The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that connects nonprofits, businesses, and individual givers with an opportunity to support important causes in the world. My guest is Matt Ostanik, CEO of Grateful.Matt is an architect, creator, builder, and tech entrepreneur on a mission. He has founded four companies. First, in 2003, Submittal Exchange - a construction technology platform. He sold this company to Textura in 2011. He continued to grow the Submittal Exchange business unit by an average of 50% per year and served on the Textura executive team as the company completed a successful IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2013. In 2014, he founded CVG, a consulting company, and FunnelWise, a marketing and sales technology startup.Matt knows the ins and outs of building successful and mission-driven businesses. He believes businesses can use social good to connect with their customers and employees on a deeper and stronger level.Today, he's the founder and CEO of Grateful, a platform that helps socially good businesses participate in “Grateful Giving” by donating to their customers’ and employees’ favorite nonprofits.Its mission is to transform charitable giving for nonprofits, businesses, and individual givers.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore what's missing in the way we build SaaS businesses. Matt shares his vision of how creating social and business impact amplifies each other when done well. He shares his lessons learned in creating successful SaaS businesses that leverage the power of the network effect. Last but not least, he provides his views on raising the bar for impact in SaaS companies.Here's a quote from him:I can tell you there are about 160 million people in the US that donate to charities every year. Those are people that care. When you ask them, 91% say they're more likely to do business with companies willing to support security that they personally care about. So there's a marketing and customer attraction value proposition with this. But we've seen with some of the companies we're working with already for the customers that participate in this type of customer giving program those customers spend 17% more with those businesses. So, it literally pays for itself.During this interview, you will learn four things:What value we can create for our customers if we'd understand what their customers desire from themYou'll understand what to look for in customers to accelerate tractionHow to engineer your solution, so it automatically brings you valuable leadsHow to go about building a business that creates a remarkable network effectFor more information about the guest from this week:Matt OstanikWebsite: Grateful

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to talk more and sell more. My guest is Alex Levin, Co-Founder and CEO of Regal.Alex is a Tech Entrepreneur on a mission. He was a product manager at Personal and Thomson Reuters and then joined Handy (later acquired by ANGI) to lead growth and marketing. Alex grew up in New York and received his BA from Harvard.While at Angi, he successfully drove top-of-funnel growth. But even after rolling out website optimization and email/SMS remarketing, only ~4 of 100 customers would convert. Surprisingly, he found that if they'd called the 96% “abandoned” customers and got them on the phone, they loved the attention and converted at double the rate.In search of technology to scale this, he found only solutions around a basic, one-size-fits-all “call more” or “call faster” strategy, resulting in declining answer rates and a terrible customer experience.Solving this problem sparked the idea to co-found Regal in October 2020 with Rebecca Green (CTO). They believe in the power of a personal touch in an increasingly digital world. In the meantime, they've built an outbound phone and SMS sales solution that helps many fast-growing B2C brands achieve their growth goals way faster. Their mission: We believe in the power of a personal touch in an increasingly digital world.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Alex to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we sell online to B2C customers. Alex explains how there is a new playbook that requires a B2C sales team and how Regal.io helps B2C sales teams 3.5x their answer rate and drive more revenue than their website does. He shares some big lessons learned on how they grew rapidly to a double-digit million ARR in 2 years and had no sales or marketing team for the first year. Last but not least, he talks about why we should prioritize creating wealth for everyone in your company rather than glorifying fundraising.Here's one of his quotes:At bigger companies, you're taught the wrong thing. You're taught that the more people work for you, the more important you are. I think that results in bad outcomes for companies. We try to teach people that the most valuable people in the company are those that can make themselves completely redundant.During this interview, you will learn four things:What you should be looking for in conversations about new products with customersThat you don't have to have a huge engineering team to build products that drive revenue from the startHow to successfully grow your SaaS business faster with fewer peopleHow to create a SaaS business that becomes critical infrastructure for your customersFor more information about the guest from this week:Alex LevinWebsite Regal

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to manage events without stress. My guest is Jonathan Kazarian, CEO of Accelevents.Johnathan is a true tech-entrepreneur‍ on a mission. His journey started in 2014 when his cousin, at the age of 17, got diagnosed with cancer, and he wanted to do something for her. Then, in preparation for an 850-person charity event with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, he recognized the many limitations of existing event technology and fundraising platforms.And this sparked the idea to create a solution so fundraisers would never have to go through that experience again.As such, he founded Accelevents in early 2015 and has been on a journey since to build a virtual & hybrid events platform. Its mission: help event organizers get some sleep the night before their event.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonathan to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of event automation and what can be if it's fixed. Jonathan shares what his business went through as their revenue 10Xed during the pandemic. He elaborates why he'd bootstrap his business again if he had to start again - and why he believes he should have taken bigger risks upfront on both product and positioning. Lastly, we talk about the critical choices he made during the Pandemic - and why without it, we wouldn't have had this conversation.Here's a quote from him:I built it nights and weekends for five years before actually going full-time with it. And as 2020 approached, we were much more focused on b2b events and for-profit events, starting to get into the world of conferences and starting to realize that technology was going to play a bigger role going forward. So we were starting to build toward this hybrid future. But it wasn't until March of 2020, when events evaporated overnight, that we knew we had to go all in on virtual. And we took our revenue from 375k in 2019 to over 3.4 million in 2020.During this interview, you will learn four things:How you can create meaningful differentiation by deeply understanding the critical moments in your customers' businessWhy your customers often aren't buying the right features but the right feelingWhat traction can you spark if you figure out how to leverage the customers of your customersWhy he decided to stick to his core principles even though that meant growing at a slower rateFor more information about the guest from this week:Jonathan KazarianWebsite Accelevents

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to redefine how we experience work. My guest is Sarah Hawley, CEO of Growmotely.Sarah Hawley is a serial entrepreneur and investor in startups, having founded eight companies since 2009. She's personally fueled by a passion for challenging the status quo of how we work, conscious culture and leadership, community, diversity, and equality, and living life on one's own terms.She's recognized as the IFA Thought Leader of the Year. Sarah was also named as one of Melbourne’s Top 100 most influential, inspiring, and creative citizens by The Age and listed in the Top 50 Female Entrepreneurs under 40 by Shoestring. She has completed the Entrepreneurial Master Program at MIT and holds a Bachelor of Business and several diplomas.In August 2020, in the middle of the Pandemic, she founded Growmotely, an All-in-one platform for growing your remote-first company. Its mission: Redefining how we experience work by bringing culture-first companies and professionals together across the world to do great things.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Sarah to my podcast. We explore what's broken in getting remote work to work. Sarah share's her vision about what it's really like to create a remote-first business - and what needs to happen for it to come to fruition. She elaborates on the product strategy lessons she learned and what it took to bring her solution to the market in order to gain traction and start a movement. Last but not least, she explains why she dropped the idea of being venture-backed.Here's one quote from her:I see it all the time, people reach out to me. I see it on LinkedIn, where there's just a high level of frustration because companies are advertising remote jobs, and people are applying for them only to find out that it's remote, but you have to live in this country or this city. And so it's actually excluding most of the world from applying for that job. And people are frustrated because those of us who really are for remote work and really understand it in the context that I am talking about here today is: It's anywhere work. And it's equal opportunity for anyone in the world to access employment opportunities. And that's the world that I want to create.During this interview, you will learn four things:What's needed beyond a strong vision to start a movement?Why she opted to focus on organic growth through word of mouth instead of outbound sales?What she did differently to achieve a 48% referral rate (and growing)Why she pulled her business back to the mission and away from too much focus on growth numbersFor more information about the guest from this week:Sarah HawleyWebsite Growmotely

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to all of us to drive meaningful results with learning communities. My guest is Shaunak Roy, Founder of Yellowdig.Shaunak is a true tech entrepreneur on a mission. The first decade of his career he spent advising global companies on technology, strategy, and growth.In 2014, he knew he wanted to start a company that mattered. As he looked back on his own academic days as an undergrad at IIT Bombay, and postgrad at MIT, he realized that he learned as much from his peers as he did from his brilliant professors. Some of the bonds he created with his peers lasted well beyond those formative years, and morphed into lifelong friendships.As Facebook and other social media technologies took over the social connectivity scene, he saw an opportunity to leverage this idea of social sharing through technology, but specifically in the area of sharing academic ideas and knowledge. That became the big idea behind Yellowdig. The platform was built on three main pedagogical principles: Agency, Mastery, and Connectedness. Its mission: To make classroom learning more joyful, active, and engagingAnd this inspired me, and hence I invited Shaunak to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we deliver education. Shaunuk shares his vision about how education can be more fun and impactful. He elaborates on the big lessons learned from making his idea a reality and gaining remarkable traction in a tough market. He shares his secrets on how to avoid failure and create a solution that users not only like, but love.Here's one of his quotes:When we sit in a classroom and try to learn, it's not just the lecture from the professor, but it's also the interaction that we're having. That's where the real learning happens. And even if I listen to the best professor in the world doesn't mean I'm going to be smart, like him or her. It's only when I try to apply that knowledge by discussing with people like me or going back to work and trying to connect with something I learned before, and those connections are where learning truly happens. And I think that's where technology has a huge role to play.During this interview, you will learn four things:How to create remarkable traction by leveraging existing technology investments and amplifying their valueThe framework Shaunak is using to grow fast but mitigate the critical risks What he learned from having to rebuild his entire stack - and how it helped them to build a viable companyWhat sales and pricing strategies work best if you aim to create momentum in traditionally conservative industries.For more information about the guest from this week:Shaunak RoyWebsite Yellowdig

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help manufacturing and cybersecurity businesses to attract and grow a sustainable workforce pipeline. My guest is Tina Zwolinski, CEO of Skillsgapp.Tina is a true tech entrepreneur on a mission. Her work as CEO and founder of ZWO, a national branding firm, provided her with decades of experience providing strategic counsel, marketing direction, and brand development to organizations that aspired to grow their businesses, reach emerging markets, and launch innovative projects and initiatives. Her passion: developing the youth for middle-skills and STEM jobs, helping states meet their industry recruitment and economic development workforce needs, and helping manufacturers and other industries fill their talent gaps with skilled recruits. She's focused her volunteer service efforts on young people -- helping them get the best start in life and grow into mature, valued young adults. And this work sparked the big idea behind Skillsgapp. Skillsgapp is on a mission to connect youth to life-changing careers through game-changing play. The platform is designed to attract and grow a sustainable workforce pipeline with the geo-specificity to meet a region’s and industry’s specific needs while providing the next workforce generation access to meaningful careers and pathways – even in underserved areas. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Tina to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we fill our workforce pipeline. Tina shares how, through technology, we can solve this problem at a global scale - in a way that's fun and ultra-precise. She shares her big lessons learned in creating a flywheel for growth by removing industry barriers. And last but not least, she shares her advice on creating a software business that people keep talking about. Here's a quote from her:In cyber, currently, there are 700,000 unfilled jobs. And in manufacturing, by 2025, there will be 3.4 million manufacturing jobs worldwide, and 2 million of those are going unfilled. But in Gen Z, there are 2 billion globally. So if you start to run the numbers, it's not a people problem. There is an awareness and access problem.During this interview, you will learn four things:How to find transformative innovation opportunities by zooming out to the global pictureHow to create a flywheel for growth when there's no real owner of the problemHow you can solve a global challenge by approaching it locallyThe power that unlocks when purpose and technology blendFor more information about the guest from this week:Tina Zwolinski Website Skillsgapp

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables B2B SaaS businesses to deliver a stellar member experience, quantify business impact, and become community-driven. My guest is Patrick Woods, Co-founder and CEO of Orbit.Patrick Woods is a tech entrepreneur on a Mission. He has more than 10 years of marketing and customer success experience. He’s the co-creator of the Orbit Model, host of the Developer Love podcast, and is the author of the Brand Strategy Canvas. He co-founded Orbit in September 2019 on the strong belief that software is no longer sold - but adopted and that value creation beats value capture. The sales funnel is about extracting value, but that only works short-term. For sustainable growth, community can drive long-term adoption through value creation. And that's exactly the mission behind OrbitAnd this inspired me, and hence I invited Patrick to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we think about community. Patrick shares his vision around the opportunity the SaaS industry has by becoming community-driven. He shares his big lessons learned to create bottom-up traction in an extremely fragmented market and how growth accelerated during Covid, purely fueled by their big idea, the Orbit Framework. Last but not least, he explains how having a compelling mission has helped them to attract the right talent.Here's one of his quotes:Late 2019, we raised our first capital because our theory was that we need to reimagine the go-to-market tech stack based on these new ideas, these new data models, and these new mental models. Nobody's done this, and somebody's going to figure out what CRM will look like in the context of community. If community-driven growth of product-led growth is real, how can we retool the tech stack to make that real? There's gonna be a retooling, but it needs to be reimagined from first principles. And the Orbit model is the thing that we're going to try to build this on.During this interview, you will learn four things:How a healthy and growing community de-risks and accelerates every part of your business How to create a self-sustaining flywheel for growth around your SaaS business purely driven by content - instead of big campaigns or outbound sales.How to maximize your growth opportunity by balancing value capturing with value creation activitiesThat starting a successful community is not about the platform you choose but about articulating why anyone would care to join your community.For more information about the guest from this week:Patrick WoodsWebsite Orbit

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power for lawyers and tax advisors to handle mandates faster while leveraging the highest security standards. My guest is Arnold Scherabon, Co-founder and CEO of IURIO.Arnold is a legal practitioner by heart; however, for the first 9 years of his career, Arnold operated in recruitment and training. During that time, he often met with Patrick Hoffman for a glass of beer - and that's where they ended up discussing how lawyers and tax advisors are often not able to use commonly accepted tools - and how that's holding them back. This fueled the big idea behind IURIO - which they cofounded in July 2017.IURIO is on a mission to help lawyers and tax advisors grow profitably while working and communicating stress-free and confidently with clients.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Arnold to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way lawyers and tax professionals have to deliver their best work. Arnold shares how he took his business from idea to repeatable traction. He digs into the big lessons learned on their journey towards product-market fit, how this influenced the way they segment the market, and why he believes he should have started selling much earlier.Here's one of his quotes:'In hindsight, we could have probably done more research and try to find out whether this customer base would be big enough, but we took a little of risk and gut feeling and thought, 'Okay, let's just start this. We think the opportunity in the market as a whole is just very big because many products are already here. So and that's still what we experiencing - we don't have to pitch against another product.'During this interview, you will learn four things:What to do differently to find a problem spot that's not solved before yetHow to go about creating traction within a segment of the market that's not willing to moveWhy we often think we've niched down enough - but are still miles offThe value of starting to sell early - and how to avoid starting selling too lateFor more information about the guest from this week:Arnold ScherabonWebsite IURIO

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to shape a world in which every single person has the exact same chance to get hired for a job. My guest is Charlotte Melkert, Co-founder and CEO of Equalture.Charlotte has been recognized among the top 8 most talented female entrepreneurs of The Netherlands, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Sifted's top 14 European Gen Z Founders. She's been on her entrepreneurial journey together with her twin sister Fleur since June 2016. First, they started Female Investments to support high-potential female talent in the growth of their career. What they learned during that journey sparked the idea behind Equalture, which they founded in May 2018.Equalture is on a mission to shape the world of unbiased hiring by merging the art of neuroscience and gamification.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Charlotte to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we recruit talent today and why we should not accept the biases of resume-based hiring anymore. Charlotte shares the big lessons from her journey to create meaningful change and thereby drills into the importance of being crystal clear on segmenting and ruthlessly aligning product strategy around a bold vision. Lastly, she also talks about her key takeaways from not only surviving the adversity of the recent pandemic but coming out stronger altogether.Here's a quote from her:Nowadays, with every single feature that we are building in the platform, the question is always: Is this feature in line with the mission statement that we have as a company? The statement is: We want to shape the world of unbiased hiring. So, is the feature that we're going to build in line with that statement, or are we just building a feature because we get some customers here and there that are asking for some useful feature?During this interview, you will learn four things:That often, traction doesn't come from selling a product but by selling a mindset and using your product to put the mindset into practiceHow to avoid losing valuable capacity in your R&D department due to feature bloatWhy rejecting or even firing a customer can be the best thing you can do to create a thriving business.That we can leverage your product in more ways than you maybe are aware of to create meaningful valueFor more information about the guest from this week:Charlotte MelkertWebsite: Equalture

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to answer any question in minutes. My guest is Ahmed Elsamadisi, CEO of Narrator.Ahmed started his career at Cornell’s Autonomous Systems Laboratory, building algorithms for autonomous vehicles and human-robot interaction. He then joined Raytheon to develop AI algorithms for missile defense, focusing on tracking and discrimination.In 2015, Ahmed joined WeWork as the first hire on their data team. He built their data engineering infrastructure and grew the team to forty data engineers and analysts.As WeWork grew, its data became difficult to maintain, and the data team struggled to deliver work to stakeholders. Ahmed realized that a traditional data model designed for dashboards increases in complexity too quickly as a company scales.And that sparked the idea of the founding of Narrator in 2017. It powers self-service analytics across all company data. It's on a mission to enable anyone to get answers in minutes instead of weeks.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ahmed to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of getting answers and how today's technology is holding us back. Ahmed is sharing his vision about the platform that he's creating to ask any question and have it answered in record time. He shares his big lessons in building a product designed to solve a problem that was perceived as impossible to solve. He digs into the messaging challenges he had to overcome to create predictable traction. Lastly, he shares how his drive to create something that's remembered and makes an impact serves everyone well: his customers, his employees, his business, and his investors.Here is one of his quotes:We started with a goal, but we had no idea about the implementation. And the goal was to ask the questions and give answers. And one of the things that I hated about the answers that we gave today was answers that are given in the form of dashboards. Dashboards are, I think, the worst way to communicate anything. So how did we solve this problem before? And the answer was stories. Everyone who reads a story is able to understand. So I knew that whatever Narrative had to output when you are answering questions, we should be pushing people to create stories so people's opinions, people's thoughts, and people's thinking process is shared. Because sharing a chart doesn't mean anything, but sharing a story sharing your thinking, and sharing your process is key.During this interview, you will learn four things:That you're off on building something remarkable when everyone thinks it's impossible … until it's notThat by looking at how we solved problems in ancient times can give you the answers to instantly turn customers into fans todayThat the way to explain your solution most clearly is to have your fans do itThat what makes you a good company is not what makes you a good investment.For more information about the guest from this week:Ahmed ElsamadisiWebsite Narrator AI