user adoption How having a helpful conversation helped them to close more business How to accelerate your journey toward product-market fit How he's leveraging internal champions to do the upwards selling within their organization. For more information about the guest from this week: Erdem Gelal Website Flowla Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices