SaaStories

By Subhanjan Sarkar

From the dreamers and visionaries who dared to think ahead. How they built their SAAS. Visions, Genesis, Struggles and Success. Brought to you every week by Pitch.Link, the buyer-seller engagement pla... more

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FAQs about SaaStories:

How many episodes does SaaStories have?

The podcast currently has 24 episodes available.

SaaStories episodes:

December 28, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Moeed Amin, Founder & CEO, Proverbial Door.
Moeed Amin’s educational background is in Neuroscience, Law and Marketing. Armed with such diverse knowledge, Moeed proceeded to build Proverbial Door, an organization that can help businesses grow their sales significantly. He believes that all sales rely on a human to human contact and interaction, which makes neuroscience a core component of any buyer-seller transaction.
Moeed Amin
Proverbial Door works with SME companies whose leaders are trying to attain extraordinary growth, by helping the founders understand what great sales is, and dispel the misconceptions about sales that has given the profession a bad reputation. Proverbial Door also helps to train sales professionals to achieve 120% consistently, year after year. Building trust and honesty, using the foundations of neuroscience, forms core parts of the training program.
Moeed has research to back his claim that customer obsession trumps product obsession. Growth and customer success should be the focus of every person and department in the organization—not just the sales function. And one of the key focus areas in being able to make a sale is building trust with the customer. No sale is possible without the customer having complete trust of the seller.
The problem is not that organizations are not dedicated, but they are running after the wrong vanity metrics. While organizations claim that they are indeed customer-focused, and have done their MVPs and product-market fit studies, founders are unable to describe their customer in detail. But to be customer oriented, founders must know the customer in sufficient detail to be able to describe them such that as if they themselves were the customer. And Customers must be described as individual human beings, not as target groups or organizations with certain needs.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 48.51 mins.
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49min
December 21, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Lazare Rossillon, Co-founder and CEO, Spoke.
Lazare co-founded Spoke after studying Law and computer science. While practising law, he noticed how easily conversations were lost and how much time was spent taking notes and sharing them. This led him to create Spoke, which is essentially a one-stop place to store, search and share online conversations.
Lazare Rossillon
Spoke started two years ago as a school project with students from a one-of-a-kind computer science school in Paris, where there are no teachers and students learn by doing. The team now consists of six people, all from the same computer school. Spoke’s aims to build a searchable, editable and sharable library of all online conversations of users.
Their ideal customer profile consists of researchers, and anybody who would like to gain insights from their online conversations, or anybody who would like to revisit their online conversations. This is great for businesses who feel that conversations with customers can be leveraged for customer insights, or even see the potential of exploiting customer feedback that has been left unexplored.
Spoke can be of great value to UX researchers and User researchers. It can also help to bridge the gap between Customer Success and Product Managers. While their original customer base consisted mainly of users from France and US, with the maturing of the product Spoke is seeing a drip effect, gaining new users from across the globe. By the end of 2022 Spoke has a target of $40k to $50k per month.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 44.06 mins.
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45min
December 03, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Markus Rentsch, CEO, Remark-able.
Markus Rentsch is the CEO of Remark-able, a consulting company helping SaaS companies to turn churn into profitable growth. has developed a unique new business framework called Customer-Value-Led-Growth. Markus is passionate about challenging the status quo and coming up with new ideas. As a consultant, his mission is to take his customers to the top.
Markus Rentsch
Customer-Value-Led-Growth is an approach designed to continuously grow the value for the customer and their lifetime value in return. Most startups and other businesses spend an immense amount of time, effort, and money in increasing the number of customer acquisitions. This is inefficient and leads to very high churn rates of 15-17 percent. Instead, it makes sense for organizations to concentrate on the customers they already have and increase their success. Through greater customer success and profits sellers can ensure retention.
Customer profits are a good indicator of customer success, because there is a high correlation between profitable customers and successful customers. The easy way to validate customer success is to see if they are expanding and procuring enhancements and upsell products. The value they are contributing will keep growing with time. These are the customers whose success should be paramount.
Customer-Value-Led-Growth model envisages acquiring the right customer and maximizing customer success, and only after that monetizing it. There are four factors that contribute to customer retention or conversely churn. These are Customer expectation, product-market fit, onboarding and Customer success program. The customer success program attempts to engineer customer success.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 41.54 mins.
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42min
November 23, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Steven Brady, Founder and CEO, SXS Consulting, LLC.
Steve Brady is an experienced startup operator and entrepreneur with expertise in revenue design. His past experience in several high-profile startups such as Square and Interseller helped him fine-tune his expertise in Revenue Growth. He founded SXS Consulting with the idea of helping startup founders achieve high volume Revenue Growth. He now works from Portugal, a place that he absolutely adores.
Steven Brady
SAAS has a profound business model, with a low barrier to entry, high margins and low to zero cost of distribution. This makes it possible for SAAS organizations to build a high six figure or low seven figure revenue with very little initial capital. Steve believes that the best person(s) to reach the first quarter of million revenue should be the founder. He also realized that most people could plunge into sales and marketing as routine exercises, provided there is the right playbook to go along with. Steve now runs a course which helps startup founders with product-market fit and revenue design.
One of Steve’s biggest achievements was growing Interseller. Interseller was founded by two very technical people, who went through an incubator program similar to Y-Combinator’s. After an initial funding they realized they had no experience with go-to-market, and so they found Steve, who would then take on this role. He helped to design the revenue model, and also design customer success and enablement.
His experience at Interseller was unique in many ways. He started using the product’s free trial when he learnt that the company way looking to recruit sales leaders. This helped him to articulate the user side experience and problems. In designing revenue systems, he also doubled the pricing during the first year, and this turned out to be a success as well.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 53.15 mins.
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54min
November 04, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Rajiv ‘RajNATION’ Nathan, Founder, Startup Hypeman.
Rajiv ‘RajNATION’ Nathan
Rajiv ‘RajNATION’ Nathan is Founder of Startup Hypeman, where he helps organizations to create exceptional presentations through storytelling, so they stand out to their audience, stand apart from competitors, and breakthrough in their category. Rajiv has been named an “Agent of Change” by Huffington Post, has given a TED Talk, and been featured in Inc, Forbes, and more. He’s also a hip-hop artist, yoga instructor, and host of the popular show Startup Hypeman: The Podcast.
Most often, people are mediocre in our presentations, and are unable to articulate the value of their product, instead only managing to compare themselves against their competitors in an increasingly commoditized arena. Rajiv helps people to communicate vision and product in their demo call.
Rajiv Nathan founded Startup Hypeman after his first business did not work so well. That was a personal branding and career coaching company. However, they realized that they were extremely effective in figuring out elevator pitches for their participants. Hence the idea of starting a presentation guidance organization seemed the right thing to do.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 54.20 mins.
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55min
September 30, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, CMO, Acqueon.
Nicolas de Kouchkovsky
Nicolas De Kouchkovsky is CMO at Acqueon, an innovative provider of conversational engagement software. Nicolas has extensive software experience and held diverse executive roles at companies of all sizes. In this episode he discusses the explosive growth of sales tech products in the recent years and where this could be headed.
One of the biggest challenges facing sales organisations is efficiently leveraging technology. Nicolas De Kouchkovsky is a recognized industry expert in sales technologies, and he has authored a comprehensive Sales Technology Landscape.
Nicolas discusses many trends, such as how the ability to weave together several discrete applications into a single ‘desktop’ is resulting in greater productivity for salespersons and is spurring the demand for high velocity results.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 42.34 mins.
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43min
September 07, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Raj Sheth, Founder and CEO of Decalab and Flydata.
Raj Sheth
Raj Sheth is a serial entrepreneur, with several ventures under his belt. He sold his first food delivery business as a student when he was 20. His next two startups failed. But the failures led him to Recuiterbox, which he grew to a 3000+ customer base and $4MM in ARR which was eventually acquired. He then acquired FlyData, and later founded Decalab.
Raj has first-hand experience in global entrepreneurship and team building, B2C and B2B product – market fit, and exits and acquisitions. His vision for the recruitment application went beyond the normal platforms where companies advertise by job-titles and salaries. He believes a platform that allows a peek into the company’s inner workings, with insider insights and an exposition of the real nature of work done is the way forward. This is a vision that Raj has been working upon to build a billion dollar idea.
He explains that many applications are “search and discovery” products, while others are “trust and referral” products. For “search and discovery” products it makes sense to build on SEO, validations and reviews. But for “trust and referral”, no matter how much it is discovered, it is imperative to build trust through superlative content. In this sense all software companies have a dual role— one as a builder of applications, and the other as a media generating company.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 53.41 mins.
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54min
August 09, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Roberto Croci, Managing Director of Microsoft for Startups in the Middle East and Africa region.
Roberto Croci
Roberto Croci has more than 20 years experience working for the likes of Google and Microsoft. With his passion for innovation and startups, Roberto now leads Microsoft for Startups In the Middle East and Africa Region, with the vision to foster a collaborative startup ecosystem to create a better, brighter future for people around the world. Roberto built the organization from scratch, and is based out of Dubai.
Geo-politically Dubai is a hub that connects many important regions such as Africa, Middle East, Europe, even India, and therefore offers immense potential for expansion and growth. The idea that every hub needs to emulate the Silicon Valley is very limiting, because every region offers its own unique culture and socio-economic dynamics that can be leveraged. Currently, with newer political alignments and synergies, the Middle East is poised for rapid development.
The vision and mission of Microsoft for Startups is based on Microsoft’s mission to empower every single person in every organization in the world to achieve more. So, Roberto’s vision is to empower every founder of every startup in their region to achieve more. Roberto talks about the model MFS has developed that helps founders to first achieve product-market fit, and thereafter start scaling. The vision is to move the conversation beyond simply bottom lines to creating greater value.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 49.34 mins.
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50min
July 23, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Co-founder & CEO at Nektar.ai.
Abhijeet Vijayvergiya
Abhijeet Vijayvergiya is a chemical engineer from IIT Kharagpur. Early in his career he worked in the clean energy sector and then moved into SaaS. At Capillary Technologies, as a Board Member & Managing Director for its APAC Business and Global Accounts, he engineered hyper-growth through seed to scale. He specialized in creating global Go-To-Market growth strategy & execution, building and scaling high performing SaaS sales teams.
Talking to various sales leaders, he realized that the sales process was broken, and that CRM was an inadequate tool for salespersons. Most had similar experiences- that some sales people were successful but a large cohort were struggling or failing. At the bottom of the pyramid a large section had to be replaced. They either churned on their own or had to be asked to go. This replacement process might cost a company between $1.2 million to $1.5 million for each wrong hire.
He decided to build Nektar.ai, which would be able to provide actionable insights to salespersons. He believes CRM will continue to remain a tool for record keeping, and will help sales managers, but must now be supplemented by better and newer tools. Nektar.ai is a fully remote organization and is venture funded. Currently in stealth mode, they have opened up selectively amongst chosen organizations for beta testing.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 50.52 mins.
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51min
June 18, 2021Bizcast: SaaStories – In Conversation with Florin Tufan CEO and Co-Founder of Soleadify.
Florin Tufan
Florin Tufan co-founded Soledify as a side project along with a colleague because they wanted to do something different. Florin had a deep background in marketing and product management, with a passion for deep tech and finding solutions to complicated problems.
Soleadify deals with big data aimed at providing actionable insights to small and large companies for a number of use-cases, from sales to marketing and procurement. It uses AI to extract in-depth and updated data on more than 60 million companies worldwide. Soleadify is now emerging as an important player in this area of Business intelligence and useable data focused on the Enterprise segment.
They were able to leverage their own technology to grow their business. With their own database of 20000 SaaS companies, they were able to convert several into paying customers by emailing the companies in the database. They were able to home in on prospects who would then go on to sign up as paying customers.
Florin unpacks the exact methods they used to go from $0 to several thousand dollars in MRR.
These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories
Run time – 51 mins.
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52min

FAQs about SaaStories:

How many episodes does SaaStories have?

The podcast currently has 24 episodes available.