Unscripted SaaS

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini "what's the best X?", a few brands get named — and most companies have never checked whether they're one of them. Somya Goyal built Stellarcast to change that: a platform that watches how your brand shows up in AI answers, diagnoses why you're missing, ships the fix, and then proves the needle moved.

After 15+ years in quality engineering — eight of them at Accenture, then leading QA and building validation frameworks for AI systems — Somya is a first-time founder building Stellarcast in the open from India. In this conversation with host Jeremy Rivera, she breaks down why AI citations are a different game from search rankings, why "AI is confidently wrong" about so many brands, and how a continuous monitor-diagnose-execute-prove loop beats the one-time audit.

"Visibility in AI is simple. Make your brand easy for AI to find, understand, and read. That is the new name of AEO, in very simple English."
— Somya Goyal"Ranking is different and citation is different. AI citations overlap Google's top-ten links by only fourteen percent."
— Somya Goyal"Most brands have never read what AI says about them, and sometimes AI is confidently wrong. It cites data that's maybe two years old — the pricing, the reviews — even after a lot of fresh data."
— Somya Goyal

Unscripted SaaS is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Catch more episodes at unscriptedsaas.com

Otter and Fireflies do not fail at African languages. They discard them. Unknown languages get filtered out as noise or approximated to the nearest English word. Tobiloba Sulaimon, a self-taught developer from Lagos, built AuTrans to transcribe Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo as they were actually spoken. It started as a fix for a meeting the tools could not handle.

Tangible things were said and their machine did not capture that. And I thought that since I am a software developer, maybe I could build something that would solve this problem.

Mainstream tools filter unrecognised languages out, or map them onto the nearest English word. The output looks like a transcription failure. It is closer to a design choice, and it is the kind of choice a large company can make for years without anyone internally noticing.

That is the general lesson worth taking from this episode even if you never touch transcription. Find the thing your category's incumbents have classified as an acceptable failure.

We are African first. We are focusing on ourselves first, so I’m trying to solve this problem within Africa first before we move on.

This is not positioning. Limited funding cannot cover the continent's language count, so attempting breadth would mean doing all of it badly. The narrowness is what makes the quality possible, and the quality is the entire product.

Everything I know today I learnt on my own. I am a self-taught software developer.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript from YouTube after high school. A first paid client build. Then a front-end role at a game studio where being the only developer meant learning fast or shipping nothing. The first version of AuTrans took about a week.

With a team and outside consulting, he now rolls features out step by step and turns down most requests, so AuTrans does not become a jack of all trades. Jeremy anchors the same lesson in Raven Tools, which expanded horizontally until it was competing with everyone and beating no one.

Around one hundred users and the first paying customers at the time of recording, with mobile apps, more languages and API access on the roadmap.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

autrans.online

Sulaimon, Tobiloba. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Africa First.” Unscripted SaaS, 2026. https://unscriptedsaas.com/africa-first-tobiloba-sulaimon-on-focus/

Tom Girgash quit his job two or three weeks before this conversation to build Taproot, a memory layer that keeps your knowledge in local files and pipes it into Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and Claude Code over MCP. Jeremy Rivera talks with him about grounding AI in your own work, finding words for a brand-new category, and building distribution without an ad budget. Follow Tom on X at @TGIRGS.

Tom took the long way into software: an Ohio State degree, a sales role selling bearings and hoses in the field, an information-systems master's at the University of Cincinnati, and a short stint as an ERP consultant at an accounting firm. Taproot started as an MVP he built for one man named Tim, who wanted one place to hold and query all his knowledge. Read the full written recap: Tom Girgash on building Taproot, the memory layer for solo AI operators.

Tom's open problem is the one most bootstrapped founders share: "I'm not in a position right now. I want to spend money on ads," so he needs an organic distribution engine. Reddit and forums help with validation but punish anything that smells like selling. He also names a trap of the moment: with AI you can do so much that it's easy to spend weeks tweaking a website instead of talking to users. We dig into that tension in Cracking distribution is the hard part, and Nick Eubanks makes the same case in distribution as the only moat.

Jeremy brings lessons from running product at Raven Tools: the interaction between pricing and churn, why "they left because of price" is not actionable on its own, and why a launch platform like AppSumo can buy you a committed early user base. He also maps where marketers went after the Twitter exodus: Threads, Bluesky and Slack communities.

Tom's line on where this is all heading: "I think being human, being as human as possible, connecting with your audience on a very human level, it's going to be something that's going to be pretty large going forward."

More founder stories from the show: Founder stories and bootstrapping. Try Taproot free for 30 days at taproothq.com/pricing.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Fifteen years building SaaS across European scale-ups, including the unicorn Brevo, compressed into two words. Malith Gamage bootstrapped Zapdigits, a client-reporting tool for marketing agencies, and his survival advice is not a framework. It is do not die. Stay alive three or four years and you are fine. Everything else in this episode is the operational discipline that makes that possible.

Some main advice is don’t die. Like as long as you can stay for like three, four years alive, then you’re good.

Unromantic, and more useful than most strategy. The failure mode for a bootstrapped tool is almost never being out-competed on features. It is running out of runway during the years when nothing is visibly working.

So the discipline is structural: no in-house hires, infrastructure scaled only when demand actually arrives, and a year of cloud credits treated as a cash-flow buffer rather than free compute to burn.

Your AI is smart as your schema. As long as you give the correct data and the correct description, then you will get good answers back.

He draws the parallel to MCP without prompting, and it is the reason he pipes context in before asking anything: pull the Analytics data first, describe it properly, then ask the question. The quality ceiling is set at the data-description step, not at the model.

I don’t even know sometimes if you ask the same question five times you get five different answers they pull out from five different places.

Zapdigits aggregates brand visibility across several models and averages it into a score for agency clients. He will tell you the underlying signal is unstable while the feature is live, which is rarer than it should be.

His sharpest example is his own: a throwaway landing-page domain with no authority and no promotion behind it was what the models surfaced when asked about his brand. The domain he had actually promoted was not.

Competitors gate white labelling behind the most expensive plan. Zapdigits puts it on every plan, and the reasoning is about who the customer is rather than about pricing psychology. An agency has to look more together than the client’s internal marketing team, so its own branding on the dashboard is not a premium feature, it is the thing being sold.

The lifetime deal was run the same way. Buyers came in through live webinars and stayed in a private group, on a public roadmap where they add feature requests directly. Many bought partly to back a founder who was starting out, and then kept sending ideas.

Which is the actual return: people who tell you something useful, rather than people who tell you it was good but too expensive.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

zapdigits.com.

Gamage, Malith. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Do Not Die: On SaaS Survival.” Unscripted SaaS, 4 August 2026. https://unscriptedsaas.com/do-not-die-malith-gamage-on-saas-survival/

Kevin Urrutia is a software engineer turned serial entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience building tech products. He's worked at Silicon Valley companies including Mint.com and Zaarly, and founded Voy Media, a digital marketing agency that has generated over $50 million in revenue. His latest venture, Magic Rinku, tackles one of SEO's most persistent challenges: automating internal link building at scale.

Connect with Kevin:

In this unscripted conversation, Kevin shares the journey of building Magic Rinku from personal frustration to SaaS solution. We dive deep into the technical challenges of WordPress integration, the strategic use of AI versus traditional algorithms, and unconventional marketing approaches that are actually working in 2025.

Kevin reveals how he discovered 350 out of 400 articles on his own site had zero internal links, the technical nightmare of supporting multiple WordPress page builders, and why cold email and Reddit still outperform traditional SaaS marketing for developer tools.

"Even for someone like me who knows SEO, who's been doing this for years, I had this massive blind spot. When I ran my prototype, it found 350 articles with zero internal links out of 400 total articles."

"Our biggest competitor is Excel spreadsheets and manual processes. There are other tools, but most are part of $200-500/month SEO suites. We do one thing really well."

"My rule is pretty simple - use AI for problems that require understanding context and nuance, use traditional algorithms for problems that have clear mathematical solutions."

"The freedom is the best part of being a founder, but also the worst part because you have infinite options every day."

"If a feature works for 80% of use cases and doesn't break anything, I ship it. I can iterate based on real user feedback rather than trying to anticipate every edge case."

In this conversation, Jeremy Rivera of Community Clean Links and SEO Arcade interviews Angshuman Rudra, a product manager at TapClicks, discussing the company's marketing operations platform, the intricacies of ETL processes, and the challenges of product management in a SaaS environment.

Angshuman shares insights on customer needs, market trends, and the importance of sales feedback in shaping product development. He's been heading up the creation and product management of their new TapDataMax product, and shared a lot of detail on the way Tapclicks views the "movement" of data. The discussion also touches on the evolving terminology in marketing technology, the role of AI in data management, and the future roadmap for TapClicks, including new features and integrations.

In this conversation, Jeremy Rivera interviews Bryan Shankman, co-founder and CEO of Tool Desk and LeadTruffle discussing the origins of their SaaS products, the challenges of pricing and customer support, and the strategies for marketing and future-proofing their business.

Bryan shares insights on building a successful startup in the home services industry, the importance of customer engagement, and the risks associated with relying on a platform like Jobber. In this conversation, Bryan Shankman discusses the evolution of his SaaS product, Tool Desk AI, focusing on the challenges and opportunities presented by platform dependencies, the innovative features of their AI-driven lead qualification tool, and the streamlined onboarding process for home service businesses. He also shares insights on marketing strategies and offers valuable advice for aspiring SaaS entrepreneurs.

takeaways

In this conversation, Jeremy Cohen, founder of Vooz an Omegle alternative in the anonymous video chatting space, discusses the journey of creating bootstrapping and self-motivating. He shares insights on the unique selling propositions of Vooz, including AI moderation and user engagement features.

The discussion covers the challenges of bootstrapping a startup, marketing strategies for user acquisition, and the importance of building a strong team. Jeremy also emphasizes the significance of taking action and starting with design, as well as the potential for monetization and growth in the SaaS space.

Take Aways