Founder Views - SaaS, Business, and Beyond

I'm speaking with Luca Micheli, CEO and founder of Customerly.io . Customerly helps companies create better relationships with their customers with effective communication. He launched Customerly about 4 years ago, they have over 17,000 customers around the world. This is a fascinating story, Luca is competing in a very hot market, where it was once pretty much a monopoly with Intercom as the main...

I’m speaking with Braden Urquhart, a fellow Canadian and CEO of RecTimes , a scheduling software that helps ice rinks manage their bookings. This was such a valuable episode to listen to if you’re focused on building a profitable, lean and high-margin business. RecTimes is a small remote team of three people. But because they’re playing in such a tightly defined niche market, they’re able to find...

Recently, I did a talk at the GrowthMentor Summit , which was a virtual summit, that included 50 of some of the world’s best growth leaders. This was such an amazing event. There were thousands of attendees from all over the world, that had free access to some incredible insights from some very talented people. My talk was on outbound sales. It was called "How to get your first 500 paying clients...

Competition is a great thing. When I see an industry with many different competitors, and many companies offering similar services to customers, my mouth starts to water. This tells me that there’s a healthy market of customers spending a lot of money on services that solve their problems. There are several advantages to playing in a competitive market: A small piece of a big pie = $$ My first Saa...

I’m speaking with Mark Thompson in this episode. Mark is the founder and CEO of PayKickStart , a subscription management, and affiliate solution that helps entrepreneurs and SaaS companies sell more and manage the payments side of their business with ease. PayKickStart recently surpassed $1M in ARR, and has really been picking up steam. Aside from PayKickStart, Mark runs Digital KickStart , a sist...

I was super excited about this episode, I’m speaking with Renat Zubairov, the co-founder and CEO of elastic.io, a B2B SaaS that helps enterprises connect and process different applications. They were founded in 2013, and have been seeing triple digit revenue growth year after year, which is extremely difficult for a company this size. They’re currently doing well over $2M in annual recurring reven...

This was an episode I was really excited about. I met Nim in Boston back in January 2019. He told me about what he was building, and I was instantly pumped about it. He founded CloudTax , which is a tax filing service that helps Canadians easily file their taxes online for free. The reason i was excited to speak to Nim is because tax and accounting have always been close to me. I got my BCom in ac...

In this episode, I’m speaking with Baptiste Debever, the CEO and founder of Feedier . Feedier is an app that helps companies get feedback from their employees in a fun, seamless and engaging way. He launched the company in early 2018, they have over 8000 users on the platform and over 50 paying clients. They’re a team of 8 people based in France. Baptiste breaks down what they did to get their fir...

In this episode I’m speaking with Robert Zalaudek, founder and CEO of Pomodus . This episode is a little bit different than what you might be used to - Robert is just starting out in the SaaS space. He’s developing an app called Pomodus, which integrates with Slack and helps you stay productive and focused. I wanted to get Robert on the podcast, because a lot of my listeners are early stage SaaS f...

In this episode, i’m speaking with Devid Henzel, the CEO of TaskDrive . TaskDrive helps companies improve their outbound sales efforts by providing qualified leads to your sales team through personal outreach, among other services. David actually acquired TaskDrive about a year and a half ago, and has been scaling up the company ever since. He also has other portfolio companies he runs, aside from...

In this episode, I’m speaking with Darren Gallop, a fellow Canadian SaaS CEO. Darren runs Securicy , they help guide companies through creating, implementing, and managing Information Security Programs. Securicy has raised a total $1.8M from investors. Before starting Securicy, Darren founded Marcato, another SaaS product for music festivals, which recently got acquired. This was such a great epis...

I’m speaking with Xenia Muntean, the CEO and co-founder of Planable.io . Planable helps brands and agencies better manage their social media content. Xenia has been running Planable for about 3 years and has seen incredible growth in such a short time. They made their mark at the famous TechStars accelerator in London. They recently closed a seed round to help ramp up their growth, which we talk a...

In this episode, I’m speaking with Mubashar (Mubs) Iqbal. I stumbled across Mubs on Twitter , and immediately wanted to talk to him on my podcast. Mubs was Product Hunt’s maker of the year in 2016, and has been the runner up a bunch of other times. He is what you can only describe as a MAKER. He’s built and developed a countless number of websites and apps , which we’re talking about in this episo...

Mature businesses with firm roots in the ground can buy a lot of time when going through slow growth periods or rough patches, compared to newer startups. The value of time is a true luxury and could be a major advantage for bigger companies if utilized properly. Established companies can afford to go through sluggish stages where there’s either stagnant sales, slow growth, or even misalignment am...

I’m speaking with Jake Stainer, the former Head of Growth at Typeform. Jake is currently the Head of Growth at Travelperk, a company that helps businesses manage and book their travel. He founded an online language learning app Papora , and he also consults companies to accelerate their growth. Most notably, Jake was the Head of Growth at Typeform. He started with Typeform very early on, when they...

In this episode, I’m speaking with Liam Martin, co-founder of TimeDoctor , a company that helps remote teams stay focused, efficient and productive. In 8 years, Liam has helped bring Time Doctor to a comfortable 7-figures in recurring revenue. They’re a team of over 100 employees in 32 countries around the world. Most impressively, they’ve done this all while being bootstrapped! Liam also helped s...

There are a growing number of tech companies that are choosing to be fully transparent with their financial metrics. Some of the bigger names like Convertkit, Buffer and Hubspot, are all publicly disclosing every financial detail for the world to see. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other companies following this open data movement. From an observer’s perspective, it’s pretty awesome to b...

In this episode, I’m speaking with the main man himself, Dan Martell. Dan has been one of my inspirations in the SaaS game, bar-none. I haven’t met too many people in SaaS who haven’t got at least some value from Dan. Dan has built 5 companies, and successfully exited three of those, most notably Flowtown and Clarity.fm. He’s an investor in over 40 startups, including Intercom, Hootsuite, and Udem...

In this episode, I'm speaking with Max Kolysh, one of the founders of zinc.io. Zinc is an e-commerce lab that builds products that helps tens of thousands of Amazon and eBay sellers with listing creation, inventory management, pricing and order fulfillment. Max co-founded Zinc back in 2014. They went through Y-Combinator, and raised a seed round of $400k, and are now doing $6M in ARR. It was a gre...

It’s very common for companies to get comfortable and settle in a “coasting state”. A “coasting state” is when a company is making money, growing (albeit slowly), and trekking along steadily in their market. Not to say this is a bad thing (far from it, actually). After all, most companies will fail before they even get close to that “coasting state”. The fact is, most founders are satisfied coasti...

In this episode, I'm speaking with Tom Libelt, the founder of Smart Brand Marketing and We Market Online Courses. Tom is a straight up hustler. His family moved to the US from Poland with to escape communism, with only $500 in their pocket. He was a serial entrepreneur from a young age. He owned a coffee shop, a record label, was a top hip-hop Polish recording artist, created a documentary, sold o...

Think of absolutely ANY business problem a company might face.
 The one thing that can absolutely solve just about any business problem is… SALES!
 That’s right – in one way or another, more generating more sales can solve those plaguing business problems that are in your way.
 Need to make a few key hires in your business? Increase sales so you can afford to make them.
 Need to launch those produ...

One of the biggest opportunities I didn’t take more advantage of while growing a company, is not gathering enough feedback from employees more often. Being the co-founder of the company that started from scratch, I personally did every single role in every department on my own. I was a salesperson, support rep, marketer, graphic designer, onboarding specialist, retention specialist, and billing pe...

We all know that team building and culture are very important for the success of any organization. In order to push projects forward, achieve company objectives, and live out a company vision, your team must be coordinated with each other, in-sync, and integrated. Team building is not something that comes naturally in an organization. It has to be deliberate and purposeful. In most cases, team mem...

This was a very exciting episode. I’m speaking with Thomas Smale, founder of FE International, the hands-down market leader for M&A and advisory services for SaaS and other online businesses. They’ve completed hundreds of millions in acquisitions over the years. If you own a SaaS or any small business, this is an episode you’re going to want to listen to in full. We talk about what potential b...