SAAS Operators

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Jack, Jeremiah and Rishabh talk to Burak Karakan about how he's building an AI data team companies can use. They cover why his company started with a data integration layer before adding agents, how that helps tackle messy, multi-source business questions, and whether the company plans to move from time to insight toward taking action on a busines...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Rishabh, Jeremiah, and Jack tackle an uncomfortable question: what happens to a traditional, well-run software business in the AI era? If you're running a $200-800M company with solid margins and steady growth, who's actually buying you? They dig into EBITDA multiples, why PE's old playbook looks shakier after write-offs like Medallia, and...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Rishabh Jain is fresh off three 20 hour days, a 20-minute layover in Denver, and four hours of sleep. Fueled by coffee and diet coke with zero complaints. The conversation starts with the AI adoption gap. Rishabh came back from Cincinnati with a clear read, the average person there is about two years behind SF, not nine months. Jeremiah added that the...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Jacob Posel joins Jeremiah, Jack, and Rishabh to talk about HQ, a cloud-based file system built on top of Claude Code and Codex that launched two days before recording. The origin story is good. Jacob meets Corey Epstein, sees a product called Indigo that was ahead of its time but waiting on AI to catch up. They stay in touch. Corey eventually puts Ja...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Jim Benton, CEO of Adapt, joins Rishabh, Jeremiah, and Jack to talk about what it actually looks like to build a company brain. Adapt connects all your tools, GitHub, Linear, HubSpot, Notion, Slack, and instead of scheduling tool calls one at a time like an MCP would, it swarms them. Hits everything at once, pulls the data back, and runs the best avai...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Ronak Shah breaks down what the best SaaS brands look like from inside Gaas for SaaS. Rokt gets the top spot. Smaller than the others, but the most intentional operators on the list. They get the pay it forward model, they activate partnerships, and they understand that feedback is its own thing, separate from conversion. Proxima rounds it out, having...

In this episode Jack, Rishabh, Chase and Jeremiah talk about how AI is changing the way they run their teams day to day. Rishabh challenged Chase on why he keeps getting pulled into problems, and his read was that Chase wants to keep his finger in the pot, so the honest move is to admit that and pick two things to drive well. We got tactical on how each of us is actually using AI right now. Rishab...

This podcast features an in-depth conversation with Maxx Blank, one of the co-founders of Triple Whale. Maxx shares the company's journey from a simple ecommerce dashboard that Maxx wanted for his own Shopify brand, to an AI-native data platform that serves over 30,000 of the fastest growing Shopify stores. We talk about internal tensions (fighting at work) and leadership approaches when navig...

In this episode of the SaaS Operators Podcast, Varun Kundra , co-founder of AfterSell, talks about how the business was built around post-purchase upsells on Shopify. The core product sits in the window between checkout and the order confirmation page, a moment where conversion rates on relevant offers can hit 5-15% when set up properly, and where the highest-performing stores see the biggest AOV...

In this episode Aaron Schwartz and Daniel Brady, co-founders of Orita, joined us and we talked about how they built an ML-powered audience intelligence product for e-commerce brands. Orita tells you which customers on your list want to hear from you, when and what about. It started as a consulting project where 5 out of 6 cold-outreached brands booked a meeting in under thirty minutes, it grew ent...

In this episode Alex Cooper and Maneesh Apte, two of the co-founders of Parker, joined us to talk about building an AI creative strategist that lives inside your Slack channel. Parker feels like a senior hire on your team. It sends you ideas without you asking. It tells you when something is a bad fit for your brand. It’s the product Alex Cooper was asking for, built by marketers that ran creative...

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...