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1<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Shahar Azulay is the co-founder and CEO of groundcover, an observability platform that helps engineering teams catch problems in production before their customers do. He has built it to eight-figure ARR with more than 250 customers, competing directly against Datadog and New Relic.\n\nHe came to it as an engineer, not a seller. Shahar and his co-founder had spent their careers as engineering managers, living the same frustrating cycle: instrument your applications, emit the telemetry you need, then get told the bill is too high and start sampling and switching things off. They set out to solve that with technology rather than a different margin, and bet the company on eBPF, a kernel technology nobody in observability was using at the time.\n\nThe selling was harder than the building. Three months in, groundcover closed its first customer through a connection to a head of DevOps. There was no user interface yet, just the sensor and some dashboards. Shahar went into the pricing call asking for $100,000 and came out with $10,000 a year, because neither he nor his co-founder knew what they were negotiating against.\n\nHis conclusion from that is contrarian: close your first dozen customers at whatever price they will pay. The learning, the references, and the confidence are worth more than the contract value, and you cannot expect to grow those early accounts anyway.\n\nShahar also covers how the first 50 to 100 customers came from his own network and a handful of LinkedIn messages a day, why he published list pricing and then discounted it by up to 70 percent, and the moment customers started ripping out Datadog before groundcover was ready for it."])</script>
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1<title>The SaaS Podcast: Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS | SaaS Club</title><meta name="description" content="How founders grow profitable software businesses. 497+ founder interviews, weekly: what actually worked, what broke, what they&#x27;d do differently."/><link rel="author" href="https://saasclub.io"/><meta name="author" content="Omer Khan"/><meta name="keywords" content="SaaS,SaaS founders,SaaS podcast,startup community,B2B SaaS,product-market fit,MRR"/><meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-video-preview:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-snippet:-1"/><link rel="canonical" href="https://saasclub.io/saas-podcast/"/><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="The SaaS Podcast" href="https://feeds.transistor.fm/the-saas-podcast-real-lessons-on-growing-profitable-saas"/><meta property="og:title" content="The SaaS Podcast: Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS"/><meta property="og:description" content="How founders grow profitable software businesses. 497+ founder interviews, weekly: what actually worked, what broke, what they&#x27;d do differently."/><meta property="og:url" content="https://saasclub.io/saas-podcast/"/><meta property="og:site_name" content="SaaS Club"/><meta property="og:image" content="https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1790603487981.png"/><meta property="og:type" content="website"/><meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/><meta name="twitter:title" content="The SaaS Podcast: Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS"/><meta name="twitter:description" content="How founders grow profitable software businesses. 497+ founder interviews, weekly: what actually worked, what broke, what they&#x27;d do differently."/><meta name="twitter:image" content="https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1790603487981.png"/><link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico?favicon.6707981f.ico" sizes="32x32" type="image/x-icon"/><link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg?icon.094430bd.svg" sizes="any" type="image/svg+xml"/><link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-icon.png?apple-icon.30ff9ce1.png" sizes="180x180" type="image/png"/>
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2<main><section class="mx-auto max-w-[1200px] px-6 md:px-10 pt-24 md:pt-28 pb-10 md:pb-12"><div class="grid grid-cols-1 md:grid-cols-[1.15fr_1fr] gap-10 md:gap-14 items-center"><div><h1 class="text-[44px] md:text-[54px] lg:text-[64px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text);font-weight:700;line-height:1.05;letter-spacing:-0.025em">The SaaS Podcast</h1><p class="mt-4 max-w-[540px] text-[17px] md:text-[19px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text-soft);line-height:1.55">Every week, one founder breaks down how they grew: the numbers, the mistakes, and what they&#x27;d do differently.</p><div class="mt-7"><div class="flex items-center gap-5 justify-start"><span class="text-xs text-muted">Listen on:</span><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-saas-podcast-building-saas-in-the-ai-era/id916927819" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" title="Apple Podcasts" class="text-muted/50 hover:text-navy transition-colors"><svg viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="currentColor" class="w-6 h-6"><path d="M12 0C5.373 0 0 5.373 0 12s5.373 12 12 12 12-5.373 12-12S18.627 0 12 0zm0 3.6a8.4 8.4 
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2<img alt="His First Deal Was $10K. Then He Learned to Sell. - Shahar Azulay" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Shahar Azulay<!-- -->, groundcover</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">His First Deal Was $10K. Then He Learned to Sell.</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Shahar Azulay is the co-founder and CEO of groundcover, an observability platform that helps engineering teams catch problems in production before their customers do. He has built it to eight-figure ARR with more than 250 customers, competing directly against Datadog and New Relic.
3
4He came to it as an engineer, not a seller. Shahar and his co-founder had spent their careers as engineering managers, living the same frustrating cycle: instrument your applications, emit the telemetry you need, then get told the bill is too high and start sampling and switching things off. They set out to solve that with technology rather than a different margin, and bet the company on eBPF, a kernel technology nobody in observability was using at the time.
5
6The selling was harder than the building. Three months in, groundcover closed its first customer through a connection to a head of DevOps. There was no user interface yet, just the sensor and some dashboards. Shahar went into the pricing call asking for $100,000 and came out with $10,000 a year, because neither he nor his co-founder knew what they were negotiating against.
7
8His conclusion from that is contrarian: close your first dozen customers at whatever price they will pay. The learning, the references, and the confidence are worth more than the contract value, and you cannot expect to grow those early accounts anyway.
9
10Shahar also covers how the first 50 to 100 customers came from his own 
10network and a handful of LinkedIn messages a day, why he published list pricing and then discounted it by up to 70 percent, and the moment customers started ripping out Datadog before groundcover was ready for it.</p></div></article></a></div></div></section><div class="pb-8"><section class="mx-auto max-w-[1200px] px-6 md:px-10 pb-4"><div class="grid grid-cols-1 sm:grid-cols-3 border-y border-border divide-y sm:divide-y-0 sm:divide-x divide-border"><div class="py-7 px-6 text-center"><div class="text-[30px] md:text-[34px] font-semibold" style="font-family:var(--font-display);color:var(--color-navy);letter-spacing:-0.02em;line-height:1.1">497</div><div class="mt-1 text-[13.5px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text-soft)">founder interviews</div></div><div class="py-7 px-6 text-center"><div class="text-[30px] md:text-[34px] font-semibold" style="font-family:var(--font-display);color:var(--color-navy);letter-spacing:-0.02em;line-height:1.1">12 years</div><div class="mt-1 text-[13.5px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text-soft)">through every platform shift</div></div><div class="py-7 px-6 text-center"><div class="text-[30px] md:text-[34px] font-semibold" style="font-family:var(--font-display);color:var(--color-navy);letter-spacing:-0.02em;line-height:1.1">5,000+</div><div class="mt-1 text-[13.5px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text-soft)">founders read the newsletter</div></div></div></section></div><section class="pb-20 px-6"><div class="mx-auto max-w-[1140px]"><div class="mb-6"><div class="flex flex-wrap items-center gap-2"><span class="text-sm text-muted mr-1">Browse by topic:</span><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors bg-navy text-white" href="/saas-podcast/">All</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/bootstrapping/">Bootstrapping</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/first-customers/">First Customers</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/ai-saas/">AI-Native SaaS</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/product-market-fit/">Product-Market Fit</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/enterprise-sales/">Enterprise Sales</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/product-led-growth/">Product-Led Growth</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/pricing/">Pricing &amp; Monetization</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/founder-led-sales/">Founder-Led Sales</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/positioning/">Positioning &amp; Differentiation</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/churn-retention/">Churn &amp; Retention</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/content-marketing/">Content &amp;
10 Inbound Marketing</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/exits/">Exits &amp; Acquisitions</a><a class="inline-block px-3 py-1.5 text-sm font-medium rounded-full transition-colors text-navy border border-border hover:bg-cream-dark hover:border-accent/30" href="/podcast/fundraising/">Fundraising</a></div></div><template id="P:4"></template><template id="P:5"></template><template id="P:6"></template></div></section><section class="mx-auto max-w-[1200px] px-6 md:px-10 py-16 md:py-20"><div class="max-w-[760px] mx-auto"><div class="rounded-2xl p-7 md:p-10" style="background:var(--color-warm-card);border:1px solid var(--color-warm-line);box-shadow:0 6px 24px rgba(31, 27, 22, 0.05)"><div class="flex flex-col sm:flex-row gap-7 md:gap-10"><div class="shrink-0 flex flex-col items-center"><img alt="Omer Khan" loading="lazy" width="160" height="160" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-28 h-28 md:w-32 md:h-32 rounded-full object-cover" style="color:transparent" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F09%2Fomer-blue.jpg&amp;w=256&amp;q=75&amp;dpl=dpl_DAJSNxnixmtLJv4zrNEXNt9qwRJn 1x, /_next/image/?url=%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F09%2Fomer-blue.jpg&amp;w=384&amp;q=75&amp;dpl=dpl_DAJSNxnixmtLJv4zrNEXNt9qwRJn 2x" src="/_next/image/?url=%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F09%2Fomer-blue.jpg&amp;w=384&amp;q=75&amp;dpl=dpl_DAJSNxnixmtLJv4zrNEXNt9qwRJn"/><p class="text-[15px] font-semibold mt-3" style="color:var(--color-warm-text)">Omer Khan</p><p class="text-[13px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text-soft)">Host</p></div><div class="space-y-4 text-[16px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text-soft);line-height:1.65"><p>I started this podcast in 2014 because the founder stories I heard everywhere else were too polished. I wanted the real version: what broke, what surprised them, and what they&#x27;d do differently if they started again today.</p><p>497<!-- -->+ episodes later, the pattern is hard to miss. The tactics change every couple of years. The principles underneath don&#x27;t: how founders find their first customers, charge what they&#x27;re worth, and build something people actually need.</p><p>Right now, every conversation eventually turns to AI. Some guests are watching their moats erode. Others are growing faster than ever with teams of two or three. The difference is the calls they&#x27;re making on pricing, product, and what to build next.</p><p>I run my own business almost entirely on AI workflows, so I&#x27;m asking these questions from inside the same shift. Not from the sidelines.</p></div></div></div></div></section><section class="py-16 md:py-20 px-6" style="background:var(--color-dark-section)"><div class="mx-auto max-w-[760px] text-center"><h2 class="text-[26px] md:text-[34px] font-semibold max-w-[560px] mx-auto" style="color:#FFFFFF;line-height:1.15;letter-spacing:-0.02em">The weekly recap, in your inbox.</h2><p class="mt-4 text-[16px] md:text-[17px] max-w-[520px] mx-auto" style="color:var(--color-dark-subtext);line-height:1.6">The patterns across <!-- -->497<!-- -->+ founder interviews. What&#x27;s working now, which bets are paying off, and the founders worth your time.</p><div class="mt-7"><div class="max-w-[520px] w-full mx-auto"><form><input type="text" tabindex="-1" autoComplete="off" aria-hidden="true" style="position:absolute;left:-9999px;opacity:0;height:0;width:0" name="website" value=""/><div></div><div class="flex flex-col sm:flex-row items-stretch gap-2 p-1.5 rounded-[14px] bg-white" style="border:1px solid var(--color-warm-line-strong);box-shadow:0 6px 24px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.06)"><input type="email" placeholder="Your email address" required="" class="flex-1 min-w-0 bg-transparent px-5 py-3 text-[16px] focus:outline-none rounded-[10px]" style="color:var(--color-warm-text)" value=""/><button type="submit" disabled="" class="px-6 py-3 rounded-[10px] text-[15px] font-semibold text-white transition-all whitespace-nowrap disabled:opacity-60 hover:-translate-y-
10px" style="background:var(--color-brand-blue-2);box-shadow:0 2px 12px rgba(70, 102, 246, 0.25)">Join 5,000+ Founders</button></div></form></div><p class="mt-4 text-[13px]" style="color:#8a8a8a">One email a week. No fluff.</p></div></div></section></main></div>
10<script>$RS=function(a,b){a=document.getElementById(a);b=document.getElementById(b);for(a.parentNode.removeChild(a);a.firstChild;)b.parentNode.insertBefore(a.firstChild,b);b.parentNode.removeChild(b)};$RS("S:2","P:2")</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"35:[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1789755303734.png\",\"alt\":\"He Aimed for $500K a Year. He Built a $50M Company. - Ross Andrew Paquette\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]\n4d:T69a,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Ross Paquette is the founder and CEO of Maropost, a commerce and marketing platform he has bootstrapped to around $50 million in ARR with roughly 300 people and 5,000 customers. He started it in 2011 out of his apartment while still working full time selling Oracle ERP software into the construction industry.\n\nThe plan was small. Ten customers paying $50,000 a year, about $500,000, and more free time. Ross had spent a few years selling marketing automation and knew the service in that market was poor, so his pitch was simple: 24-hour live chat and a five-minute response time, which in practice meant him. Three or four former customers signed almost immediately. Two of them paid around $10,000 a month.\n\nThe early build nearly sank it. His developer would disappear for days, and the platform would go down with nobody available to fix it. Ross describes standing on a departing plane holding his phone in the air to hold the signal, maybe ten or fifteen times. His mother suggested he post the job somewhere. The first person who replied on oDesk rebuilt the platform in two or three weeks and is his CTO today.\n\nThen it caught. In 28 months the business went from $300,000 to $27 million with six or seven people, largely because Ross was personally closing brands like Rolling Stone and Mercedes off conference floors. He took a secondary round around 2016, gave up about 25 percent, and roughly three years later wrote a $37 million check to buy the investors out.\n\nHe also gets into why seven or eight experienced sales leaders failed at Maropost, what he hires for now instead, and why he says he would not show up to work if he owned less than ten percent of his own company."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"36:[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Ross Andrew Paquette\",\", Maropost\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"He Aimed for $500K a Year. He Built a $50M Company.\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$4d\"}]]}]\n4e:T689,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Rodney Robinson is the co-founder and CEO of TabaPay, a payments company that moves money in and out for fintechs. It now runs at $100 million in revenue with about 150 people, profitable, growing 35 to 40 percent a year. On the day this interview was recorded, Rodney announced TabaPay had raised $155 million and acquired a bank.\n\nThe company started because Mastercard would not build what its own customers kept asking for. Rodney had sold his previous company to Mastercard and spent two years running its instant payout business. Merchants wanted to send money out and collect it back through the same card. Mastercard only wanted the send half, because the collect half would compete with its largest processing partners. Rodney left and built the thing they could not.\n\nGetting there took a year and a bank willing to sponsor a startup with no track record. Banks solve for risk by asking for a large deposit, which Rodney did not have, so he signed a personal guarantee and pledged his house. Six months in, another company accused them of stealing its software. TabaPay won, but the sponsor bank dropped them during the fight.\n\nThe company ran for nine years on a single $2.5 million seed round, its only outside money until this year. Rodney went after small fintechs he already knew, on the theory that minnows become whales, and let banks and the card networks feed him everything after that. TabaPay has never bought a keyword or run content marketing.\n\nHe also covers why he paid vendors more than he needed to in year one, how three vendors at 99 percent uptime leaves you down three percent of the time, and why he thinks outbound sales is finished in B2B."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"37:[\"$\",\"div\",\"inbound-marketing-rodney-robinson-tabapay\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/inbound-marketing-rodney-robinson-tabapay/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1789403650739.png\",\"alt\":\"He Grew to $100M Almost Entirely Through Inbound - Rodney Robinson\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Rodney Robinson\",\", TabaPay\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"He Grew to $100M Almost Entirely Through Inbound\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$4e\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Felix Hoffmann is the co-founder and CEO of 7Learnings, a Berlin company whose software decides what a retailer should charge. He spent six years as a pricing consultant at Kearney and two years running price optimization at Zalando, Europe's largest fashion marketplace, where he saw predictive pricing working at scale. From his consulting years he already knew almost nobody else worked that way. Today 7Learnings is at multiple seven figures in ARR, with around 40 customers and 60 people.\n\nThe hard part was never the idea. A demand forecasting model needs a large retailer's historical sales data, and no large retailer hands that over to a company with no product. Felix also spent the early months trying to recruit two technical co-founders in Berlin, which he describes as close to impossible when engineers can earn well without taking any risk.\n\nSo the first contract 7Learnings signed was not software at all. It was a consulting project. The retailer got help implementing its own pricing approach, 7Learnings got paid, and it kept the right to use the data to build a product of its own.\n\nThe first paying software customer came through his old consulting network, structured as an A/B test: the algorithm priced half the assortment, the retailer's team priced the other half. The first run was a disaster. Prices came out far too expensive on high-priced products, and in e-commerce you know 
10within a day. They reworked the models, and a later test came back with a 13% profit uplift.\n\nFelix also covers how a pricing company prices itself, why he refuses success-based fees, the objection he still hears from almost every retailer, and why he thinks LLMs do not belong in the pricing decision itself."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Rick Knudtson is the co-founder and CEO of Workshop, an internal communications platform in Omaha, Nebraska, now at eight-figure ARR. Before this he co-founded Flywheel in 2012, a WordPress hosting platform for creative agencies, and sold it to WP Engine in 2019.\n\nIt did not start well. In late 2020 Rick and his co-founders went all in on internal communications, then picked the wrong product. Nobody loves their intranet, Rick reasoned, so a better-designed one should win. The founding team spent the first nine months of 2021 selling that intranet and earned about three customers. Nobody agreed on what an intranet was even for.\n\nAbout four months in, they started hearing something else. Email is our number one channel and we have no visibility into it. Rick heard it and dismissed it for another five months. Email was not novel, and he had just come off an exit that told him he knew what to build. He calls it ego, plainly.\n\nBy month nine Workshop had roughly zero traction and more than half of a $3 million raise still in the bank, and Rick 
10was pushing to return the money to investors. His co-founder and COO Derek Homann talked him and Ben Stevinson out of it at a bar in Omaha. Just listen to the damn customers. They rebuilt the platform around email in 30 days and signed 10 customers, against three in nine months.\n\nIn this interview, Rick explains why an exit made him a worse listener, why he thinks you should be marketing for a year before you sell anything, and how Workshop came to price by audience reached instead of per seat."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Julius Körfgen spent years running marketing at a European startup, where he personally built around ten thousand ads. Writing headlines, testing image variants, checking which call-to-action buttons converted. He estimates that roughly ten percent of ads are ever profitable, and that companies keep running the other ninety percent because the process of finding out is slow and manual.\n\nSo he left with two co-founders to automate it. What he did not do was build first. He ran cold LinkedIn outreach to strangers, framed every message as a request to learn rather than a pitch, and used the discovery calls to find out what marketing teams actually struggled with. At the end of each call he would say the same thing: give us a week and we will come back with a solution. Then the three of them would grind out whatever they had just promised.\n\nHe also refused to run free pilots. His argument is that without a dollar attached, you cannot tell the difference between a real business case and a polite conversation.\n\nUplane reached a million dollars in ARR in about six months and now runs around twenty people across San Francisco and Berlin. AG1 is a customer, and a project with Deutsche Bahn is underway after roughly nine months of conversations.\n\nIn this interview, Julius breaks down the outreach that got strangers to take his calls, the one-week sprint, why he threw out per-seat pricing in favour of a fixed fee that only covers costs plus a variable share of ad spend, and the guardrails that stop an AI from putting bad ads in front of an enterprise brand's audience."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"3a:[\"$\",\"div\",\"selling-before-building-julius-korfgen-uplane\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/selling-before-building-julius-korfgen-uplane/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788525424570.png\",\"alt\":\"He Sold the Software Before He Built It. $1M ARR in 6 Months - Julius Körfgen\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Julius Körfgen\",\", Uplane\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"He Sold the Software Before He Built It. $1M ARR in 6 Months\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$51\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Christian Lund had spent years running an on-premise document business before he saw the cloud shift coming. Rather than retrofit the old product, he and his co-founder spun out Templafy and started over from scratch, with two engineers and no product to sell.\n\nWhat they sold instead was a point of view. Christian identified roughly 800 people worldwide who he thought were mature enough to have the conversation, targeted them with specific messaging, and used those conversations to get in front of enterprises long before there was software to demo. Templafy raised its first funding round close to twelve months before the product existed.\n\nThat approach landed one of the Big Four accounting firms as the first customer. But the deal nearly went the way most enterprise deals go, with a small pilot for ten people and no defined outcome. Christian pushed back, not by refusing, but by attaching conditions: agree exactly what we are proving, and agree what happens if we prove it. When some prospects later opened the decision up to competing vendors, Templafy had effectively written the evaluation criteria.\n\nTemplafy now runs at eight figures in revenue with a couple of hundred people. Christian is putting the business through the same reset again for AI, rebuilding the technology foundation from scratch over two and a half years. He is candid that the messaging got ahead of the market, and that being eighty percent ahead instead of fifteen percent cost the company conversations it needed."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"3b:[\"$\",\"div\",\"enterprise-sales-christian-lund-templafy\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/enterprise-sales-christian-lund-templafy/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788525916841.png\",\"alt\":\"He Closed a Global Enterprise Deal With No Product - Christian Lund\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Christian Lund\",\", Templafy\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"He Closed a Global Enterprise Deal With No Product\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$52\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"53:T5cc,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Eugene Cheah's team had built something genuinely novel: an open source foundation model under the Linux Foundation, trained across more than 200 languages, with an architecture that made AI inference dramatically cheaper. Their seven billion parameter model beat Llama's equivalent. The problem was that almost nobody was asking for it.\n\nAlong the way they solved a constraint of their own making. Customers were fine-tuning thousands of models on their platform, the industry norm was one GPU per model, and they could not afford a thousand GPUs. So they built a system that swaps models on and off GPUs on demand, bringing a cold model online in about five seconds. Most inference providers keep a fixed list of under a hundred models standing by, because loading one can take thirty minutes on hardware costing eighty dollars an hour.\n\nThen someone on the team asked whether the same technology would work for Llama and Mistral. They shipped it as an experiment. Over the launch weekend it earned more than the platform they had spent two years on. Eugene renamed the company and went all in.\n\nIn this interview, Eugene explains why he priced a flat monthly rate while the rest of the AI industry charged per token, how stripping the technical explanation off the homepage kept improving conversion until they removed their own research from the top of the page, and why competing for the long tail of open source AI models beats fighting a hundred providers over the top hundred."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"3c:[\"$\",\"div\",\"ai-inference-eugene-cheah-featherless-ai\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/ai-inference-eugene-cheah-featherless-ai/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788544763237.png\",\"alt\":\"The Weekend Experiment That Killed His Own AI Model - Eugene Cheah\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Eugene Cheah\",\", Featherless AI\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"The Weekend Experiment That Killed His Own AI Model\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$53\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"54:T885,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"George Georgiadis grew up in Greece, studied IT, and did a master's degree in education because he wanted a government job paying around $600 a month. He ended up in London instead, working through roughly ten different projects before landing on the one that stuck.\n\nThe idea for Happier Leads came out of his own frustration. He was spending money on ads for an earlier product and watching 95% of his visitors leave without ever identifying themselves. He looked for a fix, found Clearbit, and got quoted $20,000 a year. So he bought a data source and built his own version on top of it.\n\nAn AppSumo campaign brought in his first $50,000 and funded the early product. Then the business went flat. For five years, Happier Leads sat at roughly $50K ARR. George was splitting his attention between building and a fundraise that never closed, spending about 80% of his time on software development and 20% on marketing and sales. Multiple times he thought about quitting. At one point he started borrowing money to the business from his own personal accounts.\n\nWhat finally moved the number was going deep instead of wide. He owned a 175-million-contact database he had been selling to other people and never used himself. He built his own mailboxes and email infrastructure, drove the cost per send down, and started sending millions of cold emails. Once the unit economics worked, revenue compounded.\n\nThe other half of the story is how he operates now. Happier Leads runs on a set of AI systems George built himself: his own CRM, his own chatbot, his own session recording, all connected to a single AI brain that reads the data, spots bugs, fixes them, and emails stuck customers without him. He calls it 100 people working 24/7.\n\nAnd yet he is now hiring. His view is that a one-person business makes you an operator, not an owner, and an operator has nothing to sell. So after proving he could get to seven figures alone, George is building a team again.\n\nIn this episode, George breaks down the AppSumo lifetime deal math, why he turned down a $1M acquisition offer, what actually makes cold email work at scale, and how he assembled the AI agents that replaced a whole team."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"3d:[\"$\",\"div\",\"solo-founder-saas-george-georgiadis-happierleads\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/solo-founder-saas-george-georgiadis-happierleads/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788544968423.png\",\"alt\":\"5 Years Stuck at $50K ARR. Now $1.5M With No Team. - George Georgiadis\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"George Georgiadis\",\", Happier Leads\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"5 Years Stuck at $50K ARR. Now $1.5M With No Team.\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$54\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"55:T4eb,Ron Hash is a software developer who had never built a SaaS before Skimmer. He wasn't chasing a big idea. A friend with a pool service company mentioned there was no good software to run his business, and months later Ron cold-called a random pool pro in Texas to see if the problem was real. When that stranger said \"the paper game is killing me,\" Ron went all in, building the first version on nights and weekends.\n\nSkimmer grew slowly at first, 76 customers in the first year, then compounded to 1,500 customers and over $1 million in ARR with no paid marketing. The engine was SEO Ron taught himself and word of mouth from pool pros who loved the product. One of his most important early decisions was usage-based pricing: 50 cents per serviced pool with a $29 minimum, instead of the per-seat model everyone else used. That choice aligned Skimmer's revenue with each customer's growth and helped push churn down to 2%.\n\nIn 2020, Ron sold Skimmer to Unbundled Capital. Under new ownership the company went on to raise $79 million and grow past 100 employees. In this conversation Ron breaks down how he validated the idea with one call, why usage-based pricing beat per-seat, how he fixed churn through onboarding, and why he has never regretted the exit."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"3e:[\"$\",\"div\",\"usage-based-pricing-ron-hash-skimmer\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/usage-based-pricing-ron-hash-skimmer/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788545098094.png\",\"alt\":\"How Usage-Based Pricing Built a Bootstrapped SaaS Exit - Ron Hash\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Ron Hash\",\", Skimmer\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"How Usage-Based Pricing Built a Bootstrapped SaaS Exit\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$55\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"56:T682,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Farzad Rashidi is the co-founder of Respona, a company that helps brands get cited in AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.\n\nHe first came on the show back in episode 323, when Respona was a self-serve outreach tool doing a few hundred thousand in ARR. Then the classic bootstrapped trap set in. Churn caught up with new business, and every customer they won was offset by one they lost. For years Farzad tried to fix it the way most founders do, by adding more features to make the product stickier. Nothing moved. The real reason customers left was not missing features. It was that they never had the time to do the work the tool required.\n\nThe turning point came in early 2025. A marketing agency CEO haggled over an $800-a-month license, then offered to pay per result instead. That one conversation nudged Farzad toward a service-as-software model: do the work for the customer, charge for the outcome, and use the software in the back end. That first customer now spends around $65K to $70K a month, and in twelve months the company 4x'd the revenue it had spent six years building.\n\nWhat makes this a service-as-software story rather than a slide back into agency work is what came next. Farzad demoted the self-serve SaaS on the homepage, productized the service into fixed tiers with no negotiation, and rebuilt a software layer (a client portal, a publisher network, and a brain in the middle) on top of the manual delivery. We also dig into the actual playbook for getting a brand cited in AI answers, from finding lookalike publishers to building a surround-sound presence around the models.\n\nI hope you enjoy the conversation."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"3f:[\"$\",\"div\",\"service-as-software-farzad-rashidi-respona\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/service-as-software-farzad-rashidi-respona/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788619545520.png\",\"alt\":\"He Demoted His SaaS to Sell a Service and 4x'd Revenue - Farzad Rashidi\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Farzad Rashidi\",\", Respona\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"He Demoted His SaaS to Sell a Service and 4x'd Revenue\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$56\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"57:T4db,Danny Jenkins started ThreatLocker with a simple, contrarian belief: instead of trying to detect every cyber attack, you should block everything by default and only allow what a business actually needs.\n\nThe problem was that the market for that idea looked tiny. When Danny sized the whitelisting market, it was a few hundred million dollars at best, and winning it would have cost more than it was worth. So he made the bet that defines this episode. Rather than fight for a corner of an existing market, he used category creation to turn a small niche into a $10 billion opportunity: zero trust for every business, not just the largest enterprises.\n\nGetting there was brutal. It took 18 months to land the first paying customer. Danny remortgaged the house, ran the family onto credit cards, repaired a hurricane-damaged roof himself, and considered bankruptcy. When he finally got a customer on the phone, he was so scared to ask for the order that he was shaking.\n\nIn this conversation, Danny shares how he validated the idea before raising money, why a blunt salesperson outsold a polished one, how MSPs became his wedge into the small-business market, and the two things he says are the only things that matter when you are starting out."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"40:[\"$\",\"div\",\"category-creation-danny-jenkins-threatlocker\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/category-creation-danny-jenkins-threatlocker/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788619543610.png\",\"alt\":\"How ThreatLocker Created a New Category to Reach $200M - Danny Jenkins\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Danny Jenkins\",\", ThreatLocker\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"How ThreatLocker Created a New Category to Reach $200M\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$57\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"58:T683,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, the book that shaped how a generation of founders builds products. His new book, Incorruptible, is his answer to a problem he says he helped create: founders who use the Lean Startup playbook to build successful companies, then lose control of them.\n\nEric tells the story of advising a SaaS founder who landed a customer worth half their revenue. The roadmap quietly bent around that customer over six months. Nobody chose it. The product just drifted. He says this is what financial gravity looks like in the wild, and it is one of the biggest threats to founder control at the moment a startup starts working.\n\nEric also breaks down what happened to Jeff Lawson at Twilio. Lawson negotiated a seven-year sunset on his dual-class shares at IPO. Activist investors removed him 199 days after that control expired. Eric cites a Harvard Law School study showing only 20% of venture-backed founder CEOs are still CEO three years after going public.\n\nThe conversation gets concrete fast. Eric shows why most charters say \"any lawful purpose\" and why Delaware courts read that as \"maximize shareholder value\", which is how the British inhaler company Vectura ended up sold to Philip Morris for an extra 10 pence per share. He walks through the Public Benefit Corporation conversion, a two-page filing that takes about five minutes for a Delaware company, and explains why it is one of the cheapest ways to protect founder control before it is too late.\n\nThis episode is for early-stage SaaS founders deciding what to sign in their first term sheet, and for six-figure founders who already feel one customer pulling the roadmap."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"41:[\"$\",\"div\",\"founder-control-eric-ries-the-lean-startup\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/founder-control-eric-ries-the-lean-startup/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788619541648.png\",\"alt\":\"He Wrote The Lean Startup. Now He's Warning Founders. - Eric Ries\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Eric Ries\",\", The Lean Startup\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"He Wrote The Lean Startup. Now He's Warning Founders.\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$58\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"59:T85e,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Mark Abbott had the idea for Ninety back in 2005, sitting on private equity boards watching the same leadership problems repeat across 100+ companies. He wanted to write a book and build software. Then he discovered Gino Wickman had already written the book - Traction - and trademarked the EOS framework around it. So Mark pitched Gino in 2012. Gino's answer: \"We tried it, it's not in our DNA.\"\n\nMost founders would have raced into code. Mark did the opposite. He spent four years embedded in B2B community building - becoming EOS implementer #33, attending quarterly coaching gatherings, and slowly earning the trust of the people who would eventually become his distribution channel. While he played the long game, he openly shared his vision with the community. One of the implementers passed the idea to a software client, and Traction Tools launched first in 2016. Mark started laying code that same year as \"EOS compatible,\" landed his first customer in 2017, and only signed the official license in late 2018.\n\nWhat followed was a masterclass in patient B2B community building. Mark spent $500 a month on Facebook ads targeting self-implementing EOS companies, leaned into relationships with the implementer community, and built a 24/7 support culture that outflanked the first mover. He bootstrapped past 1,000 customers and hit a $100M+ valuation before raising a dollar. Then in 2021 he raised a $20M Series A from Insight Partners. Insight later returned for a $35M Series B led by Blue Cloud Ventures with Catalyst Ventures coming in - $55M total across three institutional investors.\n\nThe Series A is where things got harder, not easier. Mark hired fast, brought in seasoned executives who arrived with their own playbooks, and lost grip on culture. He explains why the lessons that worked in private equity didn't translate to scaling a SaaS company, what he wishes he had known about hiring for stage, and how AI is reshaping Ninety's product roadmap two years into a serious AI build. This is a candid conversation about taking the slow path, the cost of oversharing, and what B2B community building actually buys a founder."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"42:[\"$\",\"div\",\"b2b-community-building-mark-abbott-ninety\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/b2b-community-building-mark-abbott-ninety/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788620930826.png\",\"alt\":\"He Shared His SaaS Idea. A Competitor Beat Him to Market. - Mark Abbott\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Mark Abbott\",\", Ninety\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"He Shared His SaaS Idea. A Competitor Beat Him to Market.\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$59\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Yega Kumarappan is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Paperflite, a content and sales enablement platform that helps B2B marketing and sales teams close deals faster.\n\nBack in 2015, Yega and his future co-founders were building an internal venture at Cognizant. They needed to create decks, videos, case studies, and brochures, then get all of that into the hands of sales teams. Every tool they tried was terrible. That problem stuck with them.\n\nAfter more than a decade at Cognizant, all three founders walked away from stable careers with families to support. They had a working prototype when they went to investors. In January 2018, they raised a 400K seed round. Girish from Freshworks put money in. So did the ex-CEO of Cognizant.\n\nPaperflite never raised again. A year in, they were profitable.\n\nThe product was a Netflix-like experience for sales content. Instead of digging through folders in SharePoint and Dropbox, sales reps logged in and saw exactly what worked for their product, their region, and their type of buyer.\n\nBut selling SaaS without sales experience was harder than expected. Then one day, a message came through their Intercom chat. It was from S\u0026P Global, asking if Paperflite could host research materials for a conference called COP22. The team had no idea what COP22 was. They thought a friend was pranking them. It turned out to be the UN climate change conference.\n\nThat wasn't luck. For their first couple of years, Yega's team lived on Quora and Reddit, answering every question they could find about sales content and knowledge management. That's how the inbound started.\n\nConversion was the next problem. Generic product tours converted at 2 to 3%. So they tried something almost nobody does. They spent 8 to 10 hours setting up a custom demo for every single prospect. A personalized hub, with their actual content, in their regions, for their buyer segments. Conversion jumped to 20%.\n\nToday, Paperflite serves over 500 B2B organizations, does seven figures in ARR, and has 140 employees across India and the US. All on that same 400K. This is one of the cleanest case studies of selling SaaS without sales experience and still building a durable, profitable B2B company."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Tibo Louis-Lucas is the founder of TMAKER, a bootstrapped portfolio of 5 SaaS products doing over $1M a month with a team of 10. His flagship product Outrank crossed $200K MRR on its own. But the road to TMAKER ran through two bankruptcies, 250,000 euros of personal debt, a $8 million exit Tibo publicly regrets, and a complete rethink of how SaaS distribution channels actually work.\n\nTibo raised 200K euros for his first startup in 2015 and another 500K for his second in 2017. Both went to zero. The second left him with 250K in personal debt. He took a corporate CTO job for stability. Then his first child was born, got severely sick at two months old, and he and his wife quit their jobs to travel the world. Three weeks later, COVID hit. They were stuck in Paris with a sick baby, no income, and no plan.\n\nMost people would have crawled back to a salary. Tibo went the other way. He partnered with co-founder Tom and shipped 11 products in 4 months on unemployment benefits. The kill criteria was revenue, not downloads or feedback. Ten products flopped. The eleventh, Tweet Hunter, hit $1K MRR in its second month. Then Twitter influencer JK Molina asked for 25% of profits in exchange for promoting it. Revenue tripled from around $3K to $20K MRR in three weeks. They forked the same model into Taplio for LinkedIn and sold both to Lempire less than two years in for $2M upfront and an earnout that closed at $8 million.\n\nAfter the earnout ended, Tibo experienced what he calls a void. He publicly regrets selling. Now he runs TMAKER as a portfolio studio with the opposite playbook. Instead of being the maker, he is the SaaS distribution channel. He partners with co-makers who build the products while he handles audience, SEO, ads, and influencer pipelines that get reused across every product. Outrank is the flagship at $200K MRR. Revid does over $600K a month. The portfolio crossed $1M a month a few weeks before this conversation.\n\nIn this episode, Tibo unpacks why SaaS distribution channels matter more than the product itself in the AI era, the exact signals that told him Tweet Hunter was the one after 10 failures, the structure of his JK Molina equity deal, why he regrets the $8M exit, the co-maker model that powers TMAKER, and how he uses SEO as the most durable SaaS distribution channel of all."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"44:[\"$\",\"div\",\"saas-distribution-channel-tibo-louis-lucas-tmaker\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/saas-distribution-channel-tibo-louis-lucas-tmaker/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788620927333.png\",\"alt\":\"The SaaS Distribution Channel Bet Behind a $12M Portfolio - Tibo Louis-Lucas\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Tibo Louis-Lucas\",\", TMAKER\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"The SaaS Distribution Channel Bet Behind a $12M Portfolio\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$5b\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Marius Meiners is the co-founder and CEO of Peec AI, a platform that helps marketing teams track how their brands appear on AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. After studying economics, working in venture capital and M\u0026A at PwC, and joining Antler's Berlin cohort, Marius found himself with no team, no idea, and four years removed from writing any code.\n\nThen in late October 2024, ChatGPT launched search. Marius saw it and decided this was going to change everything. The smartest SEO experts in the world were already obsessed with it. The signal was loud. So he turned to AI search optimization as the wedge - a category that would explode as marketers scrambled to figure out how to get cited by AI assistants.\n\nHe vibe coded the first prototype with V0 in a day and a half. Eight customers signed letters of intent based on it. Antler wrote a 100K check. His CTO joined and built the real product in six weeks. Peec launched in February 2025.\n\nThen came the bet. Their biggest competitor had raised five times more money and was chasing the world's biggest brands. Marius made the opposite call. Peec priced at 85 euros while competitors charged over 500. For six months, Marius and the team ate two-euro canned food every day, wondering if the mid-market AI search optimization play would ever pay off.\n\nToday Peec has over 2,000 customers, $8.6 million in ARR, and a team of 55. All in 14 months. AI search optimization went from speculation to a live revenue channel - 20% of Peec's own conversions now come through AI search itself."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Ev Kontsevoy is the co-founder and CEO of Teleport, an infrastructure identity platform based in Oakland, California. Teleport helps organizations manage secure access to their computing environments by unifying human, machine, and AI agent identities into a single layer.\n\nBefore Teleport, Ev founded Mailgun in 2009, an email API for developers that was acquired by Rackspace in 2012. After the acquisition, he spent time at Rackspace listening to customer problems, which led him to start Gravitational in 2015. The original product, Gravity, helped SaaS companies deploy their applications across multiple cloud environments.\n\nBut the real open source SaaS story started when Ev built Teleport as one component of Gravity - a free, Apache-licensed tool for managing secure access. He intended it purely as demand generation for the paid Gravity product. Then COVID hit. Gravity's pipeline dried up overnight while Teleport's inbound demand exploded as engineers scrambled for remote access solutions.\n\nThe pivot was not really a pivot. Ev focused on one product, rebranded the company as Teleport, and launched an enterprise version. The first enterprise deal closed on an improvised phone call for $25,000 per year. Early on, they sold to individual engineers through a product-led open source SaaS motion. But when Ev asked customers to \"sell Teleport back to me,\" he discovered they were using only a fraction of the platform. They were selling to the wrong buyer.\n\nSwitching from practitioners to VPs of platform engineering nearly tripled the average deal size in a single year. Teleport now serves over 500 customers in eight figures of ARR, with AI agent identity emerging as a major growth driver - what Ev calls \"COVID 2.0\" for the business."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Karel Papik is the co-founder of Product Fruits, a digital adoption platform based in Prague, Czech Republic. Before SaaS, Karel spent 15 years building video games - shipping 16 titles, many of them for women - where he mastered the art of SaaS onboarding and user engagement through psychology rather than tutorials.\n\nWhen Karel met his co-founder Ladislav Salom, Product Fruits had just six customers. Within 12 months of their first investment from Lighthouse Ventures, they grew to $50K MRR using paid search as their primary acquisition channel. They achieved a 24-25% free trial conversion rate by applying product-led growth principles and gaming psychology to their own SaaS onboarding experience.\n\nBut around $2M ARR, growth hit a wall. The product had become too complex for self-serve SaaS onboarding, and PLG stopped being effective. Meanwhile, AI-powered competitors were emerging fast. Karel describes this as the moment they stopped \"riding the horse\" and started \"riding the tiger.\"\n\nIn a gutsy move, Karel emailed investors to say they were pausing feature development on the existing platform to rebuild it from scratch around AI. The investors responded by asking how much more money they needed. The result is an AI copilot that handles discovery calls, tailors onboarding flows, prevents churn, and resolves 80% of support tickets automatically.\n\nToday Product Fruits has over 1,300 paying customers - including KPMG, universities, and stock exchanges - with a 25-person team generating millions in ARR. Karel shares lessons on why PPC worked when most founders say it doesn't, how gaming psychology applies to SaaS onboarding, and why he believes talking to customers too much can hold you back."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Girish Redekar is the co-founder and CEO of Sprinto, an autonomous compliance platform that helps companies prove they're handling data securely.\n\nBefore Sprinto, Girish and his co-founder spent two to three years trying to build their first startup. They had no programming background, so they taught themselves to code at 28 because they couldn't afford to hire developers.\n\nThe first few ideas went nowhere. A job search engine. A resume matching tool. None of them got traction.\n\nThen they built RecruiterBox, a simple CRM for hiring. It launched before Stripe even existed, so their payment system was absurd. Customers had to click a PayPal link, swipe their card, and get credits that depleted daily. When the credits ran out, they'd go back to PayPal and swipe again.\n\nIt was terrible. But customers kept doing it anyway. That was the clearest signal of finding product-market fit Girish had ever seen - not from analytics or feedback forms, but from watching people jump through hoops to keep paying.\n\nThey bootstrapped RecruiterBox to over 2,500 customers and single-digit millions in ARR. Then they sold it. Not because it was failing, but because it got too comfortable. They felt like they were the bottleneck, and the business would grow faster in someone else's hands.\n\nThe second time around, Girish took a completely different approach to finding product-market fit. He'd experienced the pain of SOC 2 compliance firsthand at RecruiterBox, spending months and tens of thousands of dollars on consultants. So when he started Sprinto, he made a rule - no code until the idea was validated.\n\nHe used The Mom Test framework, ran 15-20 customer interviews, and then paid auditors to audit his non-existent company. Ten times. Each audit, he built a little more product behind the scenes. By the tenth, he knew exactly what to build and had confirmed the consulting service could actually become software.\n\nFor go-to-market, Girish tried 20 different channels. Seventeen failed. The three that worked were founder communities (Slack groups, WhatsApp groups), VC portfolio programs with startup discounts, and Google (paid + SEO). His framework - harvest existing demand rather than create new demand - helped him focus on places where people were already looking for solutions.\n\nNow AI is changing the game from three directions at once. It's changing Sprinto's product, it's changing how customers operate internally, and it's creating new security threats from the outside. The problems that didn't exist two years ago are now driving a whole new wave of demand.\n\nToday, Sprinto generates eight-figure ARR with over 3,000 customers across 75 countries. The team has grown to 350 people and they've raised $32 million."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"60:T8d0,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Sylvestre Dupont is the co-founder and CEO of Parseur, a platform that automates data extraction from emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets.\n\nThe idea started with a side project in 2015. Sylvestre wanted to build a travel map that auto-updated from booking confirmations. He and his co-founder Sylvain, a senior Python developer he'd known for 25 years, saw a bigger opportunity: a general-purpose document parsing tool.\n\nThey put up a landing page, ran Google Ads, and collected 50 email signups. That felt like enough validation. So they spent the next year heads-down coding. Full features, payment system ready, zero marketing.\n\nIn December 2016, they launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News. Nothing happened. They emailed the 50 people from a year earlier. Two signed up and quit immediately.\n\nSo they started from scratch on the marketing side. They began answering questions on Quora, genuinely helping people with document automation problems. That's where their first real customers came from. They also dropped the price from $49 to $9 a month just to get anyone to try it.\n\nWhat set them apart was simplicity. Competitors required users to write complex extraction rules by hand. Parseur let you visually highlight what you wanted. Setup took 10 minutes instead of two hours. That bootstrapped SaaS advantage - simple, self-serve, no sales call required - became the foundation of everything.\n\nGrowth came slowly through SEO and a Zapier integration that converted at 20 to 30 percent. For the first five years, it was just the two of them. No employees, no investors, no board.\n\nThen AI changed the game. ChatGPT could do basic document parsing. VC-funded competitors like UiPath and ABBYY were spending hundreds of millions on AI. Sylvestre had to rebuild his entire product around machine learning - funding the transition from customer revenue, not investors.\n\nHis bootstrapped SaaS strategy for survival: don't try to out-feature the giants. Be the tool that any business can set up in minutes without talking to sales. Simplicity as a moat, not technology.\n\nToday, Parseur generates seven-figure ARR with close to 1,000 paying customers in over 70 countries. A bootstrapped SaaS, still six people, still 100% founder-owned - and still growing."])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"49:[\"$\",\"div\",\"bootstrapped-saas-sylvestre-dupont-parseur\",{\"className\":\"$undefined\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L18\",null,{\"href\":\"/podcast/bootstrapped-saas-sylvestre-dupont-parseur/\",\"className\":\"group block h-full\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"article\",null,{\"className\":\"rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden\",\"children\":[\"$\",\"$L19\",null,{\"src\":\"https://eqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/content-images/23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f/episodes/img-1788621573231.png\",\"alt\":\"AI Took Over His Market. His Bootstrapped SaaS Grew 60% - Sylvestre Dupont\",\"width\":600,\"height\":600,\"className\":\"w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300\",\"sizes\":\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw\"}]}],[\"$\",\"div\",null,{\"className\":\"p-6 flex flex-col flex-1\",\"children\":[[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2\",\"children\":[\"Sylvestre Dupont\",\", Parseur\"]}],[\"$\",\"h3\",null,{\"className\":\"text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2\",\"dangerouslySetInnerHTML\":{\"__html\":\"AI Took Over His Market. His Bootstrapped SaaS Grew 60%\"}}],[\"$\",\"p\",null,{\"className\":\"text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1\",\"children\":\"$60\"}]]}]]}]}]}]\n"])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Hewitt Tomlin and his co-founder James started TeamBuildr as a social app for college athletes. A single conversation with a campus strength coach changed everything. The coach didn't want a social experience for his players. He wanted better tools for his actual job - building and distributing training programs.\n\nThat pivot turned TeamBuildr into a vertical SaaS company built around one job function: strength and conditioning. Hewitt worked a full-time job for the first three years while moonlighting on TeamBuildr, growing revenue from $20K to $100K. When he went full-time, revenue jumped from $100K to $500K and then to $1M.\n\nToday TeamBuildr is a $10M ARR business with 45 employees. They've never raised funding and still use the same operating agreement from 2012. About half their customers are high schools, and they deliberately charge pro teams the same price as everyone else.\n\nHewitt's reasoning is pragmatic. As a bootstrapped company, they couldn't afford to build different products for different verticals. By keeping pricing flat, they got NFL and college logos as social proof that drove volume in the high school market - the segment that actually moves the needle for growth.\n\nOn AI, Hewitt is taking the opposite approach from his main competitor Volt, which is building AI-generated workouts to replace coaches. Hewitt believes AI should enhance the coaching profession, not replace it. He's focused on using AI internally to help his team work better and building AI features only when coaches actually ask for them - which they haven't yet.\n\nIn this conversation, Hewitt shares how he built relationships with early customers instead of just handing out logins, why he thinks founders who plateau at $500K have a product-market fit problem, and how building for a job function instead of a vertical unlocked every segment from high schools to pro sports."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"62:T898,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Sarah Ahmad and her co-founder Colin met freshman year of college and moved to San Francisco to work as engineers. They quit their jobs to build Mistro, a platform providing benefits for remote teams internationally. They got into Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, raised a pre-seed round, and had paying customers.\n\nThen COVID hit. You'd think a remote work tool would thrive when the entire world went remote. Instead, it was silent. They couldn't even give the product away for free. COVID had pressure-tested their product-market fit and exposed the truth - nobody needed what they were building.\n\nSarah went back to basics. She ran discovery conversations with hundreds of operations managers and founders. One problem kept surfacing: companies without physical offices didn't know what to do about their business address and physical mail. The incumbents in the space had been around since the 2000s with clunky software. Nobody was raving about them.\n\nInstead of making the same mistake again - building a full product before validating demand - Sarah took a completely different approach to SaaS product validation. She posted a simple landing page in the YC community. The response was immediate. Dozens of founders emailed saying they needed it tomorrow.\n\nThe first version of Stable was embarrassingly manual. A mail partner in San Francisco, Google Drive for document storage, Zoom for onboarding, and a Stripe link for payment. Sarah was manually emailing customers when mail arrived. They ran it this way for the first 100 customers before writing any code.\n\nToday, Stable is the leading AI-powered virtual mailbox for businesses with over 10,000 customers, 8-figure ARR, and a team of 50-60 people. They operate in 20+ locations across the US with processing centers in the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas. Their customers range from solopreneurs to enterprises like DoorDash, Realty Income, and GitLab.\n\nIn this conversation, Sarah shares how the SEO playbook that built the business stopped working when AI overviews took over Google search results, why physical operations are her moat against AI disruption, and the moment she had to shift from product building to company building."])</script>
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10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"63:T8ec,"])</script>
10<script>self.__next_f.push([1,"Zhong Xu is the co-founder and CEO of Deliverect, an operating system for restaurants that connects digital sales channels like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub into one place.\n\nZhong's father immigrated from China to Belgium with nothing. He washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant, saved enough to open his own, and taught himself C++ from a book so he could build his own point-of-sale system.\n\nHe pushed Zhong into the business early. By 14, Zhong was helping run the restaurant. By 16, he was building websites for Chinese restaurants across Belgium. By 18, he'd built over 1,000 of them.\n\nHe went on to study software engineering and built one of the first iPad POS systems. He coded the whole thing himself over nine months while working full-time with a three-and-a-half-hour daily commute. In 2014, that company merged with Lightspeed. Five years later, Lightspeed IPO'd.\n\nBut Zhong wasn't done building. He kept hearing the same thing from restaurant owners. Delivery platforms were taking over. Orders were pouring in from five or six different apps, and nobody had a way to manage it all. So in 2017, he left and started Deliverect.\n\nThis time, he didn't spend nine months coding before talking to customers. He went out and signed up 50 to 100 restaurants first. Behind the scenes, his team was processing orders manually. It looked automated. It wasn't. But it proved the demand was real before they wrote a single line of code.\n\nThen he figured out the SaaS distribution channel that would change everything. Instead of signing restaurants one by one, he partnered with POS companies. Ten partners each bringing in 100 restaurants a month beat doing it alone. When COVID hit and restaurants scrambled to go digital, Deliverect was exactly what they needed. They opened 10 new offices in a single quarter to get ahead of local incumbents.\n\nToday, Deliverect serves over 80,000 restaurants across 50 countries with 450 employees. They've processed over $25 billion in orders and are approaching $100 million in ARR. And now Zhong is racing to build an AI intelligence layer for restaurants before the whole industry gets commoditized. Because as he puts it, infrastructure alone is forgettable - the value is in the SaaS distribution channel that controls the intelligence."])</script>
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10<div hidden id="S:4"><div class="grid grid-cols-1 sm:grid-cols-2 lg:grid-cols-3 gap-6"><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/founder-led-sales-shahar-azulay-groundcover/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="His First Deal Was $10K. Then He Learned to Sell. - Shahar Azulay" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1790603487981.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Shahar Azulay<!-- -->, groundcover</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">His First Deal Was $10K. Then He Learned to Sell.</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Shahar Azulay is the co-founder and CEO of groundcover, an observability platform that helps engineering teams catch problems in production before their customers do. He has built it to eight-figure ARR with more than 250 customers, competing directly against Datadog and New Relic.
11
12He came to it as an engineer, not a seller. Shahar and his co-founder had spent their careers as engineering managers, living the same frustrating cycle: instrument your applications, emit the telemetry you need, then get told the bill is too high and start sampling and switching things off. They set out to solve that with technology rather than a different margin, and bet the company on eBPF, a kernel technology nobody in observability was using at the time.
13
14The selling was harder than the building. Three months in, groundcover closed its first customer through a connection to a head of DevOps. There was no user interface yet, just the sensor and some dashboards. Shahar went into the pricing call asking for $100,000 and came out with $10,000 a year, because neither he nor his co-founder knew what they were negotiating against.
15
16His conclusion from that is contrarian: close your first dozen customers at whatever price they will pay. The learning, the references, and the confidence are worth more than the contract value, and you cannot expect to grow those early accounts anyway.
17
18Shahar also covers how the first 50 to 100 customers came from his own 
18network and a handful of LinkedIn messages a day, why he published list pricing and then discounted it by up to 70 percent, and the moment customers started ripping out Datadog before groundcover was ready for it.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/founder-led-sales-ross-paquette-maropost/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="He Aimed for $500K a Year. He Built a $50M Company. - Ross Andrew Paquette" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789755303734.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Ross Andrew Paquette<!-- -->, Maropost</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">He Aimed for $500K a Year. He Built a $50M Company.</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Ross Paquette is the founder and CEO of Maropost, a commerce and marketing platform he has bootstrapped to around $50 million in ARR with roughly 300 people and 5,000 customers. He started it in 2011 out of his apartment while still working full time selling Oracle ERP software into the construction industry.
19
20The plan was small. Ten customers paying $50,000 a year, about $500,000, and more free time. Ross had spent a few years selling marketing automation and knew the service in that market was poor, so his pitch was simple: 24-hour live chat and a five-minute response time, which in practice meant him. Three or four former customers signed almost immediately. Two of them paid around $10,000 a month.
21
22The early build nearly sank it. His developer would disappear for days, and the platform would go down with 
22nobody available to fix it. Ross describes standing on a departing plane holding his phone in the air to hold the signal, maybe ten or fifteen times. His mother suggested he post the job somewhere. The first person who replied on oDesk rebuilt the platform in two or three weeks and is his CTO today.
23
24Then it caught. In 28 months the business went from $300,000 to $27 million with six or seven people, largely because Ross was personally closing brands like Rolling Stone and Mercedes off conference floors. He took a secondary round around 2016, gave up about 25 percent, and roughly three years later wrote a $37 million check to buy the investors out.
25
26He also gets into why seven or eight experienced sales leaders failed at Maropost, what he hires for now instead, and why he says he would not show up to work if he owned less than ten percent of his own company.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/inbound-marketing-rodney-robinson-tabapay/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="He Grew to $100M Almost Entirely Through Inbound - Rodney Robinson" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1789403650739.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Rodney Robinson<!-- -->, TabaPay</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">He Grew to $100M Almost Entirely Through Inbound</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Rodney Robinson is the co-founder and CEO of TabaPay, a payments company that moves money in and out for fintechs. It now runs at $100 million in revenue with about 150 people, profitable, growing 35 to 40 percent a year. On the day this interview was recorded, Rodney announced TabaPay had raised $155 million and acquired a bank.
27
28The company started because Mastercard would not build what its own customers kept asking for. Rodney had sold his previous company to Mastercard and spent two years running its instant payout business. Merchants wanted to send money out and collect it back through the same card. Mastercard only wanted the send half, because the collect half would compete with its largest processing partners. Rodney left and built the thing they could not.
29
30Getting there took a year and a bank willing to sponsor a startup with 
30no track record. Banks solve for risk by asking for a large deposit, which Rodney did not have, so he signed a personal guarantee and pledged his house. Six months in, another company accused them of stealing its software. TabaPay won, but the sponsor bank dropped them during the fight.
31
32The company ran for nine years on a single $2.5 million seed round, its only outside money until this year. Rodney went after small fintechs he already knew, on the theory that minnows become whales, and let banks and the card networks feed him everything after that. TabaPay has never bought a keyword or run content marketing.
33
34He also covers why he paid vendors more than he needed to in year one, how three vendors at 99 percent uptime leaves you down three percent of the time, and why he thinks outbound sales is finished in B2B.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/predictive-pricing-felix-hoffmann-7learnings/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="10 Customers To $1M ARR, All Founder-Led Sales - Felix Hoffmann" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525890943.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Felix Hoffmann<!-- -->, 7Learnings</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">10 Customers To $1M ARR, All Founder-Led Sales</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Felix Hoffmann is the co-founder and CEO of 7Learnings, a Berlin company whose softw
34are decides what a retailer should charge. He spent six years as a pricing consultant at Kearney and two years running price optimization at Zalando, Europe&#x27;s largest fashion marketplace, where he saw predictive pricing working at scale. From his consulting years he already knew almost nobody else worked that way. Today 7Learnings is at multiple seven figures in ARR, with around 40 customers and 60 people.
35
36The hard part was never the idea. A demand forecasting model needs a large retailer&#x27;s historical sales data, and no large retailer hands that over to a company with no product. Felix also spent the early months trying to recruit two technical co-founders in Berlin, which he describes as close to impossible when engineers can earn well without taking any risk.
37
38So the first contract 7Learnings signed was not software at all. It was a consulting project. The retailer got help implementing its own pricing approach, 7Learnings got paid, and it kept the right to use the data to build a product of its own.
39
40The first paying software customer came through his old consulting network, structured as an A/B test: the algorithm priced half the assortment, the retailer&#x27;s team priced the other half. The first run was a disaster. Prices came out far too expensive on high-priced products, and in e-commerce you know 
40within a day. They reworked the models, and a later test came back with a 13% profit uplift.
41
42Felix also covers how a pricing company prices itself, why he refuses success-based fees, the objection he still hears from almost every retailer, and why he thinks LLMs do not belong in the pricing decision itself.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/listening-to-customers-rick-knudtson-workshop/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="The Complaint He Ignored for 9 Months Led to His First $10M - Rick Knudtson" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525248582.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Rick Knudtson<!-- -->, Workshop</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">The Complaint He Ignored for 9 Months Led to His First $10M</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Rick Knudtson is the co-founder and CEO of Workshop, an internal communications platform in Omaha, Nebraska, now at eight-figure ARR. Before this he co-founded Flywheel in 2012, a WordPress hosting platform for creative agencies, and sold it to WP Engine in 2019.
43
44It did not start well. In late 2020 Rick and his co-founders went all in on internal communications, then picked the wrong product. Nobody loves their intranet, Rick reasoned, so a better-designed one should win. The founding team spent the first nine months of 2021 selling that intranet and earned about three customers. Nobody agreed on what an intranet was even for.
45
46About four months in, they started hearing something else. Email is our number one channel and we have no visibility into it. Rick heard it and dismissed it for another five months. Email was not novel, and he had just come off an exit that told him he knew what to build. He calls it ego, plainly.
47
48By month nine Workshop had roughly zero traction and more than half of a $3 million raise still in the bank, and Rick 
48was pushing to return the money to investors. His co-founder and COO Derek Homann talked him and Ben Stevinson out of it at a bar in Omaha. Just listen to the damn customers. They rebuilt the platform around email in 30 days and signed 10 customers, against three in nine months.
49
50In this interview, Rick explains why an exit made him a worse listener, why he thinks you should be marketing for a year before you sell anything, and how Workshop came to price by audience reached instead of per seat.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/selling-before-building-julius-korfgen-uplane/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="He Sold the Software Before He Built It. $1M ARR in 6 Months - Julius Körfgen" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525424570.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Julius Körfgen<!-- -->, Uplane</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">He Sold the Software Before He Built It. $1M ARR in 6 Months</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Julius Körfgen spent years running marketing at a European startup, where he personally built around ten thousand ads. Writing headlines, testing image variants, checking which call-to-action buttons converted. He estimates that roughly ten percent of ads are ever profitable, and that companies keep running the other ninety percent because the process of finding out is slow and manual.
51
52So he left with two co-founders to automate it. What he did not do was build first. He ran cold LinkedIn outreach to strangers, framed every message as a request to learn rather than a pitch, and used the discovery calls to find out what marketing teams actually struggled with. At the end of each call he would say the same thing: give us a week and we will c
52ome back with a solution. Then the three of them would grind out whatever they had just promised.
53
54He also refused to run free pilots. His argument is that without a dollar attached, you cannot tell the difference between a real business case and a polite conversation.
55
56Uplane reached a million dollars in ARR in about six months and now runs around twenty people across San Francisco and Berlin. AG1 is a customer, and a project with Deutsche Bahn is underway after roughly nine months of conversations.
57
58In this interview, Julius breaks down the outreach that got strangers to take his calls, the one-week sprint, why he threw out per-seat pricing in favour of a fixed fee that only covers costs plus a variable share of ad spend, and the guardrails that stop an AI from putting bad ads in front of an enterprise brand&#x27;s audience.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/enterprise-sales-christian-lund-templafy/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="He Closed a Global Enterprise Deal With No Product - Christian Lund" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788525916841.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Christian Lund<!-- -->, Templafy</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">He Closed a Global Enterprise Deal With No Product</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Christian Lund had spent years running an on-premise document business before he saw the cloud shift coming. Rather than retrofit the old product, he and his co-founder spun out Templafy and started over from scratch, with two engineers and no product to sell.
59
60What they sold instead was a point of view. Christian identified roughly 800 people worldwide who he thought were mature enough to have the conversation, targeted them with specific messaging, and used those conversations to get in front of enterprises long before there was software to demo. Templafy raised its first funding round close to twelve months before the product existed.
61
62That approach landed one of the Big Four accounting firms as the first customer. But the deal nearly went the way most enterprise deals go, with a small pilot for ten people and no defined outcome. Christian pushed back, not by refusing, but by attaching conditions: agree exactly what we are proving, and agree what happens if we prove it. When some prospects later opened the decision up to competing vendors, Templafy had effectively written the evaluation criteria.
63
64Templafy now runs at eight figures in revenue with a couple of hundred people. Christian is putting the business through the same reset again for AI, rebuilding the technology foundation from scratch over two and a half years. He is candid that the messaging got ahead of the market, and that being eighty percent ahead instead of fifteen percent cost the company conversations it needed.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/ai-inference-eugene-cheah-featherless-ai/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="The Weekend Experiment That Killed His Own AI Model - Eugene Cheah" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
64w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544763237.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Eugene Cheah<!-- -->, Featherless AI</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">The Weekend Experiment That Killed His Own AI Model</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Eugene Cheah&#x27;
64s team had built something genuinely novel: an open source foundation model under the Linux Foundation, trained across more than 200 languages, with an architecture that made AI inference dramatically cheaper. Their seven billion parameter model beat Llama&#x27;s equivalent. The problem was that almost nobody was asking for it.
65
66Along the way they solved a constraint of their own making. Customers were fine-tuning thousands of models on their platform, the industry norm was one GPU per model, and they could not afford a thousand GPUs. So they built a system that swaps models on and off GPUs on demand, bringing a cold model online in about five seconds. Most inference providers keep a fixed list of under a hundred models standing by, because loading one can take thirty minutes on hardware costing eighty dollars an hour.
67
68Then someone on the team asked whether the same technology would work for Llama and Mistral. They shipped it as an experiment. Over the launch weekend it earned more than the platform they had spent two years on. Eugene renamed the company and went all in.
69
70In this interview, Eugene explains why he priced a flat monthly rate while the rest of the AI industry charged per token, how stripping the technical explanation off the homepage kept improving conversion until they removed their own research from the top of the page, and why competing for the long tail of open source AI models beats fighting a hundred providers over the top hundred.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/solo-founder-saas-george-georgiadis-happierleads/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="5 Years Stuck at $50K ARR. Now $1.5M With No Team. - George Georgiadis" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788544968423.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">George Georgiadis<!-- -->, Happier Leads</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">5 Years Stuck at $50K ARR. Now $1.5M With No Team.</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">George Georgiadis grew up in Greece, studied IT, and did a master&#x27;s degree in education because he wanted a government job paying around $600 a month. He ended up in London instead, working through roughly ten different projects before landing on the one that stuck.
71
72The idea for Happier Leads came out of his own frustration. He was spending money on ads for an earlier product and watching 95% of his visitors leave without ever identifying themselves. He looked for a fix, found Clearbit, and got quoted $20,000 a year. So he bought a data source and built his own version on top of it.
73
74An AppSumo campaign brought in his first $50,000 and funded the early product. Then the business went flat. For five years, Happier Leads sat at roughly $50K ARR. George was splitting his attention between building and a fundraise that never closed, spending about 80% of his time on software development and 20% on marketing and sales. Multiple times he thought about quitting. At one point he started borrowing money to the business from his own personal accounts.
75
76What finally moved the number was going deep instead of wide. He owned a 175-million-contact database he had been selling to other people and never used himself. He built his own mailboxes and email infrastructure, drove the cost per send down, and started sending millions of cold emails. Once the unit economics worked, revenue compounded.
77
78The other half of the story is how he operates now. Happier Leads runs on a set of AI systems George built himself: his own CRM, his own chatbot, his own session recording, all connected to a single AI brain that reads the data, spots bugs, fixes them, and emails stuck customers without him. He calls it 100 people working 24/7.
79
80And yet he is now hiring. His view is that a one-person business makes you an operator, not an owner, and an operator has nothing to sell. So after proving he could get to seven figures alone, George is building a team again.
81
82In this episode, George breaks down the AppSumo lifetime deal math, why he turned down a $1M acquisition offer, what actually makes cold email work at scale, and how he assembled the AI agents that replaced a whole team.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/usage-based-pricing-ron-hash-skimmer/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="How Usage-Based Pricing Built a Bootstrapped SaaS Exit - Ron Hash" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788545098094.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Ron Hash<!-- -->, Skimmer</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">How Usage-Based Pricing Built a Bootstrapped SaaS Exit</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Ron Hash is a software developer who had never built a SaaS before Skimmer. He wasn&#x27;t chasing a big idea. A friend with a pool service company mentioned there was no good software to run his business, and months later Ron cold-called a random pool pro in Texas to see if the problem was real. When that stranger said &quot;the paper game is killing me,&quot; Ron went all in, building the first version on nights and weekends.
83
84Skimmer grew slowly at first, 76 customers in the first year, then compounded to 1,500 customers and over $1 million in ARR with no paid marketing. The engine was SEO Ron taught himself and word of mouth from pool pros who loved the product. One of his most important early decisions was usage-based pricing: 50 cents per serviced pool with a $29 minimum, instead of the per-seat model everyone else used. That choice aligned Skimmer&#x27;s revenue with each customer&#x27;s growth and helped push churn down to 2%.
85
86In 2020, Ron sold Skimmer to Unbundled Capital. Under new ownership the company went on to raise $79 million and grow past 100 employees. In this conversation Ron breaks down how he validated the idea with one call, why usage-based pricing beat per-seat, how he fixed churn through onboarding, and why he has never regretted the exit.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/service-as-software-farzad-rashidi-respona/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="He Demoted His SaaS to Sell a Service and 4x&#x27;d Revenue - Farzad Rashidi" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
86w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619545520.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Farzad Rashidi<!-- -->, Respona</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">He Demoted His SaaS to Sell a Service and 4x'd Revenue</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Farzad Rashidi is the co-founder of Respona, a company that helps brands get cited in AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
87
88He first came on the show back in episode 323, when Respona was a self-serve outreach tool doing a few hundred thousand in ARR. Then the classic bootstrapped trap set in. Churn caught up with 
88new business, and every customer they won was offset by one they lost. For years Farzad tried to fix it the way most founders do, by adding more features to make the product stickier. Nothing moved. The real reason customers left was not missing features. It was that they never had the time to do the work the tool required.
89
90The turning point came in early 2025. A marketing agency CEO haggled over an $800-a-month license, then offered to pay per result instead. That one conversation nudged Farzad toward a service-as-software model: do the work for the customer, charge for the outcome, and use the software in the back end. That first customer now spends around $65K to $70K a month, and in twelve months the company 4x&#x27;d the revenue it had spent six years building.
91
92What makes this a service-as-software story rather than a slide back into agency work is what came next. Farzad demoted the self-serve SaaS on the homepage, productized the service into fixed tiers with no negotiation, and rebuilt a software layer (a client portal, a publisher network, and a brain in the middle) on top of the manual delivery. We also dig into the actual playbook for getting a brand cited in AI answers, from finding lookalike publishers to building a surround-sound presence around the models.
93
94I hope you enjoy the conversation.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/category-creation-danny-jenkins-threatlocker/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="How ThreatLocker Created a New Category to Reach $200M - Danny Jenkins" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619543610.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Danny Jenkins<!-- -->, ThreatLocker</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">How ThreatLocker Created a New Category to Reach $200M</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Danny Jenkins started ThreatLocker with a simple, contrarian belief: instead of trying to detect every cyber attack, you should block everything by default and only allow what a business actually needs.
95
96The problem was that the market for that idea looked tiny. When Danny sized the whitelisting market, it was a few hundred million dollars at best, and winning it would have cost more than it was worth. So he made the bet that defines this episode. Rather than fight for a corner of an existing market, he used category creation to turn a small niche into a $10 billion opportunity: zero trust for every business, not just the largest enterprises.
97
98Getting there was brutal. It took 18 months to land the first paying customer. Danny remortgaged the house, ran the family onto credit cards, repaired a hurricane-damaged roof himself, and considered bankruptcy. When he finally got a customer on the phone, he was so scared to ask for the order that he was shaking.
99
100In this conversation, Danny shares how he validated the idea before raising money, why a blunt salesperson outsold a polished one, how MSPs became his wedge into the small-business market, and the two things he says are the only things that matter when you are starting out.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/founder-control-eric-ries-the-lean-startup/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="He Wrote The Lean Startup. Now He&#x27;s Warning Founders. - Eric Ries" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
100w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788619541648.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Eric Ries<!-- -->, The Lean Startup</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">He Wrote The Lean Startup. Now He's Warning Founders.</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, the book that shaped how a generation of founders builds products. His new book, Incorruptible, is his answer to a problem he says he helped create: founders who use the Lean Startup playbook to build successful companies, then lose control of them.
101
102Eric tells the story of advising a SaaS founder who landed a customer worth half their revenue. The roadmap quietly bent around that customer over six months. Nobody chose it. The product just drifted. He says this is what financial gravity looks like in the wild, and it is one of the biggest threats to founder control at the moment a startup starts working.
103
104Eric also breaks down what happened to Jeff Lawson at Twilio. Lawson negotiated a seven-year sunset on his dual-class shares at IPO. Activist investors removed him 199 days after that control expired. Eric cites a Harvard Law School study showing only 20% of venture-backed founder CEOs are still CEO three years after going public.
105
106The conversation gets concrete fast. Eric shows why most charters say &quot;any lawful purpose&quot; and why Delaware courts read that as &quot;maximize shareholder value&quot;, which is how the British inhaler company Vectura ended up sold to Philip Morris for an extra 10 pence per share. He walks through the Public Benefit Corporation conversion, a two-page filing that takes about five minutes for a Delaware company, and explains why it is one of the cheapest ways to protect founder control before it is too late.
107
108This episode is for early-stage SaaS founders deciding what to sign in their first term sheet, and for six-figure founders who already feel one customer pulling the roadmap.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/b2b-community-building-mark-abbott-ninety/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="He Shared His SaaS Idea. A Competitor Beat Him to Market. - Mark Abbott" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
108w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620930826.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Mark Abbott<!-- -->, Ninety</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">He Shared His SaaS Idea. A Competitor Beat Him to Market.</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Mark Abbott had the idea for Ninety back in 2005, sitting on private equity boards watching the same leadership problems repeat across 100+ companies. He wanted to write a book and build software. Then he discovered Gino Wickman had already written the book - Traction - and trademarked the EOS framework around it. So Mark pitched Gino in 2012. Gino&#x27;s answer: &quot;We tried it, it&#x27;s not in our DNA.&quot;
109
110Most founders would have raced into code. Mark did the opposite. He spent four years embedded in B2B community building - becoming EOS implementer #33, attending quarterly coaching gatherings, and slowly earning the trust of the people who would eventually become his distribution channel. While he played the long game, he openly shared his vision with the community. One of the implementers passed the idea to a software client, and Traction Tools launched first in 2016. Mark started laying code that same year as &quot;EOS compatible,&quot; landed his first customer in 2017, and only signed the official license in late 2018.
111
112What followed was a masterclass in patient B2B community building. Mark spent $500 a month on Facebook ads targeting self-implementing EOS companies, leaned into relationships with the implementer community, and built a 24/7 support culture that outflanked the first mover. He bootstrapped past 1,000 customers and hit a $100M+ valuation before raising a dollar. Then in 2021 he raised a $20M Series A from Insight Partners. Insight later returned for a $35M Series B led by Blue Cloud Ventures with Catalyst Ventures coming in - $55M total across three institutional investors.
113
114The Series A is where things got harder, not easier. Mark hired fast, brought in seasoned executives who arrived with their own playbooks, and lost grip on culture. He explains why the lessons that worked in private equity didn&#x27;t translate to scaling a SaaS company, what he wishes he had known about hiring for stage, and how AI is reshaping Ninety&#x27;s product roadmap two years into a serious AI build. This is a candid conversation about taking the slow path, the cost of oversharing, and what B2B community building actually buys a founder.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/selling-saas-without-sales-experience-yega-kumarappan-paperflite/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="How They Closed 500 SaaS Customers With No Outbound Sales - Yega Kumarappan" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
114w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620929284.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Yega Kumarappan<!-- -->, Paperflite</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">How They Closed 500 SaaS Customers With No Outbound Sales</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Yega Kumarappan is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Paperflite, a content and sales enablement platform that helps B2B marketing and sales teams close deals faster.
115
116Back in 2015, Yega and his future co-founders were building an internal venture at Cognizant. They needed to create decks, videos, case studies, and brochures, then get all of that into the hands of sales teams. Every tool they tried was terrible. That problem stuck with them.
117
118After more than a decade at Cognizant, all three founders walked away from stable careers with families to support. They had a working prototype when they went to investors. In January 2018, they raised a 400K seed round. Girish from Freshworks put money in. So did the ex-CEO of Cognizant.
119
120Paperflite never raised again. A year in, they were profitable.
121
122The product was a Netflix-like experience for sales content. Instead of digging through folders in SharePoint and Dropbox, sales reps logged in and saw exactly what worked for their product, their region, and their type of buyer.
123
124But selling SaaS without sales experience was harder than expected. Then one day, a message came through their Intercom chat. It was from S&amp;P Global, asking if Paperflite could host research materials for a conference called COP22. The team had no idea what COP22 was. They thought a friend was pranking them. It turned out to be the UN climate change conference.
125
126That wasn&#x27;t luck. For their first couple of years, Yega&#x27;s team lived on Quora and Reddit, answering every question they could find about sales content and knowledge management. That&#x27;s how the inbound started.
127
128Conversion was the next problem. Generic product tours converted at 2 to 3%. So they tried something almost nobody does. They spent 8 to 10 hours setting up a custom demo for every single prospect. A personalized hub, with their actual content, in their regions, for their buyer segments. Conversion jumped to 20%.
129
130Today, Paperflite serves over 500 B2B organizations, does seven figures in ARR, and has 140 employees across India and the US. All on that same 400K. This is one of the cleanest case studies of selling SaaS without sales experience and still building a durable, profitable B2B company.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/saas-distribution-channel-tibo-louis-lucas-tmaker/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="The SaaS Distribution Channel Bet Behind a $12M Portfolio - Tibo Louis-Lucas" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
130w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788620927333.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Tibo Louis-Lucas<!-- -->, TMAKER</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">The SaaS Distribution Channel Bet Behind a $12M Portfolio</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Tibo Louis-Lucas is the founder of TMAKER, a bootstrapped portfolio of 5 SaaS products doing over $1M a month with a team of 10. His flagship product Outrank crossed $200K MRR on its own. But the road to TMAKER ran through two bankruptcies, 250,000 euros of personal debt, a $8 million exit Tibo publicly regrets, and a complete rethink of how SaaS distribution channels actually work.
131
132Tibo raised 200K euros for his first startup in 2015 and another 500K for his second in 2017. Both went to zero. The second left him with 250K in personal debt. He took a corporate CTO job for stability. Then his first child was born, got severely sick at two months old, and he and his wife quit their jobs to travel the world. Three weeks later, COVID hit. They were stuck in Paris with a sick baby, no income, and no plan.
133
134Most people would have crawled back to a salary. Tibo went the other way. He partnered with co-founder Tom and shipped 11 products in 4 months on unemployment benefits. The kill criteria was revenue, not downloads or feedback. Ten products flopped. The eleventh, Tweet Hunter, hit $1K MRR in its second month. Then Twitter influencer JK Molina asked for 25% of profits in exchange for promoting it. Revenue tripled from around $3K to $20K MRR in three weeks. They forked the same model into Taplio for LinkedIn and sold both to Lempire less than two years in for $2M upfront and an earnout that closed at $8 million.
135
136After the earnout ended, Tibo experienced what he calls a void. He publicly regrets selling. Now he runs TMAKER as a portfolio studio with the opposite playbook. Instead of being the maker, he is the SaaS distribution channel. He partners with co-makers who build the products while he handles audience, SEO, ads, and influencer pi
136pelines that get reused across every product. Outrank is the flagship at $200K MRR. Revid does over $600K a month. The portfolio crossed $1M a month a few weeks before this conversation.
137
138In this episode, Tibo unpacks why SaaS distribution channels matter more than the product itself in the AI era, the exact signals that told him Tweet Hunter was the one after 10 failures, the structure of his JK Molina equity deal, why he regrets the $8M exit, the co-maker model that powers TMAKER, and how he uses SEO as the most durable SaaS distribution channel of all.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/ai-search-optimization-marius-meiners-peec-ai/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="Building an AI Search Optimization SaaS to $8.6M ARR in 14 Months - Marius Meiners" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621580328.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Marius Meiners<!-- -->, Peec AI</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">Building an AI Search Optimization SaaS to $8.6M ARR in 14 Months</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Marius Meiners is the co-founder and CEO of Peec AI, a platform that helps marketing teams track how their brands appear on AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. After studying economics, working in venture capital and M&amp;A at PwC, and joining Antler&#x27;s Berlin cohort, Marius found himself with no team, no idea, and four years removed from writing any code.
139
140Then in late October 2024, ChatGPT launched search. Marius saw it and decided this was going to change everything. The smartest SEO experts in the world were already obsessed with it. The signal was loud. So he turned to AI search optimization as the wedge - a category that would explode as marketers scrambled to figure out how to get cited by AI assistants.
141
142He vibe coded the first prototype with V0 in a day and a half. Eight customers signed letters of intent based on it. Antler wrote a 100K check. His CTO joined and built the real product in six weeks. Peec launched in February 2025.
143
144Then came the bet. Their biggest competitor had raised five times more money and was chasing the world&#x27;
144s biggest brands. Marius made the opposite call. Peec priced at 85 euros while competitors charged over 500. For six months, Marius and the team ate two-euro canned food every day, wondering if the mid-market AI search optimization play would ever pay off.
145
146Today Peec has over 2,000 customers, $8.6 million in ARR, and a team of 55. All in 14 months. AI search optimization went from speculation to a live revenue channel - 20% of Peec&#x27;s own conversions now come through AI search itself.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/open-source-saas-ev-kontsevoy-teleport/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="The 8-Figure Open Source SaaS Playbook - Ev Kontsevoy" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621578568.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Ev Kontsevoy<!-- -->, Teleport</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">The 8-Figure Open Source SaaS Playbook</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Ev Kontsevoy is the co-founder and CEO of Teleport, an infrastructure identity platform based in Oakland, California. Teleport helps organizations manage secure access to their computing environments by unifying human, machine, and AI agent identities into a single layer.
147
148Before Teleport, Ev founded Mailgun in 2009, an email API for developers that was acquired by Rackspace in 2012. After the acquisition, he spent time at Rackspace listening to customer problems, which led him to start Gravitational in 2015. The original product, Gravity, helped SaaS companies deploy their applications across multiple cloud environments.
149
150But the real open source SaaS story started when Ev built Teleport as one component of Gravity - a free, Apache-licensed tool for managing secure access. He intended it purely as demand generation for the paid Gravity product. Then COVID hit. Gravity&#x27;s pipeline dried up overnight while Teleport&#x27;s inbound demand exploded as engineers scrambled for remote access solutions.
151
152The pivot was not really a pivot. Ev focused on one product, rebranded the company as Teleport, and launched an enterprise version. The first enterprise deal closed on an improvised phone call for $25,000 per year. Early on, they sold to individual engineers through a product-led open source SaaS motion. But when Ev asked customers to &quot;sell Teleport back to me,&quot; he discovered they were using only a fraction of the platform. They were selling to the wrong buyer.
153
154Switching from practitioners to VPs of platform engineering nearly tripled the average deal size in a single year. Teleport now serves over 500 customers in eight figures of ARR, with AI agent identity emerging as a major growth driver - what Ev calls &quot;COVID 2.0&quot; for the business.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/ai-saas-karel-papik-product-fruits/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="The Risky AI SaaS Rebuild That Broke a $2M ARR Ceiling - Karel Papik" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
154w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621576782.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Karel Papik<!-- -->, Product Fruits</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">The Risky AI SaaS Rebuild That Broke a $2M ARR Ceiling</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Karel Papik is the co-founder of Product Fruits, a digital adoption platform based in Prague, Czech Republic. Before SaaS, Karel spent 15 years building video games - shipping 16 titles, many of them for women - where he mastered the art of SaaS onboarding and user engagement through psychology rather than tutorials.
155
156When Karel met his co-founder Ladislav Salom, Product Fruits had just six customers. Within 12 months of their first investment from Lighthouse Ventures, they grew to $50K MRR using paid search as their primary acquisition channel. They achieved a 24-25% free trial conversion rate by applying product-led growth principles and gaming psychology to their own SaaS onboarding experience.
157
158But around $2M ARR, growth hit a wall. The product had become too complex for self-serve SaaS onboarding, and PLG stopped being effective. Meanwhile, AI-powered competitors were emerging fast. Karel describes this as the moment they stopped &quot;riding the horse&quot; and started &quot;riding the tiger.&quot;
159
160In a gutsy move, Karel emailed investors to say they were pausing feature development on the existing platform to rebuild it from scratch around AI. The investors responded by asking how much more money they needed. The result is an AI copilot that handles discovery calls, tailors onboarding flows, prevents churn, and resolves 80% of support tickets automatically.
161
162Today Product Fruits has over 1,300 paying customers - including KPMG, universities, and stock exchanges - with a 25-person team generating millions in ARR. Karel shares lessons on why PPC worked when most founders say 
162it doesn&#x27;t, how gaming psychology applies to SaaS onboarding, and why he believes talking to customers too much can hold you back.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/finding-product-market-fit-girish-redekar-sprinto/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="3 Years of Nothing. Then Product-Market Fit Hit Twice. - Girish Redekar" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621574939.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Girish Redekar<!-- -->, Sprinto</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">3 Years of Nothing. Then Product-Market Fit Hit Twice.</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Girish Redekar is the co-founder and CEO of Sprinto, an autonomous compliance platform that helps companies prove they&#x27;re handling data securely.
163
164Before Sprinto, Girish and his co-founder spent two to three years trying to build their first startup. They had no programming background, so they taught themselves to code at 28 because they couldn&#x27;t afford to hire developers.
165
166The first few ideas went nowhere. A job search engine. A resume matching tool. None of them got traction.
167
168Then they built RecruiterBox, a simple CRM for hiring. It launched before Stripe even existed, so their payment system was absurd. Customers had to click a PayPal link, swipe their card, and get credits that depleted daily. When the credits ran out, they&#x27;d go back to PayPal and swipe again.
169
170It was terrible. But customers kept doing it anyway. That was the clearest signal of finding product-market fit Girish had ever seen - not from analytics or feedback forms, but from watching people jump through hoops to keep paying.
171
172They bootstrapped RecruiterBox to over 2,500 customers and single-digit millions in ARR. Then they sold it. Not because it was failing, but because it got too comfortable. They felt like they were the bottleneck, and the business would grow faster in someone else&#x27;s hands.
173
174The second time around, Girish took a completely different approach to finding product-market fit. He&#x27;d experienced the pain of SOC 2 compliance firsthand at RecruiterBox, spending months and tens of thousands of dollars on consultants. So when he started Sprinto, he made a rule - no code until the idea was validated.
175
176He used The Mom Test framework, ran 15-20 customer interviews, and then paid auditors to audit his non-existent company. Ten times. Each audit, he built a little more product behind the scenes. By the tenth, he knew exactly what to build and had confirmed the consulting service could actually become software.
177
178For go-to-market, Girish tried 20 different channels. Seventeen failed. The three that worked were founder communities (Slack groups, WhatsApp groups), VC portfolio programs with startup discounts, and Google (paid + 
178SEO). His framework - harvest existing demand rather than create new demand - helped him focus on places where people were already looking for solutions.
179
180Now AI is changing the game from three directions at once. It&#x27;s changing Sprinto&#x27;s product, it&#x27;s changing how customers operate internally, and it&#x27;s creating new security threats from the outside. The problems that didn&#x27;t exist two years ago are now driving a whole new wave of demand.
181
182Today, Sprinto generates eight-figure ARR with over 3,000 customers across 75 countries. The team has grown to 350 people and they&#x27;ve raised $32 million.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/bootstrapped-saas-sylvestre-dupont-parseur/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="AI Took Over His Market. His Bootstrapped SaaS Grew 60% - Sylvestre Dupont" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621573231.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Sylvestre Dupont<!-- -->, Parseur</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">AI Took Over His Market. His Bootstrapped SaaS Grew 60%</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Sylvestre Dupont is the co-founder and CEO of Parseur, a platform that automates data extraction from emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets.
183
184The idea started with a side project in 2015. Sylvestre wanted to build a travel map that auto-updated from booking confirmations. He and his co-founder Sylvain, a senior Python developer he&#x27;d known for 25 years, saw a bigger opportunity: a general-purpose document parsing tool.
185
186They put up a landing page, ran Google Ads, and collected 50 email signups. That felt like enough validation. So they spent the next year heads-down coding. Full features, payment system ready, zero marketing.
187
188In December 2016, they launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News. Nothing happened. They emailed the 50 people from a year earlier. Two signed up and quit immediately.
189
190So they started from scratch on the marketing side. They began answering questions on Quora, genuinely helping people with document automation problems. That&#x27;s where their first real customers came from. They also dropped the price from $49 to $9 a month just to get anyone to try it.
191
192What set them apart was simplicity. Competitors required users to write complex extraction rules by hand. Parseur let you visually highlight what you wanted. Setup took 10 minutes instead of two hours. That bootstrapped SaaS advantage - simple, self-serve, no sales call required - became the foundation of everything.
193
194Growth came slowly through SEO and a Zapier integration that converted at 20 to 30 percent. For the first five years, it was just the two of them. No employees, no investors, no board.
195
196Then AI changed the game. ChatGPT could do basic document parsing. VC-funded competitors like UiPath and ABBYY were spending hundreds of millions on AI. Sylvestre had to rebuild his entire product around machine learning - funding the transition from customer revenue, not investors.
197
198His bootstrapped SaaS strategy for survival: don&#x27;t try to out-feature the giants. Be the tool that any business can set up in minutes without talking to sales. Simplicity as a moat, not technology.
199
200Today, Parseur generates seven-figure ARR with close to 1,000 paying customers in over 70 countries. A bootstrapped SaaS, still six people, still 100% founder-owned - and still growing.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/vertical-saas-hewitt-tomlin-teambuildr/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="How a Vertical SaaS Hit $10M ARR With Flat Pricing - Hewitt Tomlin" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100v
200w, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621571470.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Hewitt Tomlin<!-- -->, TeamBuildr</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">How a Vertical SaaS Hit $10M ARR With Flat Pricing</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Hewitt Tomlin and his co-founder James started TeamBuildr as a social app for college athletes. A single conversation with a campus strength coach changed everything. The coach didn&#x27;t want a social experience for his players. He wanted better tools for his actual job - building and distributing training programs.
201
202That pivot turned TeamBuildr into a vertical SaaS company built around one job function: strength and conditioning. Hewitt worked a full-time job for the first three years while moonlighting on TeamBuildr, growing revenue from $20K to $100K. When he went full-time, revenue jumped from $100K to $500K and then to $1M.
203
204Today TeamBuildr is a $10M ARR business with 45 employees. They&#x27;ve never raised funding and still use the same operating agreement from 2012. About half their customers are high schools, and they deliberately charge pro teams the same price as everyone else.
205
206Hewitt&#x27;s reasoning is pragmatic. As a bootstrapped company, they couldn&#x27;t afford to build different products for different verticals. By keeping pricing flat, they got NFL and college logos as social proof that drove volume in the high school market - the segment that actually moves the needle for growth.
207
208On AI, Hewitt is taking the opposite approach from his main competitor Volt, which is building AI-generated workouts to replace coaches. Hewitt believes AI should enhance the coaching profession, not replace it. He&#x27;s focused on using AI internally to help his team work better and building AI features only when coaches actually ask for them - which they haven&#x27;t yet.
209
210In this conversation, Hewitt shares how he built relationships with early customers instead of just handing out logins, why he thinks foun
210ders who plateau at $500K have a product-market fit problem, and how building for a job function instead of a vertical unlocked every segment from high schools to pro sports.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/validate-saas-idea-zero-code-sarah-ahmad-stable/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="How to Validate a SaaS Idea With Zero Code - Sarah Ahmad" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621568714.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Sarah Ahmad<!-- -->, Stable</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">How to Validate a SaaS Idea With Zero Code</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Sarah Ahmad and her co-founder Colin met freshman year of college and moved to San Francisco to work as engineers. They quit their jobs to build Mistro, a platform providing benefits for remote teams internationally. They got into Y Combinator&#x27;s Winter 2020 batch, raised a pre-seed round, and had paying customers.
211
212Then COVID hit. You&#x27;d think a remote work tool would thrive when the entire world went remote. Instead, it was silent. They couldn&#x27;t even give the product away for free. COVID had pressure-tested their product-market fit and exposed the truth - nobody needed what they were building.
213
214Sarah went back to basics. She ran discovery conversations with hundreds of operations managers and founders. One problem kept surfacing: companies without physical offices didn&#x27;t know what to do about their business address and physical mail. The incumbents in the space had been around since the 2000s with clunky software. Nobody was raving about them.
215
216Instead of making the same mistake again - building a full product before validating demand - Sarah took a completely different approach to SaaS product validation. She posted a simple landing page in the YC community. The response was immediate. Dozens of founders emailed saying they needed it tomorrow.
217
218The first version of Stable was embarrassingly manual. A mail partner in San Francisco, Google Drive for document storage, Zoom for onboarding, and a Stripe link for payment. Sarah was manually emailing customers when mail arrived. They ran it this way for the first 100 customers before writing any code.
219
220Today, Stable is the leading AI-powered virtual mailbox for businesses with over 10,000 customers, 8-figure ARR, and a team of 50-60 people. They operate in 20+ locations across the US with processing centers in the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas. Their customers range from solopreneurs to enterprises like DoorDash, Realty Income, and GitLab.
221
222In this conversation, Sarah shares how the SEO playbook that built the business stopped working when AI overviews took over Google search results, why physical operations are her moat against AI disruption, and the moment she had to shift from product building to company building.</p></div></article></a></div><div><a class="group block h-full" href="/podcast/saas-distribution-zhong-xu-deliverect/"><article class="rounded-2xl border border-border bg-white overflow-hidden hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow h-full flex flex-col"><div class="relative bg-cream-dark overflow-hidden"><img alt="Why SaaS Distribution Matters More Than Your Product - Zhong Xu" loading="lazy" width="600" height="600" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="w-full h-auto group-hover:scale-105 transition-transform duration-300" style="color:transparent" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw" srcSet="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 256w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=384&amp;q=75 384w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 640w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=750&amp;q=75 750w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=828&amp;q=75 828w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=1080&amp;q=75 1080w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=1200&amp;q=75 1200w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75 1920w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=2048&amp;q=75 2048w, /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75 3840w" src="/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Feqtaflaupozjriguzsxb.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fcontent-images%2F23099723-8e85-49e3-9dea-821e0adea11f%2Fepisodes%2Fimg-1788621566832.png&amp;w=3840&amp;q=75"/></div><div class="p-6 flex flex-col flex-1"><p class="text-xs font-medium text-accent mb-2">Zhong Xu<!-- -->, Deliverect</p><h3 class="text-base font-semibold text-navy group-hover:text-accent transition-colors mb-2 line-clamp-2">Why SaaS Distribution Matters More Than Your Product</h3><p class="text-sm text-muted line-clamp-2 flex-1">Zhong Xu is the co-founder and CEO of Deliverect, an operating system for restaurants that connects digital sales channels like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub into one place.
223
224Zhong&#x27;s father immigrated from China to Belgium with nothing. He washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant, saved enough to open his own, and taught himself C++ from a book so he could build his own point-of-sale system.
225
226He pushed Zhong into the business early. By 14, Zhong was helping run the restaurant. By 16, he was building websites for Chinese restaurants across Belgium. By 18, he&#x27;d built over 1,000 of them.
227
228He went on to study software engineering and built one of the first iPad POS systems. He coded the whole thing himself over nine months while working full-time with a three-and-a-half-hour daily commute. In 2014, that c
228ompany merged with Lightspeed. Five years later, Lightspeed IPO&#x27;d.
229
230But Zhong wasn&#x27;t done building. He kept hearing the same thing from restaurant owners. Delivery platforms were taking over. Orders were pouring in from five or six different apps, and nobody had a way to manage it all. So in 2017, he left and started Deliverect.
231
232This time, he didn&#x27;t spend nine months coding before talking to customers. He went out and signed up 50 to 100 restaurants first. Behind the scenes, his team was processing orders manually. It looked automated. It wasn&#x27;t. But it proved the demand was real before they wrote a single line of code.
233
234Then he figured out the SaaS distribution channel that would change everything. Instead of signing restaurants one by one, he partnered with POS companies. Ten partners each bringing in 100 restaurants a month beat doing it alone. When COVID hit and restaurants scrambled to go digital, Deliverect was exactly what they needed. They opened 10 new offices in a single quarter to get ahead of local incumbents.
235
236Today, Deliverect serves over 80,000 restaurants across 50 countries with 450 employees. They&#x27;ve processed over $25 billion in orders and are approaching $100 million in ARR. And now Zhong is racing to build an AI intelligence layer for restaurants before the whole industry gets commoditized. Because as he puts it, infrastructure alone is forgettable - the value is in the SaaS distribution channel that controls the intelligence.</p></div></article></a></div></div></div>
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