The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that gives SMBs a position of advantage by leveraging technology typically only available to the Enterprise. My guest is Matthew Schmidt, Founder and CEO of Peoplelogic.aiMatthew is and experienced entrepreneur and operator with a history of building and launching products and growing businesses. Early in his career, he led DZone’s media business unit, responsible for DZone.com, a popular website and publisher for the global software developer community. He was the architect behind its community platform, AnswerHub, and attracted a global audience of millions of technology professionals.Today, he’s the CEO of Peoplelogic.ai, a startup that’s on a mission to make growth scalable. Peoplelogic is an AI-augmented mission control for SMB teams. It monitors, alerts, and predicts outcomes around immediate risks and opportunities within a business so they can focus where it counts and get ahead of problems before it sinks them.This resonated with me, and hence I invited Matthew to my podcast. We explore the challenges SMB organizations have due to the lack of information and insight– and how easily they get off track as a consequence (especially when they grow). Many can’t anticipate the big waves that can take them out, let alone take advantage of opportunities before the competition does. We also dig into the key question of what’s required to build a remarkable software business and keep living up to that.Here are some of his quotes:What I set out to solve originally with Peoplelogic was really: How do we make better managers? How do we use technology and data to be able to augment our managers on their way to better understanding their people and to help them maintain growth and be able to not slip, and fall, or trip over their shoelaces as the company's growing.We come from selling enterprise software, but the businesses that we ran, were high growth startups. And to be successful, a lot of things have to happen correctly along the way. There are so many opportunities for failure. What we saw was that if you can stop even 20% of those from happening, or from having a big impact on your team, or getting you off track, you're going to be that much more successful.During this interview, you will learn four things:Why technology is only a piece of what makes your company successful.How to thrive if you’re launching your new product at the start of the world’s largest pandemic we can rememberHow to carve out your own blue ocean by democratizing technology typically only available to the enterpriseWhy you should avoid comparing your company to othersFor more information about the guest of this week:Matthew SchmidtPeoplelogic.ai

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to drive growth without having to rely on expensive ad campaigns. My guest is Adam Benzecrit, Co-founder at inflo.Ai.Adam has worked in a number of startups and high-growth companies for nearly a decade. In 2013, he co-founded inflo.Ai, a London-based technology company that’s on a mission to help overstretched in-house marketing teams, business owners and SMEs to find their voice and grow online.When they saw thousands of companies simply didn’t have the resources to create highly effective blog content and therefore had rely on expensive paid ad campaigns and SEO agency retainers, they had to step in and solve it.How? By helping their clients tell great stories with the power of artificial intelligence and making content creation and blogging simple, fast and affordable on at the same time.This inspired me, and hence I invited Adam to my podcast. We explore why producing great content is so tough and why so many businesses continue to underutilize their expertise to drive engagement. We also address what’s required to stand out in your market and become the go-to player. Last but not least, we dig into the things to do as leaders to create a software business that customers keep talking about.Here are some of his quotes:Our journey started with the creation in 2015, around a sports news app. When we got off the ground, we started to get thousands of users, and then ran into an accelerator, which introduced us to lots of different companies. And they introduced us to brands, a lot of bookmakers.What we were trying to do then, the start of our journey, was we were trying to influence bookmakers to advertise on our product.We learned and realize there was an opportunity much bigger than that. They were more interested in how we got content in our own app, and wanted to do that for themselves to drive digital engagement to their products and services. That was the big lightbulb moment for us is forget the B2C route.During this interview, you will learn four things:How to carve out your own category and find a playing field where you are can become the go-to player.Why it’s so important to reflect and dig deep on the business you are really in. Only that understanding makes saying ‘no’ easier and give you the resourcefulness to remain making a differenceWhat strategies to put in place to continue to have the cashflow runway to execute and deliver upon the mission.Why you should treat your client like a partner, and a partner like your client. For more information about the guest of this week:Adam Benzecritinflo.Ai

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help digital marketers prove and improve the impact they can make in content marketing and accelerate revenue on the back of it. My guest is Avishai Sharon, Co-Founder and CEO of TrendemonHe has over 15 years of experience in product design and management, UI/UX, web and mobile applications, entrepreneurship and startups. In 2005, he founded a digital marketing agency that helped B2B companies build and execute digital marketing strategies.Today, he’s CEO and Co-founder at Trendemon, a revenue acceleration SaaS platform that helps B2B companies close more deals from their content marketing efforts and assets. It does this by empowering marketers to prove and improve their content’s impact.This resonated with me, and hence I invited Avishai to my podcast. We explore the disconnect in what marketers do and the direct impact that has on business performance. Why it takes a different way of thinking to solve this challenge – as focusing on increasing traffic is not the answer. And last but not least, we discuss what it takes to build a software businesspeople just keep talking about.Here are some of his quotes:I was working at a marketing agency. A big challenge that I was running into those days was how do I prove to my customers, companies that were paying substantial amounts, that the work that we were doing, the effort that we were putting in, was actually impacting their bottom line.That disconnect between work that's being done and the inability or the challenge of proving it was what got me started with Trendemon.The main opportunity that we see here is that most marketers, especially in content, are storytellers. And I think that we're not seeing technology as a way to replace storytelling. Storytelling is a very human and delicate and sophisticated capability. We want to empower them with data that gives them the ability to validate their work with results, and help them show unequivocally how content, blog posts, and videos have been created, and help the company close more deals.During this interview, you will learn four things:That we often focus optimizing our software products too much on making doing the work easier, rather than to do that work with more impact.How being deliberate about how to stay as independent as possible through your product strategy choices will bring opportunities you might not expectThat to spur creativity and curiosity, you have to create probing challengesWhy you should plan for your inflection points – those momentum building events that you can leverage to get to the next stage.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give everyone of us a better understanding of what our customers really want. My guest is Frank Schneider, CEO at Speakeasy AI.Frank consulted and led teams providing various SaaS and AI solutions for contact centers and B2B. He’s a former officer and VP of Sales, Marketing and Customer Success at Creative Virtual USA. During his tenure, Creative Virtual USA grew revenue over 300% and became the leader in Fortune 500 enterprise virtual assistant deployments.Today, he’s the CEO at Speakeasy AI. He and his team are on a mission to make it easier for businesses to understand and respond to their customers’ needs in voice with the help of AI. This put them on the pioneers’ path to provide in-the-moment insights into understanding customers'​ intents, needs and outcomes.And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Frank to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in today's chatbot-driven economy – and how this leads to more automation, but not to better customer value and relationships. We also address the dilemmas customer have with a ‘rip and replace’ strategy vs one where they can evolve their investments. Last but not least, we discuss some critical ingredients to building a remarkable software business.Here are some of his quotes:In any organizational structure, it's servant leadership that allows for success to be possible when you can put the needs of others in front of yourself.The aha moment that we found is that customers, when they come and try to interact with a brand, they want information or help easily. They want it to be sort of done in a way that doesn't take much effort for them. And they want it done quickly and whenever they want it. And those are the issues that have gone on in servicing customers, for long before AI was in place.We want to start with listening to your customers. And the piece of technology that we have a patent pending for is called speech to intent. In order to understand a customer and also leverage your other investments, we need intelligence on the line at the moment you say hello.As soon as you start speaking to us, we're not listening to just transcribe and send somewhere. We're listening to start to derive what that intent is from the beginning, and then send the intent to a place to fulfil the need.During this interview, you will learn four things:Why the essence of turning customers into fans is not so much in listening to what they say they need, but understanding intent, i.e., what they really wantHow embracing and leveraging ‘what’s there’ – be the orchestrator - can accelerate your growth and stickiness, i.e., enabling your customer to leap without having to reinvent everythingHow defensible differentiation can be created by not betting on a technology difference, but on a methodology difference.That the trick to getting customers to actually use your solution and increase the ‘love curve’ is in earning their trust, and creating wins

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to empower organizations to deliver remarkable impact by creating game-changing teams and cultures. My guest is Nathan Ott, Co-founder and Chief Polisher at The GC IndexNathan has over 20 years of experience working with business leaders to get the best from their talent. He is the co-author of two studies: The DNA Of A Game Changer and The DNA Of A Game-Changing Team, and published ‘Coaching Me, Coaching You’.Today, he is the vision and driving force behind The GC Index. He has a fundamental belief that everyone can make an impact in their world and has created a global community of GC Partners and GCologists.They are working globally with a diverse range of commercial and non-profit organisations, and help their clients understand how their employees can make an impact and helps leaders create game-changing teams and cultures.The GC Index framework is disrupting the way people manage talent. It’s not only being used to help individuals be the very best they can be, but it is liberating organisations to embed their diversity and innovation initiatives to impact tangible business outcomes. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Nathan to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of managing talent. Too often, we look for someone’s personality and academic background, rather than connecting people to business outcomes, and in particular, what type of outcomes people can have maximum impact on. We also dive into ways we can fix this challenge and deliver remarkable impact by blending people and technology in the right way.Here are some of his quotes:A lot of organizations would come to us and say: “We need some people to make a change.” We would sit down with them and use their traditional frameworks for assessing these people. And then they would say to us, these senior leaders: “Just get me some people that ‘get it’.”That started me thinking of what is this thing that everyone can recognize, but can't explain?The things that the business leaders were describing to us was something different. They wanted people that were different to what they were getting. And so, we termed those individuals game changers.The GC index got formed as a language and a framework for impact. So it’s a piece of software that aligns people's impacts to business outcomes and roles. And that's when the magic really started to happen.During this interview, you will learn three things:That too often we focus our software solutions on optimizing the impact of an individual doing a specific task, without looking at the exponential leverage they can create in a setting with the right people around them.Why it’s key to make the distinction between innovation and invention – as a software business you need to find the right balance in order to stay relevant in your category.Why alignment and collaboration are key to create breakthroughs – and how to orchestrate that by addressing the tensions in the boundariesHow one solution can be marketed through multiple business models concurrentlyFor more information about the guest of this week:Nathan OttThe Game Changing Index

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has power to make field engineers far more productive, and give the companies they work for new ways to retain and grow their competitive edge. My guest is Sam Waicberg, Co-founder and CEO CareAr.Sam Waicberg is an entrepreneurial business leader passionate about building brands that scale. His expertise: driving and inspiring high-performing teams, game-changing solutions, positioning strategies, innovative partnerships, ecosystems, and communities that create network effects and growth.Throughout his career, he’s held senior roles in sales at Oracle, Blue Martini, Aspect Software, Ascendent Systems, Envox, Fluency Voice Technology, Genband, and Vidyo.He’s recognized for strategic out-of-the-box approaches for developing and executing corporate and go-to-market plans, thought leadership, and creating long-term meaningful relationships.In December 2018, he co-founded CareAR, an Augmented Reality platform for smart services. Their mission: Making expertise accessible anywhere and instantly.This triggered me, and hence I invited Sam to my podcast. We explore the challenges faced in the field services market and how technology can help transform productivity, quality of work, and overall profitability. Beyond that, we dig into a much larger problem that the services industry is facing as a whole: the rapidly decreasing workforce, and what challenges that gives entrepreneurs to retain tribal knowledge and their competitive edge.Here are some of his quotes:Innovation is something that constantly drives us. We think about the art of what's possible all the time. And we don't think too much about limitations and barriers.We saw a gap in the market, and the other is something that evolvedThe simplest issue was applying what we see in telehealth when we see a long-distance learning to field service, getting a remote expert to assist the field tech on site to do a visual consult to solve the problem while they're out there.The big problem permeated as we started getting in there and talking to more C-level people.70% of their organization's most valuable assets, employees, are leaving over the next 5 to 10 years. All the knowledge goes out the door with that.So, the C-levels really are thinking, this is what keeps them up at night, about ‘What can I do to retain this tribal knowledge? What can I do to transfer this knowledge to other new individuals coming into the organizations in a way where I can accelerate the pace of that and retain my competitive edge?’During this interview, you will learn four things:How you can drive transformative value by bridging the gap between consumer applications and the enterprise workflowThat instead of constantly worrying about the catching up you have to do, focus your roadmap on the question: “How do you want to be the favourite?”That the opportunity to create unique value is often hidden in developing an eye for rapidly developing issues that can become a catalyst for transformationHow to take friction for adoption out by not only focusing on the user experience, but also on the business model

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to create expert networks that promote thought leadership, increase revenue, and build engagement and trust. My guest is Charles Thiede, Co-founder and CEO of Zapnito.Charles was born in the USA, studied at San Francisco State University and achieved a Bachelor of Arts degree in Design and Industry. His previous roles have included the Interim Chief Product Officer and Digital Systems Director at Nature Publishing Group, Chief Technology Officer and Group Operations Director at Informa and Product Manager at Blue Shield of California. He has also acted as a Mentor for Women Who Tech.Today, he is the CEO and Co-Founder of London-based, Zapnito, a Software as a Service (SaaS) knowledge-sharing and expert community platform. Zapnito helps event organizers, expert networks, membership and subscription businesses to deliver expertise on‐demand and to build sustainable communities.And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Charles to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge that the noise on the internet is just getting louder and louder. It’s harder to have a voice. It’s harder to create and share collective knowledge and intelligence. And it’s harder to create trusted places. We discuss why it’s so key to bring that original premise of the internet back in order to solve the new challenges ahead of us, deliver remarkable value, and create sustainable advantage on the back of that.Here are some of his quotes:I was very much impacted by a talk, I heard from a guy named Gerd Leonhard who's futurist. And I was seeing social media creating a lot of noise out there. This is back in 2010/2011. And it was bothering me. The noise was getting heavier and heavier.And so, one of the things that was bothering me in that model is this idea of trusted collective intelligence being lost in that noise. And actually, at that time, I was working for a trusted business information company. And they were really struggling with this new paradigm. And I thought, well, in the heart of what they're doing is about trust collective intelligence, but the way they're delivering it is totally old school and archaic.So, the big idea was to help return the internet back to its original premise, which was around collective intelligence from experts sharing with each other.During this interview, you will learn four things:How the power of communities can help to push boundaries and avoid the risk of so-called echo chambersWhy trust, quality and diversity are essential ingredients for success in creating expert communities that have staying powerHow switching your approach from being a vitamin to being a painkiller can become the tipping point for your software businessHow having a sense of humour and fun helps you get through tough times in a much easier way

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform our society from being very transactional into very empathetic. My guest is Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral SignalsRana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, and investor. He founded TiZE, a cloud software for specialty chemicals, in 2014. He was recruited to be a part of the core turnaround team for Cricut Inc. where he built a first-of-its-kind product for the DIY community and helped turn bankruptcy to profitability within a span of 2 years. Rana also held leadership positions at Logitech S.A. and Kronos Inc., where he was responsible for the development of best-in-class products generating billions in revenue and contributed towards several award-winning engineering innovations.He has been awarded the ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ by CIO Magazine and the ‘US China Pioneer’ Award by IEIE. He has been listed among 8 A.I. Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2019 by INC Magazine and Top 10 Entrepreneurs to follow in 2017 by Huffington Post.Today, he is the CEO of Behavioral Signals, an enterprise software company that delivers a robust and fast evolving emotion AI engine that introduces emotional intelligence into speech recognition technology.And this triggered me, and hence I invited him to my podcast. We explore the challenge with today’s voice technology and what has kept it from reaching its true potential. We discuss a variety of use cases that will create transformative experiences and impact when some of the limitations are taken away. Not only for us individuals, but also the level of business and society at large.Here are some of his quotes:Behavioral Signals was really driven from this sort of really intrinsic desire to improve voice communications and take it to the next level, whether it's communication happening between two humans or whether it's communication happening between a machine or a human.This is the best utopian experience that matches our human interests. And that's led to the whole voice-first design movement.The whole promise was that we are going to take this to the next level, which means we're going to talk to our devices and devices are going to communicate back to us, as humans do. We could use those experiences to replace some of those elements in our livelihoods, and use those as companions. But that hasn't happened.That is why we are actually very rude to voice assistance in general, because we feel that they're beneath us, not because it's a machine, we know it's a machine, of course, it's not a human. But we also feel that, hey, it doesn't have the basic capability to understand how I feel. So, our mission is to really take that interaction to the next level.During this interview, you will learn four things:That solving critical problems is often not about following the right process, but connecting people that are on the same wavelengthWhy the secret behind growing momentum behind the adaption of your application is in making it human and empatheticHow you can exponential grow the impact your solution can create for your customers by capturing intent, rather than the transactionHow imagination and your ability to connect the dots into a vision are essential skills to create a remarkable software business

This podcast interview focuses on the technology and processes that bring people together to deliver transformative impact. My guest is Greg Silverman, CEO of Concentric Market.Since 2010, he has been the CEO of Concentric, a enterprise decision support platform that improves your strategic planning process and your forecasting capabilities. Previously, he was Global Managing Director, Analytics and Valuation, for Interbrand, where he designed the current version of their Brand Valuation methodology and led their global consulting practice. He has also worked in manufacturing, franchising, and retail.Greg received his BBA in Marketing and Retail from the University of Georgia and his MBA in Management from the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. He is the author of the book, Turning Complexity into Strategic Advantage and published the Interbrand Top 100 Brands Report.Being an avid reader of the Interbrand brand report, this triggered me – and hence I invited Greg to my Podcast. We explore how brands deliver revenue and value, and how a lot of intangible and hard-to-observe components influence how they remain relevant in a market. We dig into the key role people play in all of this, and what role technology should play beyond just automation.Here are some of his quotes:On what makes them remarkable: Being a human in this day and age is hard. We have to just see people for their strengths and the fact that none of us are complete enough. And it's been the mission of the company actually to augment people's intelligence to help them be better people, enrich them.Regarding the impact they have: There's still domain expertise. And that matters. You need inspiration. You need creativity. You need to understand the zeitgeist, and having quantifiable tools that help you understand the forward impact of that, has really been our mission.About their offering, Greg says: ‘Can I forecast the future better than 50%?’ For our forecasts on a weekly basis, the standard we're held to is 95% accuracy. And that doesn't matter if that's weeks in advance, months in advance, and sometimes years in advance -- that has to be the standard because the only way you'll believe a predictive or prescriptive analytics is if it forecasts properly.During this interview, you will learn four things:That you know your software platform is ready to scale when people come to you saying, ‘It’s time to fire us because the software is doing everything’.Why when your software is making accurate predictions, you are only halfway in terms of the value you can deliver to your customers.That integrity isn't not stealing from your neighbour. It's having a vision and sticking to it when the world doesn't want you to.That everyone in your company at some point will have to face the fear of failure, but more importantly, face the fear of success.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take our ability to effectively communicate to the next level. My guest is Scott Sandland, Co-founder and CEO of Cyrano AIScott is among the most well-known hypnotherapists on earth and an accomplished innovator and entrepreneur. He has been actively involved in the development and customization of multiple software platforms focused on continued education and professional networking for over a decade.Scott has 20 years of experience helping clients by using strategic questions and pattern recognition to understand and influence subconscious decision-making processes. Cyrano is built on the idea that these soft skills are inherently teachable, and that doing so will improve human:computer interaction at scale. Applying that knowledge and experience into a neural network to help more people is his driving passion.This inspired me, and hence I invited Scott to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in way we use technology to communicate – and how that is inhibiting us to get global problems (such as teen suicide) under control or effectively transmit our ideas. We also dig into the art of preparing the market to adopt transformative technology and what the secrets to create a software business people keep talking about.Here are some of his quotes:One of the main driving points in the thesis of our company is, most AI tech is about generating correct responses, not a meaningful communication.A long-standing tenet of mine is that the second most valuable thing in the known universe is effective communication. The first is oceans made out of water. We spent a lot of time looking for that. But the second most valuable thing is effectively communicating our ideas.The most human thing there is talking well, and the fact that, for maybe the second time in human history, our defining technology, since the printing press, this era is defined by the ability to transmit ideas better than ever before.During this interview, you will learn four things:Too often we focus the software we build on improving rather than prevention. What if we do the opposite?How to overcome the hurdle of getting people to adopt solutions that deliver results that by far exceed their wildest expectationsHow to build brand trust and create desire in a market where you are unknown and have no credibilityHow creating an emotional, visceral vision for the future will help you overcome the difficult periods you’ll face on your company’s journey