SaaS Fuel

Ben Perreau, founder and CEO of Parafoil, joins Jeff Mains to explore what he calls "leadership intelligence" — a new category using AI and cognitive science to help managers become better leaders in practice, not just in theory. Drawing on a career that spans BBC and Sky News journalism, nearly a decade advising Fortune 50 executives at SY Partners, and firsthand research with 50 early-career managers, Ben unpacks why leadership c...

Jeff Mains sits down with Jim Effner, founder of P2P Group and a 36-year veteran of Northwestern Mutual, where he grew a firm from 63 to 127 financial advisors and nearly 400 total staff before selling and launching his own boutique sales training company. Jim breaks down what truly separates elite sales performers from everyone else — and it's not the strategy. It's mindset, belief system, and the willingness to do uncomfortable w...

Brian Will — Wall Street Journal bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and founder/CEO of Living Forever AI — joins host Jeff Mains for a wide-ranging conversation on entrepreneurship, scaling, sales, and what it truly means to leave a legacy. Brian has built and helped build companies worth over half a billion dollars across 10 ventures in five industries. Now, he's setting his sights on disrupting the $3 billion genealogy mark...

What if AI isn't just a tool to plug into your business — but a reason to redesign the entire thing? In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Steven Wunker, managing director of New Markets Advisors and bestselling author of AI and the Octopus Organization: Building the Super Intelligent Firm. Steven has been working in AI since 2012 and has advised dozens of Fortune 500 companies on how to unlock real growth through transformati...

Nikki Barua — immigrant, serial entrepreneur, and CEO of Flip Work — joins Jeff Mains for a conversation on what it truly takes to build something outsized in the AI age. Drawing on two decades of experience in M&A, corporate strategy, and scaling tech businesses, Nikki shares why reinvention isn't a one-time event but a survival skill.

The conversation digs into the mindset required to make bold decisions under uncertainty, th...

Mike Collins is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who has spent his career at the intersection of technology, innovation, and investing. Starting at a VC firm right out of college in 1986, he went on to found companies like Kid Galaxy and Big Idea Group before launching Alumni Ventures in 2013 — now one of the most active VC firms in the world with nearly $1.6 billion raised from individual investors exclusively.

In th...

Most SaaS founders obsess over acquisition — but what happens after the sale is where loyalty is either built or silently lost. In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Ken Rapp, CEO and co-founder of Blue Stream, to explore the largely overlooked post-purchase experience and why it may be the biggest growth lever hiding in plain sight.

Ken shares the story behind Blue Stream — born from a cracked guitar that nobody warned him to ...

In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Stanley Leong — former IBM/Agilent engineer turned bestselling author and private wealth advisor — to explore what it truly means to engineer your finances. Stanley brings his analytical, systems-driven engineering background to personal wealth building, and the result is a refreshingly practical framework for tech founders and high-income professionals who are great at running businesses ...

What if the most valuable data in your company isn't in a dashboard — it's buried in stories no one is asking for?

In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with James Warren, founder and CEO of Share More Stories and creator of the SEEK platform — a human experience insights tool that helps organizations uncover the emotional drivers behind employee and customer behavior through narrative-driven research.

James shares his journey from a...

In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Paige Wiese — founder and CEO of Tree Ring Digital, a Denver-based digital agency with 16 years in the business. Paige brings a unique perspective to digital marketing rooted in her background in architecture, and uses that framework to help companies build websites and marketing systems with intentional structure, clear user flow, and long-term durability.

The conversation covers the growi...

AJ, founder and CEO of Daylight — an award-winning, Mac-exclusive CRM — joins Jeff Mains to share one of the most quietly remarkable stories in SaaS: a decades-long journey from refugee to bootstrapped CEO.

AJ traces his path from arriving in Canada with nothing, to bartering his labor for computer access, to navigating the dot-com crash, multiple pivots, and a delicate transition from on-premise software to the cloud — all without ...

Javier Lozano Jr. didn't come up through brand or PR. He came through sales — and that lens has shaped everything about how he approaches growth marketing. Starting his first business in the teeth of the 2008 recession with a personal guarantee on a five-year lease, Javier learned early that you have to be strategic when the market won't forgive waste. That crucible turned him into one of the sharper go-to-market operators in B2B t...

Andy Ellwood is a repeat founder whose career took him from early-stage mobile startups acquired by Facebook and Google, through eight years building Basket.com, to shutting it down during the pandemic — and ultimately back into the arena with Stretch, an AI-powered grocery platform built to give families price transparency, shopping intelligence, and an advocate at checkout.

In this conversation, Andy shares the through-lines conne...

Anthony Chiaravallo, founder and CEO of Vallo Media — a performance marketing agency that has placed over $100 million in paid media — joins Jeff Mains on SaaS Fuel for a candid, no-BS conversation about what actually works (and what doesn't) in B2B paid advertising.

The conversation goes deep on performance media for SaaS: why cold lead gen ads are the fastest way to burn budget, how to build warm audiences before asking for a demo...

What happens when a bored teenager starts a Discord trading group and accidentally discovers the power of video? For Elijah Khasabo, co-founder of Vidovo, it became the foundation for a bootstrapped UGC and influencer platform now serving over 200 brands and 20,000 creators.

In this episode, Elijah shares the unfiltered origin story of Vidovo — from running negative for the first six months to crossing 20,000 organic creators withou...

In this episode, filmmaker-turned-brand strategist Jake Isham breaks down what authentic storytelling really looks like in business. Jake has worked with over 150 entrepreneurs and brands, including Grant Cardone, Callaway, and 511 Tactical, creating content that's generated over 1 billion views.

He shares practical frameworks for translating product features into compelling narratives, why consistency beats perfection every time, a...

In this episode of SaaS Fuel, host Jeff Mains sits down with Allen Cooper, co-founder and CEO of Ready List, to unpack what it really takes to build and scale SaaS companies in healthcare—one of the slowest, most regulated industries on the planet.

The conversation dives deep into navigating 12-18 month enterprise sales cycles, recovering from product failures, hiring salespeople with domain credibility, and building remote culture ...

In this episode of SaaS Fuel, host Jeff Mains sits down with Mike "Damp" Damphousse, co-founder of Category Design Advisors and co-author of "The Category Creation Formula." With three decades of experience as a founder, CEO, CMO, investor, and advisor, Mike reveals why most companies lose before they even start—not because their product is weak, but because they're competing in categories defined by someone else.

Key Takeaways<...

Drew Sechrist, CEO and co-founder of Connect the Dots, takes us on a journey from being Salesforce's 36th employee to building his own venture addressing one of B2B sales' most persistent challenges: unlocking the hidden power of professional networks. In this conversation, Drew shares inside stories from Salesforce's scrappy early days in 1999, when "SaaS" didn't even exist as a term and the company spent VC money "like drunken sa...