SaaS Open Mic by ChartMogul: Recent Episodes
ChartMogul
SaaS founders and innovators share their story! ChartMogul's SaaS Open Mic podcast talks to the most inspiring innovators behind high-growth subscription businesses, identifying key components of their success. ChartMogul helps thousands of businesses use data to understand their customers and reach sustainable growth.
On this episode of SaaS Open Mic:
- Two common pricing mistakes founders make
- How to apply the Jobs to Be Done framework to pricing strategy
- Pricing experiments to test for price sensitivity
- 90% of growth comes from 10% of the activities
Matt has worked with dozens of startups and scaleups in his time at 500 Startups and Startup Core Strengths. A challenge that every company must face at some point is optimizing pricing or setting a price for a new product or feature. Matt shares his perspective on establishing and optimizing pricing using the Jobs to Be Done framework.
On this episode of SaaS Open Mic with Jess Bartos of Salesforce Ventures:
- Growth needs to endure at high rates
- Net Dollar Retention means you’re delivering on your promise
- Turn your gross margin into growth
- Rule of 40 is the balance between growth and profitability
- Burn multiples measure growth efficiency
- Use your SaaS metrics to tell a great story to your investors
On this episode of the SaaS Open Mic:* How Capchase got started * The different options for raising capital * Drivers and tendencies in funding and fundraising * Revenue-based financing * The metrics that distinguish the fastest-growing companies
On this episode of the SaaS Open Mic:* How Capchase got started * The different options for raising capital * Drivers and tendencies in funding and fundraising * Revenue-based financing * The metrics that distinguish the fastest-growing companies
On this episode of SaaS Open Mic
- The challenges of revenue attribution for B2B SaaS businesses
- The do’s and don’ts of revenue attribution
- Google Analytics for complex sales cycles
- Why you can’t measure everything but you should measure what you can
On this episode of SaaS Open Mic:
- What is the hotbed for technical talent right now?
- Creating a plan for hiring and onboarding new employees
- The minimum requirements to run a global team
- Going above and beyond for your employees
In this episode of SaaS Open Mic:
- The story of Mind the Product, the world’s largest community of product managers
- How it sold to Pendo
- What software companies should consider before acquiring a community
- De-Risking acquisitions
- What community leaders should contemplate when considering an exit
- Building audiences versus building communities
- The next steps for the acquirer and acquired after the sale
In this episode of the SaaS Open Mic we discuss:
- Rapid growth during a pandemic
- How to tailor priorities and keep focus during a growth phase
- Establishing clear guidelines and expectations in remote work
- Measuring success through outputs (and not inputs)
- Hiring with a standardized process in mind
- Focus on company values
- Automating onboarding
- North Star metric for team alignment
In this episode of the SaaS Open Mic we discuss:
- How initial pricing models can be challenging and ultimately need to change
- Reaching price to value alignment
- Making the final decision to switch to a different pricing model
- The three dimensions of pricing experimentation and when to apply A/B testing
- The metrics that SaaS businesses need to keep an eye on during pricing experiments
We touch on many topics related to pricing migration:
- The decision drivers that led ChartMogul to decide on a pricing migration
- How to prepare for a pricing migration
- Where things could go wrong
- Maintaining flexibility and making space for conversation
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In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, Ross and I discuss creating repeatable revenue processes and:
- Customer journey mapping
- Improving the funnel
- Positioning and sales/marketing alignment
- How to know when to iterate on your processes
- Personas and PMF
- Revenue generation responsibilities beyond the sales organization
- Relationship building
Our interview covers the following:
- The shift from a service business to SaaS
- Focusing on the problem and nothing else
- Raising money
- The balance between confidence and vulnerability in the leadership team
- Employee experience
I hope you enjoy the latest episode of SaaS Open Mic!
John and I sit down to talk about the success he’s seen running his agency like a subscription business, and:
- Agency versus subscription model
- HIstorical data and billing practices
- LTV, ARPA, and other SaaS metrics
- Tracking lead source and its contribution to revenue
- Churn and customer retention
- Tracking custom attributes
- Pricing
Resources
Black Propeller
John Thornton on Linkedin
Black Propeller on Twitter
Alexa and I discuss:
- The myth of a no sales product-led growth
- Repeatable trends, Tests, and Metrics: When this happens, know why it will happen
- Marketing-qualified leads versus product-qualified leads
- Combine customer firmographic data and product usage to get to closed-won
- When to you add a sales team to your self-serve model
- Lead scoring and prioritization
- How to test and measure the benefits of your product-led sales motion
- Community: where to talk and read about product-led sales
Hope you enjoy this SaaS Open Mic episode!
Resources
Alexa Grabell on LinkedIn
Alexa Grabell on Twitter
Pocus
Thomas has sold hundreds of businesses in his 10 years in M&A and understands what it takes to hit your target valuation – but you have to know where you're headed if you want to draw a roadmap to get there. We discuss company benchmarks and how companies can decide on which areas of the business to focus on and when it's best to bring in outside help.
In this episode we cover:
- What founders can do to prepare for an acquisition
- Goal setting and making the right hires
- Common distractions to scaling startups
- How the team at FE International helps businesses find areas of focus
- How to grow an M&A company and market trends
Links and Resources:
Thomas Smale on LinkedIn
FE International
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Userflow lets your team build customized in-app tours, checklists and surveys, without code. It’s a tool to help drive onboarding and trial conversions. It was a conscious choice of the Userflow team to focus on product-led growth from day one. They try to avoid hiring people to solve problems and look into improving the product instead.
“The essence of product-led growth - it’s an approach where you think product first instead of people first.”
Topics covered in this episode
- What is product-led growth and what is the difference between product-led and sales-led growth
- The SaaS industry maturing into PLG
- How too much customization can make it harder to move away from sales-led motions
- Examining if PLG is working within a company
- How to tackle support questions proactively
- The best tools for product-led growth
Links and Resources
Esben Friis-Jensen on LinkedIn
Esben Friis-Jensen on Twitter
Userflow
Listen to the episode
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
On this weeks episode, Tatiana shares her insights about:
- When and why Tatiana started Revolv Culture Solutions
- Before and after: What employee engagement looks like and how it is measured
- Methodologies and strategies to cultivate culture
- The role of leadership in creating culture
- Where remote work goes wrong and what to do about it
- Hybrid work models
- Creating successful events and off-sites for a remote workforce
- The future of remote work
Links and Resources:
Listen to the episode
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
What I love about this episode is Adam's willingness to share his thinking and strategy about what it means to succeed as an enterprise solution. We cover:
- Strategies to diversify and promote your brand
- How consumer buying trends impact GMV, and how GMV impacts related-SaaS entrepreneurship
- His approach to analyze, research, and acquire SaaS businesses in the ecommerce space
- Why acquirers should prioritize relationships and customer alignment over SaaS metrics
- The importance of net dollar retention
- Strategies to improve net dollar retention
Links and Resources:
- Adam Crawshaw on LinkedIn
- Assembly
- How 2 startups scaled to 50M ARR and beyond
- ChartMogul
Listen to the episode
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Jenna Wyer (@Jenna W.), Vice President of Partnerships and Head of Payments at Recurly.
Jenna has an impressive background in partnerships and payments from her time with Recurly, Spreedly, and as the founding VP of Sales at Braintree. This means she’s no stranger to navigating relationships with payment giants like Stripe and the intricacies of how complex software work together.
Topics covered in this episode:
- What partnership means at Recurly to generate revenue and marketing materials
- How to identify and approach a potential partners
- Shared pipeline: collaborating with partners to build pipeline and new business
- Why some partnerships fail and others succeed
- Where to start for more information, content, and resources in the partnership space
Links and Resources:
- Jenna Wyer on LinkedIn
- Recurly
- Crossbeam
- Partnership Leaders
- Braintree
- ChartMogul
Listen to the episode
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Adam Jones (@AdamJones85), Vice President of Sales for Thinkific, a product-led company that helps businesses create, market, and sell customized online courses.
What’s especially interesting for our listeners is that Thinkific’s sales organization and strategy was layered on 6 years into building the business. And just 5 years later, that same sales organization helped them take the company public. Adam discusses his experience with the IPO.
Listen in to hear how Adam’s sales leadership compliments a product-led business model. You’ll hear:
- The company’s decision process to build a sales team (but avoid selling to enterprise)
- His approach to structuring product-led sales teams
- How his role has changed since the IPO
- What he would have done differently
- Thinkific’s guiding sales principles
Links and Resources:
- Adam Jones on LinkedIn
- Adam Jones on Twitter
- Thinkific
- Hootsuite
- Fiverr
- Uber
- Predictable Revenue Virtual Summit
- To Sell Is Human
- ChartMogul
Listen to the episode
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
Matt Spiegel is a licensed lawyer and serial entrepreneur. His first tech startup was called MyCase, a SaaS product that, “keeps all of your important case details — documents, contacts, calendars, emails, tasks, invoices — in a single, organized location.”
The transition from criminal defense law to SaaS started as a “scratch your own itch” kind of thing. A typical day for Matt meant receiving dozens of calls, texts, and emails every day from nervous clients wanting updates and resolution — often while he was in court. This inspired an initial personal build that transformed into a full-fledged legal practice management platform.
Matt’s first SaaS success led to more and after some experimentation in B2C, he decided to start another B2B legal tech company, Lawmatics. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, Matt shares his learnings and approach to building businesses.
Can thinking about your exit strategy narrow or diminish your exit strategy? Or at the very least your focus? Matt thinks so:
“Build your business as if you’re going to build this massive business that’s going to buy other businesses one day. Some entrepreneurs build a company to sell it quickly, but I feel like you don’t build a great company, necessarily, by doing that. You might cut corners if you are building to sell in a couple of years”
Matt Spiegel, Lawmatics
Head over to your favorite podcast platform or listen below. We discuss:
- From criminal defense law to SaaS: how and why Matt started his first legal tech startup
- Getting out of your comfort zone to try something new and ultimately, coming back to what you love
- Weighing the options of taking a break from entrepreneurship vs. the decision to ‘just keep firing’
- Reactive vs. proactive startup ideas
- What strategies can be used to tackle different market segments
- Understanding how customers spend and how to marry that with your product strategy
Links and Resources:
- Lawmatics
- Matt Spiegel on LinkedIn
- MyCase
- AppFolio
- Lawmatics raises $2.5M to help lawyers market themselves
- ChartMogul
Like, subscribe, and if you’re feeling generous, share your favorite episode(s) with a colleague.
In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Brendan Sweeney (@popmenu.com), CEO and Co-Founder of Popmenu, a restaurant technology company. He talks about product market fit by sharing the story of Popmenu and finding success in an obvious place: the online experience of restaurants.
“We started off with delivering to restaurants a dynamic menu that they control... gave consumers all the criteria they want to make their dining decision - photos, reviews, ratings, social validation, interactivity, all of that.”
Brendan details Popmenu’s approach to staying close to the customers, their consumers, and the data. He covers the positive and negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant and hospitality industry and what to expect from Popmenu in the future.
“Delivering that initial product actually opened us up to a whole world of other opportunities for the product. We’re lucky that the beginning of our product market fit journey was something that restaurants responded to, our target market responded to instantly.”
Brendan started Popmenu in December 2015 with several leadership roles under his belt. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Product and Marketing at the SaaS Real Estate Marketing and CRM Platform Commissions Inc. and served as the VP of Product Development at CareerBuilder.
“Now, I understand how you can use SaaS... to help a small local business kind of take some control back from large technically sophisticated third-party platforms, which is clearly the dynamic in the restaurant space just like it was in real estate.”
Brendan has demonstrated success driving product, marketing, and UX innovation scaling high-growth businesses.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Why restaurants need a more compelling tool than PDFs to present offerings
- The beloved topic of finding product market fit
- Brendan's take on how to design features for your customers
- The adoption SaaS and the buying habits of buyers in new and different industries
- How to help small businesses take back control from big platforms
Links and Resources:
- Popmenu
- Brendan Sweeney on LinkedIn
- Commissions Inc.
- CareerBuilder
- OpenTable
- Instacart
- ChartMogul
Listen to the episode
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
We're back with a new season of SaaS Open Mic. To kick things off, I talk to Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki), former CEO of Bizness Apps & Altcoin (both acquired).
His most recent venture is MicroAquire, a marketplace designed to help startups get acquired. Andrew shares his goal to make a thousand millionaires by helping entrepreneurs exit.
“The genesis of the idea was, I looked at the market, I saw a lot of options for startups looking to sell.”
Tune in for advice about building, selling, and still loving your SaaS businesses.
Also, Andrew pushes a competition with the Hustle to give away a SaaS business up to $25,000.
Topics covered in this episode include:
- How Andrew got the idea to start MicroAcquire
- Why you shouldn't go all in on starting a company until it starts to work
- Who acquires startups and how that's changed
- What is due diligence, how to value a SaaS company, how to negotiate a LOI
- Strategies to attract buyers
- The 3 stages of SaaS: invention, go-to-market models, and building your brand
- Understanding and storytelling with SaaS metrics (Net Cash Flow, Churn, CAC, LTV)
Links and Resources:
- Win a SaaS Business Valued At Up To $25k From MicroAcquire
- How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition - blog post by Andrew
- It's F***ing ChartMogul - blog post about viral marketing
- Drift
- Copy.ai
Listen to the episode
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
This interview is with one of my most-requested guests and someone who’s had an outsized influence on my thinking about SaaS metrics and the wider SaaS industry.
David Skok is a former entrepreneur turned VC, who founded four companies before he turned his focus to investing. He’s now General Partner at Matrix Partners.
David was thinking about SaaS metrics before I was even starting out on my career. His industry-defining post, SaaS Metrics 2.0 is the go-to reference for entrepreneurs and VCs alike, and serves as a guiding light for anyone who has a need to understand the principles and measurements behind a SaaS business.
This conversation was recorded at this year’s SaaStock conference in Dublin, where I was super excited to sit down with David in the SaaStock podcasting studio.
There’s so much in here for anyone building or growing a SaaS business, we dive deep on certain metrics and measurements, we talk about why some metrics are only useful at specific stages of growth, and what’s relevant for businesses in 2019.
Receptive is a SaaS company helping businesses build better products by collecting and acting on customer feedback more effectively. Hannah Chaplin founded the company, along with her co-founder Dan, back in 2015. Like many other B2B SaaS products, Receptive began its life as a project inside of an existing organization that was eventually spun out into a full-scale business. Hannah and Dan found that they'd struck a chord with businesses that were really struggling with capturing, prioritising and acting on customer feedback to try and answer a critical question: What should we build?
In this conversation, we discuss:
- How you can balance product vision with feature requests Some common
- Common mistakes companies make with feedback
- Tools and strategies for
prioritizing input from customers
...and much more!
As always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!
Christoph Janz (@chrija) is managing partner at Point Nine Capital — a venture capital firm that's highly prevalent in the world of SaaS.
After founding several internet businesses in the 90s and early 2000s, Christoph converted to a career in venture capital and made several early investments in companies such as Zendesk, FreeAgent and Geckoboard.
Today, Point Nine invests in early stage companies with a focus on SaaS and marketplaces. If you're not a regular reader, make sure you check out the team's excellent thought leadership content!
In this episode, the pair covered:
- What it takes for SaaS startups today to raise venture capital
- Whether you should aim to create a moat of defensibility
- How startups should be using data today
- Whether startups should aim to dominate a niche before expanding to wider market segments
- How Point Nine Capital is making fundraising suck less for founders
- Whether it's possible for startups to shift from linear to exponential growth
And much more!
If you’ve ever thought about bootstrapping your own side project to meaningful revenue and scale, this episode is for you. Today I’m talking to Maxime Berthelot of Buffer and PixelMe.
PixelMe was conceived next to a pool in Bali, but this is not a digital nomad story — both founders are based in France. In fact, Maxime didn’t even quit his day job as Product Manager of Growth at Buffer. Yet the pair have managed to validate their concept and reach $5K in monthly recurring revenue.
I spoke with Max about:
- Validating the product without writing code
- Hacking his way to those
first few paying customers * The radical transparency at both Buffer and
PixelMe * Balancing time on his side project with his primary job
…and much, much more!
We all know that SaaS companies should be collecting customer feedback. But how you should actually manage, process, quantify, categorize and action that feedback data is far from simple. Especially when you’re operating at scale. Canny Co-Founders Sarah and Andrew left their jobs at Facebook to bootstrap Canny as a SaaS business, because they believe there was a better way to handle customer feedback and feature requests.
I’m really happy that I could pick their brains on a lot of best practices for making feedback more valuable within a business.
When Max Seelemann (@macguru17) and his team at Ulyssess announced their pivot to a subscription model in August 2017, they knew it would cause some controversy among users and the wider tech industry. In fact, Max wanted to create a wave in the industry and the operation was poised to make the most of any resulting publicity.
"For us as developers, it’s important that we have the freedom to
experiment and try things out. Recurring payments give us planning
security and enable deep thought. We are less rushed to release
features, and we are more inclined to iterate on them, if we do so on
a sound financial basis."
Sitting down with Max at the team's headquarters in Leipzig, Germany, it would be easy for him to look back on the period and say everything went as planned -- there were certainly some surprises -- but it's hard to argue that shifting Ulysses to a subscription-based product wasn't a big success overall.
Topics covered This chat with Max is a must listen for anyone evaluating the subscription model for their own business. In this conversation, we discuss:
- The carefully planned process of announcing subscriptions, and the following media buzz
- How Max and his team finally made the decision to go ahead with the move
- The economics of perpetual licensing vs. subscriptions
- Some unexpected impact from the move
- Finding optimal pricing for the subscription plans
- How the team plans to measure success in the subscription world
I'd like to extend a huge thanks to Max and the Ulysses team for hosting me at their beautiful office in Leipzig! (and for letting me drool over that 2016 Apple Design Award trophy...)
Check out Ulysses at https://ulyssesapp.com/
One of the biggest barriers to SaaS businesses going truly global from day one is localization. That is, the process of adapting your product to meet the language and cultural requirements of a specific target market. Vasco Pedro is Founder and CEO of Unbabel, a company helping businesses go global from day one through both AI and human-powered translation as a service.
Welcome back to this new season of SaaS Open Mic! In this first episode I'm talking to Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi of Forget The Funnel -- both strong proponents of a more holistic approach to modern SaaS marketing.
David Cancel, CEO of Drift is a product person through and through. He’s no stranger to growing a SaaS business, formerly working as CPO at HubSpot after his startup Performable was acquired by the Marketing giant. David firmly believes that the experience of buying business software is lagging far behind the experience we’ve all come to expect from consumer shopping. David and I chatted about his vision of the future of Sales and Marketing software - and how Drift fits into this. (hint: it involves chat bots).
Feedback culture doesn't just happen. In startups feedback is rarely given focus from day one. So how can an established team nurture processes and attitudes towards feedback that make the difference between a desirable company and one you shouldn't touch with a bargepole? Feedback, and the culture surrounding it, is one of the biggest contributors to a company’s desirability, from a recruiting standpoint. But after some quick research, it occurred to me that the act of developing good feedback processes is almost always under-invested in, especially with early stage startups. Per Fragemann has made it his mission to improve feedback and feedback culture in business, with a business he started called Small Improvements.
For most SaaS startups, there comes a point when expansion to new markets seems like the logical path to faster growth. Arun Mani is Managing Director for Freshdesk's efforts in Europe, and his approach and philosophy towards this (and career growth in general) is something we should all pay attention to.
Whether by design or by chance, Zapier has found itself at the center of the unbundling of SaaS and rise of API-based solutions. Enabling code-free integrations between over 800 apps (including ChartMogul), it's clear why this is the case -- Zapier empowers employees across the world to scale their output and effectiveness to new levels. I spoke to Co-Founder and CEO Wade Foster to understand what made him pursue this way back in 2011.
From blog post, to Kickstarter, to sustainable SaaS business: We spoke to globe trotter founder John O’Nolan to understand what’s behind his mission for open source blogging platform Ghost.
Mikita Mikado started out on his entrepreneurial career, selling berries he’d picked in his home Belarus, and now runs PandaDoc, a Series-A funded SaaS business in San Francisco. Clearly there’s a LOT that happened between those two points of Mikita’s life. I joined him to try and understand some of the things he’s learned along the way. In our discussion, we cover: - How activities from his youth translate to his business today - How his long-term business relationship with co-founder Serge works successfully, and how the complement each other - Why he’s so passionate about making business transactions and contracts less painful - What metrics are important to the team at PandaDoc, and how they’re actionable - The books he’s learned the most from (which you can find on blog.chartmogul.com)
As a consumer, an increasing proportion of my digital life can be attributed to subscriptions. Photo editing, movie watching, music listening, ebook reading, blog hosting… and plenty more. But what about subscriptions for physical products? This is the realm of Berlin-based Grover. I paid a visit to their HQ, to chat to Thom Cummings (CMO) and Michael Cassau (CEO) and dig a little deeper.
Looking back at Sharon’s experience, it’s clear that nurturing communication in communities, groups and movements is the underlying theme of her career. This conversation goes deep on the pricing strategy for Mobilize. Sharon and her team have a very clear vision for how the subscription pricing should be structured, with each plan targeting a specific company profile, with a very clear understanding of their set of needs.
Introducing: Jukely Founder, Bora Celik. Jukely is a subscription for going to concerts. For a monthly fee you can go to unlimited live concerts — even every night of the week, if you can handle such a schedule. The music events scene is a tough segment to crack — many startups have tried and failed along the way, trying to use technology to change the way people consume live music. So why is Jukely equipped to succeed where others haven’t? I took away a lot from this conversation that can be applied to any subscription business — SaaS included. Bora has a thirst for constantly experimenting and adapting the product — which he sees as a constant work-in-progress.
Webflow is a fascinating product in the SaaS space, partly because it’s commonly associated to a current trend in the industry towards consolidation. I wanted to probe a bit more on this topic, and also understand Bryant’s approach to building, marketing and selling a product that targets multiple user personas.
Tope Awotona, Founder and CEO of Calendly is big on Focus, and it’s clear that this has played a big part in launching his product to the world. Tope moved from a background of Enterprise Sales in businesses like IBM, Perceptive Software and EMC to solve a problem that was close to his heart in those roles: Scheduling. I Spoke to Tope about why the freemium SaaS model has been key to the product’s success so far, how the most important acquisition channel for Calendly is the product itself, and how he manages feedback from customers, among other things.
Typeform is one of europe’s hottest SaaS businesses, after raising a $15M Series A in 2015. And moving into a beautiful, expansive new office space this year. I wanted to get some insights from David into his thinking around user experience (UX) as a concept, and how the team at Typeform are pushing beyond this into what is referred to as Human Experience. HX spans much wider than UX, and goes at least some of the way towards capturing the complete experience a person encounters when interacting with a brand or company. The Typeform team have published some excellent content around this, showing that they're really pushing the boundaries of current product thinking.
Go to the website of London-based Connect Ventures and the first thing you’ll see is three statements: They invest early. They are product focused. They are hands on. But what drives this approach to investing in young startups? I spoke to Managing Partner Pietro Bezza to find out.
Alex Theuma is the man behind the online community SaaScribe, as well as a new B2B SaaS-focused conference called SaaStock, which will take place for the first time this September. So why did Alex move from the world of B2B sales to growing a community — starting from nothing?
Jameson, now a subscription box pioneer, set out to build his first subscription box business (Conscious Box) purely out of interest and product potential. Yet some years later, he's crafted a formula for subscription box success, and reaps the benefits of a recurring-revenue-based lifestyle business.
Alex is a driving force of the Paris startup scene, having founded several startups himself and worked at the capital's startup builder eFounders before moving onto new projects. I wanted to really understand why he decided to create B2B rocks, as well as his vision for the future of the conference.
Emeric of Agorapulse dives deep on measuring social media performance and interaction for businesses and his experience with the problems in the space. If you want to understand the performance of your social media efforts, start here!
Word of mouth is one of the oldest forms of marketing there is. It’s also the most effective. But in today’s world, when customers are other companies, what is it really worth? And how are B2B businesses making the most of it? Read this full article and many more at http://blog.chartmogul.com. Narrated by Annie Musgrove Produced by Ed Shelley & Annie Musgrove Music by Podington Bear
I sat down with Szymon Klimczak, CMO of LiveChat - A SaaS-based live chat and helpdesk product for businesses. LiveChat was founded in 2002 and has a somewhat remarkable story of pivots, organic growth and selling SaaS before SaaS was really a "thing".
Since launching in 2015, Clearbit has gone from strength-to-strength in their quest to be the definitive Business Intelligence infrastructure for businesses. In this chat, co-founder and CEO Alex MacCaw talks about his career in tech and engineering, including working for Stripe in the "early" days and travelling the world whilst writing his book on Javascript.
In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I visited the headquarters of Blinkist - a consumer-focused SaaS business in Berlin, who have recently raised Series A investment and are pioneering in the learning app space.
This week I sat down for a chat with Murat, who left a career in design to grow his app prototyping platform, Marvel. Marvel began as a side project, but gained enough traction since launch to rapidly grow into a full-scale business.
This week I spoke to Bjoern - Founder of Ivyleads, a simple solution for managing and nurturing sales leads. We chatted about his early YCombinator experience, constant involvement in side projects and focus on design.
I grabbed a 20-minute chat with Nikos (@moraitakis), to discuss a range of SaaS-related topics: - How Workable was started (in Greece) and eventually moved to Boston - SaaS Metrics and measurement in a high-growth environment - Customer Churn characteristics – Dealing with a high amount of “sleeper” accounts that eventually reactivate - Pausing vs. cancelling subscriptions, and the perceived difference for customers - The economics of a SaaS business past initial traction stage, and the difficulty of capturing/balancing other business costs - LTV, Payback Period and how to make them useful