The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

He walked into his first pricing call asking for $100,000 and walked out with $10,000 a year. Shahar Azulay had never sold anything before co-founding groundcover, and the product he was selling had no user interface yet, just a sensor and some dashboards. He took it anyway, and still argues that was the right call. Shahar explains why founders should close their first dozen customers at almost an...

He closed most of the deals himself. It took him ten years to stop. Ross Andrew Paquette bootstrapped Maropost to around $50 million in ARR, and for most of that run he was the discovery call, the demo and the follow-up. It worked well enough to take the business from $300,000 to $27 million in 28 months with six or seven people. Then the thing that built the company became the thing capping it. R...

He never bought a keyword, never ran content marketing, and the big outbound sales force he tried did not work. Rodney Robinson still grew TabaPay to $100 million in revenue, almost entirely through inbound, on a single $2.5 million seed round that stayed the company's only outside money for nine years. Rodney explains how he found a problem Mastercard could not solve, why he chased small fintechs...

He needed a big retailer's data to build the product. No big retailer gives data to a company with no product. Felix Hoffmann solved it sideways: 7Learnings sold a paid consulting project, kept the right to use the data, and built its predictive pricing product on top of it. Ten customers later it was at $1M ARR, and he had closed every one himself. Felix explains why a demand forecasting product...

Nine months in. Close to zero customers. He was ready to hand the money back to investors. Rick Knudtson had already sold one company, so Workshop started with the idea he found interesting: an intranet. Customers kept telling him to fix email instead. The rebuild took 30 days and brought in 10 customers. Rick explains why big enterprises cannot run internal comms on a cheap marketing tool, how a...

Ten thousand ads, all built by hand. Julius Körfgen left that grind to build Uplane, software that automates it, then sold to his first customers before writing a line of code. Uplane reached a million dollars in ARR in about six months. Julius makes the case for selling before building: the cold outreach that got strangers on calls, the one-week sprint from discovery call to working demo, and why...

Two founders. Two engineers. No product. Christian Lund closed one of the Big Four accounting firms as Templafy's first customer before the software existed, by selling a point of view instead of a demo. When that customer asked to start with ten people, he didn't say no. He said "yes, if." Christian breaks down his approach to selling to enterprise without a product, why he answered every ten-per...

He spent two years building his own AI model. Over one launch weekend, a side experiment out-earned it. Eugene Cheah killed the original product and rebuilt Featherless AI around what customers actually paid for. He explains why he concluded people wanted these models more than they wanted his, and how he made the call to walk away from two years of work. Eugene breaks down how GPU hot-swapping ch...

Five years at $50K ARR. Ten failed projects. Lending the business money out of his own bank account. George Georgiadis came close to shutting Happier Leads down. Instead he broke through the revenue plateau and reached $1.5M ARR with zero employees. George explains what moved the number: an end-to-end platform instead of a narrow point tool, cold email as his cheapest channel because he owns the m...

Ron Hash bootstrapped Skimmer, software for pool service companies, to over $1 million in ARR and 1,500 customers with zero paid marketing, then sold it. His SaaS pricing was the engine: 50 cents per serviced pool with a $29 minimum, when every competitor charged per seat. Ron shares how he validated the idea with one cold call, why his SaaS pricing aligned revenue with each customer's growth, how...

Six years of grinding, and SaaS churn kept capping his growth: win a customer, lose a customer, repeat. Then one pricing call flipped everything. Farzad Rashidi pivoted Respona to a done-for-you service-as-software model and 4x'd in twelve months the revenue it took six years to build. Farzad shares why adding features never fixed his SaaS churn, the agency CEO haggle that sparked the pivot, how h...

Danny Jenkins was $150,000 in credit card debt with zero paying customers 18 months into building his bootstrapped startup. An accelerator told him to quit. He ignored the advice and built ThreatLocker into a cybersecurity company approaching $200M in revenue. In this episode, Danny Jenkins shares how he grew a bootstrapped startup from $150K in debt to nearly $200M in revenue. You'll hear how he...

He wrote the startup playbook. Then he watched founders who used it lose control of what they built. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, felt like he was feeding companies into a meat grinder. Founders will hear his startup governance framework, why most lose founder control after product-market fit, and the two-page filing that protects them. Eric breaks down what happens when one customer bec...

He talked openly about his startup idea. A competitor took it and beat him to market. Mark Abbott shared his SaaS vision inside a tight-knit coaching community. A member passed it to a client who launched first. Founders will hear how Mark recovered with community-led SaaS growth and built Ninety to $44M ARR and 18,500 customers. Mark explains why he spent 4 years on B2B community building before...

Two years on Quora and Reddit. Zero customers. Yega Kumarappan and his two co-founders had no sales experience. They bet that founder-led sales could beat the B2B sales playbook. Founders will hear how Paperflite grew from a 400K seed to 500 B2B customers and seven figures in ARR while selling SaaS without sales experience. Yega shares the founder-led sales process that took conversion from 2-3% t...

Two failed startups. 250K euros in debt. Stuck in Paris with a sick baby and no plan. Tibo Louis-Lucas walked away from a stable CTO job and shipped 11 products in 4 months on unemployment benefits. Today TMAKER is a bootstrapped SaaS startup portfolio doing $1M a month across 5 products with a team of 10. Tibo breaks down the exact signal that told him Tweet Hunter was the one after 10 failures,...

Hadn't coded in four years. No team. No idea. Marius Meiners launched his AI startup, Peec AI, with a V0 prototype built in 1.5 days and 8 letters of intent. 14 months later: $8.6M ARR, 55 employees, and a competitor with 5x his funding chasing enterprise. Marius shows how to validate an AI startup before coding, win the mid-market while competitors chase enterprise, and price your AI startup at €...

He built a free tool as a lead magnet. Then customers started calling his cell phone, begging to pay for it. Ev Kontsevoy turned an open source SaaS side project into Teleport, now an 8-figure ARR business with 500+ customers. Founders will hear how a free GitHub project became an open source SaaS business worth eight figures - and why selling to the wrong buyer persona nearly capped growth. Ev re...

Most SaaS onboarding is terrible - rigid, pushy, and forgettable. Karel Papik spent 15 years designing video games before he looked at B2B software and thought: this is hopeless. He co-founded Product Fruits, a digital adoption platform that now serves over 1,300 paying customers. Founders will hear how gaming psychology transformed their SaaS onboarding and helped them break through the $2M ARR c...

Three years. Zero traction. Then product-market fit hit - twice. Girish Redekar taught himself to code at 28 and spent years on failed ideas before B2B product-market fit clicked with RecruiterBox. Customers endured a broken PayPal payment hack just to keep using the product. He bootstrapped to 2,500+ customers, sold it, then found product-market fit again with Sprinto by paying for 10 audits befo...

His competitors have raised hundreds of millions. ChatGPT can do the basics of what his product does. Sylvestre Dupont's entire company is six people. His competitive differentiation strategy - that most businesses want something simple that works in minutes, not enterprise complexity - is what keeps Parseur alive and growing 60% year over year. Founders will hear how Dupont rebuilt from rule-base...

Five years to the first million. Zero dollars raised. NFL teams pay the same price as high school teams. Hewitt Tomlin built TeamBuildr into a $10M ARR vertical SaaS company by focusing on one job function and refusing to charge enterprise customers more. Founders will hear why flat pricing drove more growth than premium tiers ever could. Hewitt shares how a single conversation with a college stre...

Sarah Ahmad offered her first product for free during COVID. Nobody signed up. Her next company hit 10,000 customers and 8-figure ARR. The difference was SaaS product-market fit - validated before writing a single line of code. Sarah shares how she and her co-founder tested demand with a landing page in the YC community, signed 100 paying customers using Google Drive and a Stripe link, and built S...

100 restaurants. Every order processed manually. Zero lines of code. Zhong Xu built Deliverect by turning integration partners into a SaaS distribution channel that scaled his product 10x faster than direct sales. Here's how he reached 80,000 restaurants and nearly $100M ARR through partnerships instead of cold outreach. Zhong shares why he launched with a Wizard of Oz MVP, how he convinced compet...

Joel Griffith's first customer paid $200 a month. His infrastructure cost $50. He was profitable from day one. But it took three years of nights and weekends before his bootstrapped SaaS hit $500K ARR. Then Google Cloud launched a competing product and a startup raised $60M to go after his market. His growth did not flinch - because eight years of content had built a bootstrapped SaaS moat that fu...