The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on the essence of the book ‘The Wicked Company’, and my guest is Markus Kirsch, FRSA, Author & Founder of The Wicked Company.Marcus is a .com veteran with nearly two decades of award-winning, international and integrated design and technology project experience.A Royal College of Art alumni and ex-MIT Media Lab Europe researcher, Marcus Kirsch has worked as a transformation, service design, and innovation specialist. With project experience for companies like British Telecom, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft, McDonald's, Nationwide, Nissan, Science Museum, P&G, Telekom Italia, and many others, he believes that we need a new narrative, mindset, and way of working to align ourselves with what society needs today. As he states: We live in an era of wicked problems. Problems that continue to evolve and morph beyond your solutions even as you form them. The ways that always worked to solve problems, don’t work anymore. The days of tame problems—mass production, building bridges, solving for x —are behind us, but we’re still designing companies to solve those tame problems. As a consequence, 70% of digital transformations are failing (McKinsey). Marcus Kirsch is on a mission to change all that. This inspired me, and hence I invited Marcus to my podcast. We explore how the nature of problems are changing from tame problems into wicked problems, and what this means to the mindsets, organizations and cultures we need to develop to succeed. We also address how our measures should change and how qualitative measures become essential in the process. Last but not least, we talk about what Tech-Entrepreneurs need to do differently to drive the transformation and unlock new margin-boosting sources of value.Here are some of his quotes:The big thing to realize is that we're living in an era of problem evolution, not a technology revolution. We have organizations who have spent a lot of time creating solutions, without having reviewed what the actual problem is. We know that some problems have changed, because technology has entered our life. Technology has to some extent changed our behavior the way we are connected around the globe. And that has led to a type or characteristics of problems to grow and evolve around us, without organizations or people being able to identify those characteristics. And because we haven't identified it, I think that's why we're failing a lot.During this interview, you will learn four things:Why it’s key to fall in love with the problem, not the product Why the better way to look at finding solutions it in aiming for effectiveness (i.e, impact) rather than efficiencyThat we have to develop an idea about sustainable failure – to learn faster and grow your innovation muscle better, quicker and more effectiveWhy it is key to embrace emotion as a skill to truly understand what the problem really looks like.For more information about the guest from this week:Markus KirschThe Wicked Company

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to shape working environments that increase our productivity and wellness. My guest is Tim Panagos, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at MicroshareTim is a technology executive with 20 years of experience in Enterprise Software. He’s a change agent and a vision setter who’s thrilled by building and sees the wisdom in maintaining. He believes that technology is a weapon for strategic competitive advantage, and is most productive when he can team with a business partner who shares his big ideasHe was most recently Chief Architect of Accenture’s global Business Process Management (BPM) practice leading architecture innovation. Prior to that, Tim was CTO at Knowledge Rules, a global consulting start-up and held multiple engineering leadership roles at Pegasystems (PEGA).He holds a Masters in the Management of Technology from MIT and studied Computer Science at UNH.In 2013, he co-founded Microshare™, where today he’s in charge of strategic product vision and the implementation of it. Microshare is all about squeezing more value from more data. The focus has been on harnessing and sharing previously hidden insights on client operations. This unveils vast cost-savings opportunities and delivers new metrics on occupant wellness, building performance and sustainability – and enables the businesses to deliver novel business models that will create new industries and disrupt existing.That inspired me, and hence I invited Tim to my Podcast. We explore how businesses are challenged to make the right and best decisions how to deploy the space they own or occupy, and how COVID has made that challenge worse.We address what opportunity we have in taking employee wellness and productivity to the next level when we bring in meaningful and live data from sensors into the picture. Beyond that, we talk about what it takes to build a software business that creates solutions that not only have an edge, but also keep it.Here are some of his quotes:When I was leaving Accenture, what I was getting to see was that there were patterns in how these very large projects, 50 million, hundred million dollar a year projects that were being executed, were combining technologies that I felt were ripe to be harvested and democratized.And so being a systems thinker, I began to kind of visualize how we could take and boil these will large projects down and create building blocks that would allow more people to take advantage of them. People who didn't have the budget or the risk profile necessary to launch a $50 million Accenture project to apply these things. How would we kind of redesign and reconceived these technologies to make it more broadly applicable?During this interview, you will learn four things:How to create solutions to aid decision-making in areas where there’s a lot of human bias, emotional tension or invisible behaviour.How removing friction in the adoption and decision/buying process of enterprise solutions helps drive momentumHow data privacy can become your key differentiator if you think about it differentlyHow you can grow faster and bigger by focusing with dedication on a smaller, less educated, and narrower defined marketFor more information about the guest from this week:Tim PanagosWebsite Microshare

This podcast interview focuses on what secrets investors are looking for in B2B SaaS companies. My guest is Akeel Jabber, Investment Director and GP at HoriZen CapitalAkeel is an expert in growth marketing strategy and business operations. He’s also an engineer who was previously a partner and operations director at Wired investors, a micro private equity firm focused on digital asset acquisitions and has been involved in over 15 company acquisitions. Today, he’s a general partner and Investment Director at HoriZen Capital, an investment firm that invests and acquires SaaS companies over $500k in ARR. He’s also the host of the SaaS District podcast, where he interviews entrepreneurs and investors on topics such as leadership, B2B sales, growth marketing, innovation, scaling, funding and M&A. The combination intrigued me, and hence I invited Akeel to my podcast. We explore what’s essential to make the ‘marriage’ between a start-up and investor magic. What do investors look for, what do they value and care about, and what turns them off. Besides that, we discuss (through the eyes of an investor) what it takes to build a remarkable software business.Here are some of his quotes:When you're building a company, try to think outside the box, and be so good they can't ignore you.There's kind of two kind of trends that I found with how people stumble upon starting to their companyNumber one, you have the people who just know it from the beginning: I'm an entrepreneur. I have to build something.And then once I build the next one, I go to the next one, and it's just in my DNA.And then there's the other side, that people don't think about it. They're stuck into a problem that they never even thought to monetize or build as a solution. So, they just build a solution, because they're creatorsThe moral of the story is like, it doesn't matter. You don't have to be a born entrepreneur think that it's built into you, you just have to be able to look around for a problem to solve. If you feel you can solve it, take that courage, take that step, I think you have nothing to lose, you'd be surprised with yourself.During this interview, you will learn four things:That it doesn’t matter how you start and build your SaaS business. The power is in starting. Ideas are cheap. The value is in bringing it aliveWhy you should avoid fitting into the norm – build your business the way you want to build it. That your ability to have customers stick around for the long-term is more important than growing fast. That we tend to be proud in saying we’re doing ABCDEFG – but focus is king. It’s more important to showcase how you do 1 thing extremely well.For more information about the guest from this week:Akeel JabberWebsite HoriZen Capital

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to change the way that marketers create. My guest is R.J. Talyor, CEO and Founder of Pattern89.R.J. has been a B2B software entrepreneur for well over 15 years. He fulfilled various roles ranging from strategist, director Product Marketing and VP of Mobile Products at ExactTarget, became VP of Messaging Products at Salesforce, and served as the VP of Product Management at Geofeedia. He’s recognized as one of the Indianapolis business Journal’s 40 Under 40.In 2016, he founded Pattern89. With this company, he’s on a mission to inspire creativity – and to build something that will change marketing forever. Their strong belief is that AI will make brands, agencies, and marketers more creative, and more human in an increasingly automated world.This inspired me, and hence I invited R.J. to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in marketing – especially on the creative side. We discuss how marketing is becoming more and more metrics-driven, while we still make creative decisions based on gut-feel (often by the highest-paid person in the room). We also dig into what it takes to build a remarkable software business – creating software that’s extremely sticky – software that people want to use.Here are some of his quotes:Marketers spend a ton of time on audience development, on reach, on frequency. Everyone talks about journeys, but they don't talk about creative.What I saw was that there's a better way to create what images or videos or copy that you see, and machine learning provides marketers with tools to allow them to do that, like never before. So, the big problem is how do we get more efficient at the creative process, without asking marketers to act more like machines?What they want to do is understand if their idea is going to work or not. And so marketers are kind of trained themselves into machines to try to compute that when we should say: “Hey, no, no human marketer, go create something else. You're the creator, you're the idea person, you're the idea. Machine machines can come up with ideas, let the machines simulator validate what's gonna work, and you human, you do what humans can do best.”During this interview, you will learn four things:That very often stickiness of your applications increases not by building a better User Interface to perform a task, but by making it magically happenHow you can help your customers make a difference is by avoiding the ‘highest paid person in the room’ to feel inclined to make a decisionWhy your future success and momentum can be hidden in killing your darlings, i.e., get rid of those things you’re just hooked to.How Data-Coop across your customers can shift from a nice-to-have into your primary selling pointFor more information about the guest from this week:R.J. TalyorWebsite Pattern89

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to engage your support team and empower them to do their best work. My guest is Justin Winter, Co-founder and CEO of Boostopia.He has been an advisor to over a dozen companies and acted in a consulting capacity with over 150+ consumer brands and technology companies across areas of growth, retention, product, and operations. Justin studied for his Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing from Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. In 2010, he co-founded Diamond Candles, the fastest-growing and largest online home fragrance brand in the world. He led the company as the CEO for 5 years.In that process, he became frustrated with the solutions available to him to deliver customer support that his customers loved. So he decided to set out to assemble a team to lead to build what he wished he had during his tenure there. This became the spark that started Boostopia, of which Justin is the Co-founder and CEO. Boostopia is a technology company that helps B2C companies decrease the number of tickets they get, discover ways to efficiently manage support issues, and transform support into a new revenue-generating channel.This inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore why bad customer support still exists and why the current approach of focusing on the support agent is not enough to solve it. We also discuss the opportunities to turn the support department from a cost-centre into a profit-centre, and the opportunity to increase the wage of support team members by a mere 50% as a consequence of that.Here are some of his quotes:We fundamentally believe that the way to create better customer experiences isn't by getting the latest and greatest fancy ticketing system. It's really about engaging your support team that you have and empowering them to do their best work.Why is customer support, from our perspective as a consumer, so horrible? We all hate talking to customer support. We have lots of frustrating experiences. So, we fundamentally believe that the reason why bad customer support still exists. It's not because companies don't know that that's happening. It's because they don't have an underlying attribution model for understanding how those bad experiences lead to them making less money.During this interview, you will learn four things:How to spark momentum by overwhelming your users with opportunity, i.e., give them a clear picture of the value they are creating with your productHow to find balance in your investment between ‘selling what you got’ versus making ‘the next big thing.’ Why companies that bet on product-led growth are proportionally better rewarded than those that are sales-led.Why you’d drive more value for your customers by instead of helping them be more efficient, help them eliminate the underlying problem all together.For more information about the guest from this week:Justin WinterWebsite Boostopia

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help marketers to build the meaningful relationships with the right companies. My guest is Riaz Kanani, Founder and CEO of Radiate B2B.Riaz is a mix of marketer, technologist and entrepreneur who worked with cutting-edge technologies throughout his career, whether it be the nascent flash/Java video space in the early 2000s to combining email, mobile and social media marketing technologies in 2008. Throughout it all, he’s used data as the backbone behind these technologies to better understand how people behave and use these new approaches. In that journey, he founded 6 companies and worked for IBM, Lyris, Alchemy Worx and Profusion. He’s also a mentor at Techstars.Today, he’s helping to build a better way to do B2B Marketing that increases both average contract values and the speed of closing contracts.And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Riaz to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in marketing automation and why the answer is in choosing a different approach, not in more tools.We also discuss what it takes to succeed in B2B software, and what decisions and mindsets are fundamental to stand out.Here are some of his quotes:It became really clear when talking to those companies that we've become in the B2B or business marketing space, very reliant on content and events to drive lead acquisition, nurturing, and email marketing, obviously. Basically, we were all reliant on exactly the same things, and B2B marketing would become homogenous. And the only way to stand out was really to be doing better creative. And I think that's a marketer’s worst nightmare.I felt that there had to be a better way.The more I looked at it, the more I realized that if you were building a marketing automation company today, you wouldn't build a platform that looked anything like the marketing automation platforms that exist today.During this interview, you will learn four things:That there’s no nice handbook that tells you exactly what’s going to happen with your software business: so, to succeed it’s your duty to hire people that can think on their feetWhy your marketing will become exponentially better if you start thinking about the world as being a list of companies that you build relationships withHow defensible differentiation can be created by blending a strong product with an irresistible business model.That your decision how to position yourselves in a space can create a significant problem around your messagingFor more information about the guest from this week:Riaz KananiWebsite Radiate B2B

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to radically evolve the way people search and transact property. My guest is Bobby Bryant, Founder and CEO of Doss.Bobby has been in real estate for 20 years. He began his journey in the mortgage business. In 2008, he took one year off to relentlessly study and understand the collective real estate industry, what happened, and what's to come. That sparked the idea to found DOSS. DOSS is on a mission to develop the best technology to make homeownership in America more affordable.This inspired me, and hence I invited Bobby to be a guest on my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the Real Estate industry when it comes to finding and buying properties. We dig into the opportunity to create a win-win approach, i.e., a world where nobody has to lose, and how technology and data have a fundamental role in realizing this. Finally, we discuss what it takes to build a software business that people would miss if it was gone. Here are some of his quotes:Every industry in the country has become more automated and economical.If you think about the promise of technology, it was to do two things. The promise of technology was to save us time and money. So, in real estate, when you think of all of the technological advancements of today, yet the cost of transacting real estate hadn't changed.The biggest issue for a lot of people is the barrier of entry of costs to get into a home. Or a seller who has a million-dollar house and to give away $60,000 of their equity. How can we be in 2020 charging the same fee that we charged in the early 1900s?The real estate industry struggles with a win-win. Why does somebody have to lose in this equation?During this interview, you will learn four things:How a position of advantage can be created if we think about win-win, i.e., provide unique value to both parties at the table – not just one.Why instead of talking like a rocket scientist you should soften your message and talk like a truck driver Why the companies of the future are going to be the companies that figure out how to make people feel good, and feel good about themselves Why you have to be prepared to pay attention to continuous evolution. For more information about the guest from this week:Bobby BryanWebsite Doss

This podcast interview focuses on a discussion around the essence of the book ‘The Innovation Ultimatum – how 6 technologies reshape every business in the 2020s. My guest is Steve Brown, Author and Founder of Possibility & Purpose.Steve Brown is a futurist, author, entrepreneur, and advisor with over 30 years of experience in high tech. Prior to building his own consulting business, he was Intel’s Chief Evangelist and worked in Intel Labs as a futurist, where he imagined and built plans for a world 5, 10, and 15 years in the future.After leaving Intel in 2016, Steve built his own company, Possibility and Purpose LLC, which helps businesses to be more innovative, more resilient, and more profitable. In 2018, he co-founded The Provenance Chain Network, an open standards approach to bringing transparency to global commerce.In 2020, he published his latest book, 'The Innovation Ultimatum: How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the 2020s'This inspired me, and hence I invited Steve to my podcast. We explore why the gap between those that embrace the new technologies and those that don’t is going to dramatically widen. Why it’s about agency taking responsibility and deciding you’re going to participate in building the future that defines the winners. We also address what qualities leaders are required to develop to lead and be remarkable in doing so.Here are some of his quotes:There are two pieces to the innovation ultimatum, there's one that's sort of more obvious on the surface, which is the competitive imperative, which is kind of the stickThe gap between those that embrace technology, and those that don't, has always been there, but that gap is going to widen dramatically in the next decadeThe other side of the innovation ultimatum is the moral obligation for us as individuals and as companies to do the right thing and to create value for humans and to solve human problems.During this interview, you will learn four things:That you should ask yourself two questions: "What's the future we want to build?" and "What's the future we want to avoid?".That to be great a leader in the 2020s, you should be equipped to ask the right questions, become very clear-eyed, and understand the application of these technologiesWhy the smartest companies are thinking five or six steps ahead and then they work their way back to a starting point.That too much of the ‘innovation’ we put out is still about boosting productivity and efficiency, and that in doing so, we’re leaving so much on the table that we risk irrelevancy.For more information about the guest from this week:Steve BrownWebsite

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to empowers internet users and content creators with the tools to build a safer and more trustworthy internet. My guest is Sebastiaan van der Lans, Founder and CEO of WordProof and Chairman of Trusted Web FoundationSebastiaan van der Lans has a big heart for open source. In 2006, he co-founded Amsterdam’s first WordPress agency, 'Van Ons', which is a leading digital agency now, serving over 100M page views a year. Sebastiaan has a strong passion for improving the playing fields of publishing, SEO, and e-commerce.In 2019, Sebastiaan founded WordProof with which he’s on a mission to restoring trust on the internet.This inspired me, and hence I invited Sebastiaan to my podcast. We explore what’s underpinning the fact the internet is broken when it comes to trust and how this is undermining our progress. We also address how to get a movement going in a situation that’s characterized by multiple ‘chicken & egg’ dilemmas. Finally, we discuss the mindset and approach required to achieve results that have remarkable impact for everyone around the globe.Here are some of his quotes:Even though the Internet has brought us so many great things, it has a deep-rooted issue. And that's what it's trustworthiness.And therefore, all sorts of obnoxious human behaviour, like theft and manipulation and fraud thrive. Normally in society, we have systems in place to make sure that those obnoxious behaviors don't thrive. But on the internet, trust simply isn't part of the internet's DNA. And that goes back to society. So what we say is: “To save the world, we need to fix the internet, we need to make trust part of the internet's DNA.”That's what we aim for. And Wordproof is a Time Stamping tool to achieve the mission of the trusted web. In a few years from now, if you don't timestamp your information, you’ll be considered a fraud. What are you hiding from?During this interview, you will learn four things:That just because technology isn’t scalable or mature enough is no reason to not embrace it.How to solve a business model challenge where the audience that benefits most are not the one that will pay for it.Why it requires to declare war on a specific problem to create solutions that are remarkableWhy spending 1000 hours on a 1-minute pitch pays offFor more information about the guest from this week:Sebastiaan van der LansWebsite WordProof Website The Trusted Web

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables us to rediscover the places and the people that make the area we live in or visit unique. My guest is Tom Charman, Co-founder and CEO of NavaFor the last decade, he has founded, been involved in, and scaled high-growth consumer-facing products that aim to solve questions relating to understanding and predicting human behavior through data. He’s a fan of lean startup methodology and spends most of his day building products. Tom gave a TEDx on A.I. and quantum computing, advised corporates on data privacy/security, and UK and EU parliaments on data and innovation.He co-founded NAVA in 2017 around the vision to connect people together through food. Their mission to realize this through creating immersive city experiences across Europe by helping locals better understand what’s going on around them. UNWTO recognised NAVA as one of the world’s most disruptive tourism startups.This resonated with me, and hence I invited Tom to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the process of restaurants and venue reviews and how this is not only impacting us as consumers, but also many business owners – simply because their ‘larger peers’ have an unfair competitive advantage.We discuss how to solve both the B2C and the B2B challenge with smart technology, and how to do this in a way that fuels itself by designing for virality. Here are some of his quotes:When you look for, say, a restaurant or a place to visit on Google, the kind of the general feeling is: ‘if it's above four stars, it's worth going to.’ But actually today, most restaurants are about four stars. So how do you pick out a restaurant that's 4.3 versus a restaurant that's 4.4? And at the end of the day, that’s ignoring the kind of things that come with it like boosted posts and information to try and manipulate reviews.The general feeling here is that this is a system that's flawed and fundamentally broken. The whole independent market of local restaurants, local bars, independently owned places, it's such a disjointed and fragmented market, which makes it hellishly difficult to actually work.But if you get something like this working, what you're doing here is creating a global platform for independent venues to actually compete against the Starbucks, the McDonald's the all of the other big chains that are out there - giving them a level playing field.During this interview, you will learn four things:That too many business software companies say they are talking to customers, but miserably fail to do so.Why we should make it the standard rule to consume less data instead of more (without compromising quality)Why too many features can become your biggest problem and what to do about itHow rapid +50% growth isn’t always an indicator you got product market fitFor more information about the guest from this week:Tom CharmanWebsite