On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Rod Ardant, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendesk, about how to build a global company.

An engineer by education, Rod always enjoyed building stuff and co-founded his first company, Wozaik, pretty much straight after college. In 2013 it was acquired and Rod started plotting his next venture. He increasingly saw the discrepancy between how people could pay for things in their personal life and professional. Spending time manually uploading receipts or always needing to borrow a credit card from a manager was outdated he believed. Spendesk was born in September 2015 to improve this. By the following June when the product launched, Rod and company had made a bold statement to the media - they would be operating in multiple markets from the start. To make that happen and scale it, Spendesk has had to be global from day one, doing massive amounts of customer research to understand the local mindset and hiring with inclusivity in mind. 

Listen on to learn:

• How Spendesk decided which markets to approach 
• One simple thing that has allowed him to build a great foundation for an international team
• How he has created a feeling of belonging among all his employees

Going global from the early days and building teams that are not simply diverse but also inclusive are topics that speakers from around the world will be covering at length at SaaStock19 on October 14-16th. Have a look at the full agenda and grab a ticket now.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with one of the SaaStock19 Keynote speakers, Leela Srinivasan, CMO at SurveyMonkey about how B2B companies can survive and thrive in the feedback economy.

Originally from Scotland, Leela has spent her entire professional life in the US, passing through exciting companies such as Lever, OpenTable, Linkedin amongst others. Leela had been a long time SurveyMonkey user before she joined the company as their CMO about a year and a half ago. And she did so for many reasons, one of which being the proper attention the company gives to Diversity and Inclusion. Both the senior executive team as well as the board at SurveyMonkey are gender balanced and diverse.

As SurveyMonkey has moved more and more into the B2B realm, they have been confronted with the fact that we live in the era of the feedback economy. In that sense Leela and her team have had to eat more and more in their own restaurant, meaning using SurveyMonkey to gather feedback in a variety of ways and acting on it.

Listen on to hear:

• How did we get to the era of the feedback economy
• How SurveyMonkey gathers and acts on feedback
• An example how gathering feedback helped SurveyMonkey land a branding campaign

Leela is one of many excellent speakers we will host at SaaStock19 in Dublin this October alongside other fantastic CMOs and VPs of Marketing such as Sydney Sloan CMO at SalesLoft, Alison Murdock CMO at SocialChorus, Kieran Flanagan VP Marketing at HubSpot and others. Grab a ticket now at the best possible price.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we speak with Jason VandeBoom, Founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign about all the unusual things he has done to reach $70M in ARR and counting.

A builder and maker of things from an early age, young Jason thought that the best way to cater for that was to attend Fine Arts school. That pursuit brought him to Chicago. However, to pay for Arts school he started doing consulting on the side. He ended up packaging it into an on-premise solution, which he sold for the good part of the following decade, abandoning the pursuit of the fine arts and establishing himself as a tech entrepreneur. In 2013 he began a transition into building a cloud based customer experience automation platform. By 2016, Jason was employing around 20 people and started growing the company.

Three years later the numbers speak for themselves - headcount is nearing 550, the company has 80,000 customers and is on a healthy growth trajectory, currently earning 70M in ARR. What is not so obvious is how Jason got there. Breaking a lot of hard SaaS rules and doing things that on paper made little sense in scaling but in fact have contributed massively to the success of the company, has been the heart of it.

Listen on to hear:

• An example of an unscalable tactic, many would consider toxic to the bottom line
• Active campaign’s unusual way of doing customer research
• How they break the rules of user conferences

Jason VandeBoom is one of many excellent speakers we will host at SaaStock19 in Dublin this October that will be sharing unusual and not often talked about ways to grow. We have over 160 speakers that will be split between 5 stages, including a Podcast stage where your favorite podcasts such as The Top, The Growth Marketing Podcast, Inside Intercom, The SaaS Revolution Show and others will be recording live episodes that you can listen in on. That is just one small part of what you get with your SaaStock ticket so go ahead and grab one now at the best possible price.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Dan Adika, CEO and Co-Founder of WalkMe about how he has raised the whopping $217 million in the past 7 years.

Dan follows a somewhat familiar path that has bread many excellent Israeli entrepreneurs. He spent 6 years working for tech unit of the Israeli Defence Forces. He then had a year in HP, before realizing that to truly follow his passion for making things, improving them, all the while solving some thorny problems, he had to build his own company. In 2011 Dan did just that. Together with his co-founders Eyal Cohen and Rephael Sweary they started WalkMe.

In February 2012, the three raised their first round of funding that wasn’t coming from friends and family. There were no customers at the time but there was a dream, a bold one - allow people to “walk” the digital world, the way they did the physical one. That bold dream would not always be enough to convince funders but for those times, Dan and his co-founders learned the art of metrics, benchmarks and the data that matters, and have gone through six funding rounds, which have all been very different. How have they done it each time? That’s the topic of our conversation today.

Listen on to hear:

Dan Adika will be joining us at SaaStock West Coast on September 11th, where he will be sharing how he has grown WalkMe to 800 employees and $100m+ ARR and the mistakes he has made when it comes to hiring and culture. He will be joined by a roster of spectacular speakers such as Dan Martel, Nathan Latka, Leela Srinivasan, Sarika Garg that will be providing actionable lessons for growth stage saas companies on how to scale. Check out the full list of speakers and what you can expect to learn from them on our blog. We have very few tickets remaining for SaaStock West Coast so be sure to grab yours now.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

This week on the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Sarika Garg, Chief Strategy Officer at Tradeshift about walking the tightrope between tactics and strategy.

Sarika was raised in Africa and India and moved to Silicon Valley about 20 years ago. Fifteen of them she spent working between SAP and Ariba, moving up the ranks of product management. When she felt she had gotten too used to the comfy life that big organisations can create, Sarika jumped into the deep end joining Tradeshift, first as VP of product marketing and then raising up to Chief Strategy officer two years ago. At the time, the company employed 100 people and she was the first CSO.

Nowadays the company employs 1000 people and at its last Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs, it was valued at $1.1 billion. No wonder then, that Tradeshift is one of the fastest growing Fintech companies in Silicon Valley. That has been achieved by navigating the complex network that Tradeshift offers to businesses and having both a disciplined long term view as well as timely day to day operational excellence. Both of those have fallen within the remit of Sarika and she has learned to walk the tightrope between tactics and strategy.

Listen on to hear:

Sarika will be joining us at SaaStock West Coast on September 11th in San Francisco moderating a panel which will aim to tackle another common tightrope SaaS companies need to walk and navigate: how to split their focus between attracting new customers and retaining the existing ones. Joining her on that panel will be Shane Murphy-Reuter, SVP Marketing at Intercom, Omar Nawaz, Chief Product Officer at Chargebee and Jason Reichl, CEO of GoNimbly. We have a few tickets left for SaaStock West Coast so be sure to grab one before August 30th when prices increase.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Natalie Nagele, Co-founder and CEO of Wildbit about how she and her co-founder and husband, Chris Nagele have run the company for the past nearly 19 years and have created both an effective and calm environment.

During those 19 years, Natalie and Chris have built a lot of products and have shut down many of them. The ones that have stood the test of time have often been SaaS. Currently the company maintains Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. Wildbit currently employs 30 people who are spread between 6 countries.

Natalie’s main goal throughout all this time has been to keep the company a sane place to work. She has never taken VC funding and has never imposed high growth, or unsustainable goals for the company. At the start of the year, however, Natalie and Chris introduced The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to help the company become more effective and productive. So far the experience has been great and they are already seeing great results. It has made them far more effective and aligned, especially as they operate a four day work week.

At SaaStock we also implemented EOS at the start of the year, so this is as much a rundown of how it works as it is an exchange of notes and advice on how to make it better. Listen on to hear:

Natalie is one of many diverse voices we will hear from at SaaStock in Dublin this October. While we will have plenty of stories of high growth and stellar metrics, we will also feature the other, equally as effective ways do SaaS - by growing slowly and sustainably. Joining her on 5 separate tracks will be 150 speakers representing a variety of company stages and verticals. Grab a ticket now at the best possible price.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we take you back to the SaaStock18 stage for a special Ask Me Anything session with William McQuillan, Partner at Frontline. Without any preselected questions, William answers everything on the spot at the Traction stage.

After leaving university, William was one of the founding employees of Ondra Partners, a startup investment-banking boutique. William’s work at Ondra led him to discover his passion for rethinking an industry, and he shortly thereafter co-founded Osmoda, a fashion e-commerce company creating a new way for young and up-and-coming designers to sell online. During the same time, William was also the Global Ambassador for the Sandbox Network, a community of over 1000 innovators under 30. It was through his work at all those places that William experienced firsthand the difficulty that European founders have when fundraising. This inspired him to join the other two partners, Will Prendergast and Shay Garvey to set up Frontline, a fund that would usher in a new generation of early-stage venture capital in Europe. Frontline is based in London and Dublin, but backs companies throughout Europe. Their portfolio includes companies such as Boxever, Roomex and AQMetrics among others.

In the AMA, Will answers a host of questions such as: Does he invest in failed entrepreneurs, advice for “unsexy” companies with a slow start, what is the first company Frontline invested in and where are they now as a result and many others.

Having hundreds of investors around such as William is one of the best features of SaaStock. With targeted matchmaking, a dedicated investor zone and plenty of serendipitious opportunities, you will be sure to have many chances to speak with potential future funders. We just ran a list of 20 investors that will be joining us so be sure to check it out on the SaaStock blog and start prepping. We will link to it in the show notes. Grab a ticket at the best possible price now

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Nazma Qurban, Chief Revenue Officer of Cognism about how she has managed to build a predictable outbound sales machine in the past 2.5 years.

When Nazma joined Cognism she was the first sales employee. The company had one paying customer so the world was hers to conquer and bring in the revenue. Nazma knew the way to go was outbound so she started building a predictable outbound strategy. Driven and ambitious, Nazma would go to every networking event she could and knock on many doors to get a ton of advice and spur as much interest about Cognism as possible.

Two and a half years later she has built a team of 25, mostly comprised of graduates that she carefully upskills. The learning mentality is still present among them and you would be hard-pressed to go to a meetup in London and not run into someone from Cognism. The efforts have paid off. The retention of employees is incredibly high and nowadays Cognism earns $5M in ARR. Cognism’s is a truly remarkable story, with outstanding salespeople in the heart of it.

Listen on to hear:

Nazma Qurban is one of many excellent speakers we will host at SaaStock19 in Dublin this October who will help you improve your sales efforts. During the three days, you will learn much more from the likes of Jacco vanderKooj, CEO of winning by design, Steli Efti, CEO of Close.io, Patricia Duchene, VP Sales, and GM Europe, Wrike and many others. Grab a ticket now at saastock.com for the best possible price.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

On this month’s episode of the Struggle, with talk with Joachim Klein, President of ThreeKit. Originally from Germany, Joachim has been living in San Francisco for the past three years. 

ThreeKit is Joachim’s fourth foray into Enterprise SaaS, a field he is fully subscribed to at this point. He started off his path in a company called BigMachines, the subject of the conversation on this episode.  

Joachim joined it in September 2000 as EMEA MD, nine months after BigMachines had been started. The startup helped manufacturing companies provide the best possible quotes for their big machines. Joachim remembers the first year as particularly exhilarating. They were receiving a lot of interest from prospects, had many great conversations with them and all in all got a lot of praise for the problem they were tackling. On top of that, they had raised $30 million in funding so there was plenty of money in the bank. Bullish about the future of the company, BigMachines hired a lot of people that year, preparing for the demand they would get once these prospects became customers. 

Sounds great, doesn’t it? This wouldn’t be an episode of the Struggle if BigMachines lived happily ever after, would it? They ran out of money before they had sold anything. On the verge of bankruptcy, BigMachines was forced to lay off 70% of its workforce. Joachim lost his entire team.

One night during this rocky period, Joachim's wife asked him, "Would you invest in BigMachines right now?" and Joachim admitted, "No, I wouldn't put even $100 in. The company is dead." 

The company didn’t die and instead eventually got acquired by Oracle but not before a major turnaround, achieved thanks to a lot of self-reflection, change, and learning how to sell. That’s the story of this episode of the Struggle.  

If you can be as honest and open as Joachim or any of the other guests we have hosted on the Struggle, get in touch and send us your story on [email protected]. Thanks for listening, see you next time.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)

This week’s guest on the SaaS Revolution Show is John Doran, Director of Engineering at Phorest Salon Software, a cloud-based management solution and marketing suite for salons and spas. 

Born and bred in Dublin, John has always loved building product and iteratively improving it. Phorest is the first SaaS product he was involved with, jumping in from professional services. which he found far more unsatisfactory. When John joined Phorest four years ago, there were only 5-6 engineers who all reported to Ronan Perceval, CEO and Founder of Phorest. 

Two years into his tenure, John became the Director of Engineering. For a while, he continued operating under the flat structure he inherited but quickly that began to cause problems. Individually siloed and not in sync, the engineering development suffered. John and his team began to experiment with changes and are on a journey of continuous improvement.

Listen on to learn:

John Doran will be one of many speakers we are bringing to SaaStock 19 to talk about engineering and product. He will be joined by Des Traynor co-founder of Intercom, Janna Bastow, Co-founder Mind the product, Dan Martell, 5-time founder and chief instigator at the SaaS Academy and many others. Use code IRINA20 to get a ticket at the best possible price.

Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward: 

🇮🇪 SaaStock Europe: 14-15 October 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Book you tickets: https://saastock-europe.com/tickets/

🇺🇸 SaaStock USA 2025: April 2026 | Austin, Texas
Join the waitlist: https://saastock-usa.com/

🤝 SaaStock Founder Membership: A private members group of B2B SaaS founders between $100K - $10M ARR who are committed to growth and helping others (https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/)

🌎 SaaStock Local: Monthly meet-ups in cities all around the world, bringing together SaaS enthusiasts and experts to discuss the most pressing topics in SaaS (https://local.saastock.com/home)