The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that is transforming the way we rent residential property by shifting the focus to the needs of the tenant, not the agent. My guest is Mayank Mathur, CEO of Avasa.aiMayank Mathur is a technology entrepreneur with over 15 years experience in the industry. He co-founded a capital markets technology startup in India, developing trading platforms and blockchain solutions for brokers, banks, exchanges, and other financial institutions based globally. Mayank is an ex-Technology banker, having spent about 9 years advising global technology companies on M&A, and equity / debt fund raising.His current PropTech venture in London (UK) is focused on simplifying the home search experience for residential tenants. The way he’s doing this inspired me, hence I invited him to be a guest on my podcast: We explore how and why the process of renting real estate has effectively not changed in the last 100 years – and what enormous waste, stress and financial drain this leads to for everyone in the process – and even beyond. We discuss how Mayank is creating a new category and what his view on what it takes to become a remarkable software business.Here are some of his quotes:The big idea is that tenants, residential tenants today are wasting a lot of time and energy on home search.We want to reduce that time to less than 10 hours, make sure that all of these tenants are super relaxed during that process after they are starting a new chapter in their life. It has to come in a very relaxed manner rather than them being hassled about it or them being totally stressed out about it.Historically, there has been no player in the market that looks after the interests of the residential tenantsWe choose a business model which is centered around: How do we ensure we earn some money working with the tenants, but we don't want to completely or at all displace the other side of the equation because there is an important role that estate agents play.The estate agents actually absolutely love us. They basically like us because a we bring what's called in the industry as hot leads.During this interview, you will learn four things:How you can identify underserved markets and create a new category by analysing existing markets and approach the problem from the ‘other end’How to stick to your guns and play the infinite game in the early stage of your business when short-term ‘low-hanging fruit’ type opportunities are luring.How to create a well-functioning funnel by giving partners what you have in abundance – creating win-win situations.That innovating the business model is probably even more important than innovating the product.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to solve the demand/supply gap in the accounting industry. My guest is Enrico Palmerino, CEO of Botkeeper.Enrico’s background has been in automation, decision trees, and accounting with a triple major from Babson College in Quantitative Methods, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management. While in college, he co-founded ThinkLite, which automated lighting analysis, design, and manufacturing. ThinkLite grew from dorm room to 46 on Inc.'s 500 List. A a result of that, Enrico was ranked 2nd among America's Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 by Bloomberg Businessweek. After successfully exiting ThinkLite, he invested in a small accounting firm, joining as the company's Managing Director, and helped grow it from 7 to 40 people in 3 years. Beyond this, he advises, consults and invests in several startups.Botkeeper caught my eye with its claim to create the future of bookkeeping, and this triggered me to invite Enrico to my podcast. We explore what’s inhibiting the accounting industry from transforming, and why the combo of blending tech and people in the right way is the secret to a better future. We also discuss Enrico’s vision to what it takes to build a remarkable software business.Here are some of his quotes:There are two big problems that we're trying to solve in the accounting space:The one being, just there's a major shortage of people to do the work.The huge supply demand gap and by the numbers, at least in the US, you got exponentially more businesses forming year over year.And then if that wasn't bad enough, the other challenge you have is that in many industries there's been this over-amplification of all these little micro niche apps for the accounting sector. All those apps don't talk to each other, which means more siloed data sets that require more manual entry, and an unpleasant experience.So the big problem we're trying to solve is two things. First, how do we automate as much of the basic pre-accounting or compliance accounting and bookkeeping work? And then how do we consolidate the app stack [to] free up the limited supply of accountants that are out there, to do more critical thinking, consulting, advisory, and complex accounting.During this interview, you will learn three things:How, by looking at the big picture “app-stack” of our ideal customers, we can find major opportunities for remarkable productivity improvementsThat to solve the shrinking workforce problem we see in many industries we need to approach the problem from a different angle to really solve it.How to orchestrate 3x growth in a market of “Late Adopters” by creating a pull effect.

This podcast interview focuses on how to architect a tech company that delivers sustainable, transformative impact to its customers, society and the business at large. My guest is Hugo Spowers, Chief Engineer and founder of Riversimple.Hugo is an Oxford University-trained engineer and entrepreneur. His first business was in motorsport, designing and building racing cars and restoring historic racing cars. He left motorsport for environmental reasons and set up OScar Automotive in 2001 (which became Riversimple in 2007) on the basis that a step change in automotive technology is both essential and possible.Hugo is responsible for all technical aspects of the cars and for the architecture of the business itself. He is considered a thought leader on the Circular Economy. At the Real Innovation Awards in October 2019, hosted by the London Business School, Hugo was awarded the George Bernard Shaw Unreasonable Person Award “for someone who has shown enormous tenacity and stubbornness in pursuing an idea despite the difficulties encountered along the way”.This inspired me, and hence I invited Hugo to my podcast. We explore what it takes to drive remarkable transformation in a market through technology and how it is possible to design a business that delivers environmental, social, as well as financial returns without it being in conflict.Here are some of his quotes:“I'm interested in the big picture because that's where I think the real breakthroughs lie.I set the company up to really make a step change in the environmental impact of personal transport. I assumed that the future for environmentally sustainable cars was better batteries, and that requires big budgets, big labs, basic science, not my sort of field at all. And after about six months, I found out about hydrogen fuel cells. And I realized that the breakthrough is hydrogen fuel cells was not through making better fuel cells. The breakthrough is in building a different sort of car.The car is designed very much for the business model. We will never sell. We had probably the only car company in the world that hopes never to sell a car.”During this interview, you will learn three things:That the only advantage you have as a startup is a clean sheet of paper. So make the most of that clean sheet of paper.Why remarkable companies are born by imagining a point far enough in the future, and back-cast their strategy from that point, rather than forecast their strategy from where you are at the moment.That changing one thing at a time is a catastrophic strategy. Changing everything at once reduces the risks and reduces the barriers.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to unlock the hidden value inside unstructured data and, with that, grow the value we can deliver. My guest is Adam Carte, CEO of LuminosoAdam previously served in a number of C-level positions: As the CEO of Cadre Proppants, a mining company, he doubled revenues. As the COO of Niotan, Inc., a chemical manufacturer. And as the CFO of The Trigen Companies, an energy company, where he led the turnaround and doubled profits, and doubled its equity value in less than three years.He has also been an Operating Partner to Denham Capital Management, and a founding member and Partner of Fairlead Advisors. At Fairlead, Adam has led negotiations for acquisitions, divestitures, equity and debt financings, strategic partnerships, licensing agreements, and company restructurings for over 20 different companies across a broad range of industries.Today, Adam is the CEO of Luminoso, where he leads the company’s efforts in building products that turn conversational text data into business-critical insights.This triggered me and led me to invite Adam to be a guest on my podcast. We explore the opportunities that arise when you look at the abundance of unstructured data we have at our disposal, but hardly get value from. We dig into the inhibitors to unlock that value and how, by democratizing it, this allows companies of any size to explore value scenarios previously unattainable. Here are some of his quotes:The challenge that we faced early on was: Unstructured text is everywhere. Unstructured text is in everything that humans do.Usually, it’s survey data or customer tickets, and they [businesses] need some way to analyze it, and they don't have it.The traditional way to solve that problem would be to go find a sophisticated data science team, build a supervised model, which takes a number of months. And then you can start to get insights from that data. But most people don't have that sort of time.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why it’s key to start paying attention the fact the real gold in your business software solution is the data, not the process or the transactions you manageThat just because getting answers from data is complex doesn’t mean it needs to be the job of data scientists. What if you’d democratized that thought and start addressing a much larger audience?How to stand out in a dense market which is loaded with hype – How do you cut through the noise and resonate?

This podcast interview focuses on the art of product innovation, and my guest is Dr. Teresa Jurgens Kowal, author of The Innovation Anwer Book and president of Global NP Solutions.Teresa is a strategic innovation provider. She is an accomplished visionary and results-oriented professional with extensive industry experience from creative research to effective portfolio management through streamlined new product development processes.Prior to founding Global NP Solutions, Dr. Jurgens-Kowal acquired over 12 years of experience in leadership and management positions with ExxonMobil Chemical Company and a total of 16 years as a practicing Chemical Engineer. She has extensive experience leading successful teams, managing the product development life cycle, and defining the portfolio strategy.Our joint passion for innovation and new product development led me to invite Teresa to my podcast. We explore the misconceptions about innovation, why many organizations are challenged to deliver innovation worth making a remark about, and what to do to remove the roadblocks.Here are some of her quotes:The word innovation is largely overused. And my personal definition of innovation is bringing something new to customers that deliver value to them. And that might be new technology. It might be an old technology introduced to a new market, or it might be a different combination of things.All of that starts with having a strategy. And there are several levels to strategy. Most organizations, companies, firms have a corporate strategy, which is tied around growth goals, geographical expansion, those kind of things.60 to 70% of CEOs put innovation as a top five priority. On the flip side, 60 to 70% of CEOs do not think that their organizations are innovativeDuring this interview, you will learn three things:That innovation is not defined by what you think, but by what your customers experienceWhy our obsession with our direct competition is causing the biggest conflict in the potential success of innovation.How one can avoid being disrupted by paying close attention to what’s going on in tangential industries as much as your own industry.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take our ability to make critical decisions to a completely new level. My guest is Graham Mills, Co-founder and Managing Director of techspert.io.Graham is a scientist by training. He completed his PhD in pancreatic cancer chemoresistance at the University of Cambridge, having further worked scientifically in R&D at Genentech and Avidity Biosciences. His commercial experience comes from roles in venture capital at both Abingworth and Johnson & Johnson’s corporate venture fund, all of which preceded his most entrepreneurial endeavours, both as co-founder of smoking cessation startup Abdicare, followed by Biotechspert, which has evolved today into techspert.io.techspert.io was born out of the frustration with the challenges in connecting to the right experts at the right time. Current solutions on the market have evolved based on decades-old principles, closed networks and manual subjective matching - which make it error-prone, biased, slow and highly costly. techspert.io was founded to solve this – and their approach inspired me, hence I invited Graham to my podcast. We explore what why our ability to make better more informed decisions on the topics that really matter needs a complete overhaul, and how this can spark competitive advantage. We also dig deeper into the question: "What’s the secret to creating a remarkable software business?"Here are some of his quotes:“We were setup about three years ago, really recognizing that, first of all knowledge, in many ways is how companies stay competitive and make some of the most important decisions around the world today, really access to high-quality knowledge on demand.Yet, while we realized a huge importance of this knowledge exchange and access, the way through which companies were identifying and accessing it felt like it was designed in the 90s and remained there.The way people currently go about solving these issues is one, they ask someone in their company, and if not, then they either pay a lot to a consultancy to go away and do an eight week project, or they just Google it. The challenges when you're Googling, the information you look at it's probably because someone is paid to be the top of Google SEO and that's not necessarily the right insight for your type of product and your type of company.During this interview, you will learn three things:How one way to grow value and defensible differentiation is to focus on quality and objectivity over volume and bias.Why focusing on playing the infinite game is going to bring you further than trying to win the short-term game.That growing your empathy skill is key to deliver remarkable value – not only understanding the ‘pain point’, but also deeply understand how your customer feels, what they care about, and what powers they have to deal with.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way executive assistants can support their executives through courageous help and ambitious growth like never before. My guest is Paige McPheely, Co-founder and CEO of Base.In 2013, she co-founded 33Vincent, an executive assistant service that matches busy executives with experienced and top-quality EAs. As the company grew, she got frustrated that there were no tools built for the unique workflow of EAs. That’s where she started to imagine how much more impactful a talented EA could be with the right setup. This led her to found Base in 2018, with the goal of solving this problem for EAs everywhere.This inspired me, and hence I invited Paige to my podcast. We explore the challenge executives and their assistants face to optimally work together: inadequate technology, manual processes, communication inefficiencies, competing priorities, and so on. Here are some of her quotes:We were seeing more and more frequently that entrepreneurs and people even in large businesses didn't necessarily want someone sitting outside of their office. They just needed some fractional, very focused support.We began to run into a series of roadblocks for a number of different reasons. But I'd trace it all back to the fact that there's no standard, either definition, or process on how to become an executive assistant, and how to work with an executive assistant.We think of assistance as this luxury. That you can only work with an assistant once you've achieved a certain level in your career. So, our big idea behind that is to completely debunk that. That if you are a high performer of any capacity, you have to have at least some access to an assistant..We actually believe it helps us to go faster. It's increasing our velocity, and it's maximizing our impact.During this interview, you will learn three things:How you can create your own category and transform decades-old approaches by taking a 30000 ft view and asking some critical (but simple) questionsThat you have an opportunity to create your own ground swell, by leveraging abundanceWhy the way you make a difference is not a matter of working harder, but by understanding your superpowers and using them smarter

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to achieve 9+ satisfaction rating with any of your customers. My guest is Roland Hallebeek, CEO of Scotty Technologies.Roland has been in communication all his life. He was the vice president of Telecom and Media at Capgemini (2001-2011), headed up various data driven start-up initiatives between 2013 and 2016, led European AI Customer Engagement Management at IPsoft (2017), and ran the Global Digital & Cognitive AI centre at EPAM Systems (2018).In 2018, he founded both Cognitive Affairs and Scotty Technologies, two companies centered around the same mission to take Customer Contact Automation to the next level by making it simpler, smoother, more scalable, highly predictable from a cost perspective, and most of all – more human.This triggered me, hence I invited Roland to be a guest on my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of Digital Transformation, why many companies focus on solving the wrong problem, and what could be an alternative way to approach it in order to get far better results for both the customer as well as the business. We also explore Roland’s approach to building a remarkable software business.Here are some of his quotes:“People are talking about digital transformation, customer journeys, customer experiences. All big words, big projects, and initiatives, but very often not very clearly defined in so what does it do for your customers or how do your customers behave?We saw many initiatives where people were focusing on chatbots, so automating chats.What we also saw is that a lot of the voice so people calling was being outsourced to low-cost countries or to overflow parties. So basically, moving away from your core processes in your company.But if you look at the numbers in Western Europe, you see that less than 5% of all customer contacts is actually chat, and voice is actually way over 50%.So, way over 50%, you outsource, you give away to other parties to handle it for you, and all those efforts on chats are basically solving less than 5% of the complexity and volume….”During this interview, you will learn three things:Why it’s critical to take a big picture view and challenge yourself whether the problem you solve with your software business is the most valuable problem, and not just an interesting problem.Why very often you get exponentially better results if you aim for a symbiosis of humans and 60-80% automation, rather than plain 100% automation.That remarkable things happen when you start off with a clear vision, hire a team of linchpins – people that can deliver 10x – and then organize around a framework focused on value and defensible differentiation.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way we can mobilize and leverage the power of advocates, and my guest is Mark Organ, Founder and Executive Chairman at Influitive.Mark is an entrepreneurial go-to-market specialist; a CEO with a focus on sales, marketing and business development. His greatest professional passions include creating new billion-dollar categories in technology and developing new leaders. Today, he’s helping CEOs achieve their full potential in their businesses and their lives.Mark founded 6 companies, amongst which Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), raised more than 15 rounds of financing, helped a lot of people realize their dreams, and got specialized in creating cultures that are a competitive advantage. He’s also the author of the book 'The Messenger is the Message'.In September 2010, he founded Influitive based on the idea that the most successful sales and marketing comes from advocates. That inspired me, and hence I invited Mark to my podcast. We explore the challenge many software businesses have in getting customers to reference them, how that’s driving everyone crazy, and what needs to change approach-wise, to solve that. We also dig deep into Mark’s experience in creating new categories that deliver remarkable impact.Here are some of his quotes:“What I realized, working at Eloqua, was how important it was to have your customers doing more of the work for you, more of the sales and marketing work especially.When you have multiple referrals and references and case studies and all these things, the sales cycle would go down by like +90%. We'd have these deals closing in four days, instead of the usual four months, because there's a ton of advocacy over it.Sales cycle is critical. Where most of the cash flow is tied up in a software company is in ‘people who are not able to make a decision.’ And the best way to get people to make a decision is to surround them with great relevant people who are all saying how great a company is, how great the product is, and how great the people are.”During this interview, you will learn three things:How the best innovation is created if you embrace curiosity and dare to bring in ideas and people from totally different domainsWhy you should fall in love with your target market, instead of your product, in order to create an impact that turns customers into advocates.That focusing your time on turning your advocates into superheroes is the secret that will ultimately turn you into a superhero.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that transforms the way businesses can leverage messaging to make communication with customers more meaningful. My guest is Rebecca Clyde, Co-founder and CEO of Botco.aiRebecca is an entrepreneur pioneering AI-driven chatbot technology. She’s recognized as "35 Entrepreneurs 35 and Younger"​ by the Arizona Republic and named Most Admired Leader by the Phoenix Business Journal in 2018.Most of her career, she’s been in marketing, where she drove business growth through creative and innovative communication strategies. Her skills lie in recognizing market trends, multi-cultural nuances and uncovering customer needs. This sparked the idea to co-found Botco.ai. Botco.ai is founded on the idea that brands are leaving money on the table through their inability to avoid significant time delays in answering questions from prospective customers. As businesses, we haven’t figured out how to make ourselves accessible through messaging in a way that’s meaningful and that can scale.This triggered me, and hence I invited Rebecca to my podcast. We discuss the effects of the growing mismatch in what customers have come to expect, and what businesses are able to provide when it comes to the way we communicate. We also discuss the journey Rebecca went through from idea to driving remarkable results – and the lessons she learned along the way.Here are some of her quotes:We've moved into this on-demand economy. Everything has become instant, and 24/7. Unfortunately, businesses have struggled to really keep up with that on-demand experience that customers expect today.If you look at the buyer journey […] you may have questions along the way as you're trying to ask questions. And today, it's very slow to get those answers, you're going to be playing phone tag, you're going to be emailing back and forth to get those answers and probably feeling very frustrated by the time you get all the information you need to make a decision. This is no longer acceptable for customers.73% of customers require, and this is for business and consumer buyers, instant engagement in order to make a buying decision about your company. And if you can't instantly answer them, they will go to whoever else has the fastest answer.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why true impact is created if, with your solution, you can redefine the tech/human symbiosis, i.e., the different roles humans can play in the process to create value.What benefits you’ll get if you thoroughly test the viability of your idea before writing a line of code.The momentum that sparks once you make bets on being highly specialized and focus on the ‘non-obvious’ (underserved) markets.