This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to turn a B2B SaaS company with negative growth into a sustainable growth machine in less than a year. My guest is Mads Wedderkopp, CEO of Dreaminfluence.

Mads Wedderkopp has been running SaaS companies for nearly a decade now. Mads started his career early at the age of 17. By age 18 he was managing 120 sales reps. After his early success, he founded his own SaaS company, which he scaled from 0 to 70+ employees and 7M USD ARR. 

In July 2022 he was appointed CEO of Dreaminfluence, owned by Blazar Capital, where he has turned around the business and grown it from 360k USD ARR to +1M USD ARR in less than a year.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Mads to my podcast. We explore what Mads changed to create a cohesive culture to succeed. He then elaborates on the counterintuitive actions he took to battle the too-high churn numbers. He shares his secrets to building a healthy inbound funnel of talent. Last but not least, he explains how he's been able to 5x pricing AND introduce contractual commitments from customers as a means to further expand the fanbase.

Here's one of his quotes

There is learning for everybody that sometimes you have to dare to invest in the right places, even though it doesn't necessarily yield an immediate return on investment. But that investment in product is what has helped us bring churn even further down. And enabled us to raise prices over and over again.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to help overcome performance challenges in SaaS revenue operations. My guest is Aaron McReynolds, Co-Founder and CEO of Alysio.

Aaron is a tech entrepreneur on an ambitious mission. He's got over eight years of experience in sales and sales management. Working for companies like Qualtrics, Octa, and Lacework gave him a proven track record of leading and growing sales teams in various markets, such as enterprise, corporate, and international. The challenges he faced during that period inspired him and his co-founder to found Alisio in October 2022. 

Their mission: to empower sales professionals with the tools and insights they need to achieve their goals and refine their Sales teams.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Aaron to my podcast. We explore why, instead of building a tool primarily for revenue operations, he decided to bet on the end-users (sales reps), thereby challenging the traditional approach of building tools for Sales backend operations. We discuss the toughest challenges he had to overcome early on his journey, thereby prioritizing the success of the business over personal considerations. He elaborates on his 'Minimalist Funding Approach' - acknowledging the necessity of funding, but still advocating for a lean approach. And last but not least, he explains why he and his team decided to take AI off their roadmap. 

Here's one of his quotes:

We see, in the future, essentially a three-legged stool. And to us, that three-legged stool is comprised of the three most important parts of any sales organization: customers, revenue, and people. And so you talk about customer data: Salesforce HubSpot. You talk about revenue data: Clari, Gong, Outreach. And then, when you talk about the people, 'How do you understand the people who are your most important asset and most valuable asset?', that's almost always where the crickets come up.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to change the status quo of an industry that hasn't changed in 3 decades. My guest is Sharekh Shaikh, CEO of CleverX.

Sharekh is a 2X founder in the human capital and the future of workspace. He has successfully created businesses that have generated $ multi-million in sales.

Sharekh’s story is about an immigrant’s Silicon Valley dream. He has lived and worked in 4 different countries and traveled to over 35 countries. He spends most of his time understanding how people collaborate and share knowledge in different contexts of work.

Before becoming a tech entrepreneur, Sharekh worked with Gartner. He helped them build programs so technology leaders across industries could collaborate with each other in a trusted space.

The challenges he had to overcome in that period inspired him to found CleverX In January 2020.

Their mission: To make human knowledge accessible to all and be your trusted place to build real relationships and get work done.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Sharekh to my podcast. We explore the journey of building a solution for the broken B2B market in commercial research. Sharek digs into the critical choices he made early on and explains his first principles for creating a SaaS business that people find worth making a remark about. He shares his views on avoiding dependence on venture capital and getting pricing right from the start. Last but not least, he shares what it takes to navigate various company phases successfully.

Here's one of his quotes

Finding a specific set of customers is really really valuable rather than trying to go after five different people. Because your product can serve five people. It's not like won't. But where does it really solve a pain where people are excited and ready to give you the money right away? That is what you should be looking for.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)

My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to plug directly into the services of IT suppliers around the globe at the click of a button.. My guest is Juha Berghäll, Co-founder and CEO of ONEiO

Juha Berghäll is a visionary leader and a serial entrepreneur with a wealth of experience in the IT domain. His background spans over 20 years in enterprise service management. 

Throughout his career, Juha has held pivotal roles, from being the Chairman of the Board and a Founding Partner at Verco Oy to serving as the Director of Marketing & Partners at Efecte Corp. 

Juha's passion lies in tackling the biggest bottleneck of enterprise digitalization - integrations. He understands the challenges faced by Large Enterprise IT service providers who strive to collaborate with teams, vendors, suppliers, partners, and subcontractors on different platforms.

That's where Juha and ONEiO come in. He envisions an industrial revolution in the enterprise integration space, moving from a hand-made approach to an industrialized, automated, and cloud-based model.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Juha to my podcast. We explore the shift from one-stop shops to best-of-breed providers and what challenges that gives to managing IT supply chains in a changing business landscape. He shares how he made hard choices on his business model, thereby avoiding consultancy temptation. He then elaborates on the big lessons he learned from international expansion, the impact of VC funding, and his evolving go-to-market strategies.

Here's one of his quotes

We really changed the game. We wanted to move away from the traditional red ocean of projects, integration projects, and technologies and platforms and provide something that focuses on the end result.

​​This is a reall new approach and different approach for this industry. It required, of course, a quite drastic change in that we cannibalized our own business.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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In this podcast interview we explore the journey of building a B2B SaaS business around the bold mission of making the world a little more curious. My guest is Guy Cohen, CEO of Wonder. 

Guy is a tech entrepreneur on a big mission. He has worked for three companies in his career. From 2011 to 2013, they worked at Morgan Stanley in the RVR Group. From 2013 to 2015, they worked at Seeking Alpha as the Director of Business Development and Business Development. 

During that period he faced a number of repeating problems and started to look for solutions. The result: He and his co-founder started Wonder in 2015. 

Their mission: to make the world a little more curious.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Guy to my podcast. We explore the profound link between curiosity and business success. Guy shares the pitfalls of not asking the right questions and how that sparked the idea to founding Wonder. He shares why he chose the route of augmenting human potential and how the helped create defensible differentiation. He also elaborates on the challenges they faced getting traction and what he needed to change to accelerate momentum.  

Here's one of his quotes

Every LLM and every AI right now is trained in the way that schools train us, which is to lead to a solution to lead to an answer. We took a very different approach. We've been answering professional questions for the better part of eight years, what we've learned is that the initial question you pose is seven degrees removed from the actual things you need to know. And the only way to get to the right set of questions is to ask more clarifying questions. So we built a clarification engine called Claire, short for clarity.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)

My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to prepare for tomorrow while successfully managing the present. My guest is Graham Hogg, CEO of See6.

Graham is an authority on Sales AI, the author of "Seeing Around Corners", andan industry tech leader with more than 10 years of commercial experience. 

He started his career as a UK Commando Forces Officer. During this career, he realized the power of simulations and how this was a very good way to help teams respond positively to transformation. 

This sparked the idea to found see6 in 2014 - which he leads as the CEO.

Their mission: help organizations, teams and individuals prepare for tomorrow.

Their promise: Help sales teams go 6X faster.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Graham to my podcast. We explore how sales is evolving as a skill - and what's required to succeed. Graham shares his vision to enable this in CPG. He also explains why he decided to niche down (and say no to very big markets) and how that's made a meaningful difference in the traction they're creating. He also shares his framework for making the best product strategy decisions. Last but not least he shares how he avoids his teams to become too internally focused - and how that helped them to become a Remarkable SaaS business.

Here's one of his quotes

Relationship-based selling isn't really relevant in this new environment. The real skill for sales teams to turn it going forward, is actually a writing skill. Their ability to construct compelling sales narratives.  This whole relationship based, 'Hey, buddy, how are you doing and taking you out?' that's not what buyers want anymore. They want much more. They want insight. They want that consumer category lens so that they can see around the corner and what's coming next for their shoppers.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)

My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to buy and sell SaaS businesses in less than 30 days. My guest is Joe Lewin, CEO Foundy. 

Joe Lewin is a two-time SaaS founder who successfully sold his first business in 2022. Since selling his company, his vocation has been to modernize the antiquated M&A process for other tech founders. 

The demand for a modernized exit process has been accelerated by the turbulence in the tech sector and the broader economy, especially now that it's become harder to raise funding. However, founders face a bottleneck issue because most investment banks and advisory firms primarily focus on serving the most prominent companies (i.e. £15m + in revenue). Foundry is focusing on the bottom 90% of companies.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Joe to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the SaaS M&A market. Joe shares his vision and the change he's committed to creating. He talks about the fundamental decisions he made and the mindset he follows to create a business that lasts. He elaborates on his learnings on how they created early momentum - and how that's now accelerated through word of mouth. Last but not least he shares what he learned from the mistakes he made in hiring

Here's one of his quotes

I've met hundreds and hundreds of founders now, even those that may raise double-digit VC funding, and a lot of them really do not have the knowledge or insight on how to maximize their valuation upon an exit. And they haven't laid the foundations to build that deep-rooted value

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)

My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power for marketing teams to work better together. My guest is George Huff, CEO of Opal.

George has been a business/tech/design geek for a long time. That's manifested in a career that started as a web designer and has culminated in him being the co-founder of a few really great companies.

In October 2011 he became the CEO of Opal, a platform Built for Marketers

Their mission: To enable marketing teams to spend less effort maintaining internal alignment and more time doing the work that matters.

George led Opal till July 2016 - stepped down as the CEO - to then take back the scepter in January 2021. 

And this inspired me, and hence I invited George to my podcast. We explore the 12 year journey of Opal and what have been the fundamental choices to grow the business to where it is today. We discuss the lessons he learned from stepping down as the CEO - seeing things from a different perspective - and what that meant when he took on the CEO role again halfway the pandemic. He also elaborates on the challenges he faced managing two innovation S-curves in the business. Last but not least he shares his secret to create a business people want to fight for.

Here's one of his quotes

As a startup person, you had an initial jump, and your ego is like, 'Yeah, we could do anything, we're so great.' The idea of a slowdown is not even in your mind at all. And so, there's a lot of hubris that happens when you craft all these parts of your product, they are your darlings, and then you have to kill them in order to get to the 'What's next'. You've got to admit failure first.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)

My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that gives creators the power to supercharge their productivity. My guest is Jon Ricketts, Co-founder and CEO of Writerly.

Jon's career in the SaaS industry spans over 12 years. He has established himself in the field of artificial intelligence and business innovation. Jon’s journey as an entrepreneur began as an early employee at Transcard, a pioneering fintech company specializing in payment processing. 

In June 2022, he co-founded Writerly, which he leads as the CEO. 

Their mission: to make it easy for creators – both individual and enterprise – to leverage sophisticated AI to supercharge their productivity. 

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore what it takes to build a successful Generative AI startup in a period where a tsunami of companies is coming to market every single day. Jon shares how he started the business without a clear idea of what problem to solve and how he found his sweetspot. He then elaborates on what techniques he uses to build defensible differentiation and stand out in the market. Last but not least, he shares his secrets on how to stay nimble as the business grows.

Here's one of his quotes

The hardest part about being in a generative AI market and seeing the tsunami of companies that are being released is just simply being patient. You try to weaponize speed, speed in terms of development, speed in terms of commercial marketing and sales. But the faster you move, the further back you fall.  

Because when you see something that you would like to replicate this week. Well, by the time your engineers and developers have completed, you've done your testing, and you're moving from staging to production, guess what's happened: someone else has come out and made that essentially obsolete.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed

(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)

My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation, that has the power to run hundreds of engaging webinars without having to be there. My guest is Melissa Kwan, CEO of eWebinar.

Melissa is a 3rd time bootstrapped founder. Her previous company, Spacio (real estate tech), was acquired in 2019.

eWebinar was the product she always dreamt about because she was drowning in sales demos, onboarding and training webinars every day for 5 years.

So, in March 2019 she made the jump and founded the eWebinar. 

Her mission: to give people their time back so they can do something else more fun because that's what life is about.

We don't need to work harder; we need to work more creatively.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Melissa to my podcast. We explore how she built a $1M ARR business from scratch - deliberately going the bootstrapped way. Melissa elaborates on her experiences in building software that helps her customers provide experiences that their customers love to engage with. She talks about how getting her first 200 customers was easy but how growing beyond that became a big challenge - and how she overcame that. Last but not least, she shares some of her secrets to creating a SaaS business without getting into the vicious cycle of desperately chasing funding.

Here's one of her quotes:

The toughest nut to crack is not getting it launched and adopted with your first 200 customers. The toughest stuff to crack is what happens after you've exhausted your entire network and their friends. 

That was a huge reality check for me. Because that didn't happen until about a year after launch. Because all I know is sales I didn't realize that what I need for this business is marketing.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

For more information about the guest from this week:

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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)

My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices