The SaaS Podcast: How B2B SaaS & AI Founders Get Customers

Steli Efti dropped out of school at 17, flew to San Francisco with a one-way ticket, and asked a stranger at SFO how to get to Silicon Valley. Five years and one failed startup later, his team's internal sales tool became Close.io - built on founder-led sales hustle that generated seven figures with just six people.

Steli breaks down how Close.io pivoted from an outsourced sales services company to a profitable SaaS, why founder-led sales is about asking the right questions instead of pushing pitches, and how content marketing became the only growth channel they ever needed. His approach to founder selling shaped everything about the product.

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Spencer Haws spent $5,000 on a cheap developer to build his first software product. It broke after two weeks. He started over, invested $30,000 more, and turned a 1,000-person email list into a six-figure business using SaaS SEO strategy on his blog NichePursuits.com.

Spencer reveals how his SaaS SEO strategy grew his email list 3-4x between launches, why his relaunch did 3x the sales of his first attempt, and how consistent blogging about SEO experiments drove SaaS organic growth that compounded month after month.

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Jim Belosic stopped paying his mortgage so he could make payroll. That bet turned a small design agency into ShortStack, a SaaS lead generation platform with 350,000 users and revenue approaching eight figures - with zero dollars spent on advertising.

Jim shares how he spotted a repeatable pattern in agency client work, built an internal tool for SaaS lead generation campaigns, then opened it as a self-service product. Within eight months, software revenue eclipsed what the lead generation SaaS agency was generating. He shut down the agency entirely.

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Ben Congleton built his first company in high school, pulling in $170,000 a year from a web hosting business before he could drive. His next act was even bigger - a self-funded SaaS that grew to multi-millions with only $85,000 in outside capital.

Ben shares how Olark went from a side project he funded with consulting work to a self-funded SaaS live chat platform serving 5,000+ customers in 151 countries. He explains why he turned down an acquisition offer, and how obsessing over customer service - not sales - drove this bootstrapped SaaS to profitability.

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Jesse Mecham built a budgeting spreadsheet in 2004 because he was too broke to pay rent. Nobody bought it at $9.95, but when he doubled the price to $19.95, his first sale came that same day. That bootstrapped SaaS spreadsheet became You Need a Budget (YNAB), now a profitable SaaS generating $5M a year.

Jesse shares how he grew this bootstrapped SaaS by teaching first and selling second. A 9-day email course doubled revenue overnight. Live webinars now convert 5,000 people a month. He ran YNAB as a self-funded SaaS side project for four years - earning 2x his accounting salary - before finally quitting.

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Matt Mickiewicz is the co-founder and CEO of Hired, a two-sided marketplace that matches high quality technology talent with the right job opportunities. Previously, Matt co-founded 99Designs, the #1 marketplace for crowdsourced graphic designs. He also co-founded Flippa.com, an online marketplace for buying and selling websites, domains and apps. And if that wasn’t enough, Matt also co-founded SitePoint.com as a teenager and grew it into a profitable multi million dollar company without any venture capital or outside funding. And in 2011, Forbes nominated Matt to the "30 under 30" list.

Matt Mickiewicz built his first online marketplace at 15 years old, paying for his domain registration out of his allowance. By 30, he had used the same playbook for launching a marketplace four separate times - SitePoint, 99designs, Flippa, and Hired - and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Matt reveals why every marketplace launch was born from watching user behavior inside an existing community, how he solved the chicken-and-egg problem when launching a marketplace each time, and why he pitched VCs for introductions instead of money. His two-sided marketplace Hired generated $30M in job offers during its first two-week auction.

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Brecht Palombo is the founder of Distressed Pro, the home of BankProspector, a SaaS application that  provides access to real time updates for real-estate financials from some 14,000 banks and credit unions. He founded this business in 2009 and today has built a 6-figure business which he runs from on the road while travelling full-time with his wife and kids.

Brecht Palombo had no technical background and no funding. He was a real estate auctioneer who saw an opportunity hiding inside public financial data from 14,000 banks. His first product was a PDF report he sold for $300. That niche SaaS bet turned into BankProspector, a six-figure business he runs from the road.

Brecht shares why targeting a niche SaaS market too small for big competitors gave him a defensible position, how chasing side projects caused his revenue to flatline every time, and the SEO strategy that finally made his niche market SaaS growth automatic.

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Josh Ledgard is the co-founder of Kickoff Labs, a lead generation platform which provides easy to setup landing pages, combined with lead capture forms and email marketing to help you grow your customers. Josh and his co-founder Scott, launched Kickoff Labs in 2011 and since then have helped their customers generate over 3 million leads.