B2B SaaS Podcast

Tom Burton, Co-founder of LeadSmart Technologies talks about how he's reinventing CRM for the wholesale distribution space, where Excel sheets rule and cutting-edge tech is sparse.

What to expect:

• 🚀 LeadSmart's Birth Story: How an industry vet and tech guru created a game-changing CRM.
• 🎯 Cracking a Unique Market: It's more than just software. It's about introducing businesses to the digital age.
• 📈 Growth Unleashed: Over 60 enterprise customers and counting! Dive into LeadSmart's skyrocketing journey and their almost 100% YoY growth secret sauce.
• 💡 The Adoption Playbook: It's not just about selling but ensuring businesses thrive with the software.
• 🎙️ Marketing Wins: From webinars to their own podcast, "Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution", discover LeadSmart’s unique approach to trust-building.
• 💰 Bootstrap to Big Time: Their mostly self-funded adventure is turning heads and attracting investors.
• 🥊 In the CRM Arena: Why the big CRM players might not always be the best for niche markets.

Join us for a deep dive into the world of niche tech solutions, as Tom Burton paints a vivid picture of LeadSmart’s journey, challenges, and their vision for the future.

You can watch this episode on youtube below,

https://youtu.be/hOz7Wgaa_y8

Brendan Weitz, Co-founder of Journey, joins host Upendra Varma to deep dive into how his company is revolutionizing the B2B sales and marketing realm with an innovative storytelling format. Brendan walks us through how Journey emerged from a prototype to a game-changing tool, aiming to make B2B transactions as seamless as B2C purchases on platforms like Amazon.

Key insights from this episode:

• The inception of Journey and its mission to create a captivating buying experience for sales and marketing teams.
• How Journey transcends the conventional 16x9 presentation format to offer a more interactive, mobile-first experience in an asynchronous remote world.
• Brendan's take on targeting sales and marketing sectors, yet being open to a wide range of storytelling use cases.
• A snapshot of Journey's current customer base (around 200 customers) and its freemium model attracting tens of thousands of users monthly.
• The product's self-sufficient viral loop driving 50% of their signups, and their aspirational aim to match viral growth akin to tools like Loom or Calendly.
• A nostalgic journey into Brendan's past roles at major companies like Facebook, AdRoll, and Quora, and how these experiences shaped Journey's growth.
• The vision of Journey and its future go-to-market strategy.
• Team dynamics, funding details, and Brendan's ambitious outlook for the platform.

You can also watch this episode on youtube here.

Jane Portman, CEO & Co-Founder of Userlist, discusses how they repositioned themselves from a customer messaging platform to a more established email service provider (ESP) category tailored specifically for SaaS businesses. In this interview, she shares insights on how they acquired their first set of customers, how they use content marketing to drive leads, and how their repositioning has helped them, among other topics.

The interview covers the following topics:

• How Userlist helps B2B SaaS companies with email automation
• How they acquired logos like SavvyCal and Transistor fm as customers
• How they used personal branding to acquire their first few customers and why it doesn't scale
• How most of their top-of-funnel leads come from inbound leads via content marketing
• What their sales cycle looks like and why customers switch from their competitors
• The backstory of their repositioning
• Team, funding, and vision.

Ahmed Elsamadisi, CEO & Co-Founder at Narrator, talks about how they are building an innovative data platform based on his own innovation of data schema (called Activity Schema). We talk about how he’s come up with this brand new data modelling paradigm, how they’re trying to build a business around this now open-sourced innovation, their customer acquisition strategy & lot more.

The interview covers the following topics:

• The ways in which Narrator empowers data analysts in enterprises, offering quicker insights via the Activity Schema.
• Their journey to acquiring over 200 paying customers, including some prominent brands.
• Efforts to encourage data enthusiasts to amplify their innovation, fostering a ripple of positive online conversations.
• A glimpse into their current sales cycle.
• The intriguing "0 to 1" journey of Narrator.
• Insights into their team, funding trajectories, and a peek into their vision for the future.

Dan Balcauski, Founder & Principal Consultant at Product Tranquility, talks about how B2B SaaS founders should think about pricing & packaging their products. We talk about how to think about pricing, when it starts really mattering & finally how to increase prices without affecting your existing SaaS customers.

The interview covers the following topics:

• How Product Tranquility helps high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products
• The importance of pricing strategy for SaaS companies and the common mistakes that companies make.
• Why understanding customer segments, value drivers, and competition is crucial for creating a pricing strategy that maximizes profitability.
• Why companies looking to increase prices should align on goals, evaluate expected revenue and costs, and test changes at a smaller scale.
• Why pricing and packaging should be approached as a multidimensional strategy rather than just focusing on price level.

Vivek Khandelwal, Co-Founder of iZooto, discusses how they grew their audience marketing platform past $5MN+ in ARR while remaining completely bootstrapped. In this interview, we cover their product, journey from 0 to 1, growth over the past 12 months, sales cycle, and long-term vision. We also talk about how Upekkha, a leading SaaS accelerator, helped them grow manifold over the years.

The interview covers the following topics:

• How iZooto helps publishers of all sizes with audience engagement and retention
• How they acquired over 1000 paying customers with approximately 16000 users on the platform
• How they crossed the $5MN ARR mark and are on track to hit $10MN soon
• How they have been growing in double digits almost every year
• How they hustled and used their connections to get their first set of customers
• How they acquire approximately 60% of leads through outbound and the rest through inbound channels, with content and SEO playing a huge part
• How their sales cycle looks across various sets of customers
• How they joined Upekkha (a leading Indian SaaS accelerator) at around $250K ARR and how they benefitted from Upekkha’s network, tools, and community over the years
• Why Vivek recommends fellow SaaS founders join Upekkha and how they can benefit from the brilliant founder community they have built
• Their vision and team

Phil Alves, the CEO of Devstats (& Devsquad), discusses how they grew their developer performance improvement SaaS to 50 customers within 12 months of its launch, with an ACV of around $10k. In this interview, we cover their product, journey from 0 to 1, growth over the past 12 months, sales cycle, and long-term vision.

In the interview, we discuss the following:

• How Devstats is the only engineering management tool for leaders focused on actionable performance data and healthy teams.
• How they acquired over 50 customers in the past 10-12 months with an ACV of around $10k, primarily using founder-led sales.
• How they used cold emailing to acquire all of their first set of customers.
• What their sales cycle looks like and how it took almost 10-12 months to close their first set of customers.
• How Phil built a hugely successful dev consulting company (Devsquad) with around 100 employees doing in excess of $10MN in top-line revenue.
• How he plans to bootstrap the company using his other successful dev consulting business.
• Their vision and team.

Robert Kirstuik, co-founder and CEO of Freshline, discusses how they have grown to over 100 customers with 200% year-over-year growth in the past 12 months, primarily using cold calling. We cover their product, their journey from 0 to 1, their growth journey over the past 12 months, their sales cycle, and their long-term vision.

In this interview, we discuss the following:

• How Freshline helps food wholesalers and distributors become more efficient.
• How they have acquired 100 customers, each with up to 25 warehouses.
• How they are growing at over 200% year-over-year, primarily from cold calling and organic SEO.
• What their cold calling process looks like, with a conversion rate of 2-3% from call to demo.
• How their sales cycle works, taking around 4-5 months.
• Their journey from 0 to 1.
• Their vision, external funding, and team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDQn_KLXjjQ

Lars Gronnegaard, the Co-Founder and CEO of Dreamdata, discusses the company's growth from 25 to 100 customers in the past 12 months. The following are some key points from the discussion:

• Dreamdata helps B2B SaaS companies with revenue attribution by pulling data from multiple sources.
• Dreamdata has approximately 100 paying customers with an average contract value (ACV) of around $30K.
• Dreamdata's growth has been 4x over the last 12 months.
• Dreamdata's social selling strategy on LinkedIn is responsible for most of the above growth.
• The discussion also covers topics such as their sales cycle, expansion, churn, external funding, and future vision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDdLsh_A6-Q

Ryan Austin, Founder & CEO of Cognota, discusses how they have grown to over 100 enterprise customers with ACV in the range of $20K-$50K at over 150% YoY growth last year. We explore their top-of-funnel lead generation strategy, sales cycles, retention, and expansion strategy.

Here are some key points from the discussion:

• Cognota is the first learning operations system for learning and development teams, as well as other business functions in the enterprise.
• They have approximately 108 enterprise customers using their platform, with ACV in the range of $20K to $50K.
• Around 80% of their new leads come from inbound content strategies, including webinars, blogs, and ebooks.
• Their sales cycle has a win rate of almost 25%.
• Their NRR stands at around 145%, with almost 90% logo retention.
• We discuss what it takes to build a new category and how they are approaching this challenge.
• Finally, we touch on external funding and their future vision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zEFfo-hypo