Episode Summary:

In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Mark Stouse, Chairman and CEO of Proof, joins host Phil Alves. Proof offers an analytic tool used by sales, revenue, and analytics teams. The company is a five-year-old SaaS startup with a revenue pipeline of over four and a half million.

Mark is a former CCO and CMO at multi-billion dollar enterprises like Honeywell and HP. He shares his perspective of an older founder and walks us through his journey from a unique funding concept to market fit, positioning, and pricing. Along the way, he shares his insights on leadership traits. 

Guest at a Glance:

Name: Mark Stouse

What he does: Mark is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Proof, a SaaS company that offers an analytic tool used by sales, revenue, and analytics teams. He has been a CCO and CMO at multi-billion dollar enterprises like Honeywell and HP.

Mark on LinkedIn

Proof on LinkedIn

Mark’s Book Recommendation Misbehavior of Markets

Topics we cover:

• 
  Things they don’t teach you about leadership
• A unique funding model
• You have way less than a one percent chance of founding a unicorn
• A unique way of attracting customers
• Know these facts before embarking on your startup journey

Highlights:

Everything They Don’t Teach, but You Should Know About Leadership

It all starts with a shift in mindset. Trying to be indispensable at work is akin to slavery. They’ll never promote you if you're indispensable, and you’ll be stuck in a box. Leaders build teams that are collectively smarter than the leader, and sooner or later, the leader becomes dispensable—time to move on to bigger challenges. You need to be a leader before becoming a founder.

“As a leader, it’s my job to ask the best questions and not be the smartest person in the room”. 

Discovering Family Office Funding for a SaaS Startup

Mark made a conscious decision to avoid venture funding as VC expectations and benchmarks distort the nurturing phase of startups. Mark instead tapped into family office funding, a network of privately held companies that do wealth and asset management for high net-worth individuals. The family office is a tightly knit community, and the companies in a given niche talk to each other. Hence, if you can get one of them on board and have a successful proof of concept, the other family offices will knock on your door.  

“We went with family offices that were in the software space and tied up funding rounds linked to performance gateways”.

Set Realistic Goals; You’re not Founding a Unicorn.

Mark cautions founders, especially young founders, from setting unrealistic goals for their startups. Goals and performance gateways need to be realistic because no matter how unique and revolutionary your idea is, it’s a brutal market out there. Also, there’s a high chance that someone bigger than you and who has been around for longer is doing the same thing, maybe in just a slightly different way. 

“It’s great if you build a unicorn and sell it for a billion dollars, just know that the real-world chances of that happening are way less than one percent”.

A Unique Strategy for Building Trust and Attracting Customers

At Proof, Mark uses conventional digital tools like ABM to achieve the marketing goal of converting leads into sales. However, much of his time to date is still devoted to posting on LinkedIn. He follows relevant conversations and offers free tips and advice. This helps build trust among his audience, and he counts on the audience to spread the word and create awareness. It also makes the audience more likely to convert when Mark recommends Proof as a solution. Mark is also a fan of the marketing mix modelling.

“I participate below a relevant post and offer help to people; I’m like a free consultant. It helps build trust with the audience”.  

One Person' Hindsight Is Another's Foresight

Know that being an entrepreneur will teach you things you can’t learn anywhere else. Get ready to devote almost every waking moment to building and thinking about your SaaS. Get prepared to fail in front of an audience and know how to handle those situations. 

Be ready to pivot if your proof of concept proves that there are no takers for your exact idea but there is a crying need for something slightly different. Another must-have is the ability to talk in your audience’s language. If you're qualifying your SaaS product in technical terms to a CMO, you will not make the sale. Instead, qualify your product in impact on marketing goals.   

“We talk about product-market fit, but the real challenge is to qualify and sell your product in a language your audience understands”.