In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I speak with Matt Lerner, the founder and CEO of Startup Core Strengths. He shares his perspective on establishing and optimizing pricing using the Jobs to Be Done framework.

In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I’m speaking with Jess Bartos, an investor with Salesforce Ventures. We discuss the SaaS metrics that investors like Jess use to evaluate the potential of a company, no matter the market conditions. If you’re looking to secure VC funding, you should understand your growth trajectory, net dollar retention, gross margin, rule of 40, and burn multiples.

How are experienced founders raising funds? What are the best options for financing based on the stage of the company? How did fundraising change in the last few years? In this episode of the SaaS Open Mic, I speak with Miguel Fernández, the CEO and co-founder of Capchase. We speak about current drivers and tendencies in funding and fundraising, revenue-based financing, and the metrics that distinguish the fastest-growing companies.

Blog posts, case studies, ads, and conferences are fantastic ways of attracting leads and generating revenue. But, how do you know which of your top-of-the-funnel activities led to that revenue? With a complex sales cycle, that´s not an easy task. If this challenge sounds familiar to you, listen to this episode of SaaS Open Mic. My guest today is Lars Grønnegaard, the co-founder and CEO of Dreamdata.

Deel, the payroll and compliance company, recently raised $425 million in series D at a valuation of $5.5 billion. Deel’s exponential growth comes as no surprise considering how remote work has boomed during the pandemic. My guest on this episode of SaaS Open Mic is Liina Laas, the Head of Expansion at Deel. She focuses on expansion in the Central and Eastern European regions. In our conversation, Liina and I looked at trends in hiring. We also talked about best practices for hiring global talent.

Mind the Product is the world’s largest community of product managers. It recently announced its acquisition by Pendo. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I speak with James Mayes, the co-founder and CEO at Mind the Product. We talk about why Mind the Product decided to exit, why they sold to Pendo, and what’s next for the community. James also shares advice on what communities and SaaS companies should consider before merging.

When faced with rapid growth, how does a company adjust, adapt, and evolve? In this SaaS Open Mic podcast, we speak with Gilles Bertaux, CEO and Co-founder of Livestorm. He shares his lessons from the last two years of running and rapidly scaling the company. Gilles explains how the team was able to grow sustainably and successfully while experiencing unprecedented growth. To support the rapid customer and revenue growth, they needed to build out the team. However, in order to hire and onboard rapidly, they needed to strengthen their frameworks and create a model that would support that hiring velocity.

As Unito began to expand and grow, their pricing needed to adapt. However, first, the Unito team had to consider what a sustainable pricing migration could look like without disrupting existing customers and blocking the company’s continued success. So, they made pricing experiments part of their DNA. They created a dedicated pricing squad, performed continuous surveys, interviews, and pricing tests. In this SaaS Open Mic episode, I speak with Marc Boscher, CEO and co-founder of Unito. Listen to the podcast to learn more about how a continuous testing approach can get you through a pricing migration without taking huge risks.

Getting pricing right is one of the most challenging aspects of running a SaaS business. At ChartMogul, we’ve experienced it first hand. In 2018, ChartMogul went through a pricing migration that heavily impacted our business. To find out what drove us to start a pricing migration and what we’ve learned in the process, listen in to this latest Open SaaS Mic. On this final episode of this season, I speak with ​​Tyler Daley, Director of Strategic Accounts and Retention at ChartMogul who has been the point person during this process.

Ross Rich knows something about sales processes as the CEO and co-founder of Accord. Accord is a customer-facing collaboration workspace for B2B sales, onboarding, and success.

This week, I speak with Jeb Banner is the CEO of Boardable. Boardable is a board management and meeting software for mission-driven organizations. We talk about how to turn a service business into a SaaS business.

Most marketing agencies base their fees on a percentage of what their clients intend to spend on advertising. John Thornton, the founder and CEO of Black Propeller, realized that the traditional agency model could be simplified for his team and his customers. That’s when he started looking at the typical agency retainer from a different perspective, and started running his agency like a SaaS business.

In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Alexa Grabell, the founder/CEO of Pocus, about the future of product-led sales. Pocus identifies top opportunities and surfaces insights that help sales reps convert self-serve users to paid customers.

This week I talk to Thomas Smale of the M&A consulting firm FE International about what it takes to scale companies at any stage of growth and get them acquired.

In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Esben Friis-Jensen, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Userflow, a fast and user-friendly onboarding flow builder for SaaS and online businesses.

Whether your team is fully remote or working in a hybrid model, it can be a struggle to manage workplace culture and create a sense of community – especially in times like these. Tatiana Correa, the founder of Revolv Culture Solutions has many years of experience building culture and communities for companies that have their workforces scattered all over the globe.

Assembly is a software platform for ecommerce businesses. Their suite of products addresses the everyday challenges facing ecommerce entrepreneurs — from optimizing Amazon listings to tracking sales performance across channels. In this week's episode, I talk to Co-Founder and President of Assembly, Adam Crawshaw. Adam tells his own unique story of SaaS entrepreneurship, which, interestingly, started with a podcast much like this. Adam and team are now on a mission to make Assembly an enterprise-ready solution. How, you ask? Listen in or check out the show notes for more detail.

The concept of partnerships exists at most early stage startups, but often in an unstructured and unproductive format. Jenna Wyer, VP of Partnerships and Head of Payments at Recurly, joins me on this week’s episode of SaaS Open Mic. We discuss what it takes to build a successful partnership program.

This week on the SaaS Open Mic Podcast, I spoke with someone from my Vancouver sales network. Adam Jones, VP of Sales at Thinkific, tells a story of how he built and led a revenue model from start to IPO. What’s especially interesting for our listeners is that Thinkific’s sales organization and strategy was layered on 6 years into building the business. And just 5 years later, that same sales organization helped them take the company public. Listen in to hear how Adam’s sales leadership compliments a product-led business model.

In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Matt Spiegel, a criminal defense lawyer turned 2x legaltech SaaS entrepreneur. Our interview follows the story of how Matt's personal experience fielding client calls in between court trials led him to build a business designed to help lawyers like him. We discuss the differences in building a startup when the business idea hits you from personal experience versus proactive market research. Matt also shares his thoughts on how too much focus on your exit strategy can lead to cutting corners.