The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

Welcome to episode 300 of The Remarkable SaaS Podcast.

Because this is a big milestone on the journey, I didn’t want to devote this podcast to one guest – instead, I got 23 B2B SaaS CEOs on the mic.

A big element of every single episode of the podcast is my question at the end of each episode.

What would be a Do or a Don't that you'd like to share with other SaaS entrepreneurs?

And so, I’ve made a hand-picked selection of these Do's & Don'ts from the last 100 podcast episodes

Let's start with the Don'ts

1. Neta Meidav, CEO Vault Platform: Don't take other entrepreneurs' advice on face value.
2. Melissa Kwan, CEO eWebinar: Don't start a business that you hate, even if it has success.
3. Emil Jimenez, CEO Mindbank AI: Don't think about the money
4. Aleks Gollu, CEO 11Sight: Don't bother people will steal your idea
5. Toni Hohlbein, CEO Growblocks: Don't forget where you are in the process
6. Sunny Han, CEO Fulcrum: Don't allow comfort to take over
7. Jon Ricketts, CEO Writerly: Don't limit yourself in your thinking
8. Patrick Woods, CEO Orbit: Don't ignore yourself
9. Charlotte Melkert, CEO Equalture: Don't think you need to be in control of everything
10. Antony Thomson, former CEO Loopin: Don't bring new people on unless you're 100% oversubscribed.
11. Barrett King, Sr. Manager Global GTM Strategy, Partner Ecosystem Hubspot: Don't use the sentence: I'm gonna build a partner program
12. Christian Owens, CEO Paddle: Don't malign yourself with having 2 different interpretations of what a good outcome looks like

And now over to the Do's

1. Melissa Kwan, CEO eWebinar: Do create your own definition of success
2. Amir Konigsberg, CEO Pragma: Do something that can be genuinely valuable for someone else
3. Lars van Wieren, CEO Starred: Do walk the walk and talk the talk
4. Patrick Woods, CEO Orbit: Do aggressively communicate - keep everyone on the same page
5. Christine Tao, CEO Sounding Board: Do ask for what you need

...

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to deliver on the promise of offering the best cybersecurity service in the world. My guest is Matt Holland, CEO of Field Effect.

Matt Holland is an authority in the cybersecurity industry. He started his career at the Communications Security Establishment in 1999 as a leading security researcher for top-secret projects in the Five Eyes community. In 2007, he co-founded Linchpin Labs because he saw the opportunity to provide better solutions to democratic governments and corporate clients globally. The company was sold to L3 in 2018.

In January 2020, he co-founded Field Effect, which he leads as the CEO. Their mission: To turn the global cybersecurity landscape on its head by creating the technology and tradecraft to protect underserved small & medium-sized businesses from modern cybersecurity threats.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the cybersecurity industry, in particular for small and medium-sized businesses. Matt elaborates on the strategic choices he made early on to differentiate the business - being able to offer his solution at a fraction of the price of traditional players. He also shares his formula to build a sustainable business that can successfully compete with very large competitors.

Here's one of his quotes:

The mission of the company to protect small and medium businesses around the world is a really neat thing to see in action. We have stopped some incredibly challenging ransomware attacks. And when you think about it, if we weren't there, it would potentially be a business-ending event for the customer. It could potentially shut down a medical facility.

When it comes to job satisfaction, […] It's like a passion flywheel that feeds right back into it to make the entire product and service even better.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How Matt found the underserved markets he could serve like no one else.
2. How he's able to offer game-changing pricing in a very competitive market.
3. What he's steering for to increase the effectiveness of product development
4. What ingredients he's looking for to keep growing in challenging times.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matt Holland
• Website Field Effect

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey and critical choices that were required to sustainably enable small businesses to compete with the big ones. My guest is Aditya Varanasi, CEO of Awarity.

Aditya Varanasi is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He started his career at Frito-Lay as an engineer but quickly grew into a brand manager. After 8 years, he then moved to PepsiCo, where he worked for 14 years pioneering new ways to amplify the power of digital media across brands, including Cheetos, Cracker Jack, and Lays Stax.

He never dreamed of being an entrepreneur until he was faced with a choice: take a risk or sink back into Corporate America.

This sparked the idea and the courage to found Awarity in 2016.

Their mission: World-class marketing should be affordable to everyone.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Aditya to my podcast. We explore the journey to realize the mission to help small businesses compete with the big brands when it comes to marketing. Aditya elaborates on the initial struggles he experienced to get traction, and what he did differently to fix that. He also shares a framework for making conscious product strategy decisions so that value, stickiness, and differentiation increase. And last but not least, he shares his principles for aligning everyone and growing in a responsible way.

Here's one of his quotes:

I spoke to the co-founder of a large electronic medical records company in the US. And he gave me some feedback. He said, hey, look, if you can price this at $299 a month and guarantee what they're going to get, I think you've got something.

So I took that feedback very seriously. By the second week of December, we updated the website with a new pricing and value proposition. By the middle of December, we had signed up our first two doctors; by the end of January, we had about 25 doctors signed up. I said, Okay, there may be something here. We still had the same idea. But it was productizing it to something that was a value proposition that was overwhelming. That ultimately helped us get some traction.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to gain traction in a market that wants what you offer badly but can't afford it?
2. What principles Aditya uses to continue to bootstrap the business for as long as possible.
3. The four attributes he is using to score everything on his product roadmap.
4. The pragmatic approach he's using to keep everyone in the company aligned on the voice of the customer

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Aditya Varanasi
• Website Awarity

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to make the biggest possible impact as a business in the most positive way. My guest is Jonny White, CEO of Ticket Tailor.

Jonny White started his career as a software engineer, building websites for clients. On his journey, he spotted a gap in the market for ticketing systems. That became the founding idea behind Ticket Tailor, which he founded in 2011. It started a wild entrepreneurial ride. He achieved product market fit and decided to sell his company after about 2 years. This made him an employee for the first time ever - but only for a short time, since he bought his company back only a few years later.

The next period, he ran it as a lifetime business to then realize its unique growth potential. The rest is history.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonny to my podcast. We explore the valuable insights Jonny learned from transitioning from a bespoke to a subscription model. He elaborates on the three things that make his company sustainable: the importance of simplicity, creating cycles of positivity, and tightly integrating social and business impact. Last but not least, he talks about how he remained resilient during the COVID turbulence and managed to come out as a stronger company.

Here's one of his quotes:

Keeping things simple is a very hard thing to do. But if you can do it, you can move mountains. Keeping things simple often gets confused with ignoring complexity. It's about unpacking that complexity and really understanding it as core. And then we're like, which is the one that's going to be simple, not in terms of this decision, but what's the one that makes it simple in terms of the long term for us, so that we're not compensating for that in the future?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to sell your SaaS business and then buy it back only a few years later, coming out stronger.
2. The methodology he used to gain the confidence to make some fundamental decisions for his business
3. How he doubled down on purpose helped double the business, grow NPS and eNPS scores to benchmark levels, stay very lean, and maintain a healthy profit.
4. Why obsessing over revenue and financials is not the leading thing if you want to build a business with staying power.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jonny White
• Website: Ticket Tailor

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:

1. What questions to ask to reduce churn in your company.
2. Why you should prioritize cash over MRR in your early-stage SaaS journey.
3. How to increase the quality of your customer base.
4. Why customers should pay for onboarding - and how to get them to do so.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Mads Wedderkopp
• Website Dreaminfluence

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:

1. How he identified a gap in sales tools despite using all the popular ones.
2. How they are creating a market perception to be a much bigger company than they really are.
3. Aaron's leadership style to use humility to make up for the things he doesn't know as a SaaS CEO.
4. Why he's focused on understanding and rewarding individual sales performance, challenging the norm of board, organization-level metrics.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Aaron McReynolds
• Website Alysio

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 we 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:

1. Why he doesn't believe in Minimum Viable Product and what he did instead to drive success early in the process.
2. Why he'd explore more verticals at the same time - if he'd ever get the chance.
3. How he's testing whether he's on the right track with his product fit and strategy.
4. What he's doing differently to get feedback that translates directly into his development choices.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Sharekh Shaikh
• Website: CleverX

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 really new 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:

1. Why he decided to cannibalize his business and what it meant to succeed in doing so.
2. Why he decided to bootstrap the company instead of immediately jumping into the venture capital train
3. Why he'd opt to internationalize the business earlier if he'd do it again
4. How niching down his target market helped to increase deal size by 5x.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Juha Berghäll
• Website: ONEiO

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 he 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:

1. Why most failures and how are related to money are a consequence of not being curious enough.
2. How blending technology with a human element has helped them to deliver value no other company can.
3. Why, if he could rewind the clock and do something differently, he'd choose to narrow the aperture of who they are serving and why.
4. How fear inhibits the asking of essential questions and hindering progress - and how to overcome that.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Guy Cohen
• Website: Wonder
• Try Wonder for Free

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", and an 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:

1. Why a very important decision was to not work with marketing, but sales instead.
2. Why he discarded Pharma as a market as 'way too big' - and how that made everything easier.
3. How he tested for Problem Market Fit - and how that accelerated Product Market Fit.
4. How See6 is leveraging first-mover advantage in the Generative AI world.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Graham Hogg
• Website: See6