Founder Views - SaaS, Business, and Beyond

In today’s episode, I'm speaking with Laura Roeder, the founder and CEO of MeetEdgar. MeetEdgar helps professionals and small businesses manage their content and promote it on social media. Laura founded MeetEdgar in 2014. In less than 4 years, they’ve grown to over $4 million in annual recurring revenue, all while being fully remote, and bootstrapped, which is absolutely incredible. We dive into...

You marketed your product, your sales team pitched the product to a prospective client, had a few follow up meetings, and finally closed the sale! Congratulations, the client is in the door! Now the hard work begins… NOT to take anything away from those in sales – in fact, sales is the most important department in business, in my opinion. Without sales, companies slow down, flatten out and eventua...

I'm chatting with Foti Panagio, the founder of growthmentor.io, a platform where you can get advice and mentorship from vetted experts. We're talking about the challenges of a double-sided marketplace, how he plans on growing his startup, marketing opportunities, and much more. This was a very fun and insightful chat, with a lot of great takeaways. Enjoy! Visit growthmentor.io to learn more. Music...

One of the most important topics in SaaS that isn’t too often covered, is the dunning process. For those who might not be familiar with dunning, it’s the process of communicating with customers that are past due, to collect payments before their accounts get cancelled or closed. Dunning is usually a structured automated process whose form of communication is email or sms. For SaaS companies with a...

For the first six years, we ran our company out of offices. We’ve experienced everything you could out of an office, from expanding into bigger spaces, growing the team, launching products, hitting milestones, etc. For the past two years, we decided to make the drastic switch and ditch the office to become a fully remote company. After comparing the two experiences, I can confidently say that ther...

Since I started being more active on social media, many people have been asking me “why do you blog and podcast?”. My answer is an important lesson that I think several people can get value from. First, one of my jobs in running a SaaS company, is developing strategy. A lot of my own strategy and thought-process is done through writing. I’ve been writing for several years now. It helps me absorb m...

I recently attended a live podcast panel discussion in Toronto, hosted by Drift. The main focus on the discussion was on marketing, specifically branding. The topics really resonated with me in my current journey and stage with Web4Realty. In most cases, startups don’t think about branding in the early days. The early days are all about the grind- selling, gaining traction, building out your team,...

There are very few things that can make me lose sleep at night. One of those things are negative reviews. Although negative reviews in our company are very rare, they always sting- really, really bad. Each negative review is even worse than the last. Reading a bad review feels like getting punched in the gut. Negative reviews suck, and they always will. However, negative reviews are inevitable. As...

A common question I get asked is “what do you do at work every day?”. What is a very simple response for most people, is actually one of the most difficult questions for me to answer. I get asked that question often because we’re a remote company and I work from home, which is a new concept to most people. From an outside perspective, it probably appears like I do nothing all day, and that I’m liv...

When you’re several years deep into your startup and becoming more mature as a company, it’s very easy to lose sight of what got you to where you are – your early clients. The clients you acquire in the first two years of business, are all taking a chance on you. They know you’re a startup and anticipating issues, yet for some reason, they’re giving you their business. They’re investing their time...

2018 has definitely been our most active year in terms of hiring, by far. An important metric to look at as your company scales, is revenue per employee (how much money you make per employee). This is a great indicator to show how efficiently your company is growing. Total Revenue / # of Employees = Revenue per Employee A good employee should be an asset to your company. Just like any asset, they...

Throughout the years of managing a growing team, there are a number of observations you start to make and situations that arise that get you thinking about people, in general. When your company‘s headcount starts growing, you naturally start observing character traits, mindset, and psychology of people, among many other things. One of those thoughts is the question of work ethic versus skill. When...

A topic that has gathered my attention a lot lately, is marketing. Marketing is a much more diverse and complex subject than people realize, and all ties back to understanding human behaviour. One can argue that humans have changed more in the last 10-15 years than in any other time in history. The simple reason for this change is the invention of the smartphone. Mobile devices have changed the wa...

Remote companies and company culture usually don’t go hand in hand. When you think company culture, the thoughts usually consist of an open office environment, daily huddles, a nice lunch area to hang with your co-workers, cool boardrooms, and of course the company ping-pong table. When we took our company remote, we didn’t really know what to expect. As with most of our business decisions, we usu...

Some people are born with certain skills and intuitions that come naturally. There are no guides, rules, or courses for managing cash flows in a small business. Although there are certain things anyone can do to help with cash flow, the majority of it is through intuition and deep understanding of the business. I also believe it would be very difficult to train someone to manage cash flow successf...

Since day one, we’ve always preached that our company’s bread-and-butter was our customer support. That sentiment holds true, nearly eight years later. The evolution of our company’s support department has been one of the most challenging to execute, and the most rewarding. In a very competitive industry, one of the differentiating factors you can provide your clients is amazing customer service....

I’m sure everyone knows about the classic 3:1 LTV CAC ratio that all SaaS folks should strive for. Just a reminder, LTV is the lifetime value of a client (the amount of money a client will pay you in their lifetime). CAC is the customer acquisition cost (the amount of money you spend to acquire a new customer). You can read more about these SaaS metrics and more, here . Let’s use a very simple exa...

The lifeline of nearly any business starts and ends with those who pay your bills – your clients. Unfortunately, most people view client support as an entry-level and basic part of a company process. That sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth. As a startup founder, having your nose to the ground and listening to your clients, will tell you how your business is doing, foresee where it’s head...

Think about the effort and thought you put into your sales and marketing process. From refining your sales pitch, creating sales material, content marketing, social media, etc. As important as it is to be able to effectively market and sell your product/service to potential clients, it’s equally as important to be able to sell your company to potential new team members. It’s very tough for a new c...

If you were looking for some secret sauce to starting a SaaS with no money, I hate to break it to you, but that doesn’t exist. If you aren’t ready to hustle, put in the time and work, make sacrifices, and be fully dedicated, than you should probably take the conventional route and seek funding right away. We started and grew our SaaS with $0. No angel money, no seed rounds, no money from parents/f...

We started our SaaS near the beginning of a tech-craze in 2008-09, where a lot of big companies and apps were popping up that were starting to kill it. These companies included Airbnb, Tumblr, Spotify and Groupon, to name a few. During these years, I noticed a peculiar trend that was happening. There were several companies who weren’t focusing on making money and being profitable. Instead, their f...

It’s very easy to get complacent in any business, especially when things are going smoothly. When you’re getting a nice stable paycheck, business is growing steadily and you’re living a good lifestyle, it’s very easy to take a back seat and get comfortable. If you’re ever feeling too much of this, you should be very worried. This is when you should snap out of it, and get in serious grind mode. Th...

I’ve been having quite a few conversations about being a remote company lately, so I thought i’d continue on the topic. Running a software company certainly has its lifestyle advantages, I must admit. Being able to work from literally anywhere in the world is pretty awesome. Mostly I work from my home office, but sometimes I like to get out and work from a coffee shop. If I’m away or on vacation,...

One of the most common questions I get is regarding how  Web4Realty  came to be a remote company. Something that’s so normal from my perspective, is very uncommon from the average person’s viewpoint, which will certainly change over time, as more companies realize the benefits of going remote. About three years ago, I began to read a lot of content about remote companies like Chargify, Buffer and...

Bootstrapping is one of my favourite topics to discuss. Probably due to the fact that Web4Realty is 100% bootstrapped and revenue financed, and has been since we launched. That alone is one of my proudest achievements thus far. I have so much respect and admiration for other bootstrapped companies, because I can relate to how difficult it is, and the sacrifices that have to be made. In my opinion,...