The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on the technology advancements of the last decade and in particular how enterprise software vendors can capture a bigger opportunity. My guest is Vinnie MirchandaniVinnie is the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Vinnie also founded IQ4hire, a project marketplace, and Jetstream Group, a sourcing advisory firm.Earlier in his career, he had various technology consulting roles at PwC (now IBM) in the US, Europe and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner.He wrote various books about the evolution and future of the enterprise software, amongst which Silicon Collar, The New Polymath, The New Technology Elite and SAP Nation 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Other than he’s an inspiring blogger – and exactly that triggered me to invite him again to my podcast.We explore his blog ‘A Decade-end review: Enterprise Applications have NOT eaten the world’ and dig deeper into the question: "What can we learn from the past decade, and how should we use that knowledge to capitalize on it in the next decade?"Here are some of his quotes:It's kind of fascinating to look at the 10 years how much optimism there was around SaaS, in the beginning of the decade, how SaaS has done and where things have not improved.If you go back to Marc Andreessen, he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal earlier in the decade where he said, we have enough technology we have enough you know, we have enough where software can transform industries, software. He basically said software is going to eat the world.Over and over again, what I saw was, many new markets emerged or grew or transformed. But the software vendors either completely missed it, or they were at the edge of it and didn't really do much.To get into other categories you have to keep evolving. You can't just expect your licenses and subscriptions to keep helping you grow.If you define a market too narrowly, then you start looking at your competition very narrowly. And you miss the big markets around it.During this interview, you will learn four things:Revisit the concept of Addressable markets – is it really what you think it is, or is it actually holding you back from thinking bigger?Don’t only hire technology visionaries – start hiring functional visionaries as well. It’s the tension between the two that will help you break new groundsThe biggest opportunities in the next few years will be in verticals - operational areas - and in geographic expansion. After 20 years of cloud applications, it is amazing how many industries and countries have so little choiceStop looking at just your immediate competition. The biggest risks, but also the biggest growth, come out from left field.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help Not for Profits raise more donations and achieve their cause faster. My guest is David Semerad, CEO of Kindest.David is a driven entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience in the software development field. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in information technology from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. He also studied at Technische Universitat Munchen in Germany and Universidad de Málaga in Spain and is a member of the Forbes Agency Council as well as the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC).In 2004, he co-founded STRV, a one-stop mobile app and web development shop working with top-tier startups and brands.In addition to STRV has spun off several companies. The Game, acquired by Spark Networks in 2014, followed by Surge, the world’s 3rd largest gay social network (3M+ users) and one of the world’s fastest food delivery startups Ordr.David’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired and TechCrunch.What triggered me to invite David to my podcast was his most recent startup Kindest. Kindest and here is why: Just as nonprofits rely on the generosity of their donors, Kindest's business model relies on optional tips. It’s what allows Kindest to remain completely free for all nonprofits that need them.In our podcast interview, we explore the underserved market for small and medium-sized Not for Profits and how the basic needs of donors – transparency - are even today still not met. We also discuss Kindest business model, and how exactly that business model gives them the ultimate incentive to do exactly the right thing for their ideal customer. And this pays off.Here are some of his quotes:There is a huge opportunity to bring something extremely, intuitive, simple and effective in the hands of nonprofits, because right now all the tools available there are focused on large nonprofit organizations that have big teams in-house.But actually, the fun fact is that there is 1.5 million nonprofits in the US, and 92% of them are actually small to medium size. And no one is focused on those 92% of nonprofitsThey don't have a marketing expert in house. They don't have an engineer in house and there is no tools available for them.So we decided to jump into the space. We basically build a solution that is extremely easy, effective, and also free to help all their fundraising and donor management needs.Whereas we don't charge any monthly or annual fees. We don't take any cut on donations and everything is just directly going to nonprofit.During this interview, you will learn three things:That creating a cool-looking app doesn’t always mean it will take off. If people are not waking up in the middle of the night around the idea of your solution, it likely doesn’t solve a valuable and urgent problem.That momentum starts when you’ve created a solution that gives your users their focus back and allows them to do what they are good at.Why its key to avoid conflict of interest by aligning your mission and your business model. If the two are optimally aligned it will create your flywheel.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to provide both individuals and brands their unique vocal personality – so they can be heard. My guest is Rupal Patel, Founder and CEO of VocalID INCRupal is an internationally renowned speech scientist. She was named a Voice Visionary in 2019 by Voicebot and listed amongst the 50 most creative in business by FastCompany, Rupal is a sought-after public speaker on the future of voice AI. Her work has been featured on TED, NPR, BBC, Wall Street Journal, and more. She holds two patents, a degree in Psychology from the University of Calgary, a Masters and Ph.D. in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Toronto, with post-doctoral studies in speech acoustics at MIT.VocaliD, a voice AI company that creates unique synthetic voices. VocalID was founded on the believe that every individual should have a unique voice, regardless of their vocal ability.This triggered me, hence I invited Rupal to my podcast. We explore the wealth of opportunity of voice technology – not only for those that have lost their ability to speak, but also to give a voice to brands and to all the products we use on a day-to-day basis.Here are some of her quotes:We believe that vocal identity is such an important part of someone's personality of how they think of themselves, whether that's an individual or whether that is a company or an organization. The voice is really metaphorically and sometimes figuratively part of their identity.Our social mission behind what we do at vocal ID is to give voice to those who are underheard or not heard, because they have some kind of a speech disability.Voice is so connected to individuality, that if everything sounded the same, it also means that they all have the same value proposition, or they all have the same kind of roots.The ultimate kind of application is not where we become dependent on the technology but that the technology really facilitates interaction between humans.What I mean by that is if the technology is really helping us connect to individuals in ways that are meaningful, then it's done its job.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why voice is still so underutilized as a mechanism to connect and interact with the users of our productsHow voice can help take adoption of your product to new levels by its ability to create a unique bond with users, build trust and change behavior.That you role as a product owner is not to reinvent everything – sometimes you are way better of using readily available components and understand their value proposition in context of what you are trying to achieve.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to revolutionize the way markers communicate with their audience. My guest is Joe Urban, Co-founder of Vennli.Joe is a core marketing faculty member in Notre Dame’s MBA program and past Associate Dean of the Mendoza College of Business with numerous publication credits related to customer decision making and growth strategy.In 2010, Joe Urbany co-wrote a book entitled ‘Grow by Focusing on What Matters: Competitive Strategy in 3-circles.’ The premise of the book is that growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. The model facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing strategic attention on what impacts customer decisions.It has been applied in over 1500 projects in the Graduate Business Masters Programs at Notre Dame and it’s the model that led to founding Vennli in 2013. Vennli brings the model to life through the use of collaborative technology and by providing a platform that delivers customer choice analytics and makes an already intuitive process even more accelerated and streamlined.Being a marketer at heart, this triggered me, and hence invited Joe to my podcast.We explore why marketers experience so many issues in increasing the performance of their content. We address why it’s not the lack of technology that sits in the way, but the approach we take to creating the content. And that’s a relatively easy thing to fix.Here are some of his quotes:… many, if not most, companies make decisions about strategy and tactics that don't fully account for the views and the perceptions of the people who determine their success, and that is: Customers.We tend to operate on the basis of past knowledge and our best intuition about what it is the customers value. What we found over and over, and really this came out of my executive MBA teaching in a big way:There were significant gaps between what businesspeople were thinking or predicted and then what customers actually said. And when you close those gaps and make decisions that better align with customers, the impact can be enormousNo one is immune from this … we get enamored with our inventions. Often the coolest inventions today are technical in nature. It's much more difficult to translate a technology into a validated product that really solves a problem for somebody.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why starting with the big idea and a crystal value proposition is not only going to help marketing perform better, but everyone and everything else in your organization – simply from the power of alignment.How rethinking who’s our real competitor is not only going to increase urgency and improve win-rates, but also fine-tune the value of our product investment.What value we can unlock when our solutions provide new insights – and AHA moments. And how this could rewire how an organization thinks and acts.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to build high-performing teams and bring out the very best in people. My guest is Stephen Lowisz. Stephen M. Lowisz is a Fortune 500 consultant, serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and coach who generated his first $1 million in revenue at 19. As the Director of Performance Solutions at Qualigence, he uses his expertise to grow and scale technology companies around the globe. Qualigence combines the people analytics technology with consulting to optimize talent at leading organizations. The aim: build high-performing team. He’s an official member of the Forbes Business Development and Sales council.I got intrigued by the approach Qualigence takes to talent optimization and scaling – hence I invited Stephen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the process of hiring people, why there’s an 80% chance of getting it wrong, and what needs to change in order to get it right, while optimizing the performance of the workforce you already have.Here are some of his quotes:At Qualigence as a whole, historically was a talent acquisition consulting shop.We've been hiring and helping people build out their teams for 20 years. Now what?How do we reduce churn? How do we get the best out of the people that we're bringing on board? How do we optimize the team and make sure everyone is performing to the best of their ability, just like we expect from our technology?So the main problem is, think about when you buy Salesforce.You're going to optimize it until it's perfect for your business objectives,You're going to customize the hell out of it.You're going to have a whole lot of fun doing so.But when we go hire people, we put I'm on the shelf and we do nothing.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why technology should not be focused on getting the most out of people, but instead getting the best out of them.How we can create exponential impact by combining the three T’s: Tactics, Talent and TechnologyWhy CEO’s need a mindset change around what drives growth.

This podcast interview focuses on driving product innovation by applying the concepts of Radical Product Thinking, and my guest is Radhika Dutt, Co-founder of the Radical Product Thinking movementRadhika is a product development executive and entrepreneur. She participated in 4 exits, 2 of which were companies she founded. She’s a global citizen having lived or worked on 4 continents - speaks 9 languages and has an engineering background from MIT. She is the author of the Radical Product blog, which is also the name of her movement of leaders creating vision-driven change.Radical Product Thinking is a systematic approach for cultivating change-makers in our organizations and building world-changing products.And this triggered me, hence I invited Radhika to my podcast. We explore some of the common mistakes made in product management and software development, and discuss how Radical Product Thinking can be the recipe for any software company to become remarkable at what they do, and thereby deliver an impact never held possible before.Here are some of her quotes:When I was building my own startups, I made many mistakes. And I learned from these mistakes. I also worked at companies where they were making similar mistakes. Rarely, there were companies that weren't making these mistakes.We have come to believe that the way you build products is just to iteration: try something, try something else. And that's really how you build products. And what was driving me was, it doesn't have to be that way. Because what happens is you keep pivoting, and you lose momentum along the way. So, it doesn't have to be that way. Or can we build products that are successful more systematically. And that's how radical product came into being.Radical product thinking means that you can think of anything as your product, that your product is really a mechanism to create change. And so, whatever change you're trying to bring about in the world, you can build a product that is engineering that change.During this interview, you will learn three things:That iteration is a very good concept in software development, as long as you know what your north star is.Why product market fit is not the holy grale. The big question is if that product market fit is creating the change you intended to create. If not – question your visionHow focusing your solution on someone rather than everyone is going to give you the focus to deliver real impact

This podcast interview focuses on the essence of the book 'The AI Republic: Building the Nexus Between Humans and Intelligent Automation'. My guest is one of the authors, Mark Esposito.He is a Co-founder of Nexus FrontierTech, a leading global firm providing AI solutions to a variety of clients across industries, sectors, and regions. In 2016, he was listed on the Radar of Thinkers50 as one of the 30 most prominent business thinkers on the rise, globally.Mark has worked as Professor of Business & Economics at Hult International Business School and at Thunderbird Global School of Management at Arizona State University and as Fellow at the Judge Business School in the UK, as part of the Circular Economy Center.He has developed and conducted courses in Business, Government & Society & Economic Strategy and Competitiveness for Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education.Mark also served as Institutes Council Co-Leader at the Microeconomics of Competitiveness program (MOC) at the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness, at Harvard Business School under the mentorship of Professor Michael E. Porter.I interviewed Mark for the first time in episode 22 of my podcast. We then focused on his best-selling book, ‘Understanding How the Future Unfolds’. Today, we discuss his new book, ‘The AI Republic’ and explore the changes that are required to build a position of advantage by blending humans and tech in a relevant way.Here are some of his quotes:There is a whole degree of misinformation about AI out there.Especially from a business perspective of B2B, where we're trying to make clients.Regardless of how educated they were, I think they were heavily influenced by what they were hearing.The more you work with AI scientists, the less they call it intelligence.They call it everything but AI.I said: ‘Why is there such a big gap between what the scientists who develop this technology talk about and what everybody else describes?’And so, the AI Republic is really the effort to create this relationship between what we think that technology is and can do, which is by itself is a phenomenal advance in our technologies, and the misinformation that I think we're currently have so that we can empower more and more people, first of all to know, and once they know, they can make a deliberate decision whether they need it or whether they actually they just need some good form of either automation or digital transformation.During this interview, you will learn three things:That to succeed with AI we have to get the entire organization engaged – not only IT. Understand IT needs to be part of the core strategy and that it’s a collaborative long-term process, not a one-off thing.Why the question is never ‘how do humans compare with machines?’, but instead ‘How do I integrate technology in jobs that currently exist or can exist?’ and ‘How do I empower this to become a form of excellence?’That getting started is a lot about recognizing where your business model is generating a friction with where the market is going – and from there determining where technology can help you.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to revolutionize employee experience, boost business performance and solve an immense social problem at the same time. My guest is Claire Schmidt, Founder and CEO of AllvoicesClaire Schmidt spent the majority of her career in technology for social good.She helped found and lead Thorn: The Digital Defenders of Children, a nonprofit organization which deploys technology in innovative ways to fight child sex trafficking.During her five years at Thorn, Claire ran all programmatic work, spoke at the White House, the State Department, and Stanford University, and led a task force of more than 30 major technology companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft.She also led social impact at Thrive Market, an e-commerce company focused on making healthy food accessible and affordable. Last but not least she served as Vice President of Technology and Innovation at 20th Century Fox.Claire graduated from Stanford with a degree in Economics in 2006. She was the curator and vice-curator of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Los Angeles, and in 2015 won a Mic50 award for her work at ThornAt the end of 2017, she founded AllVoices, a tool that enables anyone to anonymously report workplace issues directly to leadership. This triggered me, and hence I invited Claire to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in today’s workplace due to the absence of tools like AllVoices, and how filling that gap will not only solve an enormous social problem, but also creates the potential to take employee engagement to a totally different level – with all the positive side-effects flowing from that.Here are some of her quotes:I have spent the majority of my career working in technology and specifically technology for social good.While I did that, I really saw for the first time, that technology does have a huge role to play in solving social problems.I was most recently a vice president of technology and innovation at 20th Century Fox. And while I was there, I read Susan Fowler’s blog post about her experience at Uber. For me, that was sort of a wakeup call about the modern day reality of the workplace.When I looked at the data, I found that 75% of people who experience harassment in the workplace, never reported it. So in that case, companies also don't have the information they need to solve the problem, help the employee find resolutions and take action.This seemed like a huge mismatch to me – something that was really worth putting in the time and energy to try and solve and address it.During this interview, you will learn three things:That a big source of innovation can be inspired by critically looking at what’s holding us back – particularly in areas that fire up fear and uncertainty in people.How to scale the sales of your solution when you are dealing with the weird conflict that the companies that need your solution most are the most scared to implement it.Why keeping your sensors out for ‘events’ in the market. This could well be the spark of your next big thing – just like the Me-Too Movement did for AllVoices.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to scale the impact of content strategists and content writers by a factor 10. My guest is Aki Balogh, Co-founder and CEO of MarketMuseAki is a software developer and VC with a focus on AI. Prior to founding MarketMuse, he held sales and marketing roles at InfiniDB, evangelized Big Data as an investment focus for OpenView Venture Partners, designed Decision Support Systems as a management consultant, and worked as a software engineer. Aki holds three pending patents in semantic analysis.MarketMuse is a SaaS platform that lets marketers execute scalable demand generation campaigns through AI-driven content. The promise: realize 2-3X gains in productivity and 2X-6X improvements in search traffic within the first 6 months. This triggered me, and hence I invited Aki to my podcast.We explore what’s broken in the market of content development and digital advertising: The cost of customer acquisition is consistently going up on every single paid channel – and as such, it’s not sustainable to keep throwing more ads at people without getting better results. Something has to change.Here are some of his quotes:I love the idea of teaching people information and not just blasting them with different types of ads. It maps to how people use the internet. What's the first thing you do when you want to buy something? You start googling it, you're researching it, reading about it, you're educating yourself.So, when searchers find your content, they're actually getting a lot of, what I think of as, information value out of it, and that's essentially what our platform helps you do.A content strategist or content writer with our data is twice or three times more productive right off the bat. And the content that they write is twice to six times on average, more performant on search.So, you drive two to six times more leads with the same content because the content is that much better. It speeds them up. It drastically improved the ROI on a human, but it doesn't replace the humanDuring this interview, you will learn three things:That a lot of challenges in business software can be solved by giving people context rather than just information. Information without context isn’t actionable and hence doesn’t drive business value.Why a lot of customers stay where they are because too many business software solutions on the market (start-up and traditional) fail to deliver the so-called ‘10x shift in value’. The financial and reputational risk to move or migrate is therefore simply too high.Why every tech companies should have an abominable ‘No-Man’ that would just says: ‘Nope, Nope, No, No. It’s ‘No’ with a corollary: it's no, but prove me wrong, show me business justification.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables banks to grow faster by making communication with their customers easier, faster and more secure. My guest is Victor Fredung, CEO of Shufti Pro.Victor Fredung has many years in the payments field and has founded several successful FinTech companies, such as Ogion Consulting, GiroSwift LTD, Zensed and Stafftimer. Owning and operating several payment companies gave Victor a great insight into the troubles that a lot of Financial Services /FinTech companies are facing and what needs to be built to solve them.Our interview will focus on his work as CEO of ID Verification company Shufti Pro, a platform that enables banks and FinTech companies to expand their business safely by enabling them to verify 7 billion people living on the planet, with 99.6% precision.This triggered me, and hence I invited Victor to my podcast. We explore the challenges that a lack of identity verification options creates for banks and FinTechs. We then discuss Shufti Pro’s approach to fix this by taking a counterintuitive – but very effective approach.Here are some of his quotes:Identity verification has been existing in Europe and in the US for quite some time. But still, some parts of the world it is still not really covered when it comes to verifying individuals.The technology hasn't really been in that place as of late, but a in the past few years this technology has been exploding in those areas as well. So that's why we feel it's important to include every country in the world.What actually happens [not covering different regions] is that companies exclude those regions as well. They can't really do business with particular clients from different region. They try to exclude them and only focus on the countries which they're actually accepted in.When we tried our competitors, we experienced very unsuccessful results. We basically had huge customer drops in terms of verifying their identities and the delays it took for verifying them. To be honest, it pissed us off a little bit, because we started losing more and more customers. So, we basically decided: ‘Hey, let's do something about it’.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why focusing on the solving a universal problem enables you to remain flexible and expand your business dramatically over timeThat to create defensible differentiation you have to be prepared to take a contrarian approach in solving the complete problemHow devotion and hard work will always pay off and eventually turn customers into fans. Once this happens and they start talking about it to each other you’ll outgrow every competitor in your industry