The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Dennis Mortensen counted 1,019 meetings in his calendar from the past year. 672 had to be rescheduled. That pain led him to spend five years building an AI SaaS that most founders would never attempt. In this episode, Dennis reveals why he spent months trying to talk himself out of building x.ai, how he validated the idea by hiring a human assistant for 50 friends, and what building AI products re...

Most SaaS founders think startup funding means choosing between giving up equity to VCs or putting up personal guarantees for a bank loan. There is a third option - and it is a real venture capital SaaS alternative. In this episode, BJ Lackland, CEO of Lighter Capital, explains how revenue-based financing works, why 318 SaaS companies have used it to raise over $155 million, and how founders can c...

The average SaaS company spends just eight hours in its entire lifetime thinking about SaaS pricing. Kyle Poyar has spent over a decade on it - and the gap shows. In this episode, Kyle breaks down five common SaaS pricing mistakes with real examples from OpenView's portfolio including Expensify, Calendly, and New Relic. Kyle found that 98% of companies that changed their SaaS pricing saw neutral o...

Chris Ronzio racked up $320,000 in credit card debt to fund SaaS customer acquisition for Trainual. It was the best business decision he ever made. In this episode, Chris reveals how he turned a consulting side tool into a SaaS product that went from zero to $2M ARR in 18 months using Facebook ads, LTV math, and a scaling technique most founders never try. Chris knew Trainual's customers were wort...

Max Kolysh dropped out of MIT, got into Y Combinator, raised $400K, and built a product gaining traction - until Amazon sent a cease and desist and killed the business overnight. Finding product-market fit meant starting over. In this episode, Max reveals how a single email from an ex-customer led to the SaaS pivot that changed everything and grew Zinc to over $5M ARR. Each step in finding product...

Tyler Tringas was $50,000 in credit card debt after his venture-backed startup failed. All he had left was a one person SaaS business making $1,000 a month from store locators priced at $5 each. In this episode, Tyler reveals how he grew StoreMapper to over $40,000 MRR, sold it for "level up" money, and used the experience to launch Earnest Capital - a fund for bootstrappers. Tyler built his one p...

Rob Fitzpatrick built his first startup through Y Combinator alongside Dropbox. He had great investors and customers like MTV, Sony, and the BBC. But after four years, the company failed - because his SaaS customer discovery was built on compliments instead of real data. In this episode, Rob reveals the exact framework from The Mom Test that helps founders avoid collecting bad data during customer...

Ahrefs grew their blog from 15,000 to over 250,000 monthly visitors from Google - and turned SaaS content marketing into one of the biggest drivers of new customers. But they did it by breaking almost every rule in the book. In this episode, Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, reveals how a bootstrapped SaaS startup hit $40M ARR with just 45 people - without using Google Analytics, without capturing leads,...

Rob Kall sold his first SaaS for $80 million after six years. Then he sold his second for $15 million. Now this SaaS serial entrepreneur is building Cien, an AI SaaS startup that uses machine learning to measure what actually drives sales productivity. In this episode, Rob reveals why every success was preceded by problems and breakthroughs, how a right-of-first-refusal clause nearly killed fundra...

Omer Artun saw a massive opportunity in machine learning for B2C marketing, but he had no money and no product. So he chose starting a SaaS through the services route - launching a consulting practice and reinvesting every dollar into building his vision. In this episode, Omer reveals how it took seven years to transition from services to a real self-funded SaaS product, why he had to rebuild the...

John Stojka was losing 8 out of 10 deals competing against DocuSign and Adobe. Then he made a counterintuitive SaaS positioning bet - narrowing his target market from 70,000 prospects to just 300 companies. In this episode, John reveals how that radical focus on niche SaaS took bootstrapped Sertifi from $1M to over $10M ARR, why he spent 12 months visiting trade shows before picking a vertical, an...

Thomas Smale has closed over 140 SaaS exit transactions through FE International - and the biggest mistake he sees is founders underpricing their businesses by 30% or more. In this episode, Thomas breaks down what actually drives SaaS valuations during a SaaS exit, why your pricing strategy matters more than your growth rate, and how to prepare for selling a SaaS business that maximizes what buyer...

Most SaaS founders lead with features and wonder why prospects ghost them. Jimmy Ellis and Chris Rizzo built a performance-based marketing firm and discovered the single biggest reason enterprise SaaS deals stall: a weak offer. In this episode, they break down a three-level framework for crafting irresistible enterprise SaaS offers, from basic risk reduction to power guarantees that increased B2B...

Christian Owens dropped out of school at 16 and made his first million by 18. But when he launched Paddle, nobody wanted it. The marketplace generated just $800 in two months. Then consultative selling SaaS changed everything. Christian threw away 90% of the product and used founder-led sales - personally writing every cold email with company-specific insights - to grow Paddle to $10M+ ARR and 140...

Dave Rogenmoser paid $10,000 on Upwork for his first SaaS product. He had no idea how to handle customer acquisition startup challenges, and the business quickly failed. But that failure set him on a path to $250,000 in monthly recurring revenue. After building an agency and selling info products, Dave and his co-founders built a social proof widget in a single weekend - and the customer acquisiti...

The email market was dominated by Gmail. So how do you achieve SaaS positioning against Google - the ultimate 800-lb gorilla? Olof Mathe and his co-founders decided not to compete at all. Their SaaS positioning strategy was to build on top of Gmail instead. Mixmax grew to 10,000 customers and $5M ARR by turning Gmail into a sales platform through competitive differentiation that enhanced the domin...

Bart Lorang and his co-founders had a problem most founders would love to have - too many ideas. They were finding product-market fit signals in one product while chasing two others. The SaaS product validation lesson was hiding in plain sight. Rainmaker, a simple Google contacts tool, kept getting customers while the founders ignored it. In this episode, Bart shares how validating SaaS idea after...

Jason VandeBoom started ActiveCampaign from a dorm room, sold his car to fund it, and charged $9 a month. As a one person SaaS business for 13 years, Jason built the company to 60,000 customers and $50 million in annual revenue - all without a co-founder. In this episode, he reveals why he ran on-premise software for a decade before switching to SaaS, why he raised $20M but has not spent any of it...

Unbounce grew from zero to $7 million in five years. Then the channels that built them stopped working. Blogging, webinars, organic content - all lost effectiveness. The real SaaS growth challenge was not getting to $7 million. It was growing SaaS to $20 million when everything that worked before failed. In this episode, Rick Perreault shares the SaaS growth strategy Unbounce used to navigate from...

Most SaaS founders skip the marketing plan because it feels too complex. Allan Dib solved that by creating a SaaS marketing strategy that fits on a single page - nine boxes covering everything from identifying your target market to orchestrating referrals. In this episode, Allan walks through each phase of his SaaS marketing strategy - the before, during, and after stages - with specific SaaS exam...

Hampus Jakobsson co-founded TAT and sold it to BlackBerry for $150 million. Then he started a new SaaS company called Brisk - and it failed completely. Selling a SaaS business made him wealthy, but the failure taught him more about building products. In this episode, Hampus shares how six friends built a mobile UI company into a $150 million startup acquisition, why his next company failed despite...

Delamon Rego was stuck at a 20% close rate. Instead of guessing, he mapped every reason deals were dying and built a SaaS sales process from scratch. Within a year, his close rate hit 45%. In this episode, Delamon walks through his complete B2B sales process - from building targeted prospect lists using outsourcers, to cleaning and qualifying leads, to crafting multi-touch SaaS sales process caden...

Lindy Ledohowski was an English professor who did not know how to register a domain name. She had zero technical skills, zero business experience, and zero funding. As a non-technical founder, she flew a developer from Malaysia to live in her guest room for four months, started selling before her website could accept payments, and built a SaaS product that 12,000 students use - generating $500,000...

Nick Macario has built four companies over 10 years. Three of them grew to over a million users each. He sold two. And he used the same formula for getting first customers every time - referral marketing, content education, and obsessive attention to retention. In this episode, Nick shares the exact mechanics of his repeatable growth playbook, how Branded Me reached 500,000 early customers in four...

Martin Gontovnikas started coding at 12, built his career as a software engineer, then switched to "the dark side" - marketing. At Auth0, he applied a 6-step inbound marketing SaaS framework that grew the company from $200,000 to eight figures in less than five years. In this episode, Gonto walks through each step, shares a case study where two experiments failed before the third unlocked growth,...