The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help your business resolve and prevent misconduct and ESG violations and, with that, create flawless integrity. My guest is Neta Meidav, Co-founder and CEO of Vault Platform. Neta is a tech entrepreneur on a very big mission. She started her career at Ofgem as manager of European Strategy and then moved to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, responsible as their Climate Change Negotiator. In 2017, inspired by the #MeToo movement and her own experiences with harassment, she left her job as a UK climate adviser - to solve this growing global problem. Her own experiences sparked the big idea behind the Vault platform, which she co-founded in 2018 and leads as the CEO. Their mission: help companies worldwide become the best and most ethical versions of themselves - thereby creating a world in which every working environment is inclusive, diverse, productive, and safe. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Neta to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of misconduct reporting. Neta shares her vision of how to solve this problem for good and why that needs a radically different approach. She elaborates on the lessons learned from the pivots she had to undergo, how that turned their entire GTM on its head, and what it took to create a dent in a market that's dominated by very large companies. Lastly, she shares her secrets on how to turn every employee, their family, and their friends into advocates for the mission. Here's one of her quotes Many of them [competitors] have taken kind of the old analog way of internal reporting, taking it away from a hotline and creating a digital experience. But this is not what Vault is about. This is about truly using technology to unlock new ways of reporting that weren't there before. And by doing so, changing human behavior. It's not about an app. And it's not about an interface. And it's not even about accessibility, though; all of those things matter greatly. It's about leveraging technology to do something very, very different. It's a completely new way of coming forward.  During this interview, you will learn four things: How showing up differently can be your weapon to outperform the largest competitors. Why the best solutions out there are not about making legacy a digital experience but about changing human behavior. How to find out as early as possible your SaaS business needs to pivot. How to create a SaaS business that remains relevant at all times  For more information about the guest from this week: Neta Meidav Website Vault Platform 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 ensure that in 7 years we can still drink and eat. My guest is Dr. Max Gulde, Co-founder and CEO of constellr.  Max is a prototype of a tech entrepreneur on a mission. A massive mission. By training, he is an experimental physicist with a strong background in materials science, computational physics, image processing, methodology development, and the ingestion of scientific work into applications. In April 2020 he co-founded constellr a German deep-tech company at the interface between agriculture and space. Max is the inventor of constellr’s core technology and holds several patents.  Their mission: the provision of a robust data basis to drive 'more crop per drop' and help feed 10 billion people by 2050. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore the challenges Max has been going through to convince the nay-sayers and what he has learned from that. He explains what they have done to break a huge global problem into a manageable structure - and what choices have been fundamental to deliver remarkable impact - and grow predictable traction. Last but not least he shares his recommendations for building a Software business that has staying power. Here's one of his quotes What we were looking at were two things. It was impact on the one hand side, so what are the biggest challenges? But then also the timescale, i.e., when will these challenges have a really big effect? And that's the reason why we then started with water because carbon, for example, is magnificent in scale. The amplitude of this problem is just amazingly large. However, water will probably overtake carbon in a few years, so now in terms of amplitude and it will be a lot more severe, a lot earlier. It's a lot shorter timescale, we're not looking at 2050, we're not looking at 2070, we're looking at seven harvests from now. So, if we don't have a good solution implemented, the world will, I wouldn't say be on fire, but we'll definitely live in a lot more stressful world. During this interview, you will learn four things: Why getting everyone to see and acknowledge the severity of the problem doesn't mean they'll buy or invest How to approach a problem that's beyond imagination in size How to go about segmenting the market when no-one 'owns' the problem you solve best How to leverage positioning to grow momentum when the market doesn't see the urgency of the problem yet For more information about the guest from this week: Max Gulde Website constellr 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 better understand ourselves and control our productivity. My guest is Dror Talisman, Co-founder and CEO of NeuroBrave. Dror is a finance expert and a neurotechnology, robotics, and Deep Learning enthusiast. Throughout his career, he's been a finance innovator, management consultant, senior project manager at the Israeli Military Intelligence, and the former CEO and co-founder of RAS robotics. This has brought him proven experience in building companies from an idea through bootstrapping to capital raising.  In 2020 he co-founded NeuroBrave a platform to provide access to real-time cognitive and emotional states through everyday wearable devices. Its mission: To help people better understand themselves, cope better with day-to-day challenges, and have better control over their time and productivity. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Dror to my podcast. We dig into the opportunity we have when we can understand the human brain in a better way. Dror shares his experiences of building the company, and what impossible obstacles he had to overcome. He shares his lessons to gain traction and convince even the most skeptical experts. Last but not least he shares his experiences on what it requires to defensible differentiation and turn that into something remarkable. Here's one of his quotes Most of the wearable companies today will give you stress tracking. It's a number between zero to 100% that says, "What is your stress right now?" All right, what do you do with it? Like, my stress level is 74 now. Wow. So, basically what we are building is a recommendation system based on AI processing that tells you what to do with it.  During this interview, you will learn four things: How to disrupt an industry that can leverage 100 years of research, employs the smartest people, can leverage the best physicians? Insights on how to get the fastest to product market fit Why most value in your product strategy is in use cases that prevent a problem instead of cases that cure a problem What characteristic beyond resilience you need to build a SaaS business that has staying power? For more information about the guest from this week: Dror Talisman Website Neurobrave 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 companies achieve both cost-efficient AND environmentally sustainable packing. My guest is James Malley, Co-founder and CEO of Paccurate.  James is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He went to theater school and worked as a bellboy before he fell in love with tech. Working in the logistics tech space since 2009, he has helped create a variety of enterprise shipping technology. He spearheaded the design of an award-winning multi-carrier TMS.  In 2018 he co-founded Paccurate, which he leads as the CEO. Their mission: To make shipping more sustainable for your business and the planet. And this inspired me, and hence I invited James to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way logistics companies approach packaging. James shares his vision of how to take cost-efficiency in packaging to a totally new level while at the same time making a significant global impact on the environment. He shares his big learning on getting traction in the market and what changes have been fundamental in that process. Lastly, he shares his advice on what to do / not to do to create a SaaS business that lasts.  Here's one of his quotes Our kind of biggest innovation or differentiator is that we look at the problem differently than all the others did. We're looking at optimizing for cost, whereas the other solutions were just looking to make things smaller. Which is a nice stand-in for the lowest cost, but it's not perfect.  And so, being able to make a packing decision based on the incentives that are baked into your negotiated rate table, your labor costs or your material costs - that is really about going down the rabbit hole on this problem. During this interview, you will learn four things: How to succeed in a market where everyone advises you 'stay out.' What you can do to accelerate the sales process in a market that is known for extreme long sales cycles What to do differently when promising a $10 million dollar savings doesn't get you the deal, or not even a meeting. How being a micro pessimist and a macro optimist is all you need to move the needle For more information about the guest from this week: James Malley Website Paccurate 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 create anything and make it stand out. My guest is Payman Taei, Founder and CEO of Visme Payman is an avid technologist. He loves new trends and tries to keep up with the ever-evolving internet. His background in Biology has led him to truly believe in the art of evolution. Everything changes in time. You either follow or create new trends or will be left behind.  He started HindSite Interactive with a mere $170 to pay his way through College and over the last 16 years that followed he and his team worked with over 300 companies large and small from all walks of life.  Frustrated with the lack of easy-to-use tools for non-designers to create compelling visual content, he went on to create Visme. Their belief: everyone should be able to create beautiful content with no design experience and minimal effort.  Their mission: To empower the world to speak loudly by speaking visually. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Payman to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we can communicate value and ideas. Payman shares the big lessons learned in taking his business from scratch to profitability within 18 months. He also digs into some of the internal beliefs they had to eliminate that harmed even faster growth of the business. We discuss how they selected their sweetspot in the market and what it took to create predictable traction.  Here's one of his quotes The bar has been raised today on what is expected of people and businesses. So when we say Speak Loudly, it means you can stand over the crowd. And by Speak Visually, you have the capacity to communicate visually and improve information retention As humans we are used to seeing things visually, when you see a chart, you can remember and absorb that information much more than if you just saw it, as a set of numbers and stats that are nested on top of each other.  We believe that every individual is a great storyteller, even if you think you're not. And so our platform has the means to allow them to be able to take their information and data and ideas and be able to bring them to the forefront in a more meaningful manner. During this interview, you will learn four things: How to rapidly grow market share and create defensible differentiation in a market that's always been dominated by very large vendors   What to do differently to grow purely by word-of-mouth how to structure your product strategy for impact when everyone can technically use your solution and all have feedback Why Payman decided not to raise external funding to grow the business - and why he'd start any new business bootstrapped again. For more information about the guest from this week: Payman Taei Website Visme 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 your business discover how work really gets done. My guest is Jay Bartot, Co-founder and CEO of Zeitworks. Jay Bartot is a serial technology entrepreneur and innovator with 20 years of experience building startups from the ground up. He's a creative risk-taker and passionate about developing and vetting ideas, providing vision and strategy, and building high-performing teams.  Since June 2021, Jay is the CEO of Zeitworks. It's built around the idea that teams in every company execute thousands of repetitive processes every day but are challenged to understand how work really gets done because managers don’t have visibility into these complex workflows. This is what Zeitwork is solving: By building a fitness tracker for your people, processes, and productivity Their belief: In the age of artificial intelligence, the value of human capital has never been more important. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jay to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses are leveraging automation. Jay explains that before you can automate something, you have to understand it. And that's exactly where most companies are going dark. He shares his big lessons learned to create defensible differentiation, and what thread is constantly looking for to build a business that grows predictable traction from the start. Here's one of his quotes Part of the differentiation is that this is a really hard problem. Every customer has idiosyncrasies in their processes and the applications they use to complete their processes. So that iterative process of getting new data from new customers, adjusting the technology, adjusting the product, it's something that can take years to do. Anyone else who is starting to work on this problem today has to go through this arduous R&D to figure out 'How do I take all this crazy data and turn it into something useful?' During this interview, you will learn four things: What to focus on to create a SaaS business that's got staying power Why the real value is not in automation, but in augmentation.  Why 'Transparency' should be higher on your list of value drivers What mindset to train if you want to accelerate your business For more information about the guest from this week: Jay Bartot Website Zeitworks 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 the resilience lessons learned in building 24Sessions between 2015 and 2022. My guest is Rutger Teunissen, founder and former CEO 24Sessions. Rutger is a serial entrepreneur and ex-strategy consultant. He founded 24sessions in March 2015 after realizing that it would never work to completely hand off customer communication to tech. Sometimes, you need a personal advisor to help you out.  Rutger painfully experienced that when he needed a mortgage for his new home. Finding the right advisor, making an appointment, and meeting the mortgage advisor in person was still a long, offline, and frustrating process. He decided to solve this global problem - and embarked on a mission to reinvent the way businesses engage with customers. He successfully sold his business in March 2021, and eventually stepped out in November 2022. The reason why I invited Ruther is to explore the big lessons learned on his journey. Rutger talks about how the initial idea to build a marketplace became a complete failure and what he learned from that. He then explained the pivot and what was required to make that a success. Why COVID was a double-edged sword for the business, what critical lessons this taught them, and how they were able to not only survive but come out stronger altogether.  Here's one of his quotes Almost until the last day, everybody in the company knew how much money we had in the bank accounts. It really helped, it made so many things easier if people have almost the same amount of knowledge as you have on the state of the business, on the stuff that scares you, on the stuff that you feel we're great at. That transparency really helps. During this interview, you will learn four things: Why very often we do strategic validation wrong - and how to avoid that. How to win a customer for life, even if they say your chances are 1% Why you should let everyone in your company know how much money is in the bank What's the golden combination to building belonging around your business and employees who are 100% committed   For more information about the guest from this week: Rutger Teunissen Website 24Sessions 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 manufacturers remove bottlenecks with smart suggestions. My guest is Rafi Wadan, Co-Founder and CEO Stargazr. Rafi started his career as a Financial Controller at Beiersdorf and Lufthansa Technik in Germany and US. He then finished his PhD Degree on the topic "Impact of Digitization and AI on Controlling and FP&A" In this period, he built a proven track record in turnaround situations. Rafi has a deep understanding of KPIs and how to cascade them throughout an organization. He's a strategic thinker who is able to see the big picture and develop creative solutions to complex problems. During his career, he experienced how hard it is to find accurate answers to financial controlling questions such as why the company is losing money, or what could be the year-end profit. Using Excel and heavy ERP tools was sometimes a nightmare. To provide timely and accurate information to stakeholders, he and his co-founder built themselves software that equipped management with the correct answers in real-time and the company made a turnaround. Stargazr was born. Stargazr is on a mission to help manufacturing companies' profitability by removing gut feelings and providing forward-looking insights and intelligent recommendations.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rafi to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way manufacturing companies make decisions. Rafi shares his lessons learned on creating predictable traction in the highly competitive category of FP&A. He tells stories about how niching down helped scale faster and help deliver remarkable results in a matter of 30 days. Last but not least, he elaborates on how they can constantly raise the bar and get ahead of the market.  Here's one of his quotes We like to call our tool a data-driven employee. That was always the way I was seeing Stargazer and trying to build it. However, I knew that the prescriptive part was a super complex approach. For us was clear we, first of all, need a framework for that. But we also use a customer advisory board to ensure that this whole model with the prescriptive analytics works. Our customers did a 30-day POC, and the result was awesome. We could see our tool was identifying and recommending solutions how to solve bottlenecks, which were in the six digits in terms of profit.  During this interview, you will learn four things: How verticalization will help to create traction and rapidly grow it What questions to ask in order to understand whether you are on to something with your startup idea How slicing implementation time can give you a major long-term sales advantage What to get right to drive a successful fundraising round For more information about the guest from this week: Rafi Wadan Website Stargazr 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the fact candidates will remember how you made them feel - and why we should make it an experience that matters. My guest is Lars van Wieren, Founder and CEO of Starred. Lars is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He started his career at Google, and in 2013 he founded Starred - made tons of mistakes, chased shiny objects - and then restarted the same company in 2019.  His mission: to shake up an area of recruitment that was broken. He found out that candidate experience feedback can be super impactful for candidates of all walks of life to share their voices, as well as helping to combat issues with diversity and inclusion bias in the hiring process. As such, Starred want to give people a voice to improve their candidate experience, creating a happier workforce in the long term. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lars to my podcast. We explore how the recruitment experience is broken and what consequences this has on companies. Lars shares some the biggest mistakes he made in taking Starred where it is today. He explains what made him decide to restart the company and say goodbye to 80%-90% of the revenue. He then elaborates on how he used the momentum of the fresh start as the mechanism to dominate the right segments of the market.  Here's one of his quotes It's a lot of fun when you start to start saying no. So, in the beginning, we went after every opportunity. I often compare it to Philippine dynamite fishing. Just throw some dynamite in the water, and some fish will come up, but you don't know which fish.  What we're doing today is looking at our most successful clients and finding similar companies in the market. Once you know your target audience, it's much more fun to target those companies because you can spend more money to make it far more personal to reach out to them. During this interview, you will learn four things: The signals to pay attention to understand you're positioned too broadly Why you should consider opting for stable slow-growth markets over extreme high-growth markets to grow fast That defensible differentiation is not about having most features and functions What metrics to hit before going into the next market For more information about the guest from this week: Lars van Wieren Website Starred Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Get my free, 2 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on sharing some of the big lessons learned from building Europe's largest B2B SaaS community. My guest is Alex Theuma, CEO of SaaStock. Leave a comment or a question for Alex and Ton. After 11 years of sales experience in IT, Telecoms & Cloud, Alex started a blog on SaaS called SaaScribe. This soon caught on, and he built a powerful network across the SaaS founder and investor community. The blog soon led to the creation of the first-ever podcast on B2B SaaS, called The SaaS Revolution show, which led to the first exclusively SaaS-themed meetups in London, Dublin, and Berlin. In 2015 SaaStock was founded on the back of that, which, in the meantime, has become the world’s most impactful conference for SaaS founders on the journey to $10M+ ARR and beyond. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Alex to my podcast. We explore what Alex sees as key criteria to succeed in B2B SaaS. We discuss how to start off on the right foundation, what to bet on, and what not, and how to avoid making the costly mistakes other SaaS founders made.  Here's one of his quotes I speak to people that have been running a business for like two years and are struggling, and they're still trying to figure out their ICP. So try to figure it out super early - maybe even before you launch your product. Another bonus is one is positioning. We've seen how that's transformed companies. An example of that would be DocSend (bought by Dropbox). The thing that really created the inflection point for them after many years was when they nailed their positioning. That caused them to get the hockey stick growth. During this interview, you will learn four things: Why segmentation and positioning are wrongly undervalued What signals to look for from customers to know you're on the right track Why each B2B SaaS Founder should build a personal brand  What to do and avoid doing to prevent ending up in the valleys of death For more information about the guest from this week: Alex Theuma Website: SaaStock Leave a comment or a question for Alex or Ton. Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Get my free, 2 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices