The Scale Up Show

Aytekin Tank is the founder and CEO of Jotform, a form building platform created from his desire to help automate communication between people. Aytekin, a trained developer, bootstrapped Jotform from scratch. He is also the author of "Automate Your Busy Work" and is passionate about writing and sharing business advice.

He joins Ryan to discuss his experience of bootstrapping his company from the ground up and the strategies that helped accelerate the growth of the business.

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Growth often takes time in the first few years of a bootstrapped company but Aytekin highlight the many positives of bootstrapping your company, including the independence you retain and less pressure externally.
• Jotform is a free product but where there are paid add ons and options.
• Aytekin wanted to create a simple to use form building platform after being unable to find what he needed himself.
• The pandemic helped accelerate the transformation into digital and Jotform was on of the businesses to feel that.
• A developer by trade, Aytekin had to train himself on everything including the management of people.
• Creating a culture of independence and innovation, supported with a clear mission statement has helped Aytekin grow his teams and scale the company effectively.
• To compete with the growing competition, including Google forms, Aytekin focuses on automation and delegation in his own work and across his teams.

BEST MOMENTS

“It’s about the [business] journey, it’s not about reaching one state, it’s about what we can do for people”

“I love seeing other people use it [Jotform] and get value from it”

“It’s a very horizontal product, everybody uses forms”

“Starting my company was all about independence, building my own product”

"We also improved out product in terms of automation"

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Ryan Staley interviews Randy Wootton who shares his incredible journey from the U.S. Navy to working for tech giants like Microsoft and Salesforce to becoming the CEO of Maxio, a company that has integrated a platform with over 2,400 customers and $13 billion in annual invoicing. Randy reveals the seven secrets of success for SaaS CEOs, offering invaluable insights on navigating the challenges of scaling a business.

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Randy Wooten transitioned from a successful career in the U.S. Navy and working for tech giants like Microsoft and Salesforce to becoming the CEO of Maxio, a company that has integrated a platform with over 2,400 customers and $13 billion in annual invoicing.
• As a CEO, Randy emphasizes the importance of delivering shareholder value, establishing a winning strategy, shaping company values and standards, building an effective executive team, managing the board and investors, allocating capital strategically, and investing in your personal growth.
• Randy discusses the challenges of selling to CFOs compared to CMOs, highlighting the need for a different go-to-market motion that involves bringing in influencers and references, as CFOs tend to be more introverted and rely heavily on relationships when making purchase decisions.
• Maxio uses the McKinsey Horizon Model to allocate funds for current and future growth, dedicating resources to core business (Horizon 1), near-term opportunities like payments (Horizon 2), and long-term game-changing initiatives (Horizon 3).
• Randy believes that AI will significantly impact go-to-market strategies, with boards expecting companies to incorporate AI efficiency assumptions into their fiscal year 2025 planning, and he advises businesses to start experimenting with AI tools now to stay ahead of the curve.
• To navigate the challenges of being a CEO, Randy recommends finding a mentor who has been in a similar position, working with a coach to improve interpersonal effectiveness, joining peer groups like EO or YPO, and cultivating a personal advisory board for support and guidance.
• Randy highlights the importance of being a system of record and having differentiated data that can be leveraged with AI to create intelligent engines that offer benchmarks and insights to help customers run their businesses more effectively.
• By sharing his experience co-founding the VetForce platform at Salesforce, which empowers military veterans, Randy demonstrates his commitment to making a positive social impact alongside his professional achievements.

BEST MOMENTS

"I am there to deliver shareholder value. That's primarily driven by delivering the results."

"One of the things when I became CEO, the first time was I wanted a mentor, someone who had been in the same context."

"I think for my own career growth, I had reached this inflection point where I thought, gosh, the patterns that I've seen in this scenarios, would it apply to a different vertical in this case, selling to the CFO?"

"Unless you're absolutely crushing it and everyone's gonna make a whole bunch of money, like there is [something] everyone starts to revert to it's like Maslow’s hierarchy of need. They're all nice until it becomes, okay, how are we going to carve up the pie?"

"I think anyone who's truly appreciative of what's happened in their life will also recognize how much luck has played and connections, and we'll be willing to give back to other folks."

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Ryan speaks with Bill Strogis, CRO of Trax Technologies with a wealth of experience in enterprise software sales. Together, they dive deep into the mind of buyers, uncovering the predictable patterns that drive purchasing decisions. Bill shares his unique perspective on the biggest mistakes companies make in sales and provides hyper-tactical advice for growing your business like a VC-backed company without losing your freedom.

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Aligning your sales process with how buyers make decisions can give you a significant advantage over competitors who rely on outdated practices.
• Leveraging the neuroscience of buyer behaviour can help you create a sales motion that is aligned with the buyer's journey, increasing your chances of success.
• Creating a customer engagement model that outlines what both parties need from each other can help build trust and prevent misalignments later in the sales process.
• Effective selling is about having meaningful conversations that create intrigue and get buyers to rethink how they want to solve their problems, ultimately leading them to see the unique value your solution provides.
• Building a truly profitable, sustainable, and durable business requires doing things the hard way, focusing on excellence and effectiveness rather than volume.
• Sellers often make the mistake of assuming buyers know exactly what they need and how to buy it, when in reality, buyers rarely evaluate software for a living.
• Educating buyers with all the information upfront is ineffective. Instead, focus on creating intrigue and getting them to rethink how they want to solve their problems.
• An analytical, engineering-like approach to building a sales motion, considering variables and objectives, is essential for enterprise selling success.

BEST MOMENTS

I don't want to talk to 50 people in a week when 49 of them can't buy my software, right, or don't have the capacity to."

"Every time you get asked for something, you should ask for something in return. And you've created this dance where you're starting to get really good at negotiating without it being an overt negotiation."

"Buyer behaviour is a fairly predictable thing. Most people go through the same things and they ask themselves the same whys, why should I do this? Why should I do it now? Why you like those things are fairly predictable if you understand them."

"It's hard to get somebody who's not paying attention to pay attention. It's not an easy thing."

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Ryan speaks with Andrew Johnston the head of sales at Superhuman for a second time, to explore the landscape of AI tools. Andrew shares his unique perspective on what makes an investable AI company, the importance of seamless integration and workflow, and the future of AI.

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI agents and chatbots are limited in their effectiveness unless they are built with seamless integration and have their own unique value as part of the chain within AI.
• Successful AI tools have integrated in a smart way, with 75% of their own built IP or workflow and 25% leveraging LLMs or fine-tuned data.
• Security is a huge concern in the AI space, and tools like Liminal AI are addressing this by enabling secure use of LLMs within highly regulated institutions.
• RevOps teams can benefit from AI tools like Cinch, which enable sales leaders to build dashboards, reports, and alerts using natural language and prompting.
• AI research tools like Agent Herbie bring resources directly to the user's email, making market analysis more accessible for sales reps and marketers.
• Microsoft is going deep on AI integration across their entire stack, including a proactive team copilot and AI capabilities built into PCs.
• When investing in AI companies, distribution and go-to-market strategy are key differentiators, along with good UI/UX design and core software fundamentals.
• The simplest AI use cases that save 10-30 minutes of time and deliver clear outcomes are often the most powerful and effective tools for CEOs and CROs.

BEST MOMENTS

"What I try to look for is for companies that have integrated in a smart way, but have built a unique IP or workflow so that it's more like 75 per cent of what they've built."

"I think what's important is two things. One is. If you're going to invest in a tool or you're going to find a tool that you use, like, does it get you to an outcome or is it just a chatbot?"

"Distribution is key. You know, who's your market, who you're going after, why is the product sticky? I think that's really, really important to think through."

 

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Join Ryan for part 1 of his interview with Andrew Johnston, the head of sales at Superhuman, for an in-depth conversation about measuring the impact of AI products. Andrew discusses strategies for growing B2C and B2B businesses, highlighting the key factors that contribute to Superhuman's success. 

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Superhuman, designed as the fastest email experience, saves users around 4 hours per week and helps them respond 12 hours faster, offering a glimpse into how email would look if designed in 2024.
• Superhuman's B2C growth leverages PLG levers, while B2B uses a product-led sales motion, targeting power users within corporations to expand team adoption.
• Transitioning from B2C to B2B requires adapting messaging, targeting different buyers, and meeting higher ROI expectations as the company moves upmarket.
• Quantifying ROI involves comparing pre and post-adoption metrics, such as time savings, email volume, and response speed, to demonstrate productivity gains.
• AI enhancement, like writing emails in the user's voice, complements the core value proposition, with 15-25% user adoption of AI features.
• Connecting productivity metrics to business outcomes, such as increased sales rep capacity and outbound activity, is crucial for resonating with decision-makers.

BEST MOMENTS

"Point blank Superhuman is the fastest email experience, or designed to be the fastest email experience in the world."

"The way I like to think about it is if Gmail or Outlook were designed in 2024 versus 2005, how would that product look and what, what things would it have natively built in? And that is superhuman."

"Bar none, I think the first thing is getting the tool right, right? So it has to provide value, productivity gains, and efficiency gains as it stands. And then AI is the enhancement on top of that."

"We're trying to correlate the metrics that matter to that sales leader with the things that we know are true and what we can provide based on the outputs that the tool has seen."

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Ryan Staley interviews Ozan Unlu, the CEO and founder of EdgeDelta, an edge observability platform. Ozan shares his unique journey from engineer to salesperson to CEO, offering valuable insights on integrating AI into your organization profitably. Discover how to leverage AI without compromising margins and unlock the potential for growth.

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI has tremendous potential in various businesses, but it must be implemented in a way that ensures sustainable margins and a path to profitability.
• AI augments human capabilities, providing context and awareness to professionals, especially benefiting those with less experience.
• Preprocessing and curating data sets before feeding them into AI models is crucial for cost-effective AI integration at scale.
• Integrating AI has significantly boosted productivity and efficiency in software development, potentially doubling the speed of feature development.
• AI can accelerate research and analysis tasks, such as reviewing financial reports or customer interactions, saving time while providing comprehensive insights.
• Regularly using AI to analyze website copy, marketing messages, and meeting discussions helps ensure clarity and effectiveness in communication.
• AI assists in observability by identifying anomalies and potential production issues in large-scale data sets.
• Continuous inference is a key concept for making AI work at scale with massive data volumes in observability.

BEST MOMENTS

"AI has a tremendous amount of potential in a lot of various different businesses. I think there is going to be very few businesses that are unaffected or untouched by AI."

"It's not so much replacing a person or replacing a role. It's very much augmenting what someone can do."

"We have probably doubled the amount of features and the efficiency and the speed at which we can develop within our organization internally.”

"If you have a large scale, if you have a lot of data and you are in observability trying to understand how do I actually make AI work at this scale, come talk to us."

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

In this episode, Ryan shares some of the most exciting insights he has taken away from spending 30 hours using ChatGPT4o and Microsoft Copilot. Ryan pushes past the release hype and gives you the real use cases and best solutions for using AI in your existing applications.  

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Microsoft and Google are talking about the future capabilities of their AI software, these are things that aren’t available for use yet such as agents and text to video generators.
• ChatGPT4o is as fast as promised, the speed at which charts and graphs can be built at a high quality is impressive. There is even a tab to be able to create a PowerPoint and export.
• ChatGPT4o can integrate with Onedrive and google drive, the implications of this are far reaching in almost any business case.
• Microsoft Copilot always appears to lag behind ChatGPT releases. However the Copilot functionality has a lot of use cases. Such as summarising web pages and creating content.
• The Excel and Teams capabilities within Microsoft Copilot.

BEST MOMENTS

"There are some things blowing me away that are out right now”

“I love that use case because it makes creating visuals a snap”

“I think Microsoft is a sleeping giant here”

“This is gonna change a lot if you starts to understand this”

“Google Gemini is Still behind, still has issues”

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Join Ryan for part 2 with Advait Shinde, the chairman of GoGuardian. Advait shares his journey of growing his company from zero to over $100 million in just 10 years. He offers invaluable insights on bootstrapping, the power of a strong founding team, and the unlimited potential for businesses to create value in the ever-evolving landscape of technology and AI.

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Having a co-founding team with hands-on product and engineering experience is crucial for accurately assessing the complexity of building and marketing a software product from scratch.
• Entrepreneurs should prioritize building bootstrapped software businesses that require minimal upfront capital, allowing for greater control and flexibility in directing the company's growth and vision.
• Self-awareness and reflection are essential for breaking through self-imposed limitations and achieving ambitious goals.
• The most valuable companies of the future may not exist today, as new markets, services, products, and technologies continue to emerge, presenting near-unlimited opportunities for businesses to provide value to people.
• Focusing on providing the most value to the most people, especially in the context of rapidly evolving technologies like AI, can lead to immense success and growth.
• The economic and business landscape should be viewed as an ever-expanding pie with unlimited potential, rather than a fixed, finite pie with intense competition.
• Embracing the differences between preventing malware on corporate networks and ensuring a safe learning experience for students led to the creation of a purpose-built solution for K-12 education.
• Rapid iteration and incorporating user feedback on a daily basis were key to building a strong product-market fit and driving the company's explosive growth.

BEST MOMENTS

"We figured if we were able to enable this digital transition to be seamless, that we could do a few things. Firstly, we could take all of the amazing content and learning experiences that exist online and deliver them into the classroom in a way that would increase engagement."

"If you have that right team, you should be able to first hand build and market and sell a software product from scratch just with a co-founding team. And I think that that's critical as opposed to, let's say not having technical or product experience and therefore being sort of obligated to outsource that out to a consulting firm or something like that."

"Rather than view the world as this sort of fixed pie that everybody's sort of out competing each other with, I think it's much more interesting to imagine. The world of possibility that has yet to manifest entirely and in that, I think that there seems to be a near unlimited amount of opportunity."

"I think the process of really developing more self awareness of your own fear or insecurity or your own tendencies, especially to the extent they're shaped by your society or family or community or childhood experiences, all of these things sort of come together. Impinge a set of constraints on you. And so developing an understanding of that self awareness of that, I think allows you to pretty reliably break through those limitations."

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Ryan is joined by Advait Shinde, chairman of Go Guardian, to talk about the future of AI for work and learning. They discuss how AI and machine learning in depth, Advait gives some tested AI frameworks for those trying to learn and master AI and also gives his thoughts on the future of AI in the workplace.

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Go Guardian enables students to learn and have access to better techniques to improve learning experiences.
• Relating concepts in the context of things people already understand can help people learn and retain information
• Whilst AI tools can aid learning in adults you can’t expect young children to be able to guide and give the necessary prompts needed.
• A system needs an understanding of what stage of learning a student is at before beginning. One of the key ways to do that is to ask the students questions and identify the level of mastery from their answers.
• A learning plan is just a sequence of skills that are required to meet an endpoint.
• Large language models allow certain tasks to be completed much more efficiently, but they only can do this because of decades of thorough research by individuals and still require a lot of human input.
• Advait believes AI skills will be essential for the future of work. He compares AI skills to internet skills 20 years ago, they were once brand new but now they are essential in any job.

BEST MOMENTS

"The way that we learn is by understanding the relationships of concepts between each other and I think chatgpt does a great job”

“You can’t expect a young child to take the self-directed control over their learning”

“Being successful with LLMs requires you to drive that learning yourself”

“The system needs to understand what is the current state of the student, what is the starting point of this journey”

“As AI changes workflows, more or less every workflow will be AI-enabled or AI-assisted…everything we know and do will be affected by AI”

 

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Join Ryan in part 2 of his conversation with Alex Atzberger for a deep dive into leveraging AI at scale across his 1500 employees and infusing it into their product. Discover the mind-blowing outcomes and results they've achieved by harnessing the power of AI on both the people and product side.

📈 From $100,000,000 to $400,000,000 in just 4 years, the journey of Optimizely is indeed inspiring. ✨ In this episode, Alex shares insights into AI use cases and the transformative potential for both people and products.

Tune in to learn how AI is powerfully shaping the future of work and product development. 

Join 2,500+ readers getting weekly practical guidance to scale themselves and their companies using Artificial Intelligence and Revenue Cheat Codes.  

Explore becoming Superhuman here: https://superhumanrevenue.beehiiv.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI is a driving force of change, comparable to the impact of mobile and the internet, but human adaptation is key to realizing its potential
• Enterprises are exploring AI's value and accumulation points, with a focus on understanding its capabilities and limitations in the short term
• AI can significantly enhance employee productivity and effectiveness by automating tasks and providing content-generation support
• Investing in AI skill acquisition for employees is crucial, as it empowers them to become "superheroes" in their roles
• Embedding AI into existing marketing platforms and processes can yield high value for companies
• AI-powered testing and experimentation enable marketers to test multiple variables, leading to better results
• Context-aware AI assists marketers throughout the campaign creation process, from brief writing to blog post suggestions
• Enterprises must address regulatory concerns and find valuable use cases that align with their specific needs

BEST MOMENTS

"AI is going to be, in our lifetime, one of the driving forces, just as mobile was or the internet was relative to change in terms of how we work, how work gets done, what we can do as society and humanity

"I don't see AI as a zero-sum game. I really see it as actually expanding everyone's capability. It is a superpower that you give people."

"Embedding AI into existing processes can gain a lot of value. In our platform, Optimize D1, which is really that entire marketer life cycle and marketing life cycle where people ideate and create content and test content."

"You know, the generation and the people that can start taking advantage of this, they're just going to be more productive relative to what they do."

"Being context aware when the AI knows where you are in the process. So imagine, for instance, you are starting a campaign, you are writing a brief about the campaign, why you are running this campaign, you know, writing a brief for a campaign can be a tedious task for a marketer."

Ryan Staley

Founder and CEO

Whale Boss

[email protected]

www.ryanstaley.io 

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets