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SaaS Life (saaslife.fm)
SaaS Life (saaslife.fm) episodes
- Ep 4: Fueling the Rocket Ship
Labor Day - is that a day startup founders should work on their business or not? What about other holidays? The weekends? You can get a lot done depending on your priorities, products, and projects.
On this episode of saaslife.fm, Sam Schrup and Chris McAleenan discuss work cadence and taking some downtime to reset. Then, fuel and launch the rocket ship. Countdown to blast off!
Highlights from this Episode:
- TextRetailer: Sales demos/product tours turn into deals with new merchants.
- Purpose of Call: Forget features, sell the concept - have you heard enough?
- Pre-qualifying Clients: What are their most pressing needs? Pain points?
- Customer Customization: Show don’t tell them how product works with demos.
- Feature Request: TextRetailer delivers/rolls out new coupon discount system.
- Discount/Coupon Codes: Foundation for a subscriber referral system.
- Customer Success: Content and education on what works and what doesn’t.
- Strengths and Weaknesses: Optimize customer support and development.
- How Not to Hire: Don’t skip over the employee handbook side of things.
- Contractors: Come onboard and do what they know to add value to company.
- Company Culture: Understand why and how to work together w/ preferred tools.
- Reason to Change: When existing tools do not meet needs, be open to change.
Links and Resources:
SaaSLife.fm
Sam Schrup on Twitter
Chris McAleenan on Twitter
TextRetailer
PipeTech Project
SavvyCal
Help Scout
Zendesk
Linear
GitHub Issues
Intro music by Monkey Warhol licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).49 min - Ep 3: Drinking From a Firehouse
Even if you are not involved in the day-to-day operations of a business, you may have to make major strategic decisions. After all, family comes first and progress needs to be made on your To Do list!
On this episode of saaslife.fm, Sam Schrup and Chris McAleenan are ready to get back to a regular routine between family and business(es).
Highlights from this Episode:
- TextRetailer’s First Cancellation: First figure out marketing/product infrastructure.
- Give Notice: How much time to try tools before cancelling subscription, contract?
- Churn: Depends on nature of what’s provided being integral to get things done.
- Data and Information: Good or bad, you want it all to learn and keep churn low.
- Shopify App Store: Sam’s strategy to get merchants to use TextRetailer platform.
- Integrations: Can’t separate selling from big eCommerce fulfillment process.
- Onboarding Process: Taking longer than expected for customers and new hires.
- Target Market: Small municipalities are as excited as big ones to use PipeTech.
- Contractor/Municipality Messaging: Benefits are similar, priorities are different.
- Inflection Points: New hires, customers, building a product to building a business.
Links and Resources:
SaaSLife.fm
Sam Schrup on Twitter
Chris McAleenan on Twitter
TextRetailer
PipeTech Project
Shopify
ESRI
Steadyrack
Intro music by Monkey Warhol licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).44 min - Ep 2: Thoughts on Team Structure
On this episode of saaslife.fm, Sam Schrup and Chris McAleenan share their thoughts on customers, merchants, and building a sustainable team structure and culture.
In the world of TextRetailer, Sam has been heads down for the last few weeks doing a lot of product updates. Some have been customer-driven and others are on the product road map.
Chris follows a similar road map for his PipeTech Project. When a customer or core team member needs something, listen to and learn from them to build and grow your business. Add features that benefit them to solve problems and decrease pain points.
Highlights from this Episode:
- Passwordless Login: Positive customer experience, feedback from merchants.
- Feature Deficient: Always more features to build that can benefit customers.
- Customer Challenges: Balance engineering by assessing good vs. bad features.
- Onboarding: Involves lengthy approval process for integration, data conversion.
- Fancy Features: Solve bugs, problems or expect poor and incorrect experiences.
- Platform and System Testing: You’re not going to use it like your users use it.
- Scale, Scale, Scale: Start hiring and bringing on additional people and resources.
- Remote First/Contractor-Only Business: How to build a team for future of work.
- Ideal Business Model: Includes core team and contractors to drive strategy.
Links and Resources:
saaslife.fm
Sam Schrup on Twitter
Chris McAleenan on Twitter
TextRetailer
Textiful
PipeTech Project
Square
Shopify’s Shop Pay
Audience Ops
Veri
Intro music by Monkey Warhol licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).45 min - Ep 1: Sewers, SMS & Saas
Welcome to the first episode of saaslife.fm, a podcast hosted by Sam Schrup and Chris McAleenan. They go back to basics by talking about who they are, who should listen, and why. Spoiler Alert: You might learn something and have fun at the same time!
saaslife.fm is a forum for Sam and Chris to discuss the current state of their businesses and bounce ideas off each other. They are in two completely different industries but help each other and listeners solve the same problems.
Sam is the founder of TextRetailer, a text-based shopping platform that allows merchants to send text messages (SMS) featuring a product that customers can buy. Prior to TextRetailer, Sam started Textiful, where companies capture emails through text messages to automatically populate email lists at live events.
Chris is working on PipeTech Project, a SaaS product designed for municipalities and contractors to inspect underground assets and manage data from such inspections. Once data is gathered, it is put in the PipeTech Project to make meaningful decisions and allocate resources to prevent catastrophic problems.
Highlights from this Episode:
- TextRetailer: No apps or shopping cart required. Purchase is 100% within SMS.
- Rules and Risks: Challenge of working with phone carriers and industry changes.
- Textiful: Collect information from audiences at live events using text messages.
- Sam’s Approach: Start with idea, build something small, take what works, and build something else.
- Measurements: eCommerce and text messaging increases conversion rates.
- PipeTech Project: Assets owned are anything from a park bench to a traffic light.
- Robotic Cameras: Pipeline inspections, perform maintenance, and fix problems.
- Chris’s Product: Collect aggregate inspection data, put it in PipeTech Project, make decisions, and take action (rehabilitate, repair, and allocate resources).
- Software Needs: Boring industries have cool and fun technical problems to solve.
Links and Resources:
saaslife.fm
Sam Schrup on Twitter
Chris McAleenan on Twitter
TextRetailer
Textiful
PipeTech Project
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Intro music by Monkey Warhol licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
39 min
About SaaS Life (saaslife.fm)
From the publisher's feed
SaaS Life Podcast: Follow the journey of two bootstrapped solo founders as they build their SaaS companies. Chris McAleenan & Sam Schrup will pull back the curtain and reveal their weekly ups…
& downs of running a software company. Chris is the founder of Pipetech Project. Sam is the founder of TextRetailer.