SaaShimi

Jan shares the story of Celigo, discusses iPaaS, speaks on the Company’s Org structure and functions, and how he manages the fast-growing company with an exceptional retention profile.

BIO

Jan is a veteran of the software industry with more than 25 years of experience in sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. He founded Celigo with the goal of simplifying how companies integrate business applications together for a connected enterprise. Prior to Celigo, he worked at NetSuite and Cambridge Technology Partners.

TIMESTAMPS

00:40 Jan and Celigo

06:00 Target Customers (Market)

07:25 Basis for Pricing

09:25 Competition in iPaaS

16:55 Retention

18:20 Go-to-Market

20:00 Rebuilding the platform from scratch

21:00 Size and Growth

23:55 Team and Structure

30:30 Relationship with investors

31:30 Long Term Vision

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Vlad discusses lower-middle market SaaS space, competition in the field, Nexa's deal sourcing, due diligence process, deal structures, and exit strategies. He shares a case study about Nexa's acquisition of AutoReturn, whose software connects law enforcement and towing companies.

BIO

Vlad Besprozvany is a Founder and Managing Partner of Nexa Equity, a private equity firm that invests in lower-middle market software and fintech companies. Prior to founding Nexa, Vlad was a Managing Director at Greater Sum Ventures, where he focused on investments in software companies. Previously, he was a software and fintech investor at Insight Partners and Thoma Bravo.

TIMESTAMPS

00:40 Vlad and Nexa

05:45 Competition in Lower-Middle Market

07:35 Nexa's Investment Criteria / Valuations in the space

13:50 Sourcing deals

19:38 Winning competitive deals 

21:30 Typical deal structures

29:20 Case Study: Investing in AutoReturn

35:30 Exit Strategies

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Erinn Tarpey is a CMO at Visual Lease, a software provider that helps companies stay compliant with lease accounting standards. In this episode, Erinn discussed her role as a marketer, the structure of her team, how she measures the effectiveness of different marketing functions, her take on NPS, and many other things. She also shared a case study – Visual Lease’s call-to-action with a 65% conversion rate.

BIO

Erinn has expertise scaling up organizations in SaaS companies during periods of high growth and has driven marketing efforts around proprietary research development, mergers and acquisitions, and channel sales.

Before joining Visual Lease, Erinn served as a member of the senior leadership team at iCIMS. Prior to joining iCIMS, Erinn directed marketing efforts at Aquiire and PurchasingNet, Inc., both of which provide SaaS solutions designed to streamline procure-to-pay processes at global Fortune 1000 organizations.

TIMESTAMPS

00:35 Erinn and Visual Lease

03:50 Clients

05:20 Pricing

06:05 Solving the lease problem

09:20 Tailwinds from the regulatory environment

12:10 Top objectives of Marketer 

14:35 Marketing team structure

16:05 Measuring effectiveness of Marketing functions

22:25 Internal use of NPS 

26:45 Tech Stack 

29:25 Case study 

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Shelley Perry is an investor, board director, and advisor that specializes in the uniqueness of the SaaS ScaleUp Stage. In this interview we discussed ScaleUps, compared the mindset of investors and operators, and touched on the European SaaS space.

BIO

Shelley Perry is a Managing Director at Scalelogix Ventures. Over her career in SaaS she was an Operating Partner at Insight Partners, CEO of Bynder, Chief Product Officer at NTT, CTO Industry Solutions at Hewlett-Packard, among other things. Shelly sits on boards of Chargebee, Bynder, Foresite MSP, Airbrake.io, and Trove.

TIME STAMPS

01:30 ScaleUp stage

07:30 Quantifying Low, Mid, and Late ScaleUp stage

11:10 What goes wrong on ScaleUp stage?

14:35 What do operators learn when they start investing?

16:45 Role of an Operating Partner at an investment firm

19:20 Due Diligence for different stages of ScaleUp companies

22:35 Do investors and operators look at the same SaaS metrics?

26:00 European SaaS space

28:50 US investors in European SaaS

31:40 SaaS companies that are worth imitating 

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Michael Lyon, is a Founder and Managing Director of Vista Point Advisors, an investment bank exclusively focused on Software and internet. In this episode, he discussed main drivers of SaaS valuation and how revenue models may influence it, Private Equity funds that are active in the space, what founders need to fix prior to selling SaaS companies, how they should handle inbound calls from potential investors, and many other things.

BIO

Michael Lyon is the Founder and Managing Director of Vista Point Advisors. Michael has spent 24 years as a technology investment banker and chemical engineer. Prior to founding Vista Point Advisors, Michael worked at Citigroup where he was a senior member of the technology M&A team. Prior to Citigroup Michael was an engineer for ExxonMobil and BP where he managed chemical plant operations.

TIMESTAMPS

01:00 Vista Point Advisors and Mike's background

02:00 Vista Points deal sourcing

03:05 SaaS market activity

05:00 Main drivers of SaaS valuation

12:50 Revenue models and how they influence valuations

16:00 Selling On-Premise software companies

18:35 Earn-outs or not Earn-outs 

19:55 Bringing house in order before selling the business 

23:00 Choosing a buyer and length of the sales process 

27:15 Private Equity funds active in the SaaS space

28:45 Handling inbound calls from Private Equity funds

29:45 When to call an Investment Banker

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Faisal Masud, is a CEO of Fabric, a cloud-native e-commerce platform for middle market and enterprise clients. Faisal discusses the history of Fabric, what’s behind the company's incredible growth, and what they plan to do with $150M capital they raised in less than a year. You would also be interested to hear his take on ebay, Amazon, UPS, and today’s Silicon Valley.

BIO

Faisal Masud is a CEO of Fabric, which he joined in 2020. Prior to Fabric, Faisal was COO at Wing (Alphabet), advisor to Google [X], and CTO at Staple. He also held roles at Groupon, eBay, and Amazon, and sits on several boards.

TIMESTAMPS

01:00 What’s Fabric  

05:50 Customer profile, Pricing, and Shopify discussion

09:00 Go-to-Market Strategy

12:45 Fabric’s size and growth drivers 

16:30 Company's Org. Structure

22:00 KPI for Marketing and Customer Success

22:40 Client focus - Balancing interests of customers and investors

25:00 Ebay and Amazon NPS

26:30 Survey Data vs Real Data. Silicon Valley is Wrong

27:55 Spending $100M in a frugal way

29:10 Investors involvement

31:40 Building a $100 Billion company

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Patrick Campbell, Founder and CEO of ProfitWell, discussed pricing strategies for SaaS companies. We covered wide variety of topics, from selecting a right price for your software to breaking news to your clients about increasing their price 2x.

BIO

Patrick is a Founder & CEO of ProfitWell, the software for helping subscription companies with their monetization and retention strategies, as well as providing free turnkey subscription financial metrics for over 20,000 companies. Prior to ProfitWell Patrick led Strategic Initiatives for Boston-based Gemvara and was an Economist at Google and the US Intelligence community.

TIMESTAMPS

01:15 Patrick and ProfitWell

03:50 Setting up right pricing

11:10 A/B testing or no?

14:50 Transitioning existing clients to new prices

19:50 On-Prem transitioning to Cloud

22:00 Example of companies that nailed their pricing strategy

25:00 Pricing pages

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Tom Meister, Co-Founder, COO, and General Counsel at NepFin, discusses Revenue-Based Financing for SaaS (and eCommerce companies), typical terms of such financing, profiles of the companies that should consider it as an option, and many other things.

BIO

As COO and General Counsel, Tom manages NepFin's legal affairs and oversees its business operations. Prior to co-founding NepFin, Tom served as Senior Counsel, Capital Markets & Finance at Funding Circle, where he was responsible for the structuring, execution and distribution of Funding Circle's offerings to institutional and accredited investors. Earlier in his career, Tom practiced law as a debt finance attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC and Goodwin Procter LLP.

TIMESTAMPS

01:15 Tom and NepFin

03:10 Revenue-based financing and its growth

13:15 Profile of companies that can take revenue-based loan

15:20 Terms of RBF loans

23:00 Pricing

27:30 Lender’s security interest, personal guaranty, and covenants

32:00 Is RBF good for equity raise?

35:00 Main RBF players

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Mark Znutas, Vice President of Go-to-Market Strategy and Operations at HubSpot, discusses HubSpot’s RevOps and how it aligns Sales, Marketing and Customer Success. We also covered HubSpot’s go-to-Market strategy, which has changed drastically over the years.

BIO

Mark is a VP of GTM Strategy and Operationsl at HubSpot, where he leads Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. Mark has held several key roles in RevOps at HubSpot, when the company started expanding beyond its core Marketing software. Prior to HubSpot, Mark was a Manager of Global Field Solutions at Affinnova (acquired by Nielsen).

TIMESTAMPS

00:20 HubSpot and Mark’s background

01:20 Revenue Operations and how it works at HubSpot

07:50 Go-to-Market strategy

08:40 HubSpot’s unconventional move to Product Led Growth

10:35 Three components of a growth strategy

17:40 HubSpot’s expansion from Marketing Software to CRM

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Scott Beechuk, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners discusses his experience as a startup founder and his move to VC, the latest market trends, Scott’s investment process, as well as qualitative and quantitative characteristics of companies he likes to invest in.

BIO

Scott brings more than 20 years of product, engineering, and SaaS expertise to his role as a partner on Norwest’s enterprise team. He focuses on early- to late-stage investment opportunities in enterprise SaaS with a focus on companies building business applications taking advantage of human-assisted AI, advanced behavioral analytics, client-agnostic platforms and industry-specific solutions. He currently serves on the boards of Bluecore, Leanplum, MindTickle, Qualified, Singular, and Socrates AI.

Scott most recently served as Senior Vice President of Product Management for Salesforce Service Cloud, the industry’s #1 enterprise customer service platform. While at Salesforce, he also served as Head of Engineering, Product, UX, and Documentation for Desk.com.

Before joining Salesforce, Scott cut his entrepreneurial teeth building multiple consumer and enterprise software companies including a multi-brand e-commerce service with an integrated multi-channel customer service platform, an enterprise privacy middleware platform and a consumer metasearch engine.

TIMESTAMPS

00:10 Scott’s background and why he joined Norwest Venture Partners

05:18 COVID’s effect on startup creation

09:50 Post COVID SaaS valuations

11:10 Investment Process – from sourcing to investing

18:30 Qualitative and quantitative characteristics Scott is looking for in startups

26:57 Common mistakes startups make

32:35 Fundraising advice to founders

34:32 Bonus Question