One urgent email changed everything. When a European health agency asked for a metadata registry no one else could provide, we didn’t spin up a pitch deck—we built. That moment of raw product–market fit set Sam Spencer, CEO of Aristotle Metadata, on a decade-long journey of scaling with focus, process, and a bias for the next achievable step.

We talk about the unglamorous truths of SaaS: why your first competitor is almost always Excel; how a scrappy prototype beats a perfect plan; and where AI actually helps (consistency, drafting, complex questionnaires) versus where it falls short (trust, surprise, human connection). Sam shares the hiring philosophy that’s worked for a lean team—consistent interviews, simple work-sample tasks like documenting a cookie recipe—and why early-career talent, coached well, can outperform expensive hires in the long run.

The conversation turns practical and vivid when Sam recounts losing 40% of his small engineering team and choosing a Moneyball approach: define the one metric that matters (ship Tuesday security updates), hire to that constraint, and let process carry the weight. We unpack go-to-market fundamentals that still work—clear positioning around pain, a website you own, steady LinkedIn presence, and network-led B2B referrals—and the leadership habits that give teams autonomy: explicit decision rights, written thresholds for on-call fixes, and honest reasons for hybrid rhythms that speed onboarding and incident response.

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