The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Ian Brodie and his co-founder quit their jobs in March 2020, got laughed out of every VC meeting, and built a services business instead. After selling it for a mid-7-figure deal, they launched Levanta and hit $230K MRR in 9 months through SaaS partnerships with affiliate agencies - without a dollar in paid marketing. Learn how SaaS partnerships drove 650 brands and 2,500 affiliates to one platform...

Vlad Gozman spent two years building a VR product nobody wanted. Then he pivoted into one of the most crowded markets in SaaS - form builders - and grew a self-serve SaaS to 7-figure ARR with a 14-person team. Content marketing now drives 60-70% of revenue for this self-serve SaaS. Discover how involve.me differentiated in a crowded market, why a private lifetime deal beat AppSumo for funding this...

James Evans spent 80% of every sales meeting explaining what Command Bar did. Nobody understood his SaaS positioning because he was trying to create a new category instead of fitting into an existing one. When he repositioned into digital adoption, discovery calls went from 25 minutes to 4 - and the company grew to 7-figure ARR. Learn why SaaS positioning in an existing market beats category creat...

Brett Martin and his co-founder hit $1M ARR in just two and a half months. Then SaaS churn nearly killed the business - 40% of customers disappeared in a single month. The SaaS retention crisis forced a complete pivot. In this episode, Brett reveals how Kumospace pivoted from a viral events platform to a virtual office serving millions of users. You will learn why SaaS retention problems were hidd...

George Richardson went from professional race car driver to vertical SaaS founder - and says building AeroCloud has been far harder than risking his life on the track. After two years building an airline app with zero traction, he pivoted to cloud-based airport management software. In this episode, George reveals how AeroCloud built a vertical SaaS business targeting niche SaaS opportunities in ai...

Michael Kamleitner spent over a decade scaling SaaS as a solo founder running two bootstrapped products in parallel. When the pandemic wiped out live events overnight, his social media aggregator Walls.io lost its core use case. In this episode, Michael reveals how he pivoted Walls.io into virtual events, built SaaS partnerships through a channel program that saved the company, and why running an...

Thejo Kote sold the first 15-20 Airbase customers through consultative selling SaaS - without a co-founder, without a sales team, and without writing code until 10 CFOs confirmed they would buy. That founder-led sales motion became the foundation of an 8-figure ARR company. In this episode, Thejo reveals how consultative selling SaaS to CFOs shaped Airbase's entire SaaS sales strategy. You will le...

Greg Smith spent three years manually building online courses for customers one at a time before finding product-market fit for Thinkific. Then a single webinar converted 20 of 55 attendees into $1,000 paying customers overnight - the ultimate SaaS product validation moment. In this episode, Greg reveals how he and his brother went from a $29 LSAT prep course to a $60M ARR public company. You will...

John Griffin built a backend platform for game developers, sold it to Amazon, and then watched AWS run the most sophisticated usage-based pricing system on the planet. That experience sparked the idea for m3ter - and a new approach to SaaS pricing. In this episode, John reveals how m3ter helps software companies adopt usage-based pricing models, why going too broad with early customers nearly dera...

Duda was growing fast as a mobile website builder when Itai Sadan made a counterintuitive SaaS positioning decision - stop serving half the customer base and rebuild the core product from scratch. Revenue went flat for two years. In this episode, Itai reveals how that SaaS positioning bet turned Duda into an 8-figure ARR company with 22,000 agencies. You will learn why competitive differentiation...

Lloyed Lobo sent hundreds of cold emails trying to sell Boast.ai's R&D tax credit platform. Nobody replied. Then he stopped selling and started hosting 10-person meetups with free pizza - and B2B community building carried the company past $10M ARR without a marketing team. In this episode, Lloyed reveals how community-led growth replaced traditional acquisition. You will learn how B2B community b...

Stefan Debois spent seven years searching for the right niche before finding B2B product-market fit. The breakthrough came not from a grand strategy but from listening to customers who kept requesting the same feature - personalized PDF reports. In this episode, Stefan reveals how he pivoted Pointerpro from generic surveys to an assessment platform for professional services. You will learn why fin...

Mang-Git Ng had zero sales background when he started Anvil. He spent 25 minutes agonizing over each cold email, barely got any responses, and attracted the wrong customers who demanded hand-holding for $5 a month. Selling SaaS without sales experience felt impossible. In this episode, Mang-Git reveals how he went from sweating over outreach emails to closing 7-figure ARR deals. You will learn how...

Lukas Fittl spent seven years building pganalyze as a side project before going full-time. His secret to reaching 7-figure ARR without funding or a sales team? SaaS content marketing that developers actually trusted. In this episode, Lukas reveals how deep technical blog posts, a weekly YouTube series, and webinars that attracted 400 live attendees became the inbound marketing SaaS engine behind 5...

Andrew Brown sold his first startup to Google - and felt empty. He spent three years searching for an enterprise SaaS business he would never want to sell. He found it in SaaS partnerships with platform companies desperate to add payroll but unable to build it themselves. In this episode, Andrew reveals how Check built an enterprise SaaS model targeting just a few hundred platform partners, raised...

Peter Ord searched LinkedIn for second-degree connections with "implementation" in their title. He found 116 people, asked all of them the same 16 questions, and signed 9 as paying customers. That founder-led sales motion became the foundation of GUIDEcx's SaaS sales process. In this episode, Peter reveals how he built a repeatable SaaS sales process from pure outbound, why he priced at $100 per u...

Joe Davy bootstrapped Banzai for four years, hit seven-figure ARR, and raised a Series A. Then COVID wiped out over 90% of his business overnight. His response: make net revenue retention the single most important metric at the company. In this episode, Joe reveals how he acquired Demio, pivoted from field marketing to webinars, and rebuilt Banzai to eight-figure ARR. You will learn why net revenu...

Josh Ma and his co-founder interviewed 46 engineers before writing a single line of code for Airplane. Their SaaS go-to-market strategy started strong - but selling to tech startups stopped working when budgets tightened in 2022. In this episode, Josh reveals how Airplane pivoted its SaaS go-to-market from Silicon Valley startups to fintech and healthcare verticals, reaching 7-figure ARR. You will...

Alex Yaseen launched Parabola in 2017 and spent five years attracting enthusiastic users who rarely converted to paying customers. His SaaS product-market fit breakthrough came when he noticed a pattern buried in feature requests - the highest-value users all wanted collaboration tools. In this episode, Alex reveals how finding product-market fit required separating "false positive" customers from...

Nate Sanders needed customer data to train his AI SaaS product - but had no customers. Building AI products with machine learning creates a painful chicken-and-egg problem that most founders never solve. In this episode, Nate reveals how Artifact cracked the cold start data problem by recruiting design partners who handed over proprietary data and paid $1,000-$1,500 deposits before the product exi...

Brian Elrod still does five customer demos every single day as CEO of a $15M ARR company. That founder-led sales habit is the reason Text Request keeps winning - it took five years to reach $1M ARR, then scaled from $3M to $15M in just three years. Learn how founder-led sales powered this bootstrapped SaaS company from zero to $15M ARR without a dollar of outside funding. Brian shares how Twilio's...

Dominik Angerer built one of the most effective SaaS content marketing engines in the CMS space - with zero outbound sales. Storyblok grew to $1M ARR with just two founders and 25,000 users, powered entirely by long-tail SEO articles and a live chat widget that became a content flywheel. Learn the SaaS content marketing strategy that ranked Storyblok #1 for "headless CMS explained" - writing techn...

Jonathan Fields and three co-founders built Assembly nights and weekends for over three years. Their SaaS positioning challenge was clear from day one: they launched a nice-to-have SaaS recognition tool, had no idea what an ICP was, and struggled to find their first paying customer. Learn how Assembly's SaaS positioning evolved from a nice-to-have engagement tool into a must-have employee intranet...

Adam Nathan built a templates marketplace that was growing fast - tens of thousands of users per month during COVID. Then he killed it. He walked away from traction, laid off team members, and went back to square one to fix Almanac's SaaS positioning. Learn how Adam navigated the hardest SaaS positioning challenge: a horizontal SaaS product that works for everyone but attracts no one. He spent mon...

Anshu Sharma spent 10 years thinking about one problem before writing a line of code. When he finally launched Skyflow with a SaaS go-to-market strategy built on competitive differentiation through deep expertise, the first customer call ended in a sale. Learn how Skyflow achieved competitive differentiation by creating an entirely new product category - a privacy API for sensitive data. Anshu bui...