A story about choosing the harder path—and why contrarian infrastructure decisions create unshakeable customer loyalty.

This episode is for SaaS founders tired of vendor dependency—and those questioning whether the "obvious" infrastructure choices are actually the smartest business decisions.

Most SaaS companies fail because they optimize for short-term convenience over long-term differentiation.

Alexander Sommer, CEO of DSwiss, took a different path. He's the first non-founder CEO to lead this 17-year-old Swiss company specializing in secure digital services. Rather than following industry defaults, DSwiss runs vertically integrated infrastructure—controlling their entire technology stack from hardware up.

This inspired me to invite Alexander to my podcast. We explore how contrarian infrastructure choices create unbreakable customer trust. Alexander shares insights about building fans through consistent execution, why compliance becomes a competitive moat, and how platform thinking solves the "custom request" dilemma. You'll discover why some customers now specifically seek vendors with zero ties to major cloud providers.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They offer something valuable and desirable
• They aim to be different, not better

Alexander's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Alexander's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"We have taken a slightly contrarian view and are running a vertically oriented business. From a hardware perspective, up the software stack, we actually control the entire infrastructure. That makes us definitely not going to be impacted by some of the ties to larger technology vendors."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• What contrarian choice he made to create highly defensible differentiation
• What makes compliance a desirable outcome, not just a checkbox
• When saying "no" to custom requests leads to platform innovation
• Why trust-based businesses require different growth strategies

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Alexander Sommer, CEO

Website: dswiss.com

This podcast is for SaaS founders who feel stuck chasing feature parity—and anyone wondering if there's a smarter way to build something customers can't live without.

Most SaaS founders won't kill a profitable company. They'll optimize it to death instead. Chris Brisson, CEO of SalesMsg, took a different path. He killed his first company while it was still making money. Then spent two years building what messaging should actually do—create conversations, not broadcasts.

This inspired me to invite Chris to my podcast. We explore why choosing destruction over optimization creates breakthrough opportunities. Chris reveals his thinking about engineering backwards from outcomes, disrupting yourself before others do, and building what customers consider indispensable. You'll discover why he chose the harder path of starting over—and what happens when you stop chasing features and start solving friction. We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: They acknowledge they can't please everyone They master the art of curiosity

Here's one of Chris's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"We always take that approach, like, how are we going to disrupt ourselves before someone else does? All right, what are we going to do? How do we disrupt ourselves. Just leaning into, ‘Hey, you know what? We got to kill that product.’ The reality is that it actually doesn't solve the problem. What really solves the problem is this.”

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why killing profitable products unlocks bigger opportunities
• What happens when you engineer backwards from outcomes
• Why saying yes to custom features can actually scale your platform
• Why friction removal beats feature addition every time Chris's story proves traction starts by doing what most others avoid—choosing to disrupt yourself before someone else does.

Guest Info Chris Brisson, CEO and Co-Founder at SalesMsg

Website: salesmessage.com Learn more about your ad choices.