Growth Stage by FastSpring

Ryan Austin had VP-level experience in training when he decided to start a consulting business to help enterprise-level companies with their corporate learning and development initiatives. 

Ryan and his team noticed so many inefficiencies across the L&D workflows. “It got us thinking: Why is there no purpose-built operating system for corporate learning and development teams, when their jobs are so strategic to the business, and they're managing massive budgets, but they can’t track things like ROI?”

Ryan called it a light bulb moment out of which the idea for Cognota was born. Founded in 2019, Cognota is the first and only LearnOps platform for corporate learning and development teams. There are now over 150 enterprise companies using the platform.

EJ spoke to Ryan about how Ryan and his team created a new enterprise ops category: LearnOps. He also shares insights about how Cognota is maintaining ownership over the category they created while encouraging dialogue and collaboration in the market.

Full transcript available here.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

“47% of businesses created 51 or more videos just last year. So there's all this video being made, and yet, almost none of it gets used more than once. You post it to your website, you post it to social media, and you start working on the next video.” Andrew Levy explained. 

Andrew is the founder and CEO of AdPipe, a SaaS platform that repurposes and repackages your existing videos into custom bite-sized content for any channel. 

EJ spoke to Andrew about what he calls the “great underutilization of content” and how it’s connected to his company. Listen for Andrew’s advice on portraying a company’s value and culture through video, reusing pre-existing content, and what trends he’s seeing in the world of video marketing.

Transcript for this episode is available here.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

Most CEOs don’t run the same company for over 15 years, but Alf Ruppert isn’t the typical tech founder. “I’m a bit closer to business owners from the 50s,” he admits — a time when he believes creating an enjoyable work environment was more highly valued.

This perspective is why at least four employees have been with the company since the beginning.

In 2006, founded iOSXpert — now the largest partner of the Mac-based CRM and project management software Daylite. And for the past 17 years, Alf has grown the company without any external funding and maintained a strong employee retention rate.

Our former Director of Content and Community spoke to Alf about managing a happy team, how he’s grown his company without external funding, the history of developing in the Mac ecosystem, and running a consulting and software business.

Transcript for this episode is available here.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

Before Rachel Harding became the global tax director at FastSpring, she spent two years on a mergers and acquisitions tax team. 

And she often saw deals fall apart.

“I kid you not, nine times out of 10, when a SaaS acquisition fell apart, it was a sales tax issue,” she told me.

Tax non-compliance can unravel an acquisition or result in million-dollar price adjustments.

Another time tax non-compliance can cause major issues? When you’re preparing an IPO. “That stuff will get picked up 100% on due diligence, so you want to clean it up now.”

This episode contains insights into VAT, GST, and sales tax compliance for SaaS companies, including:

• Five countries that recently passed tax regulations that impact SaaS companies.
• How tax liabilities can vary for B2B and B2C purchases in different areas of the world.
• How the statute of limitations works differently in each state in the US — and how that could affect your business financially.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

Michael Bonfils is a marketer first, and a translator second. That’s the philosophy behind SEM International, the firm he founded that specializes in multilingual internationally-based digital marketing services. Since Michael founded the firm in 2004, it has grown to over 30 offices worldwide, and they’ve worked with Intel, AWS, and Salesforce, among many other well-known brands.

Needless to say, Michael knows a thing or two about helping software and big tech manage their global marketing presence. EJ interviewed Michael about successful global marketing strategies.

Full transcript for this episode.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

As a former agency owner, now the Chief Marketing Officer at FastSpring, David Vogelpohl has helped many software companies scale around the world. EJ interviewed him for insights into how to build a global marketing strategy, especially when it comes to localization.

They covered:

• An iterative approach to localizing marketing efforts
• A step-by-step guide to looking for regional growth opportunities
• How to use insights from our 2022 Emerging Customer Markets report
• Finding regional marketing and localization partners

Transcript for this episode.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

Stagflation occurs when heavy inflation is paired with an economic slowdown. Economists fear we're entering into a period of global stagflation. FastSpring sales lead Tony Markov interviewed former Chief Product Officer and pricing expert Kurt Smith about pricing strategies for SaaS and software companies that work well in volatile markets.

Transcript of this episode.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

In our first episode, we sat down with growth expert Frederic Linfjärd to discuss conversion optimization (CRO) for SaaS.
We followed it up with deep dive into churn. Specifically, how Fred slashed it by 50% in a previous growth role at a software company.

He discusses the difference between voluntary and involuntary churn, how to build and scale an automated churn reduction engine, and more.

Transcript for this episode.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.

Is conversion rate optimization for SaaS businesses different than traditional A/B testing for ecommerce? In traditional eCommerce, CRO is all about getting people to click the “buy” button. But for subscription-based companies, that’s just the beginning. We sat down with growth expert (and current Director of Growth at Planday) Frederic Linfjärd to learn more.

Transcript for this episode.

This podcast is brought to you by FastSpring. As the leading merchant of record payment platform for digital products, FastSpring delivers an all-in-one solution for payments, subscriptions, and automated tax compliance—enabling digital businesses to expand globally with reduced complexity and lower costs.