The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Erik Christiansen and his co-founder Travis did not take a paycheck for four years. They ran three companies simultaneously and built Justuno to over $2M ARR with a zero marketing budget. On the day of Erik's wedding, the company was bankrupt. This is the story of growing a SaaS with no marketing budget at all. Erik reveals how Justuno grew from a simple coupon widget to a conversion optimization...

Jim Brown helped two companies grow from $1M to over $10M in revenue. Then he raised a million dollars for his own startup and burned through it in 11 months. His hard-won startup sales lessons could save you from making the same mistakes. Jim walks through a simple but powerful 4-step startup sales process that turns a $100K revenue goal into just 5 daily prospecting actions. At a $5K average con...

Steve Benson was named Google Enterprise's top performing salesperson in the world. Then he left to build Badger Maps, a SaaS product for field salespeople priced at just $9 to $35 a month. His SaaS sales strategy of founder-led sales and land-and-expand grew it to 6,000 customers and a 50-person team. Steve's SaaS sales strategy starts with a $9 individual seat. One salesperson signs up. Their ma...

Nick Francis spent two years searching for a help desk that did not feel like a help desk. Every tool he tried put a system between the company and the customer - ticket numbers, support portals, robotic emails. So he built Help Scout, and SaaS branding through invisible UX became the foundation of everything. Nick reveals how Help Scout grew to 8,000 support teams in 140 countries through SaaS br...

Janna Bastow and her co-founder built ProdPad for themselves as product managers who could not find the right tool. After two years of using it internally, they quit their jobs with zero customers. Growth was steady until they hit the "plateau of doom" at $30K MRR and had to fix their free trial conversion to survive. Janna explains how cutting free trial conversion time from 30 days to 7 and gami...

Greg Mercer was a civil engineer building multiple businesses when he spent $1,000 hiring a developer to build a Chrome extension. That side project grew into Jungle Scout - 100,000+ customers and multi-seven-figure revenue in under three years. Greg reveals how he went from a one-page WordPress site with a PayPal button to a fully remote 35-person company. Greg was already building multiple busin...

Tukan Das and his co-founders spent three years and $1.8 million trying to sell social media data to Fortune 500 brands. After two failed pivots and dwindling runway, they finally committed to real SaaS customer development - and everything changed. Tukan reveals how LeadSift went from five customers in year one to 105 customers and nearly $1M ARR. The breakthrough came from proper SaaS customer d...

Nobody was searching for Outgrow's product. Interactive calculators and quizzes for SaaS lead generation was not a category that existed. Randy Rayess had to invent a SaaS content strategy to sell a tool to customers who did not know they needed one. In this episode, Randy reveals how a services business question - "how much does it cost to build an app?" - turned into a bootstrapped SaaS content...

Fred Stutzman built the first version of Freedom in about an hour. It was a simple tool that turned off his internet for 45 minutes so he could focus on his dissertation. A year later, with zero marketing, the self-serve SaaS had 500,000 downloads through pure word of mouth. Freedom's user onboarding framework was the product itself - so simple that no tutorial was needed. Freedom's user onboardin...

David Abrams and his co-founder spent almost $100,000 hiring a bootstrapped agency to build their SaaS product - and ended up with a buggy product they had to throw away. Starting over with an empty bank account, they rebuilt Demio from scratch. In this episode, David reveals the painful hiring mistakes that nearly killed the company, why spending two years in beta was actually the right move, and...

Allan Wille spent three years building a B2C dashboard app with 300,000 users and zero revenue. Then Lufthansa called and asked if soccer scores could be replaced with business data - and Klipfolio's SaaS product-market fit journey began. In this episode, Allan reveals how he recognized the dangerous middle ground between failure and success, why his co-founder had to sell his car to keep the comp...

DataFox started building AI products at $49 a month. Today, customers pay anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000 a year for the same core AI SaaS product - automated business intelligence powered by machine learning. Bastiaan Janmaat reveals how four co-founders turned manual data processing into an AI product development success story. Building AI products at DataFox started with manual data labeling...

Tim Broom ran brick and mortar IT training centers for 15 years. One course cost $2,000 to $3,000. Out of every 100 conversations, he enrolled one student. So he built an influencer marketing SaaS growth engine to reach the other 99. One podcast ad on Leo Laporte's network drove 70-80% of first-year revenue. ITProTV's influencer marketing SaaS approach worked because Tim flew to meet Leo Laporte i...

Rob Percival launched his first online coding course for $199 and got exactly one sale in the first 24 hours. Then the buyer asked for a refund. That SaaS pricing lesson changed everything. Instead of quitting, he made the course free, got 2,000 students, and built the social proof needed for selling high-ticket products on Udemy. Rob's SaaS pricing breakthrough came from flipping the pricing mode...

Raj Bhaskar's growth team wrote a blog post about 16 tax deductions for Uber drivers. That was the easy part. The real SaaS content strategy lesson was getting every Facebook and Reddit admin in the Uber driver community to pin it at the same time. The result: 8,000 signups in two weeks, and eventually 100,000 users with zero ad spend. Raj's SaaS content strategy relied on distribution, not creati...

JD Graffam has never successfully built a SaaS product from scratch. Instead, he looks for founders selling a SaaS business and acquires their products. Six SaaS acquisitions later, he has doubled recurring revenue across his portfolio without spending a dollar on marketing. His strategy: buy products with loyal customers, fix the technical debt, improve support, and do not screw anything up. JD f...

Clate Mask spent three years in what he calls a nightmare - $100,000 in student debt, taking home $2,500 a month, wife in tears telling him to get a real job. His SaaS go-to-market was broken - building custom software with no clear path forward. Then his wife told him to keep going, and everything started to turn. Today Infusionsoft has 675 employees, 140,000 users, and over $100 million in ARR....

Nadim Hossain was a VP of Marketing who could not answer the biggest questions about his own marketing spend. He started solving the problem in Excel, and that spreadsheet became BrightFunnel - a 7-figure enterprise SaaS company. His founder-led sales approach landed customers like Verizon and Cloudera by finding believers, not rational buyers. Nadim's founder-led sales strategy started with 100 c...

Three teenagers started a company at age 14, inspired by Mad Men. Their advertising business could not even pay for school lunch. But a side tool - a beautifully designed analytics dashboard - crashed their servers with signups. That became GoSquared, and SaaS SEO drove nearly all of its growth to 1,000+ paying customers with just 1,000 pounds spent on ads in a decade. GoSquared's SaaS SEO approac...

Natalie Nagele built a multi-million dollar SaaS company where nobody works more than 40 hours a week. The biggest SaaS growth lessons from Wildbit's 18-year journey: team-first thinking, private offices for deep work, and treating products as replaceable while the team endures. Today Wildbit serves over 100,000 companies with three products and a team of 26. The SaaS growth lessons started with s...

Laura Roeder is a non-technical founder who reached bootstrap to profitability at $350K MRR with no sales team, no VC funding, and no tiered pricing. Meet Edgar has just one plan and one price. Laura reveals why she optimized her homepage for email list building instead of free trials, how a dead-simple Facebook ad outperformed everything the experts suggested, and why she turned away agencies to...

Grant Miller sold his first startup for millions just nine months after launch. Now he is building Replicated, a platform that helps enterprise SaaS companies deploy behind corporate firewalls. His B2B SaaS sales strategy has already landed 20 Fortune 100 companies in just 18 months. Grant reveals why chasing Slack and Dropbox for B2B SaaS sales was a mistake - they were too large and risk-averse....

Bruno Didier ordered dinner through Grubhub, waited two hours, and ended up buying pizza from a grocery store. That terrible delivery experience led him to build a niche SaaS platform for restaurant delivery management that grew to $2M ARR with 2,000 customers. Bruno reveals how a dinner with a stranger in Lyon led to Y Combinator and how asking for advice worked better than any sales pitch. Bruno...

Russ Perry shut down his creative agency, dressed up as a pickle at a conference, and handed out 600 pickles from a Mexican popsicle cart. Two years later, his bootstrapped SaaS growth story had Design Pickle at $160K MRR with 45 full-time employees. Facebook ads outperformed his sales hire by 10,000%, and the simplest sales funnel always beat every elaborate strategy. The bootstrapped SaaS growth...

Matt Ekstrom built Prospectify in two months for $30K and hit $20K MRR in nine months. His SaaS sales process was pure hustle - outbound prospecting through professional groups, integration partnerships with Reply, HubSpot, and Salesloft, and founder-led customer success that turned users into advocates. The SaaS sales process started with targeting Salesforce power user communities, then using Pr...