The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Diego Oppenheimer spent five years building Microsoft Excel features used by a billion people. Then he discovered that even Microsoft's $7 billion research center couldn't get algorithms to the teams that needed them. So he set about launching a marketplace to fix that. Algorithmia connects academics building powerful algorithms with app developers who can use them - and hit 14,000 developers on t...

George Palmer spent less than $50 to launch SendOwl, a self-funded SaaS for selling digital products. Two months later, it was profitable. He found first customers by searching Twitter every morning for people complaining about competitors. George has experience building multiple businesses, from freelance Rails work to digital product platforms. In this episode, he shares how he validated SendOwl...

Vincent Cassar sent cold emails to people who had never heard of his product and got a 40% response rate. His secret SaaS growth tactic was embarrassingly simple: follow up three to four times instead of once. In this episode, Vincent walks through three specific SaaS growth hacks from his Growth Hacking Experiment, including how Quora became his best-converting lead generation source at 35% signu...

Mike Muhney had $15,000 left from a $100,000 angel investment when his first software product failed. Over a four-hour brainstorm breakfast, he and his co-founder sketched a menu structure on a napkin that would become ACT! Contact Management - the product that created the CRM industry and sold for $47 million. In this episode, Mike reveals how losing product-market fit on his first product led to...

Robert Coorey spent a year working double full-time hours on a video production business - and made $32,000 in revenue with $32,500 in costs. He lost $500. That taught him the most important SaaS go-to-market lesson: if you are not feeding a starving crowd, no amount of marketing will save your business. In this episode, Robert breaks down his 4-step SaaS go-to-market framework for finding hungry...

Nick Kellet sold his SaaS business to Business Objects for over $8 million in 1999 - then walked away from enterprise software to create a board game. Gift Trap sold nearly 100,000 copies and won 20+ awards worldwide. In this episode, Nick reveals the strategy behind his SaaS exit that started when his product was only six weeks old, how he ordered 10,000 board games without knowing anything about...

Adam Dicker built a $500,000-per-month online business using the same SaaS marketing plan and lead generation tactics he teaches to other entrepreneurs. With a portfolio of over 30,000 domains - including one he sold for eight figures - he knows how to turn search traffic into revenue. In this episode, Adam reveals how he ranks any website on Google's front page within two weeks, why long-tail key...

At 2:30 in the morning, lying on an air mattress in his mother's spare bedroom, Benji Rogers had an idea that would not let him go. He spent his last seven pounds buying the domain PledgeMusic.com. Six years later, the company had 50 employees and released over 1,000 albums. In this episode, Benji reveals how achieving SaaS product-market fit in the music industry meant overcoming years of being t...

Aaron Epstein's team put up a teaser page offering $5 in free credits to anyone who signed up before their marketplace launch. Eight months later, 70,000 people had registered. Within 16 months of launching a marketplace for design assets, Autodesk acquired the company. In this episode, Aaron breaks down seven strategies Creative Market used to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of launching a mark...

Aaron Epstein spent six years running a solo software business he built in his college dorm room. It was making six figures a year, fully automated - and he was bored. So he merged with co-founders, built a SaaS marketplace for design assets, and sold it to Autodesk less than 16 months after launch. In this episode, Aaron shares how a single $250 pattern sale to MetLife sparked the idea for Creati...

When Y Combinator advisor Kevin Hale suggested putting a "powered by StatusPage.io" badge on every customer's status page, Scott Klein thought it was disrespectful. He almost said no. That badge now drives 30 to 40 percent of all new customers - making scaling SaaS almost effortless. In this episode, Scott shares the Y Combinator advice that changed his SaaS growth trajectory, why he regrets the u...

Scott Klein and his brother started building StatusPage.io as a side project - two weeks of contract work, two weeks on the product. Four months later, they had their first paying customer at $50 a month. Eighteen months after that, they crossed $1M in annual recurring revenue with 1,500 customers including Visa and Kickstarter. In this episode, Scott reveals how StatusPage.io found its first SaaS...

Todoist grew from 200,000 users to over 4 million in three years - and Amir Salihefendic did not hire a marketing person until a year into that growth. The key to scaling SaaS was not campaigns or PR. It was nailing app store distribution: Google search, the App Store, and Google Play drove all product-led growth. In Part 2, Amir explains why building an MVP too quickly can kill your startup, how...

Amir Salihefendic built Todoist as a student in 2007, launched it with a single blog post, then abandoned the SaaS distribution channel for four years to work on a social network. When he came back in 2012, it still had 200,000 users - and he grew it to over 4 million. Todoist became a SaaS distribution channel success story through pure product-led growth. In Part 1 of this interview, Amir reveal...

Maria Dykstra published a book on Amazon in two weeks for under $200 - and it hit #1 in the small business marketing category. That single SaaS lead generation move generated thousands of downloads, drove leads to her agency's website, and landed speaking engagements she never applied for. In Part 2 of this interview, Maria breaks down the full SaaS lead generation pipeline: how to research topics...

One of Maria Dykstra's consulting clients landed a new customer with a five-minute Twitter conversation. No cold calls, no ads, no pitch deck - just LinkedIn lead generation principles applied through real-time social selling. Maria spent 14 years at Microsoft before founding TreDigital, growing it from 2 people to offices in 3 countries. Maria breaks down her 5-15-5 formula for LinkedIn lead gene...

At 24 years old, Syed Balkhi had already built several 7-figure businesses - and influencer marketing SaaS through content was the engine behind all of them. His free WordPress tutorial site, WPBeginner, became the largest in the world and funneled hundreds of thousands of users into OptinMonster. Syed reveals how he used Twitter's advanced search to find SaaS content marketing ideas in real time,...

Bridget Harris and her husband Keith built a user onboarding framework that handles nearly half a million bookings a month - and they never spent a dollar on marketing. Their entire viral growth engine was a single orange button on every free booking page that said "Get your free account." YouCanBookMe grew 130% every year for three straight years, from a few hundred dollars a month to the doorste...

Dave Schneider used influencer marketing SaaS tactics to double Ninja Outreach's traffic in two months - without spending a dollar on ads. His SaaS content strategy included over 30 guest posts, product reviews, and resource page mentions that pushed the product to 9,000 monthly sessions. Dave breaks down the complete SaaS content strategy step by step. You will learn how to find influencers, rank...

Douglas Calhoun spent nine months taking prospective students out for coffee. No sales script. No pitch deck. Just genuine conversations about their career goals. The product? A $15,000 coding boot camp. His approach to SaaS customer lifetime value proves that authentic relationships sell high-ticket products better than any funnel. Hack Reactor's first class had 15 students, each paying $15,000....

Andrew Wilkinson built three multi-million dollar businesses by age 30 - and he did it while working just five hours a day. His secret as a SaaS serial entrepreneur was not grinding harder but being what he calls "strategically lazy." This Part 2 interview reveals how he ran Metalab, Flow, and Pixel Union simultaneously. Andrew explains how he launched Flow (a SaaS product used by Etsy, Tesla, and...

Andrew Wilkinson had $200 in his bank account when he quit his data entry job and launched Metalab as SaaS without funding. He pretended to be a team by always saying "we" and charged double what he thought he was worth. Nine years later, Metalab had 60 employees and had designed the interface for Slack. Andrew shares how he went from building a nerdy Mac news site as a teenager to running the boo...

Grant Miller and his co-founder built Look IO at a startup weekend, raised $200K in advisory funding, landed HotelTonight as their first customer, and completed a SaaS acquisition by LivePerson for millions of dollars - all in nine months. This is one of the fastest startup acquisition stories in SaaS history. Grant reveals how he found his technical co-founder by teaching himself to code first, t...

Robi Ganguly and his co-founders spent a year on customer acquisition startup efforts for Apptentive - and ended up with exactly two paying customers. It took another seven months to land a third. Then Yahoo emailed them out of the blue, and everything changed. Robi reveals how App Store frustration in 2008 led to an idea that sat dormant for over two years, the 30-day MVP sprint that finally brou...

Rob Rawson built Time Doctor to over $1M ARR without a marketing budget, using first customers tactics that cost nothing but time. His playbook? Writing 300 Quora answers, creating competitor comparison articles, and a reverse image search trick for promoting infographics - all customer acquisition startup strategies that work with zero ad spend. In this tactical deep-dive, Rob shares the exact gr...