Scaling SaaS Operations

Gocious is a Southern California based startup that helps discrete manufacturers bring products to market by providing product teams and decision-makers the capabilities and environments necessary to define, decide and communicate changes to their product portfolio faster.
 
 Throughout his career, Mazier has become renowned as an expert in improving organizations and teams' long-term performance strategies using better, accessible, and timely information and analytics. 
 
 1. Mazier shares his background developing information systems.  He started in manufacturing and became interested in back office information
 systems development.  After his experience at Experian, he teamed up with his partner and helped introduce SaaS to product portfolio management for manufacturers.
 
 2. Mazier talks about how SaaS helps transform manufacturing processes.  
 Some companies have made significant investments in on premise systems.  More companies are realizing to start that transition to SaaS models. Globally, there
 are a lot of challenges for manufacturing, supply chain structures, so manufacturers have to change how they work and it's a good time to
 consider changing methods of sharing information.
 
 3. Mazier talks about the benefits of SaaS - sales, product management, integrate more seamlessly when we have new supplies, sites - 
 you can integrate them faster.  As new capabilities get introduced, you can adopt them at a faster pace.
 
 ...and much more! 

For more information, go to Gocious or on LinkedIn.

Ryan Estes is the co-founder at Kitcaster, a podcast booking agency that currently serves over 150 clients. He has an expertise in leveraging podcasts for meaning and profitability,
and currently validates and scales Kitcaster products.
Prior to Kitcaster, Ryan owned a media and marketing agency for ten years. During that time, he hosted the Talklaunch podcast which consistently ranked in the iTunes top 100.
In this episode:

1. Ryan shares how Kitcaster helps book SaaS startup founders on podcasts and the benefits of doing so.   He discusses creating evergreen marketing assets through podcasting.

2. Ryan shares his lessons learned for new a startup founder.  He has started several startups and talks about the hype of entrepreneruship and people tend to 
wrap their personalities around their business.  Ryan talks about separting yourself by treating your product/project as a science experiment, starting
with a hypothesis. 

Ryan talks about the onboarding process at Kitcaster...and so much more!

Learn more at Kitcaster or reach out to Ryan on LinkedIn.

Vedran Cindric, Founder at Treblle.  Vedran has been a developer for the past 15 years and started with  back-end development in PHP/MYSQL and progressed to  learning HTML/CSS/JS as well as DevOps.  He loves writing great, efficient and optimized code.  Before starting Treblle, he ran a development company for the 
 past 10 years with clients all around the world.  

 With his development company, he completed over 100 projects and launched multiple products and startups for others.
 
 In this episode:
 
 1. Vedran shares his interest in programming at a very young age. His experience in backend development and API's led him to starting Treblle which allows developers to view what they are sending/receiving within APIs. Treblle makes it easy to understand APIs.  

2. Vedran shares his lessons learned as a startup founder.  

3. We talk about the current market trends in SaaS. Vedran says he's seeing a higher quality and value-add within SaaS.  Pricing models have also improved. SaaS will continue to be a competitive market.  

4. We talk about building a valuable customer experience that includes multi-channel communcation methods to build a user community. 

 ...Vedran talk about what's next for Treblle and much more!

To learn more go to Treblle.
You can find Treblee on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Dave Hurt is co-founder and head of product at Verb Data. He began his career working in customer success at SaaS startups and stepped into product management as a way to help his customers get the features they needed for success. He caught the entrepreneurial bug and started a software development and design agency which eventually sold to a customer - where his team worked for a few years.
 
Dave and his long-time business partner, Oleg, started Verb at the end of 2019 as a way to help SaaS companies build better dashboards for the end-users.

In this episode:

1. Dave shares his experience working with building dashboards & KPI's at various startups and agencies which led him and his partner to build dashboards inside customer products
that would be easier to scale and maintain.

2. Using a product-led, self-service growth model, Verb Data has about 20 customers in their first cohort.  Mostly B2B (eCommerce SaaS and RFP/documentation software) are main targets inside B2B space.

Dave talks about the onboarding process and how they have started a white glove service which allows them to stay close with these initial customers to
establish an onboarding process.  Eventually will move to a more strategic self-service model.

3. Dave shares his lesssons learns - stay close to your customer and do not be embarrassed to share early products with customers.  Also, Dave feels the founder
should perform all fucntions (sales, marketing, etc) - experience all roles before you hire someone for that role.  Although it's uncomfortable, it's
a valuable process.

You can reach Dave by email or Twitter.


...Dave shares the market trends he's seeing, what's next for Verb Data and much more!  

Amit is President and COO of Avalara, where he oversees sales, marketing, business development, customer experience, and professional services.
 
 Throughout his career,  Amit has focused on supporting businesses grow and thrive in the global economy through the use of tools and solutions.
 
 Prior to Avalara, Amit was general manager and head of the small and medium business segment for North America at PayPal.
 
 He also served in senior leadership roles at Web.com and Dell, focusing on partnerships and go-to-market strategies.
 
 
 In this episode:
 
 1. Amit shares his journey which started at Dell and how that paved the way for his experience in SaaS.  Avalara helps merchants and partners navigate the sales
 tax & compliance complexities.
 
 2. We talk about scaling -- people/teams, leveraging technology and product.  Amit suggests determining what is it you are trying to solve.  Then you can determine how to leverage technology to increase input and when to introduce tools and build the balance between people and technology.   
 
 3. Amit shares more lessons learned for a new founder  -- not staying static and planning for change.  Really spend time around your differentiation in the market  and how you bring that to light. Don't be afraid to constantly reinvent yourself.

..Amit talks about market trends, what's next for Avalara and so much more!

Learn more about Avalara here or connect with Amit on LinkedIn.

Skyler Reeves is the founder and CEO of Ardent Growth. Prior to earning degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy from MSU he served as a combat medic in the Iraq war.
He was the CMO of RunDoyen, where he took their conversion rate from 2.2% on their lead form to 18.5% in his first 30 days and doubled their revenue in the first quarter. He later went on to found Ardent Growth in 2019. His primary passion is content marketing where he can blend his passion for data and creativity into one.

After being frustrated with most approaches to hub & spoke content he began developing a way to algorithmically determine how topic clusters should be structured to align with both search engines and user journeys.

His primary focus is on content intelligence — determining exactly which content should be created for websites, how to group it together using topic clustering, and prioritize it based off of financial modeling.

His latest pursuit is helping companies save money in the long run by bringing content marketing and outreach in-house by finding, hiring, and training marketers on how to develop strategy and manage processes.



In this episode:

1. Skyler talks about Ardent Growth and how they help large B2B enterprise and SaaS companies deliver high-quality content marketing who want a clear path to ROI with financial modeling.  We also talk about outbound marketing strategy for startups, which include developing brand and focusing on building relationships with people.

2. Skyler talks about his journey to scaling his agency.  He talks about the importance of documenting processes, empowering his team to document the processes for their job
and the tools that helps the team maintain SOPs. 

3. Skyler shares his lessons learned, mainly around delegating and managing your own time. Getting the right people in the right seats as past as possible regardless of your profitability to create a more sustainable business in the long run.


..Skyler talks about market trends in SaaS, what's next for Ardent Growth and much more!

For more information, visit Ardent Growth or connect with Skyler on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Hjalmar Gislason is the founder and CEO of GRID. Hjalmar previously served as VP of Product Management at Qlik in Boston. He was the founder and CEO of DataMarket,
founded in 2008 and sold to Qlik in 2014. A career data nerd and entrepreneur, GRID is Hjalmar’s fifth software startup as a founder.



In this episode:

1. Hjalmar shares his experience and passion for helping people who use spreadsheets to effectively communicate the data and models they have put together.  He believes in a "bottoms up" approach by empowering the end users within knowledge based companies. 

2. Hjalmar describes the 3 phases of team growth at Grid. He talks through the processes and tools that were implemented to support this growth and aligning the team in various ways.   

3. Some lessons learned Hjalmar shares include bringing the team together in person and empowering them to do that work.   He introduced a professional coach from day 1 that is available for each employee,  available for any changes to team structure as well as the executive team.  The coach acts as an observer and has been transformational to the culture and commication among the Grid team.   


...Hjalmar shares key market trends in #SaaS and so much more!

You can learn more at Grid.is or follow Hjalmar on Twitter.

Ece Kural is an entrepreneur, the CEO and co-founder of Scrintal.  At Scrintal as the CEO of a B2C SaaS product, Ece has both growth and product responsibilities, making sure that month on month continues steadily and the product roadmap is aligned with the company goals.
Prior to Scrintal, Ece received her PhD in climate change, has 7+ years experience in academic and commercial research.


In this episode:

1. Ece describes her experience in research and academics that led her to start Scrintal.  Her challenges with extracting reserach from audio, video and text to make learning, studying and reserach easier gave her the idea to start Scrintal.

2.  University students and researchers are in constant need of making sense of a lot of content.  These are the early target groups for Scrintal. 

3. Ece describes competitors in this market which include the intersection of note taking, personal knowledge systems and resarch oriented software.

4. Ece shares her lessons learned - mainly talking to customers and understanding their values helped her lead the Scrintal team to make decisions.  She also talks about documentation and not waiting for everything to be perfect!

...Ece shares the market trends she's seeing and much more!

To learn more about Scrintal and to join the waitlist go to  https://www.scrintal.com
Twitter: @scrintal
Youtube: Scrintal
Email: [email protected]
Ece's personal twitter: @ecethinks 

Dean is a serial entrepreneur in the technology industry and CEO of Invisit, a website monitoring software for small businesses. Dean and Invisit are focused on protecting small businesses in a constantly changing digital world by helping customers fix bugs, legal issues, and other issues on their websites.
 
Prior to starting Invisit, Dean launched and exited a marketing technology software company. He then went to Hearst, a media conglomerate where he built the company's data monetization practice, growing it to a $15mm / year business.


In this episode:

1. Dean shares his experience in the SaaS data space and the challenges he encountered with changing privacy regulations.  Invisit helps startups and small businesses manage a variety of legal and tech platform requirements and regulations.

2. Dean discusses the challenges startups and small businesses face with the complexity of losses without configuring platform requirements correctly that could cause loss of revenue.

3. Dean shares his lessons learned as a startup founder.  Less reliance on paid aquisition channels and more focus on customer loyalty and customer experience.

...and much more!

Learn more at Invisit or email Dean directly.

Andy held various leadership roles at Pinpoint and Vera, where he was the Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Chief Revenue Officer, built a GTM strategy and Revenue teams. In the role of a Chief Sales Officer Americas, Andy is driving Creatio’s continued growth on two continents.

In this episode:

1. Andy shares his journey that led him to his current role at Creatio.  Andy spent most of his career in startups.

2. Andy talks in detail about Creatio, the customers they serve and how the low code/no code model is becoming more and more popular across all departments within organizations.  Creatio helps organizations differentiate on their processes.  On top of the platform, Creatio has built a world-leading CRM solution ultimately helping organizations Attract, Aquire, Transact and Service customers.

3.  Andy and I talk about the customer experience  being at an industry-threat level.  Customers are looking for a better experience, not really loyal to a specific brand anymore.  Companies need to be innovative, iterate and experiment at a low cost and high speed to keep up with customer demand.  If companies don't have the ability to launch a customer experience quickly with processes to support that, it will be difficult to be innovative.

Andy also talks about market trends and much more!

To learn more go to Creatio or contact Andy by email or LinkedIn.