The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Most SaaS founders rely on warm introductions to find customers. Jerrod Bailey built a SaaS lead generation system that took one company from 2 demos a month to 60 - without adding a single salesperson. His LinkedIn lead generation method uses Boolean search to build targeted lists and automated 4-step email cadences to convert strangers into qualified leads. The most counterintuitive finding from...

Most SaaS founders drive traffic to their website and hope people sign up. Jeremy Reeves has built SaaS sales funnel systems that generated millions in additional revenue. One client made $75,000 in a week by upselling monthly subscribers to annual plans. Another boosted conversions 50% just by adding phone calls to their online sales funnel. Jeremy walks through his complete 3-stage sales funnel...

Marcelino Alvarez grew Uncorked Studios to a 36-person firm building products for Google, Adidas, Intel, and Lego - all through founder-led sales with zero salespeople on staff. 95% of Uncorked's business came from relationship-driven founder selling: coffee meetings, community volunteering, and cross-industry networking events. Before Uncorked, Marcelino worked at Wieden+Kennedy building the Nike...

Mogens Moller built a hard-coded opt-in form for a travel agency and got 800% more email subscribers. 50 e-commerce managers emailed him wanting the same thing. Instead of nailing his SaaS positioning for that audience, he spent a year chasing every website type - and it nearly cost him the business. Sleeknote's product positioning breakthrough came from narrowing back down to e-commerce - the nic...

Chalk.com was making $3,000 a year charging individual teachers $30 each. Then a school in Texas requested 72 licenses in 24 hours - and that one phone call revealed B2B product-market fit. The real buyers were schools and districts, not individual teachers. That SaaS product-market fit insight changed everything. Ryan McKay-Fleming and his co-founder William built the first version at a kitchen t...

Judy Robinett was so shy as a kid that she didn't dare talk to anybody. Today she does deals with billionaires - proving that SaaS fundraising is about strategic relationships, not natural charisma. She helped manage Golden Seeds, one of the largest angel investment groups in the US, and shares the exact framework founders need for raising capital. Judy reveals the 5+50+100 rule for SaaS fundraisi...

Alexandra Keating spent months building a complex CMS that nobody asked for. Then she embraced product-led growth. She simplified DWNLD to a one-click app builder and started cold emailing prospects with screenshots of apps she had already built for them - without asking. That self-serve growth approach raised $14M and attracted over 3,000 content creators. The SaaS go-to-market breakthrough came...

Alex Berman sent over a million cold emails and generated $20 million in enterprise sales leads in a single year. His secret: spend two minutes personalizing each email instead of blasting templates. Custom cold emails for B2B SaaS sales convert at 7-8% versus 1% for templates. Alex breaks down the exact framework for closing enterprise deals - from finding qualified leads using BuiltWith and Link...

Brandon Pearce spent four years building a vertical SaaS and was only earning $1,500 a month. Today, Music Teachers Helper does $70,000 in monthly recurring revenue - and Brandon runs it while traveling the world with his wife and three daughters. He started the product in 2004 as a hobby project to track his own piano students. For the first four years, Brandon worked on this niche SaaS part-time...

B Byrne was 24 years old when his go-to-market strategy helped Clef reach 124,000 websites. The secret: go deep in small communities instead of chasing a broad audience. Clef replaced passwords with phone-based two-factor authentication but faced a brutal chicken-and-egg problem. B solved it with a niche-first SaaS go-to-market approach - earning trust through personal relationships before expandi...

Stuart Crane and his co-founder started with $400 and spent 20 years building a business worth selling. When it came time for selling a SaaS business, two deals fell through before they hired an investment banker who ran a competitive bid with 40-50 buyers. The result: a $43 million SaaS exit in July 2013. The story starts in 1991 when Stuart met his backyard neighbor Jeff, a nurse drowning in pap...

Aaron Fulkerson built what started as a one person SaaS business into a company doing over $10 million a year - with clients like PayPal, Docker, and Whirlpool. But the road to 8 figures nearly killed the company first. In 2009, MindTouch was burning cash, churn looked terrible, and the product competed against SharePoint and hundreds of funded vendors. Aaron and his co-founder Steve left Microsof...

After interviewing 99 SaaS founders, Omer Khan pulled the 10 pieces of business advice that stuck with him most - advice about SaaS growth, mindset, and the counterintuitive decisions that separate founders who succeed from those who stall. This is the 100th episode, and instead of bringing on another guest, Omer breaks down lessons from Dan Norris (WP Curve), Wade Foster (Zapier), Rob Walling (Dr...

Most SaaS founders think PR requires paying an agency $10,000 a month. Conrad Egusa built Publicize to offer the same service starting at $399. But in this episode, he gives away the entire B2B community building and startup PR playbook for free. Conrad is a former VentureBeat writer and global mentor at 500 Startups. He breaks down his 5-step process for getting press coverage, including why you...

Tom Leung spent two years and $1.5 million building a startup that never found product-market fit. Then his team pivoted eight times in six months, and on the ninth try, a one-page HTML form proved they had SaaS product validation figured out - in one week. Anthology (formerly Poachable) lets employed tech professionals explore career opportunities anonymously. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, an...

Diego Oppenheimer spent five years building Microsoft Excel features used by a billion people. Then he discovered that even Microsoft's $7 billion research center couldn't get algorithms to the teams that needed them. So he set about launching a marketplace to fix that. Algorithmia connects academics building powerful algorithms with app developers who can use them - and hit 14,000 developers on t...

George Palmer spent less than $50 to launch SendOwl, a self-funded SaaS for selling digital products. Two months later, it was profitable. He found first customers by searching Twitter every morning for people complaining about competitors. George has experience building multiple businesses, from freelance Rails work to digital product platforms. In this episode, he shares how he validated SendOwl...

Vincent Cassar sent cold emails to people who had never heard of his product and got a 40% response rate. His secret SaaS growth tactic was embarrassingly simple: follow up three to four times instead of once. In this episode, Vincent walks through three specific SaaS growth hacks from his Growth Hacking Experiment, including how Quora became his best-converting lead generation source at 35% signu...

Mike Muhney had $15,000 left from a $100,000 angel investment when his first software product failed. Over a four-hour brainstorm breakfast, he and his co-founder sketched a menu structure on a napkin that would become ACT! Contact Management - the product that created the CRM industry and sold for $47 million. In this episode, Mike reveals how losing product-market fit on his first product led to...

Robert Coorey spent a year working double full-time hours on a video production business - and made $32,000 in revenue with $32,500 in costs. He lost $500. That taught him the most important SaaS go-to-market lesson: if you are not feeding a starving crowd, no amount of marketing will save your business. In this episode, Robert breaks down his 4-step SaaS go-to-market framework for finding hungry...

Nick Kellet sold his SaaS business to Business Objects for over $8 million in 1999 - then walked away from enterprise software to create a board game. Gift Trap sold nearly 100,000 copies and won 20+ awards worldwide. In this episode, Nick reveals the strategy behind his SaaS exit that started when his product was only six weeks old, how he ordered 10,000 board games without knowing anything about...

Adam Dicker built a $500,000-per-month online business using the same SaaS marketing plan and lead generation tactics he teaches to other entrepreneurs. With a portfolio of over 30,000 domains - including one he sold for eight figures - he knows how to turn search traffic into revenue. In this episode, Adam reveals how he ranks any website on Google's front page within two weeks, why long-tail key...

At 2:30 in the morning, lying on an air mattress in his mother's spare bedroom, Benji Rogers had an idea that would not let him go. He spent his last seven pounds buying the domain PledgeMusic.com. Six years later, the company had 50 employees and released over 1,000 albums. In this episode, Benji reveals how achieving SaaS product-market fit in the music industry meant overcoming years of being t...

Aaron Epstein's team put up a teaser page offering $5 in free credits to anyone who signed up before their marketplace launch. Eight months later, 70,000 people had registered. Within 16 months of launching a marketplace for design assets, Autodesk acquired the company. In this episode, Aaron breaks down seven strategies Creative Market used to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of launching a mark...

Aaron Epstein spent six years running a solo software business he built in his college dorm room. It was making six figures a year, fully automated - and he was bored. So he merged with co-founders, built a SaaS marketplace for design assets, and sold it to Autodesk less than 16 months after launch. In this episode, Aaron shares how a single $250 pattern sale to MetLife sparked the idea for Creati...