SAAS Operators

In this episode Chase Chappell, the founder of Sirge, Success AI, Ads Mastery and Partner at DOE Media, joins us to talk about building a vertically integrated e-commerce operation, acquiring marketing agencies and smaller SaaS companies, and why personal brand is still the biggest moat in a saturated market. We talk about Block's 4,000-person layoff and what it says about how the public marke...

In this episode we talked to John Gargiulo, the founder of Airpost. Airpost makes new video ads every week for enterprise advertisers spending $1M or more a month on Facebook ads. They've got human creative strategists using a UGC footage library, AI generated clips, and an engine that orchestrates all of it into 10-40 net new ads per client per week. Some of his clients never open the platform. T...

In this episode we talked to Shaan Arora, the co-founder of Alia, about bootstrapping Alia Popups from $1M to $9M ARR in a year, bootstrapped, with zero outbound, and no venture capital. He started building Alia when he was 20, because he interned at Credit Suisse and decided he would do whatever it took to work for himself. Two customers, $20 a month, getting Etsy accounts blocked from cold outre...

In this episode we talked to Dipti Desai, the founder and CEO of Crstl, about why traditional SaaS pricing is dying and what actually makes software defensible in 2025.  Rishabh posted on X that traditional SaaS doesn't survive the next two years. We talk about why vibe coding is a feature problem, not a cost problem. Zach tells a story about a friend with a door knocking app and a companion m...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators, we talked to Yash Chavan, the founder and CEO of SARAL. We talked about why the pace of building has fundamentally changed and most SaaS is falling behind. Rishabh shares how his company went from one product to five in five months, why he stopped buying SaaS, and why doing anything manually at his company is a problem. Yash breaks down how Saral went from ze...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators, we talked to Daniel Patricio, the founder of ABRA Promotions. Daniel told us his story, from building startups in university, to working at a fast growing design agency, to spending eight years at Shopify through the IPO, and then leaving in 2021 to go full time on his own ecommerce business, selling South African Biltong. We talked about what broke for him a...

In this episode of the SAAS Operators Podcast, we talked to Jason Levin, the founder of Memelord. Jason explained how memes are the most useful tool for growth on the internet, and how “posting” is quickly becoming a necessity skill. We talked about government accounts memeing like creators, why shareability is more important than polish and professionalism and how Jason thinks about “memetic warf...

In this episode of the SAAS Operators, we go from HVAC techs to stablecoins to tech debt, the question is the balance between speed to market and borrowing from the future. The trades, like HVAC techs, are winning because real work still needs to get done. Zach explains about how he's running ads for his brothers home services business, and says it’s basically shooting fish in a barrel. If he...

In this episode of the SAAS Operators Podcast, we sat down with Matt Espinoza and Ryan Kaufman, the founders of Clover Labs to unpack how they're building a holding company designed to launch and scale multiple SaaS offers in parallel. Clover Labs is a 6 month old, 42 man team that increased MRR by 200K with one Slack message. We talk how they deliver LLM SEO in a fast changing environment, how or...

In this episode of the SAAS Operators Podcast, we sat down with Michael Alt to talk about the economics of building and running software. We talk about usage based pricing for ecommerce SAAS, why it feels great in November and awful in February, and how order volume, support load, and infra change your cost to serve each customer. Michael explains what happens when your COGS is mostly cloud and AI...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we sat down with Jannik Semmelhaack, founder of Voids.ai, the forecasting platform behind more than €1.5B in revenue for European consumer brands. Jannik shares how he went from running Philips’ online store to fixing the problem of keeping bestsellers in stock while ops is trapped in Google Sheets, and even with the incredible people on inventory, br...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we talk to Mike Manheimer, CMO at Postscript, about what happens when AI, services, and SaaS all converge around a single outcome. Mike shares how Postscript measures its success on customer economics, not feature usage, why only a small slice of their base needs a full “done for you” service, and how they think about threading the needle between auto...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we talk to Taylor Holiday, the Founder & CEO of Common Thread Collective, about the line between ecom SaaS and marketing agency services. Taylor explains how CTC evolved from an agency into a software enabled service business, why he doesn't call it a software company, and how a single growth map spreadsheet became their operating system. We t...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we talk about how Fermat is building AI search analytics and optimization as an acquisition channel for FERMAT. Rishabh explains how a free AI search product is compatible with a premium saas product that starts at $500 a month, why monitoring should be priced at zero, and how the real value is in workflows that generate shoppable, LLM friendly conten...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we sat down with Bar Bruhis, Kno’s General Manager, to look at how actual operators today are stepping in when a founder stops running the day to day but stays in the driver's seat. We talk about how accountability increases when the founder steps back, how and why Bar specifically is pushing execution while Jeremiah maintains the long-term vision...

In this episode of The SaaS Operators Podcast, Rishabh, Jeremiah, and Jack talk about what it takes to operate in challenging conditions. We talk about Stamped’s inception, tech debt, layoffs, and the challenge of building while staying profitable. Jeremiah shares the realities of inheriting a legacy codebase built by one man savant, competing against lean players like Judge.me, and making tradeof...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we sat down with Laura Lalonde, founder and CEO of Gridbank, to unpack how she built a global marketplace for authentic, phone-shot content. Laura shares how her experience running creative for a gaming company spending millions per month on advertising led her to spot the demand for real, user-shot video before it was mainstream. She describes how Gr...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we talked to Oliver Brocato, founder of Bustem.com and former founder of Tabs Chocolate, to unpack how he turned a pain point from his ecommerce days into a fast-growing SaaS business, protecting brands from copycats, counterfeiters, and scammers. Oliver breaks down how Bustem detects and removes bad actors across the internet, how most brands lose 5–...

In this episode of The SaaS Operators Podcast, we sat down with Tomer Tagrin, Founder & CEO of Yotpo, to talk about how he built a billion-dollar company, and navigated one of the boldest pivots in SaaS. Tomer tells the story about how Yotpo shut down its high growth email and SMS products to focus on reviews, loyalty, and AI, and how he’s rebuilding the company to be AI-native from the ground...

In this episode of The SaaS Operators Podcast ,  we sat down with Bennett Spooner, Co-founder of OperatorOS, to explore how he’s turning an automation agency into something that looks and feels like software. Bennett shares how his team built a customer service automation system that handles up to 90% of support without humans, and why Foreplay’s API is at the center of how he's productizing a...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we sat down with PJ Celis, founder of Judge.me, to unpack how he bootstrapped one of Shopify’s most dominant apps to $13M ARR without raising a single dollar. PJ shares the counterintuitive strategy behind Judge.me’s rise, why he built a company that drives prices down, creates consumer surplus, and wins by aligning perfectly with Shopify’s incentives...

In this episode of The SaaS Operators Podcast, we dig into what it takes to scale a Shopify Plus SaaS when the market is no longer surging. Stuart Chaney, founder of Rivo, joins us to talk about the ceiling on Shopify’s TAM, the realities of platform risk, and why he keeps all his chips on Shopify despite the threat of sudden policy changes. We break down agentic coding with LLM guardrails, the gr...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, we talk about the changing landscape for ecommerce. We start with why venture-backed founders are leaving Shopify, unpacking the brutal math of cash conversion cycles and the near-impossible path to a true venture-scale outcome. From there the conversation moves into the “barbell effect” where tiny teams and massive enterprises thrive while the middle...

In this episode of The SAAS Operators Podcast, we sit down with Drew Fallon, founder of Iris, to unpack his story moving from brand side to building finance software. Drew shares how Iris grew from a scrappy $500 a month product to a multi-million ARR platform helping brands forecast working capital and scale with confidence. We dig into the real differences between e-commerce and SAAS, the people...

In this episode of the SAAS Operators Podcast, we talk about the different games founders decide to play, and different definitions of success. Why the pursuit of money is the most noble thing you can do, and what happens when the next million doesn't meaningfully improve your life. The boys talk about different incentives, like status and legacy and how art and fashion can be tools for levera...