Hampus Jakobsson co-founded TAT and sold it to BlackBerry for $150 million. Then he started a new SaaS company called Brisk - and it failed completely. Selling a SaaS business made him wealthy, but the failure taught him more about building products. In this episode, Hampus shares how six friends built a mobile UI company into a $150 million startup acquisition, why his next company failed despite money and experience, and what he looks for across 80+ angel investments.

The contrast is striking. TAT succeeded because device manufacturers needed mobile UI software and TAT had unique technology - the SaaS exit came naturally. Brisk failed because the team built technology they thought was cool rather than solving a validated customer problem. Selling a startup is the reward for real product-market fit, not just good engineering.

Hampus Jakobsson is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture partner at BlueYard Capital who has invested in over 80 companies after selling a SaaS business for $150M.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Delamon Rego was stuck at a 20% close rate. Instead of guessing, he mapped every reason deals were dying and built a SaaS sales process from scratch. Within a year, his close rate hit 45%. In this episode, Delamon walks through his complete B2B sales process - from building targeted prospect lists using outsourcers, to cleaning and qualifying leads, to crafting multi-touch SaaS sales process cadences that blend email, phone, and social selling.

The SaaS lead generation system starts with outsourcing list building on Upwork at low cost - custom lists outperform purchased ones because you control the fields. NeverBounce reduced bounce rates from 25% to under 3%. Then the SaaS selling process kicks in: 11-step cadences over three weeks mixing six emails and five phone calls, because half of all leads come from touch seven and beyond.

Delamon Rego is the COO of TOMIS Tech, the first AI-powered marketing intelligence platform for tour operators, and creator of The Win Rates Bible.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Lindy Ledohowski was an English professor who did not know how to register a domain name. She had zero technical skills, zero business experience, and zero funding. As a non-technical founder, she flew a developer from Malaysia to live in her guest room for four months, started selling before her website could accept payments, and built a SaaS product that 12,000 students use - generating $500,000 a year.

This non-technical founder validated her product by testing with 200 students before charging a penny. In-class demos converted 35-65% of students on the spot. But the real non-technical founder breakthrough came from partnering with Nelson, a major educational distributor, to leverage their nationwide sales team. As a non-technical SaaS founder, Lindy proved you can build SaaS without coding skills if you bring domain expertise and distribution partnerships.

Lindy Ledohowski is the co-founder and CEO of EssayJack, a SaaS product that makes it easier for students to write essays and get better grades by reducing writing anxiety and procrastination.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Nick Macario has built four companies over 10 years. Three of them grew to over a million users each. He sold two. And he used the same formula for getting first customers every time - referral marketing, content education, and obsessive attention to retention. In this episode, Nick shares the exact mechanics of his repeatable growth playbook, how Branded Me reached 500,000 early customers in four months, and how Dock.io raised $20 million through an ICO.

Nick's startup traction formula starts with making it easy for users to import contacts from Google and LinkedIn, then delivering value before asking for referrals. His first company Branded Me hit 500K initial traction users in four months but taught him that getting first customers means nothing without retention. Growth without retention is just expensive churn.

Nick Macario is the co-founder and CEO of Dock.io, a blockchain-based service that lets you control your information across the web and own your digital identity.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Martin Gontovnikas started coding at 12, built his career as a software engineer, then switched to "the dark side" - marketing. At Auth0, he applied a 6-step inbound marketing SaaS framework that grew the company from $200,000 to eight figures in less than five years. In this episode, Gonto walks through each step, shares a case study where two experiments failed before the third unlocked growth, and explains why 85% of Auth0's revenue comes from inbound marketing SaaS strategy driven by developer content.

The six steps are: decompose the problem, formulate a hypothesis, define a metric, run the experiment, verify the data, and iterate. Auth0's first SaaS content marketing experiment attracted existing users instead of new ones. The second got great conversion but low traffic. The third - greenfield content distributed through Hacker News and developer newsletters - finally drove organic growth SaaS founders can replicate.

Martin Gontovnikas is the VP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0, a platform that makes it easier for developers to implement authentication and authorization for web and mobile products.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Calvin Correli lost his biggest client to outsourcing, had a mortgage three times higher than expected, and his second child would not sleep at night. Everything he tried to make money fell flat. Then this SaaS serial entrepreneur sat down one night and asked himself what he was actually meant to do - and that moment of clarity launched a bootstrapped SaaS growth story that reached $2 million in annual recurring revenue.

Calvin failed at five different startups before building Simplero. As a serial SaaS founder, he tried project management, journalism, publishing, and recruiting - none worked. He paid $2,000 for Marie Forleo's B-School course solely to access its Facebook community, where answering questions organically earned him 25 US customers. Word of mouth was the only channel that ever worked for this SaaS serial entrepreneur.

Calvin Correli is the founder and CEO of Simplero, a bootstrapped SaaS platform that makes it easy for subject matter experts to market, sell, and deliver their information online.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Aytekin Tank launched JotForm as a completely free product in 2006 and waited 14 months before charging a single dollar. That free trial conversion bet turned into a company with over 4 million users and seven-figure annual revenue - all without raising a cent of outside funding. In this episode, Aytekin reveals how he validated his idea without customer interviews, got his first 500 paying customers through word-of-mouth alone, and why adding branding to free forms increased daily signups from 1,000 to 300,000.

JotForm's free trial conversion strategy started with zero paid features. Aytekin wanted to see adoption patterns before building billing. In the first year of paid plans, 500 users converted to paying customers out of 20,000+ free users. Adding branding to free-tier forms in 2017 increased daily signups from 1,000 to 300,000 - proving that freemium SaaS virality can transform growth overnight.

Aytekin Tank is the founder and CEO of JotForm, a bootstrapped SaaS product that helps people create and publish online forms. The company has over 4 million users, 100 employees, and generates seven figures in annual revenue with zero outside funding.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Christopher Gimmer built 10 use-case landing pages that each drove up to 20,000 hits per month. That SaaS SEO playbook helped Snappa grow from zero to $45K MRR with a team of just four people and no outside funding. In this episode, Christopher shares the exact SaaS SEO approach he used to outrank competitors, how a failed dating startup taught him keyword research, and how he validated the product through 15 Skype interviews before writing any code.

Snappa's homepage keyword "graphic design tool" had almost no search volume. But use-case keywords like "Twitter header maker" and "Facebook cover maker" had massive demand. Christopher built dedicated SEO for SaaS landing pages for each use case, then drove backlinks through guest posts. Each page needed only about 5 backlinks to rank in the top 5 results, generating organic traffic SaaS founders dream about.

Christopher Gimmer is the co-founder and CEO of Snappa, a bootstrapped graphic design tool that makes it easy to create online graphics in your browser.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Three first-time founders set out to build an account-based marketing platform when most people didn't know what ABM was. Their SaaS go-to-market strategy was radical: build a B2B community first, product second. A single blog post led to a 300-person conference, which grew into a community-led growth movement of 10,000+ people.

This SaaS go-to-market approach created category creation SaaS results. LinkedIn, Marketo, Salesforce, and HubSpot all sponsored FlipMyFunnel conferences. The B2B community building gave Terminus multiple chances to succeed - when customers churned due to product gaps, the community brought them back once the product caught up.

Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and CMO of Terminus. Before founding Terminus, he led marketing at Pardot through its acquisition by Salesforce. His SaaS go-to-market insight: pursue problem-market fit before product-market fit by building a community around the problem first.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources

Most SaaS founders let fear of failure startup anxiety stop them from making enough sales calls, booking enough demos, or asking for the price they deserve. Andrea Waltz argues the entrepreneurial mindset fix is counterintuitive - set a goal for how many times you want to get rejected. Her "Go for No" framework transformed how millions approach overcoming rejection in sales.

The entrepreneurial mindset shift is simple: 92% of customers say no four times before saying yes. Founders who set "no goals" - targeting 100 rejections per month instead of 10 sales - consistently outperform those who stop after hitting their quota. Andrea's startup sales mindset framework helped her own speaking business double its pipeline.

Andrea Waltz is the author of "Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No Is How You Get There." The book took 10 years to gain traction before hitting number one on Amazon's sales list - a "10-year overnight success" that proves the entrepreneurial mindset she teaches.

🔑 Key Lessons

Chapters

Resources