The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Nabeil Alazzam had 48 hours to prove his startup could handle enterprise sales compensation for a Fortune 500 company. He got the data at 5pm on a Friday. The meeting was Monday. That weekend B2B SaaS sales play won one of his most important early customers. Learn how Forma.ai bootstrapped B2B SaaS sales for nearly four years before raising $58M, building the initial product in 8 months from a din...

A team spent months building their product, ran user testing, and shipped it - only to get devastating feedback because they skipped the SaaS product design exploration phase. They had to scrap everything and start over. Leon Barnard, Education Team Lead at Balsamiq and co-author of Wireframing for Everyone, delivers a wireframing masterclass for founders. Learn why the cheapest time to make SaaS...

Sufian Chowdhury burned through $80,000 building the wrong product, then COVID wiped out 70% of his customers. Instead of quitting, he built a niche SaaS company that now handles 7 million rides a year and is approaching $10M ARR. Learn how Kinetik became the first vertical SaaS platform for non-emergency medical transportation by physically sitting in customer back offices for 18 months. Sufian s...

Brett Turner spent two years talking to customers, VCs, and bank treasurers before writing a single line of code. Then he made a bet that could have killed the company - he started building before banks had the APIs he needed for his enterprise SaaS product. Learn how Trovata survived a two-year wait for bank APIs, turned JP Morgan into both an investor and a B2B SaaS sales channel, and grew to $1...

Ulf Arnetz watched his revenue drop from $5M to $2M after switching from services to SaaS. Then he discovered a devastating SaaS churn rate of 60% was destroying everything. The product only served CEOs - managers and employees got nothing from it. Learn how Howwe fixed SaaS retention by rebuilding the product so every employee could see their financial impact on company strategy. The result: zero...

What if the fastest way to SaaS product-market fit was to walk into a train station and start asking strangers questions? That is exactly what Jeremy King did before building Attest into an eight-figure ARR business. Five SaaS founders share hard-won lessons on customer discovery, product quality, monetization, and finding product-market fit - including Rahul Vora's product-market fit engine that...

Thomas Kunjappu spent two years building for just one customer. Then he had to figure out how to sell his SaaS positioning to the rest of the market - without a real website, a sales team, or a category anyone understood. Learn how Cleary evolved its SaaS positioning three times - from "external internal tools team" to "employee experience platform" to intranet replacement - and why having Square...

John Li had 1.5 months of runway when he launched Vimcal. He jumped on SaaS onboarding calls with every user, pitched a $15 subscription at the end, and achieved 70% free trial conversion. One user offered a $5,000 investment check instead. Learn the 4-step onboarding call framework that drove this free trial conversion rate: tease with keyboard shortcuts, deliver the magic moment (drag-to-schedul...

Aytekin Tank was helping millions of people automate their work while doing everything manually himself. When Google launched a competing product, he realized SaaS growth depended on applying his own automation principles to his business. In this episode, the JotForm founder walks through the six-step Automation Flywheel that powered scaling SaaS operations from a solo project to 20 million users...

Brandon Foo spent four years building his first startup only to realize nobody needed it. The second time, he flipped the playbook - running SaaS product validation through 100+ customer interviews and charging $30 via Stripe before writing a single line of code. Learn how Paragon used iterative SaaS product validation to pivot from a Firebase-like backend to an embedded integration platform, then...

Neha Sampat bootstrapped a services agency side project for 11 years before spinning it out as a standalone enterprise SaaS company - then raised $169M and grew enterprise sales contracts from $250/month to over $1 million per year. If you want to understand how to transition from services to enterprise sales and close Fortune 1000 deals, this episode walks you through the entire journey - from bu...

When Sunil Patro launched SignEasy in 2010, DocuSign already owned the e-signature market. His product-led growth strategy was radical - instead of matching features, he made signing documents so simple that Apple featured the app in all 400+ retail stores worldwide. That competitive differentiation turned a mobile app into a 7-figure SaaS business. If you are exploring product-led growth to compe...

Daniel Wikberg built his first CRM in 120 hours from his apartment. His server was a computer under his desk that crashed weekly. That scrappy start turned into a B2B SaaS sales platform generating $13M in ARR with 1,800 customers - all bootstrapped. The sales pipeline he built through outbound SaaS sales drives 80-90% of revenue. If you need to build a sales pipeline that competes with Salesforce...

Two years ago, LinkSquares was doing $10M in ARR with 70 people. Today it is at $40M ARR, 430 employees, $161M raised, and an $800M valuation. The SaaS metrics that drove that growth were not vanity numbers - they were unit economics tracked with relentless discipline. If you are scaling SaaS past $10M and need a framework for go-to-market predictability, this episode delivers the playbook. Vishal...

Mike Adams started Grain with a solution looking for a problem. His first year of SaaS product validation was brutal - the ideal customer profile was literally "anyone who thinks it's cool." After running blind customer research, he threw away the entire codebase and rebuilt around a single feature. If you are struggling with finding product-market fit or unclear on your ICP, this episode reveals...

Richard Fenton sat behind his desk for a full month and never made a single sales call. He was paralyzed by fear of handling rejection. His "Go for No" philosophy of consultative selling SaaS has since sold over 300,000 copies and changed how founders approach startup sales. If you are avoiding calls, undercharging, or struggling with the sales mindset needed to grow your SaaS, this episode change...

Four college students in Brisbane ran a bar where nobody showed up on time. So they built a time clock from an Android tablet and started their bootstrapped SaaS growth journey from there. Eleven years later, Workforce.com has 7,000+ customers, 150 employees, and tens of millions in ARR with SaaS without funding. If you are scaling SaaS without venture capital and wondering how to compete with gia...

Renewtrak had two customers and was burning through funding when Mathew Cagney took over as CEO. He made a rule: no new salespeople until he could fix the SaaS sales process himself through founder-led sales. Within six months, he landed Lenovo. If your SaaS sales process is broken or your team cannot close deals, this episode shows how to diagnose and fix it. Mathew reveals why the original sales...

Roxanne Petraeus had never worked in compliance or HR. But a single TechCrunch article about her customer acquisition startup approach landed Netflix as a customer - and kicked off a word of mouth SaaS engine that signed 250 companies including Zendesk, Figma, and Notion. If you are looking for customer acquisition startup strategies beyond paid ads and cold outreach, this episode delivers. Roxann...

Payman Taei built Visme into an 8-figure SaaS with 18.5 million users using a SaaS SEO strategy as the primary growth engine - without raising a single dollar of outside funding. It started as a side project. A focus group for designers attracted zero designers. The non-designers who showed up revealed the real opportunity. If you want to learn how SaaS content marketing and SEO can scale a bootst...

Rahul Vohra spent two years building Superhuman without launching. When the SaaS product-market fit score came back at just 22%, he finally had data to prove they were not ready. Within a year, he drove that product-market fit score to 58% using a systematic 4-step methodology. If you are trying to measure whether you have SaaS product-market fit or wondering when to launch, this episode is essent...

Shruti Kapoor hired a sales consultant who booked 40 meetings with ideal customers. Every single one ended without a sale. Then she built a SaaS lead generation engine using inbound marketing SaaS tactics that flipped the script entirely - over 90% of revenue came through inbound channels. If outbound is not working and you need a better SaaS lead generation approach, this episode shows how commun...

Gil Feig and his co-founder talked to 100 companies through SaaS customer discovery before writing a single line of code. Three companies told them to give up. All three eventually became paying customers. If you want to validate a SaaS idea before building, this episode is a masterclass in SaaS customer discovery and customer validation. Gil shares how network-driven outreach booked 5+ calls per...

Geoff Roberts spent a year selling Outseta to developers who shrugged. His competitive differentiation strategy was wrong - not because the product was bad, but because developers preferred assembling their own tools. When no-code founders on Webflow discovered Outseta, the same product became a must-have. If you are struggling with SaaS positioning or wondering why your target market is not conve...

Melissa Kwan emailed 250 people from her phone contacts to get eWebinar's first 50 customers. When that well ran dry, she had no idea how to build a SaaS content strategy from zero. Agencies failed. Affiliates failed. Then she brought SaaS content marketing in-house and everything changed. If you are struggling to grow beyond your personal network, this episode reveals how eWebinar reached $750K A...