The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Three first-time entrepreneurs bootstrapped an enterprise RFP platform for four years before raising a dime. Finding their first SaaS customers through founder-led sales meant Jafar Owainati was doing seven to nine demos a day linked directly to his personal Calendly calendar. Why listen: Learn how founder-led sales through beta interviews and startup sales tactics grew Loopio from a product colle...

Ryan Carson spent seven years running in-person coding workshops and building the ThinkVitamin blog. When his wife suggested teaching online, that SaaS content marketing foundation launched a bootstrap to profitability journey that turned into tens of millions in revenue with 650,000 students. Why listen: Learn how SaaS content marketing over seven years became the launch platform for an 8-figure...

Sandi Lin left Amazon in 2013 with one year of savings and an idea for a Yelp for online learning. Three months later, she shut it down. Her journey of finding product-market fit through a SaaS pivot was just getting started. Two pivots and a 60-day MVP later, Skilljar found its real opportunity. Why listen: Learn how finding product-market fit required killing a first idea fast, how a randomized...

Most SaaS companies are wasting money on SaaS PPC. Todd Chambers has spent over 10 years running paid media campaigns for SaaS businesses, and he says 95% of them make the same six SaaS lead generation mistakes with their ad spend. Why listen: Learn the six most common SaaS lead generation mistakes - from failing to understand unit economics and not tracking offline conversions, to under-investing...

Darren Chait built a mobile app for meeting preparation. It got thousands of users but monetization was painfully slow. Then his team built an internal Slack plugin - and a customer saw it and asked to use it. That pivot unlocked self-serve SaaS growth through product-led growth that changed everything. Why listen: Learn how Hugo's self-serve SaaS model turns every shared meeting note into a distr...

Robin van Lieshout's SaaS sales funnel was broken. He had 40 customers but most were barely using the product. His BDRs could not book a single meeting with B2B SaaS companies. Then he realized the problem was not product-market fit - it was the sales messaging in his SaaS sales strategy. Why listen: Learn why Robin cut six customer segments generating 70% of revenue, how rewriting the sales deck...

Sabba Keynejad flew to San Francisco for his Y Combinator interview. He got rejected. The reason: "Why are you not charging your users?" Forty-eight hours later, Sabba had 20 paying customers and VEED.io was on the path to SaaS monetization and bootstrap to profitability. Why listen: Learn why doubling SaaS pricing twice with less than one month of runway had zero impact on user growth, how SEO la...

Jaleh Rezaei pitched her first customers with no product demo - just an API and a slide deck. Her first customer paid $100 a month. Two weeks into Y Combinator, Mutiny had its MVP live and was closing SaaS customer acquisition deals by embedding directly into customer teams. Why listen: Learn how doing unscalable things was the fastest path to SaaS customer acquisition and product-market fit, how...

Sam Dolbel's co-founder taught himself to code inside a tent in Tanzania. That scrappy beginning turned into SINC, a workforce management app that grew to 1,000 paying customers through SaaS customer discovery and organic word of mouth - with zero outbound sales. Why listen: Learn the hard lessons of SaaS customer discovery through a free product, why feedback from non-paying users nearly led them...

Ben Tossell generated over $240,000 in revenue in less than a year - as a non-technical founder who never wrote a single line of code. He built Makerpad entirely with no-code SaaS tools like Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier. And for most of that time, it was just a side project while he worked at Earnest Capital. Why listen: Learn how a non-technical founder used Twitter demos and GIFs as a bootstrap...

ClickFunnels went from zero to $135 million ARR in five years - entirely SaaS without funding. The breakthrough? They stopped selling software and started selling $997 education bundles, giving the self-funded SaaS product away for free. That counterintuitive move generated 10x more upfront revenue to fuel aggressive paid acquisition. Why listen: Learn how building a SaaS without funding requires...

Renat Zubairov spent six months building a product and gave it away for free. Almost nobody wanted it. Then he changed his SaaS pricing and started charging - and better customers showed up, gave better feedback, and helped build a better product. That pricing strategy shift took Elastic.io from zero to $2.5M revenue growing 100% year over year. Why listen: Learn how SaaS pricing acts as a custome...

Jennifer Johnson was a stay-at-home mom spending two hours a night scheduling Facebook posts. Her husband built a tool in four weeks that cut it to 20 minutes. That personal frustration became CinchShare - a niche SaaS for direct sellers now doing $5M+ ARR with zero outside investment. Her competitive differentiation strategy? Ignore Hootsuite and Buffer entirely and build only for one audience. W...

Uri Haramati built Torii's first MVP in two weeks. It took one full year to land his first SaaS customers. But the SaaS growth lessons that mattered most came from Pipedrive - the first deal closed with a company nobody on the team knew personally. Uri explains how he went from building consumer apps like Meerkat and Houseparty to launching a B2B SaaS category creation in SaaS management. He gave...

Amos Schwartzfarb has invested in and worked hands-on with over 50 startups at Techstars. The biggest pattern he sees in failed startup sales? Founders target everyone and close no one. His consultative selling SaaS approach flips that - narrow your ICP until you close 100% of deals. Amos breaks down the W3 SaaS sales framework - Who, What, and Why - the same playbook he teaches pre-Series A compa...

Ryan Bennick and Ward Sandler were enterprise sales reps who bought an HTML book and taught themselves to code. Six years later, a Squarespace forum post with 100,000 views led these SaaS co-founders to build a profitable niche SaaS business. The MemberSpace co-founders reveal how they went from $600 freelance gigs to a multiple six-figure SaaS. As non-technical co-founders, they split learning -...

JD Trask and his co-founder started Raygun with $10,000 each in 2007, and it took 12 years of SaaS content marketing to build a multi-million dollar business. No big launch. No viral moment. Just content, user groups, and podcasts compounding over time. JD reveals how Raygun grew to 200K+ monthly blog visitors through inbound marketing SaaS tactics - writing about everything from broken fridges to...

Two agency founders spent two years building a better-looking form - and it turned into a freemium SaaS engine that hit $1M ARR in its first year. Every form shared was a marketing channel. Every response created a new user. And 80% of Typeform's new business still comes from that product-led growth flywheel today. David Okuniev shares how Typeform grew from a toilet company client project to a $3...

Dennis van der Heijden burned through $400K in VC funding, went through a divorce, and spent nearly a decade in what felt like a failed software startup. His SaaS turnaround came when competitors merged and abandoned small customers - leaving Convert.com as the last affordable option standing. Dennis reveals how he sold 50 customers at $4,000 each during a single conference talk, why he threw out...

Ryan Born had 400 people signed up for his SaaS product. Not a single one would pay. His savings were running out, cold outreach flopped, and paid ads burned cash with nothing to show. Then he built a SaaS sales process that delivered $10 leads - and everything changed. Ryan reveals how Cloud Campaign pivoted from a broad social media tool to a niche agency platform after cold calling SaaS prospec...

Guillaume Moubeche built an "ugly beta" in two weeks and had 100 signups in the first month. Users loved the idea but said the product lacked 90% of competitor features. Then AppSumo came calling - and startup traction was about to get a lot more interesting. Guillaume reveals how Lemlist generated $170,000 in startup traction through an AppSumo launch in just two weeks, hit $250K ARR in its first...

Most founders waste hours sending cold LinkedIn messages that get ignored. Brynne Tillman discovered a method for selling SaaS without sales experience - using social proximity to turn your existing network into a warm referral engine that generates 3 introductions per conversation. Brynne breaks down her complete LinkedIn social selling playbook for startup sales. Filter a client's connections to...

AJ charges $19 a year for Carrd - a one-page website builder competing against Wix and Squarespace. No marketing. No employees. No investors. Just a SaaS subscription billing model starting at $9/year and a product so frictionless you can build a website before signing up. Result: over $30K MRR. AJ reveals how he built an audience of 50,000 through free HTML templates, launched Carrd with a single...

Suresh Sambandam pivoted three times over 10 years, nearly went bankrupt, and downsized from 40 employees to 15. Then a customer paid $50K for his product and $90K for a better UI - and that changed everything. Today Kissflow does close to $10M in recurring revenue, and SaaS SEO drives over 50% of their inbound leads. Suresh breaks down how he built Kissflow's recurring revenue engine through topi...

Mark Thompson built 12 software products. Most failed. But they taught him one lesson - every shopping cart he used was terrible. That frustration became PayKickstart, which reached $1M ARR. Then SaaS churn at 20-30% nearly killed everything. Mark reveals how he bootstrapped PayKickstart using a 100,000-person email list and 50% affiliate commissions, but feature bloat overwhelmed new users and Sa...