saas.unbound

Mark Walker has been a litigator, a music industry lawyer, and a repeat SaaS founder — and he's now CEO of Nue, the revenue orchestration platform quietly running the billing stack for most of the major AI companies you've heard of.

We get into why customers come to you looking for reasons not to buy, how one Nue customer had $2M unbilled and didn't know it, when Stripe is genuinely enough and when it isn't, why seat-based pricing was never really right — and what Mark thinks are the only real moats left in SaaS.

For SaaS founders thinking about pricing, billing complexity, or what their revenue stack should look like as they scale.

In this episode:

→ Why customers come looking for reasons not to buy

→ How to find and fix revenue leakage (one customer: $2M unbilled)

→ When to invest in revenue infrastructure — and when Stripe is enough

→ Why seat-based pricing was never the right model

→ Lessons from selling his last company

→ Why distribution and data are the only real moats left

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:24 — Introduction: Mark's Unconventional Path to SaaS

1:08 — First Startup Blanketware: Ahead of Its Time

3:21 — What Is Nue? Revenue Orchestration Explained

4:27 — Who's Running Nue: The AI Company Client List

5:44 — Pricing for the Fastest-Growing Companies in the World

9:13 — When to Invest in Revenue Infrastructure

16:08 — How to Price Your Product (and Stop Leaving Money on the Table)

22:40 — Usage-Based Pricing: Hype or Reality?

26:48 — Revenue Leakage: What It Is and Why It's Costing You Millions

35:36 — Lessons from Acquisitions and Exits

39:19 — Biggest Failure and Biggest Win

44:08 — The Hack: Sell by Addressing What They're Afraid Of

🎙️ Mark Walker - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markwalker/

Nue - nue.io

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Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup and then spent a decade realizing he forgot to say "for the better." In this one he breaks down what's actually missing from the way founders build companies, and what to do about it before it's too late.

We get into why it's always too early to set up governance until suddenly it's too late, the two-page legal filing most founders skip for no good reason, the study showing AI made developers 19% less productive while feeling 20% more, and what Samsung's refrigerator strategy says about cycle time.

For founders, operators, and anyone building something they actually want to protect.

In this episode:

→ Why governance is always "too early" until it's too late

→ The two-page filing that protects mission (and why founders skip it)

→ How surrogation destroys great companies — and why mission is the cure

→ The study: AI made developers 19% less productive (they thought they were 20% faster)

→ What Samsung's refrigerator strategy teaches about lean startup

→ Why "just give people what they want" is harder than it sounds

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Why Lean Startup Still Matters After a Decade

3:47 — What Lean Startup Left Out (and Why Eric Wrote Incorruptible)

8:25 — The Danger of "Change the World" Without Saying "For the Better"

14:51 — Why It's Never the Right Time to Protect Your Mission (Until It's Too Late)

17:51 — The Gruff Founder Who Secretly Had a Mission All Along

20:22 — The Builder's Intuition vs. Shareholder Primacy

22:03 — How to Structurally Protect Your Company's Values from Day One

28:26 — Surrogation: When Metrics Replace the Mission

35:56 — The AI Mania: Demos Without Products and LLM Psychosis

44:51 — How Leaders Actually Learn to Use AI (The Two-Week Hack)

54:09 — The Real Hack: Just Give People What They Want

🎙️ Eric Ries - linkedin.com/in/eries

Lean Startup - theleanstartup.com

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Karel Papik spent 20 years making video games and then discovered that gaming principles for hooking users in the first hour are more advanced than most B2B onboarding. He brought that thinking to Product Fruits, then scrapped the entire roadmap to rebuild it around AI.

We get into why his investors offered more money within 24 hours of hearing the pivot, how "forbidden mechanics" from gaming translate into SaaS adoption, why he stopped doing outbound and content entirely — and why he now tells founders to stop listening to customers about the future of their product.

For SaaS founders, product managers, and operators thinking seriously about onboarding, AI adoption, and how to grow without chasing every trend.

In this episode:

→ Why investors offered more money within 24 hours of the AI pivot

→ How gaming "forbidden mechanics" translate to SaaS adoption

→ Why they stopped doing outbound and content — and what replaced it

→ Personalizing onboarding at the user level, not the segment level

→ Why founders should stop asking customers about the future

→ The personal cost of critical thinking and going against consensus

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:00 — Intro & Karel's Gaming Background

1:13 — From Video Games to SaaS: How Karel Found Product Fruits

3:17 — Gaming Principles That Apply to SaaS Onboarding

6:59 — Why Product Fruits Went All-In on AI

9:19 — AI Personalization & How Elvin Works

15:07 — The "Annotation" Method: Teaching AI About Your Product

20:33 — Data Privacy & Why Customer Data Stays Separate

21:40 — Dealing With AI Uncertainty & Pricing Changes

22:58 — Growth Strategy: PPC Over Content

26:21 — Biggest Win: The Bold Bet on AI

29:17 — Founder Hack: The Power of Critical Thinking

🎙️ Karel Papik - linkedin.com/in/karelpapik

Product Fruits - https://productfruits.com

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

J.Y. Delmotte co-founded six startups, went through YC, and is now running BuddiesHR — a suite of Slack apps doing $56K MRR. In this one he gets unusually specific about what's working, what flopped, and what could kill the business.

We get into the Slack Marketplace SEO play that captured 90%+ of inbound (and why it's nearly impossible to replicate now), what happened when he doubled the price twice, the existential risk of building on Slack, and the co-founder split that got lawyers involved.

For SaaS founders thinking about growth channels, pricing leverage, and building a business that can actually be sold.

In this episode:

→ The Slack Marketplace SEO play that captured 90%+ of inbound

→ Why doubling the price twice barely lost any customers

→ The platform risk of building on Slack — and the escape plan

→ Why 40 founder interviews shaped the roadmap before any code

→ The co-founder split that got lawyers involved

→ Selling KarmaLinks and TalkFluence: two acquisitions, smooth handoffs

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction & Guest Background

1:18 — Why J.Y Built Buddies HR

2:00 — What Is Buddies HR?

4:14 — Platform Risk & Slack Dependency

14:18 — Growth Channels & Acquisition Strategy

22:32 — Building in Public — Does It Backfire?

27:42 — Revenue, Pricing & Predictability

34:06 — Selling Car Links & Acquisition Lessons

43:57 — Biggest Win, Biggest Failure & Lessons Learned

54:31 — Founder Hack: Monthly Self-Reflection

🎙️ J.Y. Delmotte - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jydelmotte

🌐 BuddiesHR - buddieshr.com

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

Adnan Malik bootstrapped Software Finder from two people in 2019 to 340 employees with 100%+ growth every year — without ever taking outside funding.

The engine: a human matchmaking layer between confused software buyers and overwhelmed vendors. We get into why 70-80% of B2B software buyers end up unhappy, how a 120-person content team drove 300% organic growth while competitors collapsed, and the mid-market sales mistake costing SaaS founders their margin.

For SaaS founders, operators, and marketers who want to understand how marketplaces actually scale.

In this episode:

→ Why most B2B software buyers end up dissatisfied

→ The chicken-and-egg problem and the first-mover edge of starting in health IT

→ How content scaled to 300% organic growth while competitors dropped

→ Why 90% sales / 10% marketing is the costly default for mid-size SaaS

→ AEO in practice — and why Adnan calls it "glorified SEO"

→ The personal cost of scaling from 100 to 340 employees

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction & Guest Welcome

0:49 — What Software Finder Does & How It Started

2:01 — The Business Model: Free for Buyers, Paid by Vendors

5:58 — Solving the Chicken & Egg Problem

9:21 — 5 Years of 100% Growth — What's Driving It

14:43 — SEO Investment & Organic Traffic Wins

17:04 — AEO & How LLMs Are Changing Buyer Search

20:48 — Biggest Mistakes Vendors Make with Buyers

25:22 — Why Brand & Reviews Matter Before the Sale

26:32 — Review Manipulation & How to Build Trust

30:49 — Founder Burnout & Managing Rapid Growth

33:49 — Biggest Win, Biggest Failure & Lessons Learned

36:38 — Advice for Bootstrapped Founders Today

Adnan Malik - linkedin.com/in/adnanmalik1

Software Finder - https://softwarefinder.com

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

Stay up to date:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #17 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Aaron Gibson has exited two companies, turned down VC funding, and built Hurree — a data analytics platform — by obsessing over one thing: showing users value before they quit.

In this episode:

→ Why Aaron thinks moats are "a lot slimmer than they used to be" in the AI era

→ How anonymous pulse surveys exposed a culture problem he didn't know he had

→ Initiatives that changed team retention

→ His framework for knowing when to double down on a growth channel — and when to kill it

→ Why he doesn't expect his team to love their jobs, and what he expects instead

→ What serial founders actually build toward when they're "not building for acquisition"

For bootstrapped founders, operators, and anyone building a team-first SaaS business in a crowded market.

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction & What Hurry Solves

3:20 — Aaron's Background & Journey into Tech

4:45 — The Origin Story of Hurry

6:38 — Showing Monster Value Before Users Churn

10:12 — Using AI Internally & in the Product

11:55 — Measuring AI Success

14:04 — AI & Hiring: Is It Changing the Team?

17:20 — Building a Strong Culture as a Startup

29:22 — Growth Strategy: Bootstrapped & Customer-Obsessed

30:37 — Account-Based Marketing & Go-to-Market Strategy

34:30 — Building for an Exit — Lessons from Two Acquisitions

37:50 — Biggest Win, Biggest Failure & Founder Hacks

🎙️ Aaron Gibson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronhurree/

Huree - https://www.hurree.co/

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

Stay up to date:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #16 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Leo Goldfarb, co-founder of Albato — a 100% bootstrapped automation and integration platform with 200,000 users and 80 people — after years at Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Booking.com. This episode gets into what it actually takes to build an AI-first product when you're competing with Zapier and nobody on your team has formal AI experience.

In this episode:

→ Why Albato deliberately pivoted away from competing with Zapier head-on — and what they built instead

→ The AI copilot that kept crashing, and the API redesign they had to do before it could work

→ How to spot an AI skeptic on your team before they slow everything down

→ Why 95% of enterprise AI investments fail — and the metric mistake behind it

→ The case for decentralizing AI across every team, not siloing it in an innovation lab

→ What "pump your tires before tuning your car" means for founders bringing AI into legacy products

This one's for founders and operators navigating the gap between AI hype and what it actually takes to ship something that works.

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction: Meet Leo from Albato

1:35 — From Corporate Life to Co-Founding a Startup

6:30 — What Albato Does & 7 Years Bootstrapped

10:44 — The B2B Pivot: Albato Embedded

18:53 — Building AI Without Dedicated AI Engineers

27:38 — Mistake #1: The AI Skeptic on Your Team

35:54 — How to Actually Measure AI ROI

42:27 — Biggest Win & Biggest Failure at Albato

49:07 — Founder Hack: Trust Your Team, Let Go

54:10 — Fix Your Foundation Before Adding AI

Leo Goldfarb - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leo-goldfarb-7b743449/

Albato - albato.com

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

Stay up to date:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #15 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with David Boyne, founder of EventCatalog, an open-source documentation tool specifically designed for event-driven architectures (EDAs), allowing teams to document, visualize, and discover services, events, schemas, and producers/consumers.

Dave Boyne left a senior AWS developer advocate role — the highest salary he'd ever earned — and jumped into bootstrapping with 12 months of runway, a self-hosted documentation tool, and no clear business model. Fourteen months later, Event Catalog has crossed $300K in revenue, and Dave reached personal sustainability in just 8 months.

In this episode:

→ Why Dave chose a self-hosted license key model over SaaS — and why it made procurement 10x easier

→ How he reached sustainability in 8 months without raising a single dollar

→ His AI-powered content and coding workflows as a solo founder

→ The post-sale mistake he almost didn't catch: ignoring renewals while chasing new sales

→ Why he raised prices twice — and the 20% drop-off rule he uses to know when pricing is right

→ How he uses LinkedIn to build trust with developers without ever leading with the product

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:00 — Introduction & Guest Background

1:55 — From AWS to Bootstrapping

5:00 — Marketing on LinkedIn

7:25 — What is Event Catalog?

9:39 — Business Model: Open Core Over SaaS

14:23 — Building with AI as a Solo Founder

38:08 — Biggest Win & Biggest Failure

41:46 — Founder Hacks & Closing Thoughts

This one's for solo founders and technical builders who want to see what the zero-to-$300K journey actually looks like.

David - https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-boyne/

EventCatalog - https://www.eventcatalog.dev/

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #14 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Pieter Boon, co-founder of ImpactPilot, a Customer Success (CS) platform designed specifically as an add-on for HubSpot.

Pieter spent his career in post-sale roles — from Google's ads team to a SaaS startup he helped sell to a unicorn. Now he's building Impact Pilot, a customer success tool that lives inside HubSpot, not next to it. Three months after launch, HubSpot announced a competing feature. Here's what happened next.

In this episode:

→ Why standalone CS platforms create "ghost towns" of stale data

→ The difference between customer support and customer success (and why it matters for retention)

→ The classic first-hire mistake that sets CS teams up to fail

→ How to use AI in customer success without damaging real customer relationships

→ Why Pieter raised only $500K — and what he used it for

→ The one tactic that keeps customers renewing: celebrate their wins with them

This episode is for B2B SaaS founders and revenue leaders thinking seriously about post-sale growth, churn, and when (and how) to build a CS function.

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:00 — Introduction & Welcome

0:34 — Pieter's Background: From Google to SaaS Startup Founder

2:04 — Customer Support vs. Customer Success Explained

3:11 — Do All SaaS Companies Need a CS Team?

5:05 — Why Impact Pilot is Built Inside HubSpot (Not Standalone)

10:09 — Why HubSpot Over Salesforce? Narrowing the ICP

12:21 — Bootstrapping to Angel Round: The Fundraising Mindset Shift

15:04 — How to Start Customer Success as a SaaS Founder

19:07 — Using AI in Customer Success: Use Cases & Guardrails

31:02 — What "Being Active on LinkedIn" Actually Means

34:42 — Building Your First CS Team the Right Way

39:51 — Biggest Win, Biggest Challenge & One Founder Hack

Pieter - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pieter-boon/

ImpactPilot - https://impactpilot.io/

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

Stay up to date:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

•saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #13 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Joel Griffith, founder of browserless, a cloud-based headless browser-as-a-service platform that allows developers to run automated browser tasks.

Joel Griffith didn’t start in tech, he was a professional jazz musician.

Today, he runs browserless, a browser automation infrastructure powering AI agents, bots, scraping systems, and developer tools worldwide.

In this episode, we cover:

• What “headless browser” actually means (without jargon)

• Why Joel chose to bootstrap instead of raising VC

• Growing to $1M ARR without a marketer

• Open source as a growth engine

• Rewriting the entire product to eliminate technical debt

• AI, automation, and whether bots are good or bad

• The emotional reality of hiring, firing, and founder life

If you're building a devtool, infra SaaS, or considering rewriting your codebase - this one’s for you.

Joel Griffith - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-griffith-93933332/

Browserless - https://www.browserless.io

Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group

Stay up to date:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796