The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

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 cyclesWhat 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 needleFor more information about the guest from this week:James MalleyWebsite Paccurate

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 VismePayman 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 remarkable 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 retentionAs 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-mouthHow to structure your product strategy for impact when everyone can technically use your solution and all have feedbackWhy 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 TaeiWebsite Visme

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 powerWhy the real value is not in automation, but in augmentation. Why 'Transparency' should be higher on your list of value driversWhat mindset to train if you want to accelerate your businessFor more information about the guest from this week:Jay BartotWebsite Zeitworks

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 bankWhat'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 TeunissenWebsite 24Sessions

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 the 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 remarkable 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, it was clear that 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 itWhat questions to ask in order to understand whether you are on to something with your startup ideaHow slicing implementation time can give you a major long-term sales advantageWhat to get right to drive a successful fundraising roundFor more information about the guest from this week:Rafi WadanWebsite Stargazr

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 wants 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 of 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 broadlyWhy you should consider opting for stable slow-growth markets over extreme high-growth markets to grow fastThat defensible differentiation is not about having most features and functionsWhat metrics to hit before going into the next marketFor more information about the guest from this week:Lars van WierenWebsite Starred

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.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 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 undervaluedWhat signals to look for from customers to know you're on the right trackWhy each B2B SaaS Founder should build a personal brand What to do and avoid doing to prevent ending up in the valleys of deathFor more information about the guest from this week:Alex TheumaWebsite: SaaStock

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that's build to offload operational complexities of a SaaS business, so they can focus on growth. My guest is Christian Owens, Founder and CEO of Paddle.Christian Owens is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He learned to build websites when he was 12 years old. He dropped out of school when I was 16 and started his first software company. That grew to be a £3-4m business in 18 months. It was through running that business that I encountered the problem that we try and solve at Paddle.In 2012, Christian founded Paddle with his co-founder, Harrison. Its mission: To help SaaS companies navigate the revenue journey at every stage. Paddle offers SaaS companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, Paddle acts as a merchant of record for its customers, taking away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, simpler, and above all, way better. This is the short story of a company that grew its valuation to $1.4B in just ten years.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Christian to my podcast. We explore the journey Christian went through to claim Unicorn status. Christian elaborates on the holistic mission principles that underpin his business and how that has helped to build defensible differentiation and the foundation to scale from the start. Lastly, he talks about what it takes to get customers happily pay a premium for products that are not exactly sexy.Here's one of his quotes:If the whole crux of like why your product is valuable, or your business is valuable, is dependent on a single feature, that's really dangerous. However, if it's dependent on a fundamentally different way of thinking about doing your thing. That's great. That gives you a clear, strong differentiation between those folks to be able to go and compete. But there is a difference between competing on that feature function kind of "oh, we have the magic bullet", which is a complete myth and never exists. Versus we're trying to take the same problem and almost just flip it on its head and think about it from a different direction.During this interview, you will learn four things:How to avoid your Marketing team writing checks that the product can't cash Why you should avoid making the unsexy sexy if your product is not the coolest thing in the worldWhy you should not focus on trying to create the one magic bullet of a feature - and what to do insteadHow guarantees, where you promise to pay for damage, creates a mindset internally that can become your competitive advantageFor more information about the guest from this week:Christian OwensWebsite Paddle

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that gives B2C brands around the world the power to maximize eCommerce revenue the lean way. My guest is Greg Blazewicz, CEO of SALESmanago.Greg has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing. He holds two MA degrees: one in British Literature and Linguistics second in Business Management. His career started in marketing agencies in New York and London. For 6 years, held the position of Marketing Director at Comarch – one of the largest European IT solutions providers. In 2006, he was nominated as CEO of Interia, one of the largest horizontal internet portals in Europe listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, employing over 250 people.Greg is the author of the widely popular book “Marketing Automation Revolution”. He is also a lecturer at Universities, helping other technology startups.In 2008, he started as an entrepreneur creating software for marketing teams which led to founding SALESmanago Marketing Automation in 2011. Their mission: To enable every eCommerce team to be lean yet pragmatic and powerful and become the CEO's trusted revenue partner.This inspired me, and hence I invited Greg to my podcast. We explore how Greg took his business to €22 million ARR in a completely bootstrapped way. He shares his big lessons learned to build a business with staying power, how to find your own way of doing it, and why you shouldn't blindly follow the advice and rules of people outside your company.Here's a quote from him:The early kind of growth was really about having complete freedom to experiment. And I think a team that is actually really open for change for experimentation for failures is not an obvious thing. People that were committing their lives. When you see a startup, you would have two, three, or at max five founders who work like crazy. I'd say, today we are almost 400 people in the business, and 30% of them work like founders.During this interview, you will learn four things:Why the essence of your SaaS product is not its features but the transformation it lets your users makeHow going into countries no one considers can build you an interesting competitive positionHow to create an organization where +30% of your employees showcase the determination of a founderHow to arrive at a position where you can start funding from a position of strength (not desperation)For more information about the guest from this week:Greg BlazewiczWebsite SALESmanago

This podcast interview focuses on what it takes to create a business that not only survives a crisis but actually grows stronger from it. My guest is Devin Bramhall, Ex-CEO of Animalz.Devin is the former CEO of Animalz, a leading content marketing agency for B2B Saas companies. Storytelling is at the root of Devin's passion for marketing. She founded The Master Slam, a poetry slam-style debate about startups and tech. She is also a TEDx organizer and speaker trainer and has competed in several storytelling competitions. In September 2022, she posted a vulnerable LinkedIn post about stepping down as the CEO, thereby sharing her lessons learned not only to survive the company but actually grow it stronger during the pandemic and recent crisis.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Devin to my podcast. We explore the big lessons she learned taking over the CEO role at Animalz - and what it took to grow the business by 200% in two years of pandemic and economic crisis. She shares what appeared to be really important to keep and what not to keep - thereby reflecting on her misjudgments and traps she fell into without even realizing it.Here's one of her quotes:I learned this: it was more about consistency and reminding people of what the goal is that we're trying to accomplish, and therefore establishing that focus that keeps people relaxed.During this interview, you will learn five things:What's your number one job as a CEO in a period of crisis The importance of setting first principles and sticking to themHow to avoid making fear-based decisions or becoming overconfidentHow to keep everyone focused and committed when times are toughWhat to do/avoid doing in marketing to make an impactFor more information about the guest from this week:Devin BramhallWebsite: Animalz