Growth Stage by FastSpring

Conversation with Gamesight Founder and CEO Adam Lieb about developing a winning KPI strategy for video game marketing. With so many marketing channels to manage to promote your game, combined with the complexity of monetizing your games on multiple platforms, in PC marketplaces, or even D2C via your own webshop, your head might be spinning keeping up with where to focus your efforts. In this epis...

Conversation with Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze, about B2B CRO and A/B testing.  The most common examples of successful CRO tactics provided at many conferences tend to focus on B2C ecommerce, but what are the proven winning tactics you can use in your B2B CRO strategy? In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Sahil Patel of Spiralyze about his thoughts on:  Special considerations for B2B CRO...

Conversation with Adam Riemer, President of Adam Riemer Marketing, about advanced affiliate marketing and SEO. Affiliate marketing can be a great growth lever to scale your digital product business, but how can you drive meaningful growth with the right affiliates without losing out to fraud or shady attribution schemes? In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview affiliate marketing veteran and...

Conversation with Podia Senior Growth Marketer Marc Thomas about how to de-risk trying new, more innovative marketing strategies. Traditional marketing playbooks are falling short in the SaaS world, but while many marketers privately acknowledge the ineffectiveness of these playbooks, they are still hesitant to discuss it publicly. Far too often, too much time is spent implementing copy-and-paste...

Conversation with Fred Linfjärd, Director of Growth at Planday, about switching from a one-time fees model to a subscription billing model. If you're selling your software, plugin, add-on, or other digital product for a one-time fee, you’re likely thinking about switching to a recurring subscription model. While the financial reasons are strong to switch to subscriptions, your path to roll out thi...

You might be familiar with the great promise of Product Led Growth (PLG). As the story goes, PLG is based on the notion that the value a product delivers and how easy it is to adopt and share will lead to self-sustaining increases in product adoption and less reliance on human intervention to get the deal done. The expected result is more new revenue at higher profits. While this can often be true...

Game marketplaces on platforms like Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam are great ways to earn attention and attract new players to play your game, but with stiff competition and limited real estate in marketplace interfaces such as recommended game views and category pages, game developers are often left wondering, “How can I effectively market my game outside of game marketplaces?” In this episode of G...

If you're operating a SaaS, software, or digital product business, you're likely optimizing your Customer Success strategy for things like ticket response times, NPS scores, and any number of KPI and tactics that help you move your business forward. But what if you could zoom out and see what customer success really means in your business? What if you could use those observations to help you drive...

Conversation with WP Engine Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships Carl Hargreaves. As you build out your software, SaaS, or digital product business, you may be wondering what form your eventual exit might take. One potential exit is that your company is acquired by a competitor or brand with complimentary technology in your space — but what do brands look for with these t...

Conversation with Browser to Buyer founder and director of conversion Dave Gowans about how CRO is even more powerful when we move beyond just top-of-funnel website visits and sign-ups. Listen for the full insights into: Why SaaS and subscription businesses especially need to consider the entire customer relationship when optimizing the sales funnel. Two key research and testing techniques that ca...

Conversation with Dopple founder and CEO Justin Scott about building a business that is not just growing with its market — it's helping define it. Listen to the full interview for insights into: Why partnerships are key for building out your positioning. Why launching with a robust offering won out over launching early with only a few features. Why it's important to prioritize some users' feedback...

Conversation with Narrator Cofounder Cedric Dussud about building WeWork's billing platform and how it led to Narrator. Listen to the full interview for insights into: Why metrics often don’t add up. What happens when there’s not a single source of truth. Why you should be skeptical about internal data. When you need a data scientist to help you (and when you don’t). Transcript available here . Th...

Out of the Park Developments quadrupled sales in South Korea — the fourth-largest video game market in the world — by localizing its benchmark game into Korean. EJ spoke to Richard Grisham , past COO of Out of the Park and current Director of Business Development at Com2Us — a Korean development company that acquired Out of the Park in 2020. Stream their conversation below for insights into: How t...

Ryan Austin had VP-level experience in training when he decided to start a consulting business to help enterprise-level companies with their corporate learning and development initiatives.  Ryan and his team noticed so many inefficiencies across the L&D workflows. “It got us thinking: Why is there no purpose-built operating system for corporate learning and development teams, when their jobs a...

“47% of businesses created 51 or more videos just last year. So there's all this video being made, and yet, almost none of it gets used more than once. You post it to your website, you post it to social media, and you start working on the next video.” Andrew Levy explained.  Andrew is the founder and CEO of AdPipe , a SaaS platform that repurposes and repackages your existing videos into custom bi...

Most CEOs don’t run the same company for over 15 years, but Alf Ruppert isn’t the typical tech founder. “I’m a bit closer to business owners from the 50s,” he admits — a time when he believes creating an enjoyable work environment was more highly valued. This perspective is why at least four employees have been with the company since the beginning. In 2006, founded iOSXpert — now the largest partn...

Before Rachel Harding became the global tax director at FastSpring, she spent two years on a mergers and acquisitions tax team.  And she often saw deals fall apart. “I kid you not, nine times out of 10, when a SaaS acquisition fell apart, it was a sales tax issue,” she told me. Tax non-compliance can unravel an acquisition or result in million-dollar price adjustments. Another time tax non-complia...

Michael Bonfils is a marketer first, and a translator second. That’s the philosophy behind SEM International , the firm he founded that specializes in multilingual internationally-based digital marketing services. Since Michael founded the firm in 2004, it has grown to over 30 offices worldwide, and they’ve worked with Intel, AWS, and Salesforce, among many other well-known brands. Needless to say...

As a former agency owner, now the Chief Marketing Officer at FastSpring, David Vogelpohl has helped many software companies scale around the world. EJ interviewed him for insights into how to build a global marketing strategy, especially when it comes to localization. They covered: An iterative approach to localizing marketing efforts A step-by-step guide to looking for regional growth opportuniti...

Trailer introducing the Growth Stage by FastSpring podcast.

Stagflation occurs when heavy inflation is paired with an economic slowdown. Economists fear we're entering into a period of global stagflation. FastSpring sales lead Tony Markov interviewed former Chief Product Officer and pricing expert Kurt Smith about pricing strategies for SaaS and software companies that work well in volatile markets. Transcript of this episode . This podcast is brought to y...

In our first episode, we sat down with growth expert Frederic Linfjärd to discuss conversion optimization (CRO) for SaaS. We followed it up with deep dive into churn. Specifically, how Fred slashed it by 50% in a previous growth role at a software company. He discusses the difference between voluntary and involuntary churn, how to build and scale an automated churn reduction engine, and more. Tran...

Is conversion rate optimization for SaaS businesses different than traditional A/B testing for ecommerce? In traditional eCommerce, CRO is all about getting people to click the “buy” button. But for subscription-based companies, that’s just the beginning. We sat down with growth expert (and current Director of Growth at Planday) Frederic Linfjärd to learn more. Transcript for this episode . This p...