The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to put your team culture on autopilot, share authentically, and discover how to work better together. My guest is Kelsey Bishop, Founder and CEO of Candor. Kelsey is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. She started her career as an employee in early-stage startups. She is also an angel investor in companies that include Primer, Roster, Alongside Finance, Noula Health, Candid Health, Taiyaki, Areyo (acq. Zillow), and Channeled. Throughout her career, she worked on teams that felt like magic and worked on teams where that wasn't the case. Curious as she was, she started digging into why that was the case.  But getting visibility on how a team really works together is hard. Tools like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are cluttered with spam, virtue-signaling, and fake or toxic profiles. So, without finding a solution, she decided to create one herself and founded Candor in May 2021. Their mission: help people find belonging at work. Candor believes true job satisfaction in tech comes when you can be yourself in a team where you are included and accepted. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Kelsey to my podcast. We explore what's so hard about qualifying cultures inside organizations. Kelsey then shares the steps that were critical on her journey to get the company off the ground without a tech team and obtain the funding to accelerate its growth. She then elaborates on what she did differently to make users come back every single day to build the culture they desire. Lastly, she explains how she's able to grow the business without spending anything on marketing - purely leveraging the remarkable effect. Here's one of her quotes We're building some of those tools for day-to-day culture. What we hear from users is, 'A profile is great for onboarding or for this one moment, but company culture happens every single day. And so candor actually can help you manage how you celebrate your people, how you do retros, how you do one-on-ones. All of these moments that require intentionality. And on the flip side, startups usually get them wrong. They're not thinking about this stuff every single day. And when you don't think about it, you usually let it fall by the wayside, and you get it wrong. During this interview, you will learn four things: You can start a successful Tech Startup and your first raving fans without a tech team. Delivering your promises to investors is about doing what makes value sense to your customers and the business - even if this means delaying or even abandoning the original vision you promised them.  Finding your sweetspot starts with finding the people that care about the same.  The reason why people fall in love with your product is not what it does but how it will make them feel.  For more information about the guest from this week: Kelsey Bishop Website Candor Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help B2B professionals build powerful relationships for their businesses. My guest is Guillaume Moubeche, Founder and CEO of Lempire. Guillaume is a prototype of a tech entrepreneur on a mission.  In the last 3.5 years, Guillaume Moubeche has founded 2 businesses. One that he grew to $600,000 ARR and sold. The other, Lempire, he is currently growing past $10M+ ARR and +20.000 customers worldwide - all without funding.  The fact his business is now valued at more than $150,000,000 inspired him to write the book titled "The $150M Secret" - and with that, he follows one the core principles that got him where he is today: share knowledge with as many people as possible. Lempire is a group of passionate and curious individuals who have a very healthy obsession with building the world’s finest products and helping entrepreneurs worldwide grow profitable and successful businesses. Their mission: help 1,000,000 entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses by 2025. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Guillaume to my podcast. We explore his approach to building a successful SaaS business with a bootstrapped mindset. He shares how, in anything he does, community is a fundamental pillar of his approach. He talks about how, over time, he has mastered taking something that doesn't exist off the ground. Last but not least, he elaborates on how he's been able to successfully overcome some extreme throwbacks in his entrepreneurial life - such as his two co-founders leaving the business without notice - and how this has made him and the business stronger. Here's one of his quotes It took us maybe two years to go from zero to 1 million in annual recurring revenue. But after two years, I realized in the community that people were struggling with their emails, ending up in spam. I was like, 'I can automate that.' And that's when I launched Lemwarm, which was a new product to help people get the best email deliverability possible.  It's quite funny to see how things work. Because if you're very close to your customers, and you're listening carefully to what they're saying and what is the real struggle, then it's a lot easier to actually build a solution from it. During this interview, you will learn four things: The power of community - and how this helps build momentum across product, marketing, and sales. How he's creating differentiated power over his competitors beyond his products. The secret behind Guillaums' formula: Growth = Speed * Momentum Why he's for perfect execution and not for perfect process - and how that helped him. For more information about the guest from this week: Guillaume Moubeche Website Lempire Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable freelancers to take the guesswork out of running their business. My guest is Rachel Renock, Co-founder and CEO of Wethos. Rachel Renock has held various positions in the creative industry since 2009. Digital Design Intern at VOX Global. Associate Art Director at G2 Worldwide. Art Director and Visual Designer at Havas Worldwide and, ultimately, in 2015, a freelance role as a Photographer/ Designer at OPAM. After quitting her job in advertising to pursue more meaningful work, she co-founded a freelance studio to put together project-based teams for nonprofit organizations. In just 18 months, this generated $1.4 million in gross revenue and deployed over 150 diverse creative teams of the best and brightest.  But with their fast growth came the chaos of scale and a mountain of spreadsheets. From figuring out what to charge to putting scopes of work together to managing invoices and payments to collaborators, the paperwork never seemed to end. This became the founding idea for Wethos, which she leads as the CEO.  Wethos is solving arguably the most difficult challenge in the freelance economy.  Vision: Put more money into the pockets of independents everywhere Their mission: make it easier for founders to start and scale their freelance businesses and help more people break 6-figures.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rachel to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way freelancers manage their business. Rachel shares her vision of how to solve this. She then elaborates on how she's been addressing the problem radically differently from the start - and how that helped to create strong momentum, growing from serving 100 freelancers in 2020, to well over 80.000 businesses today. She shares her lessons learned, what to pay attention to (and what not). Last but not least, she shares her perspective on creating a SaaS business people start talking about and keep talking about. Here's one of her quotes: One thing that we were really cognizant of is making sure that we were focusing on profitability and not productivity, I think there is a challenge there. There is a lot of productivity software. There are a lot of software providers out there that are going to tell you, we're going to save you my time, we're gonna make you more efficient.  With our software, we want it to help freelancers make more money, we wanted to help them to capture more margin, and we wanted it to help them figure out how much we should charge for this thing. During this interview, you will learn four things: Not every business is managed equally - and that's a massive opportunity to create durable differentiation. Many SaaS founders become a magnet for competition just by selecting the problem they solve for. How to solidly embed your vision into every decision made inside your SaaS business. Some simple secrets to creating a messaging that resonates For more information about the guest from this week: Rachel Renock Website Wethos Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable all of us to collaborate, build culture, and thrive together - remotely. My guest is Brett Martin, Co-founder and President at Kumospace. Brett is a serial entrepreneur. He began his career on Wall Street as an equity research analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, Since then, he has spent his entire career building or investing in technology startups, including stints as an EIR at PrimaryVC, Co-Founder of Switchapp and Sonar (pioneering location-based social network), Director of Investments at Appfund and Vice. Today he's the President & Co-Founder of Kumospace, the virtual office platform where teams show up. When the pandemic hit, he quickly realized the technology for hosting immersive virtual events was pretty terrible. He knew there had to be a better way. And thus, Kumospace was born. Their mission: to make online connections more meaningful by building the most human spaces on the internet. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the ay we enable remote work these days. Brett shares his vision on creating solutions that are game-changers in this space. Then he talks about how the biggest hurdle in going to market is not so much selling the product but selling the organizational transformation that's required - and how they go about solving this. Last but not least, he talks about the biggest lessons he learned around go-to-market and scaling his organization- and how to avoid making the same mistakes next time. Here's one of his quotes Truly disruptive tools usually compete on a completely different axis than what they've replaced. So they're not just cheaper or faster, but they're actually qualitatively different in a way. That changes the game.  Virtual offices, like Kumospace, have that characteristic. Sure, there's no substitute for truly being in person with other people. What I can say is that by working remotely, there are all these crazy benefits that you could never get if you tried to co-locate everywhere in one city.  You don't have to pay hundreds of 1000s of dollars for office space. You can hire the best people from anywhere in the world. You can give your people the flexibility to choose where in the world they work. You can give them time flexibility. That changes the game. And but I am a believer in anything that can be done over the Internet will eventually be done over the Internet.  During this interview, you will learn four things: The principles Brett used to narrow down the focus of his SaaS business How to go about gaining traction if the sales is not about your product, but about getting people to gain a leap of faith The secret behind Kumospace' 'crazy high' retention rates Brett's secret (today) to hit the numbers predictably.  For more information about the guest from this week: Brett Martin Website: Kumospace Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give revenue teams a scientific approach to revenue and stop flying in the dark. My guest is Toni Hohlbein, Co-founder and CEO of Growthblocks. Toni has spent the last decade growing B2B SaaS startups successfully as a CRO, leading to two exits. He discovered that revenue planning and execution was fundamentally broken. The old approach is finance-heavy and is skipping over a ton of important details CROs need to know to hit their revenue targets.  So he started working on a solution and created an operating model that help the business he was working for hit target 12 quarters in a row. He learned that other startups had the same problem, which sparked the idea to create Growblocks together with his cofounders Olafur & Andrew. The mission: help organizations unlock their revenue potential. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Toni to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses run revenue operations. Toni shares his vision of how to solve this - based on an approach that delivered remarkable results at his previous company - helping them grow from €10 to €50 million in 12 straight quarters. He shares the big lessons learned in taking his startup from idea to ready for primetime and outlines what ingredients have been fundamental to get right from the start. Last but not least, he shares what he's specifically steering for to create a SaaS business people will start talking about and keep talking about.  Here's one of his quotes We are not a forecasting tool that tells you which number you're going to hit in q1. We're helping you to figure out what number you are gonna hit at the end of the year. What are the long-term revenue goals you want to achieve?  Then you start executing. And what you then very quickly see is that some part of the engine is going to veer off course. Otherwise, you would have probably seen this in the post-mortem that you have in your quarterly business review in three and a half months from now. We ping you if something is off. We give you a root cause analysis of why it is off. And then you can fix it. And that is a very nice, straightforward, you could even say, agile cycle that we are enabling organizations to do in real-time instead of having quarterly business reviews to then tweak something. During this interview, you will learn four things: How to go about challenging the status quo in a mature market How changing one word in your positioning can change everything for the traction you experience  How to empower your champions to drive the buying process from the inside The mistakes many startups make that put their buyers in a disagreeing spiral, instead of a nodding spiral How to spark word-of-mouth if you're selling big enterprise SaaS tools For more information about the guest from this week: Toni Hohlbein Website Growthblocks Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to build organizational superpowers. My guest is Jason Radisson, Founder and CEO of Movo. Jason is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He inherited his single mother’s work ethic as he worked various blue-collar jobs to fund his education. He started his career at McKinsey & Company. He then became an entrepreneur and joined the early days of Uber, where he launched and grew cities in the western US as a Regional General Manager. Fast forward to today, and Jason has built multiple tech unicorns, including rideshare giant 99. His latest venture, Sh1ft helps remove friction from employment across frontline labor industries such as manufacturing and healthcare.  He is passionate about using technology to empower and uplift the frontline workforce, which he believes is the backbone of the economy and society.  That became the trigger to found Movo in early 2019 to address the challenges and opportunities of this segment, which is often overlooked and underserved by traditional HR solutions. Their mission: To improve the gig economy by making it as good for employees as it has been for employers.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jason to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way the market has access to talent. Jason puts his finger on the opportunity HRTech vendors have failed to address and shares his vision of how to solve this global problem by taking a fresh approach. He shares his big lessons learned on how and when to scale the business. And last but not least, the tells a story about how they created remarkable differentiation when the market needed it most. Here's one of his quotes We can replace Workday for massive employers. That's what we're gunning for.  Just our philosophy towards sharing, It's been almost an afterthought by the HR tech industry to have your workforce talking to each other and sharing with other people. We think people should share, and you should be able to follow people who are in your profession in other countries, and you should be able to have casual mentoring and casual interactions outside of work. And it's kind of the antithesis of where traditionally, HR software has been. During this interview, you will learn four things: How you can gain instant differentiation by creating the antithesis of the accepted traditional approach That augmenting your tech with human touch can mean your breakthrough How adding cross-company community-building components to connect peers can become the stickiness factor your solution has been waiting for. How to deal with advice from investors - especially when it's extremely tempting.  For more information about the guest from this week: Jason Radisson Website Movo Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take the pain out of software training. My guest is Ken Babcock, Co-founder and CEO of Tango. Ken Babcock spent most of his career in the Bay Area at Uber, where he held roles in Launch Operations, Data Science, and Product Strategy from 2014 to 2018. In 2019 he decide to do his MBA at Harvard Business School. But shortly in, he and his co-founders, Brian Shultz and Dan Giovacchini, dropped out of Harvard during the pandemic to start Tango. Today he's the  Co-founder and CEO of Tango, which takes the pain out of documenting processes by automatically generating how-to guides while you work. Since then, the company has grown to over 350,000 users and is trusted by people and teams at organizations, including Netflix, IBM, Salesforce, Nike, and more. Tango has been recognized as a finalist for Product Hunt’s Product of the Year, Google's 12 Favorite Chrome Extensions of 2022, and Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech for 2022. They have raised $19.7M in venture capital funding to date.  Their mission: building a future of work where processes are easier to document and faster to follow.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ken to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we capture and transfer knowledge. Ken shares how the company went from idea to GTM in literally months due to how the problem was exposed during Covid. He shares stories about how he overcame their biggest hurdle for growth: how to market their solution. And he shares some of Tango's secrets to spark viral growth and increase conversion from free to paid plans. Here's one of his quotes What we saw with a lot of our users is that their prior way of doing something was taking screenshots, manually going in and annotating the screenshots, dumping them into a Word doc, and typing it all up. And so the old way of doing things was so clunky. It wasn't anything that was rocket science. But it was extremely tedious.  And what we found with the market is everybody knows that this is a problem. What we realized was that people actually didn't know that there would be a solution out there.  So that was the hardest part: How do we shift our marketing strategy, knowing that our best users, the people that are doing things the old way, aren't even going to know that they can solve their own problems? During this interview, you will learn four things: Why putting all functionality in your Free plan is a good thing That product market fit is an illusion, and how to go about that How to stay ahead of the market and user expectations What's the magic combo of core principles to create alignment and scale in your organization  For more information about the guest from this week: Ken Babcock  Website Tango Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on exploring the biggest business lessons learned after our last podcast interview 5 years ago. My guest is Ryan Falkenberg, Co-founder and Co-CEO of CLEVVA. Ryan has always been fascinated by what makes people tick and what makes them perform optimally. He’s been frustrated at the slow pace of change when it comes to education and learning. To address that, he created a learning consultancy, Hi-Performance Learning, that aimed to push the boundaries of organizational learning through e-learning, gamification, and expert systems. To then remove the constraints by tech. bandwidth, he founded CUDA Technologies. Yet no matter how they optimized formal learning, a core problem remained. People still had to memorize and repeat complex decision formulas in a world that was accelerating. It was time for a complete rethink. This was the starting point for CLEVVA back in June 2011. In the meantime, CLEVVA has been in business for well over 12 years, and five years have passed since Ryan was on my podcast last. This interview inspired me in many ways, and parts of it ended up in chapter 1 of my book, "The Remarkable Effect." Since so many things happened since I decided to invite Ryan back on my podcast. We explore the big lessons Ryan learned over the last five years. He shares a story about what made him realize they competed for the wrong business in the wrong market. He then explains what he changed from a mindset perspective and how that helped them get remarkable traction in a completely new category - thereby attracting the right customers and the right partners. Last but not least, he shares his experiences in how to create funding freedom for the business - and how that liberates them to do the right thing. Here's one of his quotes We took ownership of the outcome. So we didn't put on a lens of a Software as a Service company. We put on the lens as a solution as a service company. So we actually then got teams to be able to specialize in these conversations. And so that we could not just say to our customer, here's the software, I'll teach you how to build that conversation; we said we will deliver a virtual agent having those conversations, and it will be up and running in four weeks. And we will take ownership of that and be accountable for the performance. And so what changed as well is, is our customers didn't feel we were having to convince them on our software. What we were showcasing is we actually were selling an outcome, a measurable outcome that would have conversations that mattered.  During this interview, you will learn four things: That even if you add significant value, it doesn't mean it will help you scale  The importance of clarifying what business you're really in (and how that changes everything) How changing one small thing can move you from nice to have to ultra-sticky and mission-critical When you know the moment is right to build an ecosystem For more information about the guest from this week: Ryan Falkenberg Website CLEVVA Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give self-care businesses give their clients more of the magical moments that matter. My guest is Matt Danna, CEO of Boulevard.  Matt is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He's addicted to building technology for the creative class and passionate about the intersection between design and technology.  Matt has spent his entire career building technologies to empower creative professionals., Matt was head of product for the LA-based talent agency Wasserman. His career also includes product leadership positions with Awesomeness, a multi-media platform company, and the global media company Fullscreen.  He co-founding Boulevard in 2016 as he and his co-founder realized this industry - the professionals who help us look and feel our best - has traditionally been underserved when it comes to tech and support.  So their mission is to change that by enabling their customers to give their clients more of the magical moments that matter. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore how the company evolved from a scheduling solution into a complete experience platform, positioning for the salon and spa industry.  Matt explains how they carved out their niche and how early architectural design now provides them with a multi-year competitive advantage. helping them stand out from competitors who added these features later. He elaborates on how they accelerated growth and reduced CAC by leveraging the power of network effects and customer referrals. He shares his story of how brand trust, design, and community have become core differentiators for the company, thereby creating a magnetic effect. Last but not least, he explains how the company achieved minimal customer churn during covid, and was able to add well over 600 customers in a market that was effectively closed.  Here's one of his quotes The hardest nut to crack over time has been our go-to market motion. My co-founder and I were both engineers. And so, learning how to sell a product was entirely new territory for us. And there's this perception out there from some founders if you build it, they'll come. That never happens. And so you have to be so intentional about your go-to market. You have to be very, very focused on what's your ideal customer profile. That is something that we continue to refine on a quarterly basis, Who are we best set up to support? Who do we have pricing power over? During this interview, you will learn four things: What it really means to understand a problem in its full depth - and why that makes all the difference for your success  What it takes to find the sweetspot where you have pricing power What they did differently that gave them defensible differentiation from day one Why we should think differently about product market fit For more information about the guest from this week: Matt Danna Website: Boulevard Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on what it takes to scale the growth of your SaaS business by establishing a remarkable ecosystem. My guest is Barrett King, Sr. Manager - Global GTM Strategy, Partner Ecosystem at Hubspot and host of the Outcomes Podcast.  ​​Barrett is a highly motivated and results-driven professional with over 10 years of experience in building partnerships and executing go-to-market strategies for SaaS companies.  He's the host of the Outcomes Podcast - Where Partnership & SaaS meet - and Senior Manager for Go-to-Market strategies for the Global Partner Ecosystem at Hubspot.  It's that combination that triggered me to invite him to my podcast. We explore the art of building and managing partnerships in B2B SaaS organizations. Barrett elaborates on the critical components to focus on throughout the acquisition, onboarding, and lifecycle stages of partners. He shares his experience in concurring the complexity of managing partnerships as businesses evolve and the necessity of diversifying these partnerships for mutual benefit. Lastly, he addresses how to overcome the personnel challenges in various stages of a partnership program, underlining the importance of specialization as the program matures.  Here's one of his quotes Folks will always say things like: "We want to go and build an ecosystem." You're saying the wrong thing. We want to build a partner program, you're not even thinking about it the right way. I always stopped them there, and I say: "Think about your customer needs first that you don't deliver. That's where your opportunities lie." During this interview, you will learn four things: Why you should consider shifting from partnership for revenue to partnerships for customer value  What to do / no to do when you want partnerships to play a vital role in scaling your SaaS business organizations Where to make concessions around successful partnerships if you want to deliver the most value to the customer. How to go about managing partnerships that lead to mutual benefits, increased leverage and enhanced reach and value delivery. For more information about the guest from this week: Barrett King Podcast: Outcomes - Where Partnership & SaaS Meet Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices