The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

He closed most of the deals himself. It took him ten years to stop. Ross Andrew Paquette bootstrapped Maropost to around $50 million in ARR, and for most of that run he was the discovery call, the demo and the follow-up. It worked well enough to take the business from $300,000 to $27 million in 28 months with six or seven people. Then the thing that built the company became the thing capping it.

Ross breaks down how he won account...

He never bought a keyword, never ran content marketing, and the big outbound sales force he tried did not work. Rodney Robinson still grew TabaPay to $100 million in revenue, almost entirely through inbound, on a single $2.5 million seed round that stayed the company's only outside money for nine years.

Rodney explains how he found a problem Mastercard could not solve, why he chased small fintechs instead of big logos, how his inbo...

He needed a big retailer's data to build the product. No big retailer gives data to a company with no product. Felix Hoffmann solved it sideways: 7Learnings sold a paid consulting project, kept the right to use the data, and built its predictive pricing product on top of it. Ten customers later it was at $1M ARR, and he had closed every one himself.

Felix explains why a demand forecasting product cannot start with a small customer, ...

Nine months in. Close to zero customers. He was ready to hand the money back to investors. Rick Knudtson had already sold one company, so Workshop started with the idea he found interesting: an intranet. Customers kept telling him to fix email instead. The rebuild took 30 days and brought in 10 customers.

Rick explains why big enterprises cannot run internal comms on a cheap marketing tool, how a year of newsletters and ungated res...

Ten thousand ads, all built by hand. Julius Körfgen left that grind to build Uplane, software that automates it, then sold to his first customers before writing a line of code. Uplane reached a million dollars in ARR in about six months.

Julius makes the case for selling before building: the cold outreach that got strangers on calls, the one-week sprint from discovery call to working demo, and why he refuses to run a free pilot. W...

Two founders. Two engineers. No product. Christian Lund closed one of the Big Four accounting firms as Templafy's first customer before the software existed, by selling a point of view instead of a demo. When that customer asked to start with ten people, he didn't say no. He said "yes, if."

Christian breaks down his approach to selling to enterprise without a product, why he answered every ten-person pilot request with "yes, if," ...

He spent two years building his own AI model. Over one launch weekend, a side experiment out-earned it. Eugene Cheah killed the original product and rebuilt Featherless AI around what customers actually paid for. He explains why he concluded people wanted these models more than they wanted his, and how he made the call to walk away from two years of work.

Eugene breaks down how GPU hot-swapping changed the unit economics of AI inf...

Five years at $50K ARR. Ten failed projects. Lending the business money out of his own bank account. George Georgiadis came close to shutting Happier Leads down. Instead he broke through the revenue plateau and reached $1.5M ARR with zero employees.

George explains what moved the number: an end-to-end platform instead of a narrow point tool, cold email as his cheapest channel because he owns the mailboxes and the data, and running ...

Ron Hash bootstrapped Skimmer, software for pool service companies, to over $1 million in ARR and 1,500 customers with zero paid marketing, then sold it. His SaaS pricing was the engine: 50 cents per serviced pool with a $29 minimum, when every competitor charged per seat.

Ron shares how he validated the idea with one cold call, why his SaaS pricing aligned revenue with each customer's growth, how he cut churn from 6% to 2% by fixi...

Six years of grinding, and SaaS churn kept capping his growth: win a customer, lose a customer, repeat. Then one pricing call flipped everything. Farzad Rashidi pivoted Respona to a done-for-you service-as-software model and 4x'd in twelve months the revenue it took six years to build.

Farzad shares why adding features never fixed his SaaS churn, the agency CEO haggle that sparked the pivot, how he demoted his own SaaS on the homep...

Danny Jenkins was $150,000 in credit card debt with zero paying customers 18 months into building his bootstrapped startup. An accelerator told him to quit. He ignored the advice and built ThreatLocker into a cybersecurity company approaching $200M in revenue.

In this episode, Danny Jenkins shares how he grew a bootstrapped startup from $150K in debt to nearly $200M in revenue. You'll hear how he turned a tiny market into a $10 bil...

He wrote the startup playbook. Then he watched founders who used it lose control of what they built. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, felt like he was feeding companies into a meat grinder. Founders will hear his startup governance framework, why most lose founder control after product-market fit, and the two-page filing that protects them.

Eric breaks down what happens when one customer becomes half your revenue, how to tell...

He talked openly about his startup idea. A competitor took it and beat him to market. Mark Abbott shared his SaaS vision inside a tight-knit coaching community. A member passed it to a client who launched first. Founders will hear how Mark recovered with community-led SaaS growth and built Ninety to $44M ARR and 18,500 customers.

Mark explains why he spent 4 years on B2B community building before writing code, how community-led Saa...

Two years on Quora and Reddit. Zero customers. Yega Kumarappan and his two co-founders had no sales experience. They bet that founder-led sales could beat the B2B sales playbook. Founders will hear how Paperflite grew from a 400K seed to 500 B2B customers and seven figures in ARR while selling SaaS without sales experience.

Yega shares the founder-led sales process that took conversion from 2-3% to 17-20%, why he spent 8 to 10 hou...

Two failed startups. 250K euros in debt. Stuck in Paris with a sick baby and no plan. Tibo Louis-Lucas walked away from a stable CTO job and shipped 11 products in 4 months on unemployment benefits. Today TMAKER is a bootstrapped SaaS startup portfolio doing $1M a month across 5 products with a team of 10.

Tibo breaks down the exact signal that told him Tweet Hunter was the one after 10 failures, the JK Molina equity deal that too...

Hadn't coded in four years. No team. No idea. Marius Meiners launched his AI startup, Peec AI, with a V0 prototype built in 1.5 days and 8 letters of intent. 14 months later: $8.6M ARR, 55 employees, and a competitor with 5x his funding chasing enterprise.

Marius shows how to validate an AI startup before coding, win the mid-market while competitors chase enterprise, and price your AI startup at €85 a month against incumbents char...

He built a free tool as a lead magnet. Then customers started calling his cell phone, begging to pay for it. Ev Kontsevoy turned an open source SaaS side project into Teleport, now an 8-figure ARR business with 500+ customers. Founders will hear how a free GitHub project became an open source SaaS business worth eight figures - and why selling to the wrong buyer persona nearly capped growth.

Ev reveals how he spotted the signal th...

Most SaaS onboarding is terrible - rigid, pushy, and forgettable. Karel Papik spent 15 years designing video games before he looked at B2B software and thought: this is hopeless. He co-founded Product Fruits, a digital adoption platform that now serves over 1,300 paying customers. Founders will hear how gaming psychology transformed their SaaS onboarding and helped them break through the $2M ARR ceiling.

Karel shares how Product F...

Three years. Zero traction. Then product-market fit hit - twice. Girish Redekar taught himself to code at 28 and spent years on failed ideas before B2B product-market fit clicked with RecruiterBox. Customers endured a broken PayPal payment hack just to keep using the product. He bootstrapped to 2,500+ customers, sold it, then found product-market fit again with Sprinto by paying for 10 audits before writing code.

Girish shares how ...