The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to Software companies over 70% more trial conversions with personalized sales and onboarding videos. My guest is Matt Barnett, Founder, and CEO of Bonjoro. Matt is the founder and CEO of Bonjoro. He is a Britisch designer by trade and loves two things: building great products and building a great culture. He started as a designer, worked as a consultant, did his MBA in 2012, and then co-founded not-for-profit group XTech Sydney in 2013 and Verbate, a video insight agency in 2014. That's where he stumbled upon a problem with reaching overseas customers in a simple and impactful way.  What started as a sales hack for the Agency he was running, Bonjoro went from hack to side hustle to global business in 18 months, and now has a team across 5 continents.  Bonjoro is on a mission to create a world free of spamming - a world where we build trust and love amongst customers by sending something meaningful that converts them for life. It's driven by its ethos of “Automate processes, but never relationships.” And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore the art of spotting when a business idea has potential and which does not. Matt explains the journey of how Bonjoro was born - and how he took it from an idea to a business that grows through word of mouth and virality. He shares some of his big lessons learned on how to fill his product roadmap with smart investments that create both scale and customer value. Last but not least, he articulates the importance of creating a brand from the start - and how that increases your chances of success. Here are some of his quotes "If every customer brings you two users, then you're like, 'Right - if we make them love us even more, and we activate them, then they'll bring us five." But how do we do that? How do you get the funnel growing faster? And that's not product. It tends to be time and relationships and the loyalty part. If you're passive with a great product, that's awesome, but people's chances of inviting others in is much, much lower. When you're a small business, you have to be active. You can't passively expect this to happen." During this interview, you will learn four things: How to push your R&D department to focus on the desired outcome, not the obvious output Why you should look at your customer funnel with a loyalty lens on, i.e., which customers can become a superfan - a micro-influencer Sometimes your smallest customers can drive the biggest revenue impact for you - indirectly. Why everyone on your team should feel the customer's pain - and how to go about that.  For more information about the guest from this week: Matt Barnett Website Bonjoro Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to empower GTM teams to understand their prospects and supercharge their processes. My guest is Gorish Aggarwal, Co-founder, and CEO of Sybill. Gorish is a self-made tech entrepreneur obsessed with solving hard problems. Throughout his career, he worked as a senior software engineer in the healthcare research team of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). He's an electrical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi and specializes in the field of ML and Signal Processing for neural and biomedical applications. He loves working on projects which can address the real-world challenges of today and have the potential to create a meaningful impact in the lives of people.  Today, he's the Co-founder and CEO of Sybill. The big idea behind Sybill stems from his time lecturing at Stanford in the summer of 2020. Gorish firsthand faced the problem of gauging student engagement and sentiment in video calls. He decided to solve this problem for us and the world. Sybill is on a mission to introduce a new era in meeting intelligence, going beyond transcription and keyword searches and surfacing the aha! moments and buying intent of your prospects. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Gorish to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we leverage the value of video calls. Gorish shares his vision of how we can give Sales a competitive advantage by augmenting them with insights about the invisible behavior their customers showcase when meeting online. We dig into the big learnings and tough decisions that needed to be made in the development process and how that has panned out in stickiness and viral effects. Last but not least, he shares his advice on what it takes to build a software business that cannot be ignored. Here's one of his quotes "If we can quantify and track these behaviors, humans can actually level up their conversation. If they can get signals about their audience's mental state during the call, they can improve their presentation and their pitch to effectively take the audience from that point A to point B, which is the objective of most conversations. For instance, if sales reps could understand that the prospect is disengaged during the most important section about the core offering, they could actually disqualify that prospect far earlier." During this interview, you will learn four things: Why niching down is essential to creating predictable traction That 'cool' is not often valuable - and how that hurts adoption How to go to market even faster - and gather critical information to gain an advantage. How adding one simple feature can become the ice-breaker in every conversation - and drive word of mouth Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help Enterprise B2B SaaS vendors shorten their sales cycles by 50-75%. My guest is Justin Beals, Co-founder and CEO of Strike Graph.  Justin Beals is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in AI, cybersecurity, and governance. He organizes strategic innovations at the crossroads of cybersecurity and compliance and focuses on helping customers get outsized value. In every startup he started, he focused on setting a foundational culture of employee growth. Based in Seattle, he previously served as the CTO of NextStep and Koru, which won the 2018 Most Impactful Startup award from Wharton People Analytics. Justin is a board member for the Ada Developers Academy, VALID8 Financial, and Edify Software Consulting. He's also an author and the creator of the Training, Tracking & Placement System US Patent. He's passionate about making arcane cyber security standards plain and simple to achieve. That drove him to co-found Strike Graph in February 2020 - which he leads as their CEO.  Strike Graph is on a mission to enable its customers to earn revenue faster by completing security audits successfully and quickly. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the security audit services market. Justin shares his lessons learned how he found a sizeable market that Strike Graph can dominate by developing a product that creates a shift in value by aiming to be different, not just better.  His story about articulating what business he's really in and how he measures progress is a textbook example of how to create a company that's resilient no matter what crisis it'll find on its path.  Here's one of his quotes "Every company is concerned with their revenue. We didn't want to be a security company. We wanted to be a revenue company. Our goal was to say close deals faster, with more confidence. And if we can shorten your time to close by 50 to 75%, you can imagine the amount of efficiency that an organization gets, you know, in revenue acquisition quarter over quarter, there are startups that I've worked at that that simple change would have saved us, we would have been a market leader." During this interview, you will learn four things: That you create instant differentiation is you ensure the design of your solution amplifies the uniqueness of your ideal customer Why your mission should be about 2 things: Immediate and apparent value for your customers That a good exercise to repeat regularly is to start to look at what scales exponentially and what scales linearly Why crystalizing what business you are really in can mean the difference between failing and becoming the market leader For more information about the guest from this week: Justin Beals Website Strike Graph Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to provide us a significant competitive advantage by leveraging unstructured data. My guest is Kirk Marple, CEO of Unstruk Data. Kirk Marple is a customer-focused technology leader. He has over 25 years of experience developing media management pipelines, leading DevOps at venture-backed companies, and structuring successful exits. He holds multiple patents and industry awards and has truly established himself as an industry leader. Today he's the CEO of Unstruk Data, a company that's on a mission empowering enterprises to transform unstructured data files into actionable intelligence about real-world assets to solve massive business, environmental and societal problems. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Kirk to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the data analytics market - and in particular, unstructured data. Kirk shares his journey of how he pivoted from building a podcast discovery tool to a data platform for real-world assets. He shares his big lessons learned about coming to market too early and how postponing the launch has been a valuable decision that made the company more recession-proof. Lastly, he shares his experience on what it takes to build a software business that's got staying power.  Here is one of his quotes "I think the volume of data is probably one of the big stopping points. Oil and gas companies probably spend millions of dollars to search the undersea floor of their oil pipelines. And now the data just sits in a bucket somewhere after they capture it, and they can't go back and find it, or reuse that data…" During this interview, you will learn four things: Why the real user value with SaaS solutions virtually always happens in the last mile That the thing that keeps founders awake at night is not the worry about having a compelling solution but how to attract companies that need it. Why messaging is often the hardest thing - not the technology. Why having an open platform can cause serious problems in sales For more information about the guest from this week: Kirk Marple Website: Unstruk Data Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to create a world free from security incidents. My guest is Shikhar Shrestha, CEO and Co-Founder of Ambient.ai. Shikhar is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He builds and leads teams that invent new technologies that transform markets, all with the end goal of delivering magical outcomes for our customers. After several years of R&D in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence in academia at Stanford and industry at Apple and Google, he realized that the reactive approach to security doesn’t work for today’s world.  That sparked the idea to found Ambient.ai in February of 2017. Ambient.ai is a computer vision intelligence company. It's on a mission to transform security operations by preventing every security incident possible - without sacrificing privacy. They're building solutions for the world that we want to live in. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Shikhar to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of security prevention. Shikhar shares his vision to transform the industry and how the journey he's following to make the biggest possible impact. He explains what he's done differently to build traction momentum by creating a strong pull from the market. Lastly, he shares his big lessons learned from dealing with disbelief from customers, investors, and employees - and how to build a software business that cannot be ignored. Here's one of his quotes "In the first phase, the only thing that really matters is getting to product market fit. And I think, over time, the success or failure of the company really depends on the strength of the product market fit.  You want to be able to answer this question, which is: what do you uniquely offer that someone desperately wants. And unique and desperate are really important words there because if it's not unique, other people will copy you, and the company is not really going to be valuable. And if the customers or prospects are not desperate to solve the problem, it's going to be very hard as a startup to convince anybody to buy the product." During this interview, you will learn four things: How to design for creating pull from the market Why going against conventional wisdom is often the route to creating very defensible differentiation. Why early disbelief is a precondition for a good entrepreneurial opportunity Why companies should be built to be anti-fragile and how to go about that For more information about the guest from this week: Shikhar Shrestha Website Ambient.ai Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to join up Healthcare and prevent people from having cancer, losing their mobility, or their lives due to errors and delays. My guest is Chris Dial, Co-founder, and CEO of Salutare. Chris started his career as an analyst at Forrester Research. He joined Microsoft in 2002, where - over a period of 18 years - he enjoyed several roles from Sr. Product managers all the way up to Microsoft's Senior Director of Cloud ISVs and Startups. Here, he led the process of finding and making successful software companies building and running apps using Microsoft SQL, Azure, and Dynamics. He managed this innovation team across 12 European countries. In December 2020, he co-founded Salutare, which he leads as the CEO. They believe that no patient should ever be lost. Every clinician and patient benefits when they are in dialogue together on the patient’s journey, and clinicians can be freed from performing many manual tasks. Salutare is on a mission to create online services where this dialogue happens and where the greatest improvements for healthcare can be made for better outcomes. This inspired me, and hence I invited Chris to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the process of joining up healthcare - and why doing nothing is not an option. Chris shares his approach to making the impossible possible - and the lessons he learned to overcome the hurdles to gain traction. He shares his advice to stay mentally sane in the day-to-day battle that startups face to create meaningful change. Lastly, he shares his secrets to creating software that people love to work with - every single day. Here's one of his quotes It's extremely rewarding when you hear about these cases that you can make an impact. We had an early pilot participant in one of the hospitals, and she said, 'Saturday is my favorite working day. During the week, I've got to deal with all these other hospital systems. And then I work on your software. But on Saturday, I only work with your software, and it's a pleasure.'  And I was so touched by that. And I shared it with the team. And I said we have to aim for that nonstop every day. That's what we want people to say.  During this interview, you will learn four things: How you can create transformative change by addressing problems that cross silos  Why customer anecdotes of joy should be a must-have metric to track for every R&D department.  How to get customers to coach you to make the deal happen.  Why you should design both for adoption and diffusion momentum - and how For more information about the guest from this week: Chris Dial Website Salutare Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help business app developers make the impossible possible. My guest is Harry Brundage, Co-founder, and CEO at Gadget Harry is a hard-core developer turned into a tech entrepreneur. He worked at Shopify in numerous capacities, building and scaling Shopify's backend infrastructure, frontend technology stack, big data platform, and engineering organization.  Since leaving Shopify, Harry has built many other systems -- a note-taking tool, an automated vertical farm, a QA tool -- allowing him to gain first-hand experience with how repetitive software development can be. The made him ask the question: Why does it need to be this hard! Today, Harry is the co-founder and CEO of Gadget, the serverless stack for eCommerce app developers. Harry and his team are on a mission to enable developers to build ambitious software ridiculously fast. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Harry to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to the speed by which we can develop business applications. Harry shares his vision about making the impossible possible for developers - and how this backs up his dream to be a company builder at the end of the day. He shares his hard lessons learned about what it took to build something that makes even the most critical developers advocates.  Here's one of his quotes "Have you ever heard the Marc Andreessen quote: Software is eating the world? We would say: It's not done yet. It's a very big meal, the world. And there are just a lot of unautomated business processes, and people sitting in cubicles copying and pasting data between different systems. We just believe that there's a huge number of problems that have yet to be solved with software, and we're excited about enabling those builders to do that." During this interview, you will learn four things: How you can create a lot of interest and differentiation by creating a solution that's about uninteresting and undifferentiated stuff  That one way to create momentum is to help users create things they wouldn't be able to otherwise That creating a remarkable SaaS product is not about everything the product does - but how it makes your users feel using it The lessons he learned (and the tough decision he needed to make) in speeding up traction and adoption For more information about the guest from this week: Harry Brundage Website Gadget Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to make becoming data-driven easier than ever before. My guest is Peter Fishman, Co-founder, and CEO of Mozart Data Dr. Peter Fishman has over a decade of experience running data and data-adjacent teams at companies like Microsoft, Yammer, Opendoor, Playdom, and Eaze. He realized that he was building the same types of modern data stacks at each company. Taking a broader perspective, he saw many other companies building a data stack over and over again. This inspired him, and his co-founder, Dan, to found Mozart Data in 2020.  Mozart Data is on a mission to make it easy for anyone to set up a modern data stack, without a data engineer, in under an hour. Why does this matter? Because that enables 10x more employees to get access to data, it decreases the time to insight by 76% and delivers 30% cost savings compared to assembling your own data stack.  And that inspired me, and hence I invited Peter to my podcast. We explore what's broken around the way we can embrace the full potential of data. Peter explains his vision of what can be when we can leverage the power of data as a first principle versus an afterthought. He shares his lessons learned around what a SaaS application has to excel at to overcome the trust issues customers have and create a sustainable business from the start. Here are some of his quotes:  The idea of, let's build everything and let's be good at everything. And I think like this is like, almost the kiss of death. Customers don't want good. Customers want the best. You might say, well, the customer won't know the difference between good and the best. They will know the difference.  What I think of as the way to win business is you have a small contract, and you expand with a combination of the startup and the impact that you're having. So, as you're helpful, that sort of growth within the company, ends up being sort of a no brainer.  During this interview, you will learn four things: That you can build a thriving business by working closely with your competitors  That customers want the best product in the market - whether we like it or not. The opportunity is: they define 'best' - no one else. What principles to follow to grow solid traction around adoption When you know your vision is clear and powerful enough For more information about the guest from this week: Peter Fishman Website Mozart Data Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of ‘not enough’ traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It’s a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give consumer product manufacturers an edge in building customer relationships and growing continuous revenue streams. My guest is Ervin Draganovic, CEO and Co-founder of Layerise. Ervin has a proven track record in product development, leadership, and corporate governance and has the capacity to attract, build and lead top-performing teams. He calls himself a digital-product-driven corporate opportunist. In 2019 he co-founded Layerise, which he leads as its CEO. Layerise is on a mission to help companies make their products come alive. Its vision is to create a world free from all the print and ink material used for consumer product and service onboarding. At its core, Layerise believes it can convert environmental positive impact into commercial growth for enterprises worldwide. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ervin to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the customer experience process when it comes to physical consumer goods. Ervin explains how he's found a way to transform a global industry and how he managed to turn a compliance requirement into a commercial engine. He also shares his tough lessons learned in taking the product to market and selling it to an audience that's going to love it in 5-10 years' time but is not aware it exists.  Last but not least, he sets apart what he believes is required to create a SaaS business that's worth making a remark about. Here is one of his quotes We were not able to look at the market and say, Okay, this is a kind of an evolutionary step. We really had to envision a future. And a good way of predicting the future is actually by creating it. So we were looking far out and saying, okay, in 10 years' time, how is a modern hardware consumer goods manufacturer dealing with post-sales activities? Are they aware of who the customers are? Do they need to be in constant relationship with their customers? What are the factors of competitive advantage at that point for each brand? And then we looked at if those are actually to have the best customer experience, product, onboarding, customer relationship, what do we then need to do today?  During this interview, you will learn four things: What we need to do differently to create SaaS products that have a transformative impact, rather than just evolutionary How to package your SaaS products to wake up the market and make people think, 'holy moly - we definitely have to step up our game.' That if you don't do your product right, you end up spending all your budget on marketing. What mindset to embrace to ensure a lifelong competitive advantage For more information about the guest from this week: Ervin Draganovic Website Layerise Subscribe to my Daily Reflection Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable every B2B Sales person to gain trust and advantage even before the 1st meeting. My guest is Lidia Vijga, Co-founder and CEO of Decklinks  Lidia started her career in the Adtech space where she gained sales experience with both PixFuture and StackAdapt. In 2018 she co-founded Briefbid, a two-sided marketplace where media teams can connect, plan and work together. The insights she got there sparked the idea behind her new company.  Today, Lidia is a Co-founder & CEO at DeckLinks, a platform that empowers b2b sales teams to create the most personal buying experience with video sales decks. DeckLinks is on a mission to make b2b sales more human. It's building a world where sales professionals can show their expertise and personality to create a deeper connection with the buyers at any stage of the sales cycle. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lidia to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of B2B sales when it comes to how we communicate. Lidia shares her vision of how companies can grow faster by making sales more human. She talks us through the big lessons she learned in her previous startup, and how the unique insights she gained firsthand gave her and her team a formula for success. Last but not least she shares her advice on what it takes to build a SaaS business that's ultra-lean, remarkable, and able to compete with the 'big boys.' Here's one of her quotes: "This is how a buyer thinks. First they make a decision about you as a salesperson. Then they make a decision about the company. The offering, the value prop, everything else is after - but the first thing - the first 10 seconds is whether they like you, whether they trust you, and whether they want to work with you. These are the first three things they answer in their head in the first 10 seconds as they see you as a salesperson." During this interview, you will learn four things: Why deciding to automating everything can be the biggest mistake you ever made  How to win against competitors that have the biggest brand, the best product, and the best price Why the number of customers that refuse to take your discount should be a key metric on your dashboard Why designing for creating an organic network effect should be your biggest priority For more information about the guest from this week: Lidia Vijga Website Decklinks Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of ‘not enough’ traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It’s a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices