Episodios
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to empower business users, especially in SMEs, to easily find insights in their data without technical complexities. My guest is Thomas Wulff Wilhelmsen, Co-founder and CEO of Less.
Thomas and his co-founder Daniel previously worked as consultants in the data space before founding Less. Their experiences and frustrations in this role inspired them to create an analytics product for people like themselves.
And that led to the birth of Less in September 2022. The name "Less" embodies their goal of stripping away complexities to build a product that focuses on the end goal and takes care of the technical aspects behind the scenes.
Their mission: Set doers free to do what they do best: Roll up their sleeves and solve problems.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Thomas to my podcast. We explore what's, after decades of development, still broken in the Business Analytics solutions market. Thomas shares his lessons learned from steering Less' journey as a customer-funded startup. He shares how he got early traction with paying customers and how he's creating a culture of analogical thinking to solve problems in creative ways.. Last but not least, he'll inspire you with his fresh perspective on crafting a compelling narrative that sells.
Here's one of his quotes
"We've been focusing more on the persona than on the sector or industry. We call them doers. People that are curious by nature, that are frustrated with being dependent on other people and want to build cool things that they can show to other people in their teams and drive that change internally."
During this interview, you will learn four things:
Where he finds inspiration from taking Storytelling for his business to the next level.
What he's done differently from the start to get traction and stay in control as the business grows.
How he ensures everyone understands what's important, and does the right things right to create fans from the start.
Why he embraces being "customer funded" rather than just bootstrapped.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Thomas Wulff Wilhelmsen
Website: Less
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey in identifying an emerging opportunity and building an innovative, fast-growing company that transforms how we shop online. My guest is Angelo Coletta, CEO and Co-founder of Zakeke.
Angelo is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and exited multiple companies.
In 2017 he co-founded Zakeke, an AI Visual Commerce platform. It's doing groundbreaking work in transforming the B2B customer journey and shopping experience. With this focus, it's now serving 10,000+ eCommerce brands worldwide across 400+ industries
Their mission: To improve the industry's environmental footprint through the use of technology in the display process, the shopping experience, and the purchasing experience.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Angelo to my podcast. We explore how the shopping experience is still broken today - and why. Angelo shares his how he's building an organization to fix this and shares anecdotes about his lessons learned in choosing the right team, fostering a culture of innovation, and setting ambitious long-term goals. He then elaborates on creating resilience across the business, customer-centric product development, and how strategic acquisitions and investment in eco-system helped to scale their business.
Here's one of his quotes
I wanted to create a company that was totally based on a long-term vision. This is one of the most difficult choices to make when you start because it means you burn more money in the first years of the company. My opinion is that if you don't start as a long tail business, it's difficult to transform a company with 200 or 300 big customers into a company able to serve 1000s of customers, maybe most of them small customers.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
Why have a global mindset from day 1.
Why focus on product excellence first before you consider a marketing push?
What Angelo specifically prioritizes when it comes to hiring the right people that will help the company grow in good and tough times.
The strategies he applied to establish trust and leverage their growth opportunity via the e-commerce ecosystem.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Angelo Coletta
Website: Zakeke
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to make social a positive place again - for everyone. My guest is Matthew McGrory, CEO of Arwen AI.
Matthew is a tech- entrepreneur on a big mission. He has held tech leadership roles: IT Director at Logicalis, Director Managed Services at Acora, and Managing Director at Carrenza (a cloud service provider acquired by Six Degrees Group),
In the period from July 2018 and September 2020 he took a break from his corporate life to become a House Husband. In that period he developed a passion for using AI to drive positive change.
That led him to cofound Arwen AI in September 2020. Arwen AI is a platform that helps its customers actively moderate and manage their community, across both paid and organic.
Their mission: to make social media a more positive place by filtering out hate speech and toxicity.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matthew to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's Social Media world. Matthew shares his vision to make Social a place without toxicity and spam. He then elaborates on his hard-won lessons from his journey to speed up direct sales and benefit from using ecosystems to grow even faster. Last but not least, he shares his framework to increase resilience across the organization.
Here's one of his quotes
I thought, 'This is great, we'll create some technology, fix the problem and everyone will buy it.' I was so wrong on that part. I got to about demo number 200, it was with a US broadcast news organization. And the head of digital said, 'Listen, I'm protected by the First Amendment, I can let anything go up on my channels. I don't have to get rid of it. You're giving me an extra job to do. An extra cost. Tell me why this is valuable to my business. Tell me how it makes me money or saves me money.'
During this interview, you will learn four things:
How he gained traction in a market where customers resisted to buy because they saw the solution as an extra job and an extra cost.
What he did differently to gain technical and commercial momentum.
What he invested in early on to get access to strategic accounts and speed up the commercial contracting process in enterprise sales situations.
How he goes about to keep the business humming, and keeping everyone aligned and motivated - especially in tough times.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Matthew McGrory
Website: Arwen AI
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to take GTM efficiency to the next level for enterprise SaaS companies. My guest is Josh Ellars, CEO of OpenGTM.
Josh has over 15 years of experience leading successful go-to-market (GTM) functions at high-growth SaaS companies like Metalogix, Qualtrics, and OpenGov. This extensive background gives him unique insights into scaling SaaS businesses.
In 2021 he founded Patri, which was rebranded OpenGTM in 2023. OpenGTM is platform to create content buyers love, capture high-intent leads, and uncover the truth behind your buyers and pipeline.
It's mission: to unite sales, marketing, customer success, and product around the attributes of highly-retained customers in order to boost revenue and retention.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Josh to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's world of Go-to-Market (GTM). Josh shares his wealth of experience in scaling SaaS businesses. He emphasizes the importance of the "sell, design, build" methodology, where market demand pulls product development. He also explains, how their approach helps companies cut through the noise of the crowded go-to-market tech landscape. And last but not least he shares some big lessons learned on differentiation and growing efficiently.
Here's one of his quotes
Too often in Go To Market and in company building in general, we're driven by product market fit. And that's wonderful. But a big portion of that is really identifying: Is there security and regulatory fit? Is there a financial fit? Can we get some sort of return out of this investment we're making in this customer? And I absolutely saw that I had to learn the hard way and lose some very large deals. That got me thinking that I think there's a better way to to vet these opportunities.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
What B2B SaaS companies should look for beyond product-market fit to grow more efficiently.
Their framework that drives product strategy in order to build remarkable products.
How they avoid getting caught up in tech-stack rationalization.
How to expand market scope gradually while maintaining a narrow focus on the ideal buyer profile.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Josh Ellars
Website: OpenGTM
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#326 - Niklas Hanitsch, CEO of SECJUR - on balancing culture and growth challenges
A story about maintaining a blue ocean market in the rapidly evolving compliance automation landscape.
This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to sustain in a heavily competitive market. My guest is Niklas Hanitsch, Co-founder and CEO of SECJUR.
Niklas is a tech entrepreneur on a Mission. He was an idealist punk who turned lawyer, then SaaS founder. He's got deep expertise in data privacy, compliance, and agile product development. And entered the prestigious Top 40 under 40 list by Capital Magazine in November 2023.
Over the years, he grew the belief that while data protection and compliance requirements are important, the implementation should not become a stumbling block for companies.
And that became the big idea behind SECJUR, an AI-driven compliance automation platform, which he founded in December 2017.
Their vision: A world where businesses are always compliant, but never have to think about it.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Niklas to my podcast. We explore how personal tragedy grew into entrepreneurial drive. He shares how he bootstrapped the company towards growth, navigated fundraising during a recession, and built a resilient team culture from the start. Beyond that, he elaborates on his frameworks for strategic decision-making, hiring for values fit, and relentlessly delivering customer value. Last but not least he shares practical advice on how to stay motivated and sane in the crazy world of building a software business.
Here's one of his quotes
"Bootstrapping was definitely something that made us successful because we had time to really focus on the business and not focus on fundraising, on report creating reports and stuff like this. So we learned a lot about what customers really want in that time, because we could spend all our time with customers."
During this interview, you will learn four things:
How Bootstrapping gave him an advantage you cannot get when you start your venture with VC backing.
His approach to staying ahead of the competition as the market gets more crowded.
His advice (having been a lawyer himself) on how to go about committing to contracts
His 3-step framework for hiring talent
For more information about the guest from this week:
Niklas Hanitsch
Website: SECJUR
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to finally solve the problem of managing all your personal and professional relationships. My guest is Matt Achariam, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Clay.
Matt has a diverse background in product development and design.
He was a principal at design agency FortySix, working with clients like Disney, BBC, Expedia, and the University of Pennsylvania and held product roles at Custora (acquired by Amperity) and LayerVault (acquired by Tiny Capital) and
He has a lifelong obsession with the craft of design, sparked by childhood curiosity about why certain objects elicit feelings of joy. This led him to question the status quo in relationship management software - and that's how the vision behind Clay was born.
In 2018, he and his co-founder, Zach Hamed, founded the company, an app for managing personal and professional relationships.
Their mission: to help people be more thoughtful and helpful with their relationships, ultimately helping them achieve more and be happier by putting others first.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore his journey of building Clay. Matt shares how he and his team create meaningful differentiation beyond just solid functionality. He elaborates how they gained early traction and created strong organic growth that enables them to now manage over 100 million relationships. Last but not least, Matt shares his insights on navigating tradeoffs, maintaining confidence in decision-making, and staying true to company values while scaling rapidly.
Here's one of his quotes
Be very clear about the values and the lines that you will cross and won't cross because when things start speeding up, momentum is something very precious.
When you move really fast, you have to move with confidence. And if you don't have the confidence and that foundation, you're not going to be able to make decisions rapidly.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
His unconventional approach towards creating a "minimum remarkable product" instead of a "minimum viable product"
How they strengthen their differentiation by focusing on things other than just functionality, and where he focuses to find inspiration.
How they've managed to achieve all their growth to be entirely organic and driven by word-of-mouth
What signals, he in hindsight, wishes they had paid more attention to in order to grow even more.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Matt Achariam
Website: Clay
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to build a business that can survive crises and emerge stronger every time. My guest is Lee Rubin, founder and CEO of Confetti.
Lee is a visionary culture leader with over a decade of experience in B2B sales. In 2014 she founded Wekudo - a remote corporate event planning agency. The idea behind it came while working at ZocDoc, where she struggled with the bureaucracy and logistics of planning team-building events.
Soon after that, she founded Confetti, realizing that the problem could only be solved through a combination of technology and people (not just people).
Under Lee's leadership, Confetti achieved exponential 600% growth during the COVID-19 pandemic and grew it as the leading solution for virtual team-building through a relentless focus on quality experiences.
Their mission: to simplify event planning while empowering organizations to build stronger, happier, and more holistic teams through unforgettable shared experiences that make work life more memorable.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lee to my podcast. We explore her journey to build a successful B2B SaaS company in a period when most of her competitors ceased to exist. Lee shares her story about a remarkable pivot during Covid, and why she decided to do nothing when "back to work" kicked in again. She also shares how she wasted 3 valuable years at the start, and what she could have done differently to avoid that. Last but not least, she elaborates on what ingredients she doubles down on to build a product people just keep talking about.
Here's one of her quotes
The main contributor to our success is that we built a platform that had a very strong form of agility. The platform can support various different use cases if we really want it to. It allowed us to pivot super quickly [during Covid]. The last invoice that we got from an in-person event and the first invoice that we got for a virtual was 10 days. We didn't spend time sitting in sadness that our events business was in shambles. We got right back to the drawing board, back to playing and having fun and trying to see what sticks - and the virtual events stuck.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
What she has done differently to survive during & post-COVID when other competitors closed their doors.
How she managed to pivot her entire business in less than 10 days when Covid started.
What she learned from niching down, where everyone else was widening the net - and how that played to their advantage.
How she's embedded delivering "wow factor" in every aspect of her company - and why this has become unnegotiable for her.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Lee Rubin
Website: Confetti
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to create a sticky and healthy B2B SaaS business. My guest is Emeric Ernoult, Founder and CEO of Agorapulse.
Emeric is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in social media and SaaS. He co-founded affinitiz, one of the first modern social network SaaS platforms in France in the early 2000s.
In 2010 he founded Agorapulse, social media platform. He grew it from generating €140,000 in annual revenue to achieving the same figure every three days, without taking significant outside funding.
This makes Agorapulse an inspiring bootstrapped SaaS success story. Hence I invited Emeric to my podcast. We explore his insights on what it takes to create a successful B2B SaaS company without having to rely on external funding. He shares is big lessons learned running the business through a PLG motion, and explains why they've pivoted to a sales-led SaaS motion, thereby moving up market. Last but not least, he elaborates on his approach to customer segmentation, creating measurable business value, and how to enable constant evolution
Here's one of his quotes
"Do not raise money. VC firms and investors are going to tell you that you're going to get more than money... if you don't know how to leverage that money, you're basically just given away part of your company for something that you're not going to get value from."
During this interview, you will learn four things:
Why you should prioritize investing in amazing customer support, especially when bootstrapping and the product is still evolving
How to go about hiring people that have the highest chance to bring your company success
What to focus on when you want to transition from PLG to a sales-led motion
His first principle when it comes to prioritizing features to create products people start talking about and keep talking about.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Emeric Ernoult
Website: Agora Pulse
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to turn a startup into a +$100M ARR growth business. My guest is Jim Yu, Founder & Exec Chair at BrightEdge
Jim Yu is the visionary. He started his career at Mercator Software (now IBM), serving as Director of Product Development, and then moved to Salesforce.com, where he was a Director of Product Management.
He graduated from university when he was 16 years old, and holds an MBA from Stanford University, a Master's in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Dakota.
In 2007 he founded BrightEdge where he's been at the helm as CEO for 16 years. He grew BrightEdge into a global leader, helping more than 8,500 of the world's largest brands drive measurable, predictable revenue from their websites and search engines
Their mission: to help marketers deliver content that resonates with their audience and drives business impact. More specifically, BrightEdge aims to transform online content into tangible business results, such as traffic, revenue, and engagement.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jim to my podcast. We explore his journey of building BrightEdge into a successful SaaS company that crossed the $100M ARR bar. He elaborates on his first principles when it comes to building core differentiators, being intentional about market choices, and setting clear milestones for each growth stage. Lastly, he shares his advice on managing go-to-market investments and staying driven by a strong mission to scale intelligently.
Here's one of his quotes
It really paid off was when we found the big box retail segment. So if you think about social networks, they have a lot of web pages that represent musicians or people or things like that. But on the retail side, they have a lot of products, they have a lot of categories. And if those show up well on search, it leads directly to purchases and revenue.
So the next use case we built into our technology was connecting the dots back to purchases and orders. And so then you could see, as you optimize for organic search, what was the impact on revenue, and then that's when we started to really get forth. We ended up getting most of the big retailers.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
Why he has been intentional about certain GTM techniques and how he's picked his verticals to bet on.
His first principle on making strategic choices that are aligned with the core capabilities and DNA of the company.
His approach to scaling, and when to step on the gas and when not.
How he defined their unfair advantage and what makes them different as a company
For more information about the guest from this week:
Jim on Linkedin
Jim on Twitter
Website: BrightEdge
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve the most challenging productivity challenge in Manufacturing: human action. My guest is Max Fischer, Founder and CEO of Deltia.
Max is a mechanical engineer. In 2014 he was a founding member of HackZurich, the largest hackathon Switzerland has ever seen.
In 2015 he co-founded Actyx and digitized 40+ factories. In this startup, he led product management, sales, and marketing teams.
Meanwhile he has established himself as a thought leader in the space of digital transformation for the factory floor.
In November 2022, Max founded Deltia, a startup focused on helping factory operators track, analyze and improve efficiency by identifying the best possible processes and assisting workers with digital tools.
Their mission: to make human work in manufacturing more productive and less error-prone by taking out the guesswork.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore what's broken in identifying productivity opportunities in manufacturing. Max explains how for the first time ever - this is possible. He shares some of his big lessons on building the company, especially when it comes to foundational questions like "who's it for" and 'what's it for' - and how that helped them remain highly focused.
He elaborates on his first principes for building the platform - and how that helps them stay resilient and offer scalable solutions. .
Here's one of his quotes
There are a lot of decisions that you take both on the technical level and what customers you're serving. Who is the user that you're trying to focus on? We decided quite early on to not specifically target the Toyota's of this world. The automotive OEMs are basically the best-run manufacturing companies in the world. There are use cases, obviously, also for technology, no doubt about that. But I think a big opportunity is to help the 98% of other factories to come to a similar level to where Toyota of Volkswagen are today.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
Why functionality is important - but not as important as system design
How to go about building for business scalability rather than just technical scalability of your solution.
Why the dream is not to help Toyota or Volkswagen - but companies much smaller and weaker than those brands.
What they are doing differently to accelerate stakeholder buy-in from IT, legal, and Unions.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Max Fischer
Website: Deltia
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to redefine the way we learn and solve the growing skills gap. My guest is Ruban Phukan, CEO of Goodgist.
Ruban is a serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience building technology products that solve real-world problems. He's written books about AI and holds several patents in this field.
He was part of Yahoo's first data scientist team, collaborating closely with co-founder David Filo to use data to address complex business problems.
In 2005, he co-founded Bixee.com, India's first vertical search engine employing patented technology. This company then merged with market leader MakeMyTrip and DataRPM, a pioneering Enterprise AI platform for industrial IoT, which was then acquired by Progress Software in 2017.
He 2019 he co-founded GoodTrade.AI, an asset management and investment analysis platform centred around Generative AI.
Most recently he co-founded GoodGist, an AI startup for upskilling and research that tackles the challenges of scaling corporate skill development.
Their mission: To organize the world's knowledge and make it universally accessible, conversational, and digestible in bite-sized chunks on demand.
Their belief is that this creates a significant moat for their clients against competitors in today's fast-paced landscape,
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ruban to my podcast. We explore the challenges of continuous learning in today's fast-paced technological environment.
He explains his first principles for making his strategic bets and why he opts to take a platform approach rather than a point solution approach. Last but not least, he explains his lessons from niching down and verticalizing his GTM approach around the platform.
Here's one of his quotes
We don't try to build a custom solution for a custom problem. We try to look at the problem and say, 'Okay, so we are not trying to only solve for a gas turbine failure, how do we build that technology, so that now instead of just only solving for data coming out of gas turbines, it can also look at data coming out of smart cars? How can it also handle data coming out of smart televisions? So, the focus has always been in trying to understand the problem and try to generalize, so that it can solve more business use cases, without having to recreate something new every single time.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
How he's accelerating traction by packaging his horizontal platform around highly valuable & business-critical problems.
How he goes about successfully serving the mid-market and large enterprise companies in their own unique ways.
His approach to identifying new value possibilities in the market that are worth building solutions for.
How he makes decisions on what to invest in, and what not.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Ruban Phukan
Website: Goodgist
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey that required a 180-degree pivot to find strong product market fit. My guest is Ryan Leitzeiser, Co-founder and CEO of Obie Insurance.
Ryan has over 10 years of experience in an executive role in technology and commercial real estate (CRE) investment and development.
Having worked at Hudson Capital Investments and as an Investment Analyst at Ram Real Estate, he has a strong background in CRE valuation, underwriting, asset management, and private equity.
In July 2018, he co-founded Obie, a Y Combinator-backed startup that's set out to make some waves in insurance technology.
Their mission: To provide a simple, affordable, and transparent insurance experience for landlords and real estate investors.
This inspired me, and hence, I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of insurance, particularly when it relates to Real Estate. He shares his experiences and big lessons learned from having to pivot the business. He elaborates on what he did wrong, and the courage it took to correct course - the then turn that into a growth engine that is hard to stop. Last but not least he talks about some of the essential traits to develop to build a business that lasts.
Here's one of his quotes
Insurance is an admin nightmare for them [Lenders] during the closing process. We provide them with technology and tools as it relates to insurance for their consumers so that mistakes are not made. And ultimately, for a lender, this help that we provide them ultimately unlocks a ton of customers for us. In fact, we have lenders that will charge their customer base a fee, if they don't use us.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
What traits to look for in employees if you want to attract people who can solve customer problems and provide great experiences.
What to do differently if you want your customers to make your solution mandatory for anyone they do business with.
His learnings on growing confidence and commitment from others.
What he's learned to be critical behaviors to adhere to in a company if you want to build a business that lasts.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Ryan Letzeiser
Website: Obie Insurance
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to build a lean organization that has the power to win the biggest brands in the retail market. My guest is Ed Bradley, CEO of Virtualstock.
Ed started his career in wholesale distribution and has extensive international experience in Supply Chain across Australia, Singapore, United States, and Canada.
In 2004, he co-founded VirtualStock. During this period, the company pioneered new ways for retailers’ to expand their product range, increase transparency with suppliers, and provide detailed order information for customers.
It made the product evolve into a global drop shipping and marketplace SaaS platform
Today, the company has 20 years of experience in logistics, supply chains and e-commerce, as well as an extensive roster of blue-chip clients.
Their mission: Sell more products online, without the risk
This inspired me, and hence, I invited Ed to my podcast. We explore the 20-year journey of building a lasting SaaS business. Ed shares what worked and what didn't, how he managed to grow the business without external capital, and how working with the largest retailers in the UK enabled this. He elaborates on why he's keeping the organization lean, and how that helped to create meaningful and durable differentiation, survive major setbacks, and win the bulk of the UK retail market as a customer.
Here's one of his quotes
People will always buy from people. And so it's all got to do with understanding the customer. In our world, that means two things: our customer is the retailer, but we need to understand their customer, who is the consumer. And so if you get those two things right, if you really have that knowledge, and you care about their business, and you care about their customer, then the rest will follow.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
How one customer can accelerate the trajectory of your business.
Why he'd opt for bootstrapping the business again if he ever got the choice.
How to keep your organization lean - and why that helps to grow defensible differentiation.
How he survived a major crisis in the business, and how this made them come out stronger.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Ed Bradley
Website: Virtualstock
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to change the way we think and use about Business Intelligence. My guest is Ryan Janssen, Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic.
Ryan is a serial entrepreneur and visionary leader in data analytics and AI. He brings experience from previous roles at Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Private Equity and venture Capital funds, and Ex Quanta: AI Studio, giving him a strong background in AI and data analytics.
His time in the VC world likely gave him valuable insights into what investors look for, how to pitch effectively, and how to strategically scale a business.
All his hands-on experience let him to co-found Zenlytic in July 2020. It's a BI tool for commerce brands and DTC businesses.
Their mission: making data insights accessible and actionable for everyone.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what's still broken in enabling non-data scientists to create unique insights to compete with the largest brands in the world. Ryan shares his big lessons learned in building a company that pioneered the promise of generative AI. He elaborates on his first principles around value creation and what he's doing differently to stay lean while delivering high performance as a business. Last but not least he shares his tips on being able to prioritize long-term thinking as the company grows and create a business that lasts.
Here's one of his quotes
I think the real winners will be the people that are building nimbly. The people that are applying creative uses of this tech and finding creative new ways to deliver value that doesn't look very much like the generation of software that preceded them.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
What you can do differently to ensure faster development and better quality with a lean team.
Why you should break predictability to find new growth opportunities.
How you can outcompete much larger big companies on their own strength.
When you have lots of leads the challenge is not how to close them - but how you qualify them
For more information about the guest from this week:
Ryan Janssen
Website: Zenlytic
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve a global challenge: helping field sales sell more and faster. My guest is Zach Barney, Co-founder and CEO of Mobly.
Zach Barney is an experienced SaaS sales leader and entrepreneur. He has been building and leading SaaS sales teams since 2010 at companies like Vehlo, Nearmap, Teem, and HireVue. Over his career, he has personally closed over $4 million in ARR, and his teams have closed over $40 million.
In 2023, he co-founded Mobly to reduce the high percentage (+25%) of sales activity that never gets logged into CRM systems.
Their mission: To redefine lead capture and qualification for event marketers.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Zach to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the lead generation process at in-person events. Zach explains his journey with Mobly to solve this problem - and elaborates how this fits in a much broader vision. He elaborates on the big lessons he learned around gaining traction and using pricing as a lever for growth. Lastly, he elaborates on how he's building a moat around his product.
Here's one of his quotes
We learned that we needed to change our pricing model. Our first handful of customers we were grossly under-charging them and it was largely due to the fact that we were pricing based on the number of seats. Somebody would openly tell us 'Yeah, well this person can share the license with this person.' So, we realized 'I guess we made a mistake on how we price this because this should be like a $20,000 contract and you're telling me that you're gonna pay 2000…'
During this interview, you will learn four things:
How he and his co-founder managed to get very comfortable doubling down on building a product without hardly spending anything.
What he changed to his pricing strategy to increase average deal-size AND make grow each customer account from there onwards.
What strategic choices he made around phasing his product strategy to ensure they got traction as early as possible - and keep growing it.
Why he's decided to build defensible differentiation around data and not features.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Zach Barney
Website: Mobly
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to outcompete everyone in the category. My guest is JJ (Projjal) Ghatak, Co-founder & CEO of OnLoop.
JJ (Projjal) is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He held business leadership roles across technology (Uber), management consulting (Accenture Strategy) and corporate development (Essar Capital). Besides that, he's a proud naturalized Singaporean, SMU Scholar, Stanford MBA, and awarded World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2022.
In 2020, JJ founded OnLoop in an attempt to solve a problem he'd experienced throughout his career: How hard it is for managers to turn high potential individuals into high performing teams.
Their mission: Convert every manager in the world into a great manager.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited JJ to my podcast. We explore the broken world of employee & team performance. JJ shares his journey of solving this problem by driving everyday habits and feedback rather than mere documentation. He shares his biggest lessons on creating product market fit, demand generation, and how to strategically prioritize your focus as a CEO as your company evolves. Lastly, he elaborates on his approach to challenge the status quo and outcompete established players.
Here's one of his quotes
Most enterprise software is built as a System of Record. So if you look at employee engagement software, what it is, is a quarterly survey, which is then creating dashboards and data. And so it's a System of Record, not a System of Action.
What you need to drive behavior is a System of Action. So if you think about it from another analogy, people understand is, you don't get fit by doing an annual health checkup every three months. You get fit by going to the gym. And actually 10,000 steps is the best thing that happened to fitness because it made it very easy to drive a system of action. And we think about team health and team performance in the exact same way
During this interview, you will learn four things:
The framework JJ is using to help him ensure he's focused on the most impactful priority on his list - every day.
That founders should focus on creating value, and salespeople on capturing value. And why it will hurt you if you mix this up.
His perspective on identifying their ideal customer segment to capture value and scale revenue in a predictable, repeatable way.
His first principles when it comes to building remarkable products.
For more information about the guest from this week:
JJ (Projjal) Ghatak
Website: OnLoop
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to win the global content plagiarism battle. My guest is Jon Gillham, CEO of Originality AI.
Jon Gillham is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. Before he started his SaaS business, he ran a content marketing agency.
Having been one of the earliest adopters of generative AI through his agency, he understood the wave of plagiarism problems that was coming, even before Chat GPT and GPT-4 were released.
That became the founding idea behind Originality AI - a company he founded in November 2022.
Their mission: help Web Publishers be sure they are producing Original Content and can hit publish with integrity.
This means: publishing unique, Human-Created content ... the kind Google and we, the readers wants!
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of AI-generated content -and how this impacts trust. Jon shares the challenges he's faced on his journey to solve the problem. He also explains why he decided to focus on a very specific niche and not education, while he was offered contracts with brand names as big as Harvard and Purdue. Lastly, he elaborates how they are able to build extremely competitive products with just 1 simple organizational tweak.
Here's one of his quotes
We built and ended up launching the weekend before Chat GPT launched. And when Chat GPT launched it kind of blew things up. We had people coming from all different parts of the world. Academia was coming our way. User-generated sites were coming our way to say - this is now a problem that we need to wrestle with.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
What to do / not to do when you want to create defensible differentiation with your product.
Why he turned away very big sales opportunities - and why that was a critical, but right choice.
How he maintained a good work-life balance (and what he learned from that in hind-sight).
How to outperform all your competitors on review sites.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Jon Gillham
Website: Originality AI
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to tackle a very challenging industry problem and scale impact. My guest is Theo Saville, Co-founder and CEO of CloudNC
Theo is a Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineer (M.Eng, University of Warwick), with a background in defense, laser-based metals 3D printing research at Warwick Manufacturing Group, and sales.
He entered metals 3D printing expecting to be able to harness a technology ready to disrupt manufacturing but gradually became disillusioned with the state and future applicability of the technology.
When he was exposed to CNC machining, he quickly realized its disruptive potential if it could be automated to the same degree as plastic 3D printing.
And that led him to co-found CloudNC in 2015.
Their mission: to make single-click manufacture a reality.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Theo to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's manufacturing world and how that's growing to a $400 billion industry. Theo shares his journey of solving a complex problem in a very unusual - but effective way. He elaborates how they're looking for leverage in everything - and how that's led to using video marketing to get over 10M+ impressions a month - showcasing software to automate machines. Last but not least, he stresses the importance of setting clear objectives - especially as your startup scales.
Here's one of his quotes
The idea was to first build software that makes it automatic to program these machines. And we raised our seed rounds on the basis of that. We realized after, I think, two or three years that it would take 10 years to actually build software that was capable enough to be saleable to any factory with these machines, there's just too much variation from factory to factory. So we went, I know, let's reduce the complexity of the problem. Let's build our own factory, make it really simple and standardized, and then copy and paste factories, and in that way, disrupt the industry.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
How they pivoted from selling a new platform to individual manufacturers to a model where they simply plug in what they already use.
What made them decide to move from a product-led sales approach to an eco-system-led sales approach?
How they created defensible differentiation and a unique value proposition in the very crowded market for manufacturing software.
What unusual opportunities niching down has provided them.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Theo Saville
Website: CloudNC
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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.
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve the non-trivial testing problems of some companies that we all blindly rely on . My guest is Harpreet Singh, Co-CEO of Launchable.
Harpreet is an entrepreneur, innovator, developer, creative product leader, and seasoned DevOps leader who has dedicated his life to building new solutions for software teams. He's got extensive product marketing & Product management experience at Sun Microsystems. Then helped CloudBees find product market fit and create a business based on OSS that scaled to multi-millions in ARR. Then moved to Atlassian where be became the GM for Atlassian Bitbucket, where he helped set the blueprint of what became the strategy at Atlassian to embrace DevOps tools in the market.
In September 2019 he co-founded Launchable and shares the CEO role.
Their mission: Help dev teams launch fearlessly. Their point of view: 80% of software tests are pointless. We’ll help you see the 20% that matters most.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Harpreet to my podcast. We explore what's broken around software testing these days. Harpreet provides his vision of how to address this. He elaborates on the journey of building an AI-powered software delivery platform and shares his most valuable go-to-market lessons - particularly why he didn't opt for a product-led growth motion and how he avoided getting stuck in red oceans. Last but not least, he shares his advice to peer SaaS CEOs on scaling their businesses while staying true to their core mission.
Here's one of his quotes
I spent a year and a half at Atlassian. They are the Gurus of product lead growth. So I got to see that close enough. And I came in and said we should probably do this. And I came to the realization that it's not one size fits all. Different teams have different needs, and the kinds we are serving have very different needs, then this product led growth.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
His lessons on how to simplify customer communication so it resonates optimally.
His advise on how to go beyond the obvious and find the biggest possible problem to solve for your ideal customers.
How to choose your Go-to-Market model and what specifics to look for
How he landed BMW as one of his early customers and what that taught him.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Harpreet Singh
Website: Launchable
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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.
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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to create meaningful global change by making problem creators responsible for solving it together through technology. My guest is Oscar Rundqvist, CEO of eComID.
Oscar is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. A massive mission. He's founded and led multiple companies since 2010 - and has also gained experience as an investment analyst and head of growth and digital experience in online retail.
In September 2023 he co-founded eComID - based on negative trend he saw developing after COVID in online retail: A rapidly growing global returns problem.
Their mission: To help the fashion industry reduce online product returns, shrink the environmental footprint, and guide shoppers to discover and buy products they'll truly love.
This inspired me, and hence, I invited Oscar to my podcast. We explore how online shopping is broken and created a massive global retail returns problem - both in cost, waste and emissions. Oscar explains his vision of how to solve this with technology and by getting an entire industry to work together in new ways. He then shares his first principles for building a lean SaaS business that moves the needle impact-wise. Lastly, he elaborates on his lessons learned to stay nimble and avoid making fatal mistakes.
Here's one of his quotes
Coming from the industry, we managed to take the right decisions often. But we did it by taking a lot of bad decisions, but we found them really fast. So, what we do is that we explore a lot of different things. When we have something, for example, a feature idea, let's imagine that we explore 50 different ideas at the same time, but then we always keep the retailers very close. So we have weekly meetings with all of the retailers that we work with right now to always validate and align the need.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
How to get an entire industry to collaborate on solving the same problem.
Why he doesn't fear competition, and is actually cheering them to take on the opportunity.
His first principle on keeping the focus on moving the needle in the leanest possible way.
Different ways to build trust with organizations that are 1000+ times the size of your startup.
For more information about the guest from this week:
Oscar Rundqvist
Website: eComID
Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection
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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.
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