SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Doug Wilber is the CEO of Gremlin Social where he leads the creation, development and execution of the Company's long-term vision and strategy. A financial services veteran, Doug previously served as President, North America for Assembly Payments where he oversaw all sales, marketing, and operational efforts for the region. Prior to that, Doug was Chief Revenue Officer for PYMNTS.com where he oversaw all business development, financial forecasting, operations, and marketing functions. Doug has additionally held numerous product and partnership development roles at Discover Financial Services and was a consultant at Market Platform Dynamics, a leading macro-economic advisory for financial services firms. Outside of Gremlin Social, Doug mentors numerous early-stage companies via his role at the SixThirty FinTech accelerator in St Louis. He holds a BS in Marketing and International Business and an MBA with a focus on product development and brand strategy from Penn State University.

Doug Breaker serves as CEO of Scripted.com, a marketplace of freelance copywriters and provider of strategic content marketing services. Prior to running Scripted, Doug led Earth Class Mail and HomeFinder.com as CEO. Doug began his career as a software developer before jumping into product management and holding successively more senior product roles at Orbitz.com and HomeFinder.

Thomas is the founder of Tapfiliate, a company that builds world-class tools for tracking, managing and growing affiliate programs and referral campaigns. In previous lives he has created an ad-supported free printing service for students and a social network for startups. Thomas loves ad-tech, vinyl records and (needless to say) cats.

A serial entrepreneur with a 20+ year track record, Yuryi was previously CEO and founder of YMF, a leading financial software company with 300 employees that was later sold to a big tech company. A well respected authority in the Brazilian technology sector, Yuryi is often called upon to advise firms and individuals on IT best practice and solutions. Before founding YMF, Yuryi spent 8 years in the Investment Bank GARANTIA as a Trader and Portfolio Manager.

Christian Schmidt has been CEO of CleverReach® since summer 2015. Together with Jens Klibingat and Konrad Frerichs, he manages the international email marketing company with more than 200,000 customers in 152 countries. Schmidt graduated in New Media Design and Communication at the Mediadesign Hochschule Düsseldorf. He began his professional career at the ZEFA picture agency, which was later taken over by Corbis. Further professional stations include Image Source in London and the Masterfile European Headquarters in Düsseldorf. Schmidt most recently worked as Managing Director at Friesland Versand GmbH.

Serial entrepreneur and startup evangelist with expertise in Internet and social media. Since 2012, Co-Founder and CEO of SentiOne: AI-powered Social Listening and Engagement Platform. Kamil has successfully led SentiOne from a local startup to company providing services to over 750 brands across 30 international markets. SentiOne's customer list include such brands as: Procter&Gamble, Beiersdorf, Samsung, Unilever, Saatchi & Saatchi, Allianz and many more. Privately Kamil is a big fan of snowboarding, Italian coffee and travelling.

Tal is CEO & Co-Founder of Medivizor (http://medivizor.com) - leading a revolution in how health information should be presented - by making it personal. What's Medivizor? When people cope with serious or chronic illness, someone often becomes what I call a "chronic web researcher" - looking for everything and anything that can help. However, despite endless amount of health information, finding the cutting-edge information that is current, trustworthy, and relevant to the specific situation is nearly impossible. Medivizor is trying to make the world better by personalizing health information and solving for this important and unmet need. Before Medivizor Tal helped bring to life DarioHealth's all-in-one blood glucose system - stylish and compact hardware/software combination. More broadly: Tal has over 25 years of technologies and software development experience, and has held management positions in R&D and Product Management at Amdocs, XACCT, DarioHealth and other companies. As Amdocs' Chief Scientist, Tal led all innovation activities across Amdocs (a public $3B company with over 20,000 employees), including a variety of innovation and incubation programs. Tal has over 30 patents to his credit, and is recognized for his passion for, and expertise in innovation by frequently being asked to speak at major industry events such as TeleManagement World, Mobile World Congress, CTIA and Billing & OSS World. He has been actively in industry consortiums including IETF, ATIS and TM Forum, serving on various committees and boards.

Karl has helped build a few start-up software SaaS Apps and info products, eCom related SaaS, a Membership software and more. Currently, Karl is building two software and training programs. SegMateApp.com a chatbot and messenger marketing platform and Impulsely.com an eCom Funnel building application.

Wart Fransen is the CEO of an Amsterdam based company called LeadBoxer and oversees general operations & business. He also is the product owner and planning the roadmap for LeadBoxers future. Prior to LeadBoxer, Wart was co-founder and CTO for Opentracker, a web analytics company specialised in tracking individuals and behaviour.

Michael von Roeder works both as entrepreneur and corporate executive. Currently he serves as CEO of Sensorberg, a SaaS IoT company. As the founder and investor of various start-ups in the areas of Mobile, Energy and FinTech, he is firmly anchored in Berlin and the international founding scene. Prior to his involvement with Sensorberg, he gained his industrial and management experience at Vattenfall and Vodafone. At Vodafone he led the global user experience function in London, Tokyo and Düsseldorf. Before he worked at Accenture. He holds degrees in Business Administration

Brennan Dunn is the founder of Double Your Freelancing and helps teach over 50,000 freelancers and agencies how to earn more money and work with better clients. He's also the co-founder of RightMessage, a software company that helps bring on-site personalization to the masses.

Lu Zhang is the Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fund. In 2017, Lu was awarded the Forbes 30 Under 30 as a Featured Honoree in the VC category. In the same year, she was selected as Town & Country 50 New Modern Swans. Recently, Lu was awarded as the Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, Davos. Prior to starting Fusion Fund, Lu was the Founder and CEO of a medical device company for the early diagnosis of Type II diabetes (acq 2012). She is an advisor and mentor to several innovative programs and incubators in Silicon Valley. She also serves as a youth member of a council of the Future Award. Lu received her M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Andy Fletcher is a serial entrepreneur now working on his 3rd company. He has a background in development and a Masters degree in Computer Science but fell in love with digital marketing about a decade ago. This makes martech SaaS pretty much the perfect place for him to be.

I'm graduated in information technology management and I've been working with product development in the last 12 years. In the last four years I was focused to improve management and leadership skills where I found the gap of tools to help managers and HR being more efficient and do a better job.

Jeremy Greenberg is the founder and CEO of SellerCloud. His vision has guided SellerCloud to the forefront of the competitive ecommerce management playing field.

Jonah Goodhart is Senior Vice President, Oracle Data Cloud. Jonah was the Co-Founder and CEO of Moat, which was acquired by Oracle in April 2017. Jonah was the Founding Investor and Board Member of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo!), Founding Partner of WGI Group, and Co-Founder of Billions.org. Ernst & Young named him Entrepreneur Of The Year 2017 New York in the category of Digital Media. Jonah was also a member of Mayor Bloomberg's Council on Technology and Innovation.

Ben Congleton is CEO and Cofounder of Olark Live Chat. Olark is Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud, and helps over 12,000 businesses grow by communicating with the right customer at the right time. Ben is passionate about building strong work cultures where teams bring their whole-selves to work.

Garin Hess is a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple software companies, industry conferences, and a non-profit organization. He is currently the founder and CEO of Consensus, a B2B demo automation platform. He enjoys reading history, mountain biking, choir conducting, and spending time with his wife and three children.

Born in a family of hustlers, Xenia never had the chance to escape the fate of being an entrepreneur. So at only 20 y.o. she started her first company, a digital marketing agency. She was shocked that in a world transformed by social media technology, brands and agencies were still working like in the MadMen era - buried in meetings, excels, powerpoints and endless email threads. In 2016 she and her co-founders started Planable to help people behind brands work together in a better way. Today, more than 3,000 teams globally use Planable for marketing collaboration.Xenia was born in Moldova, an Eastern European country and former Soviet republic, where tech entrepreneurship is rather new. So she overcame her country’s limitation and communist history with hard work becoming the first Moldovan to be invited to attend Tim Draper’s prestigious academy in Silicon Valley. Planable is the first and only Moldovan team to be accelerated and receive an investment from Techstars. Now, the product is being used by brands such as KFC, Virgin Mobile, Wendy’s and the company has offices both in London and in Eastern Europe.

Maciej is a technically skilled leader, technology enthusiast and entrepreneur. CEO at Piwik PRO - GDPR compliant analytics and marketing platform for enterprises and Clearcode - world's leading software house specializing in building custom advertising and marketing technology (AdTech/MarTech).

CEO and co-founder of Segmint, an innovative financial technology company that empowers financial institutions and financial technology providers to easily understand and leverage data, interact with customers and measure results. Rob has been awarded 7 U.S. and international patents for Segmint. Rob is also the founder of WiredViews, a digital marketing agency.

Joe is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Opt-Intelligence. Since co-founding Opt-Intelligence in 2003 Joe has served as a thought leader and expert in the opt-in advertising space. Prior to Opt-Intelligence Joe served as Vice President of Online Services at Cross Media Marketing. He got his start in 1998 as co-founder and President of CouponSoup, a company dedicated to putting coupons for local businesses online. Joe received a BA in Psychology from Boston College.

Latif Nanji is the co-founder and CEO of Roadmunk, a product roadmapping platform that enables clients such as The Coca-Cola Company, Citibank, MasterCard and Adobe to visualize and collaborate on strategic plans. Latif's entrepreneurial chops extend beyond Roadmunk. He co-founded Pragmatic CEO, a Toronto meetup for tech entrepreneurs, and Pokerspace.com, an online social network for poker players. Latif's background spans all things startup: from leadership and sales to product management and design. In his off-time, Latif is an avid reader, rock climber and skier.

CEO of Linkfluence, a SaaS platform that turns social data into valuable insights for global brands, using AI and the human expertise from 100+ data scientists and analysts. Co-founder & CEO of Scoop.it, a web content monitoring SaaS platform acquired by Linkfluence. Entrepreneur since 2000: Musiwave (first mobile music platform, acquired by Microsoft), Goojet (pre-iPhone mobile widget platform). Startup advisor and investor: Tedemis (email retargeting, acquired by Criteo), The Refiners, Impact (cross-border accelerators in San Francisco).

I am the CEO & co-founder of PixelMe at night and Product Manager Growth at Buffer during the day! We started PixelMe as a side project with Tom and Jeremy in Sept 2017. We're at $6K MRR and more than $120k in revenue thanks to an incredible Appsumo promotion.

With more than 20 years of technology leadership experience, Steven is the CEO of Logi Analytics. Prior to this role, Steven served as both COO and CPO at Logi, where he led the sales, product, engineering, marketing, and customer success teams. Prior to Logi, he was a founding partner of OnDemandIQ, a Hosted Business Intelligence solution, and a practice manager at leading web technology company Proxicom.

Don Weobong is founder and president of Telania, a technology software-as-a-service company based in Louisville, Kentucky. Telania specializes in helping organizations solve tough challenges through e-learning technology, leaves of absence management solutions, and sales channel management. Premier products include eLeaP, CaptureLeave, PRMDeals, and Azimio.

Jody has been CEO of Introhive since it was founded 7 years ago. Jody is a frequent blogger and speaker on topics of sales acceleration, especially among enterprises.

Chris Rothstein is the CEO and co-founder of Groove.co, a sales engagement platform. Prior to Groove.co, Chris built, scaled and managed enterprise sales teams at Google.

Gaurav is founder and CEO of Verloop.io, a conversational sales and marketing automation platform. Gaurav started coding when he was 11 and has built 2 businesses before. One of them was acquired while the other was unsuccessful.

Co-founder and CEO of MeetApp. Started out as an Accenture consultant, went on to be a CIO in the Nordics at the media/tech company Cision. Quit 2012 to start MeetApp and other business full time. Since 2015 100% focus on MeetApp

One of North America's preeminent authorities on artificial intelligence, Gary has over 25 years' experience working with leading global corporations to deliver revenue and profit growth. He founded Daisy Intelligence in 2003 bringing autonomous machine intelligence to clients in retail, insurance and healthcare. Daisy Intelligence, headquartered in the Greater Toronto Area operates an applied artificial intelligence (A.I.) software-as-a-service (SaaS) business delivering operational corporate decisions that are too complex for humans to make, resulting in efficiencies and profitability gains. Currently, Daisy is revolutionizing optimization of merchandise planning for high volume retailers and fraud detection/risk management for insurance and banking. Using proprietary mathematical solutions and Daisy's reinforcement learning A.I.-based simulation platform, Daisy analyzes trillions of the tradeoffs inherent in any complex business question and provides timely, actionable decision recommendations to help corporate clients grow total sales, improve margins and reduce fraud. Gary is the former head of IBM Canada's data mining and data warehousing practices. He was also at the helm of Loyalty Consulting Group, providing analytical services for one of the world's most successful coalition loyalty programs, the AIR MILES® Reward Program. Gary holds both a B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Toronto.

Pablo lived in the United States for 10 years before returning to Mexico City to pursue a bachelor's in economics. Before founding Gus, Pablo participated in the management of a B2B sales team that was responsible for acquiring more than USD 2 million in ARR. In 2015 Pablo Co-founded Gus, an AI company that works with clients like Santander, Amercian Express, Cabify and 30 others to automate customer service and improve customer experience. Gus has been selected as the Diamond prize winner of MassChallenge and is part of the Endeavor National Panel for Mexico.

Seth lives in Southern Utah, where he has been hard-wired to the web design and development industry since 2001. In 2009, Seth launched his first WordPress plugin, then in 2011, he quit his full-time job to focus on building a business around the plugin, which now powers over 60,000 ticketing websites.

Ryan O'Donnell lives at the top of the funnel ever since he landed at Yahoo via acquisition in 2007. Ryan co-founded Replyify.com to automate cold emails and follow-ups because other solutions on the market were either glorified 'mail merge' apps or too cumbersome to work with.

A 25-year advertiser sales and online media veteran. Starting in B2B in 1992 in NYC. In 1998 launch Lawyers.com for Lexis Nexus/Martindale Hubble. Recruited by InfoUSA to be President of IDEXEC with sales offices in New York and London. Promoted by the parent company to become the SVP of Sale Op's for InfoUSA with 125 sales reps and close to $1 billion in gross revenue. Hired by Kinder Hook, a NYC based VC to build and sell CPC Associates a New Mover data compiler. With a dramatic growth in just 18 months the company which was purchased for $14 million was sold to Epsilon for $72 million. He co-founded BlueLink Marketing in April of 2010, later sold his interest in the company. He co-founded Pubvantage in 2015

I'm an entrepreneur by nature and an executive in practice. I founded ECRS in my early 20s, in 1989, with the simple vision that the microprocessor and software would transform retail, allowing local and regional retailers to not only compete, but win against their national competitors. I believe great companies are built one idea, one customer and one employee at a time. Like a great oak tree, it takes time to build a company that last, with deep cultural roots and consistent driving purpose and I've dedicated my career to building such a company.

Born and raised in New Jersey, a graduate of Amherst College - I am the Founder and former CEO of People Productions - a digital marketing agency located in Boulder , Colorado. In 1999, I spun off a related SAAS business called UpSync to help our clients distribute, track and control the digital content we were creating for them. I sold People Productions in 2017 and am now solely focused on running UpSync, a mobile sales enablement platform.

Susan Hunt Stevens is the Founder/CEO of WeSpire. She is a recognized expert in the use of social and game mechanics to drive positive behavior change and was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015. Previously she was GM/SVP at the New York Times Company, leading a large regional digital media division.

Dorin Rosenshine is the founder & CEO of Outleads, a Microsoft Accelerator company. Outleads enables brands to engage customers with online advertising and relevant content based on offsite and offline data. Dorin has over a decade of experience in optimizing the digital presence for firms in a variety of industries, from consumer electronics to home improvement. Her work ranged from business identity to web application development, online ad budget management, and landing page optimization. A self-taught developer, designer, and copywriter, she has served as head of marketing as well as IT. Dorin lives in New York City and loves everything about it, particularly Central Park.

I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Sleeknote. I live in Denmark with my wife and three kids. Besides running Sleeknote I'm also an international keynote speaker.

Casey Zeman is the founder of EasyWebinar. Casey has consulted such companies as Harper Collins, Estee Lauder and Dell on video/webinar strategies and has built his own multi-million dollar software business. His mission is to help a million experts spread their message, sell their program and leverage their time through automation and engagement using his tools.

Nazzareno Gorni is the CEO of MailUp Group (https://mailupgroup.com/en/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:45 – How MailUp has been built as a business messaging company 1:45 – Why they are doing more than €35M in ARR right now 2:05 – How they are growing 35% year over year 2:30 – Why their ideal customers are marketers and developers 3:40 – How MailUp has grown to serve 20k customers 4:20 – Why they have started to move upmarket 5:10 – How he launched the company in 2002 5:30 – Why they launched with just €15k in self-funding 5:48 – How they raised €3M when they IPO'd 6:40 – Why they went public to fund acquisitions 8:30 – How their team has grown to 170 employees in Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the U.S. 9:15 – How they optimize for payback within 6 to 7 months 9:50 – Why they created BEEfree.io out of an accident 10:40 – How 3k companies are using BEEfree for over $1M in ARR 12:00 – The Famous Five

Yoa Pridor is the CEO of Buzzilla (https://www.buzzilla.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:40 – How Buzzilla has been built as a social listening tool 1:20 – Why they offer both SaaS and professional services 1:40 – How 60% of their revenue comes from SaaS today 2:45 – Why people are paying $500 per seat, each month on average 3:15 – How they''ve grown to serve small enterprises 4:15 – Why the average customer is between three and ten seats 4:25 – How they launched the business in 2010 with $1.6M in total funding 4:55 – Why they've grown 40% in the last 12 months 5:30 – How Buzzilla landed almost 300 total companies 6:00 – Why they are doing around $400k in MRR right now 6:25 – How growth has come mostly from new customers thus far 8:45 – Why they've expanded to help governments monitor senitment 9:20 – How they are at 110% net revenue retention annually 10:15 – Why they are landing new customers through word of mouth and online marketing 10:45 – How their team has grown to 25 full-time employees in Israel 11:10 – Why they assume a lifetime value of around $65k over 42 months 12:00 – How their SaaS margins are around 80% with 40% margins on their professional services 12:25 – Why they aren't interested in raising additional capital at this point in time 13:10 – "Would you sell for $20M right now?" 13:35 – The Famous Five

Zee Aganovic is CEO of HiConversion (https://www.hiconversion.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:25 – How HiConversion helps improve the buying experience on eCommerce sites 1:30 – Why the average customer pays them $5k per month 2:30 – How they launched the current version of the company in 2014 3:15 – Why they self-funded before raising $10M from institutional investors 4:15 – How their last round of $3.5M came last year 5:15 – Why several hundred customers are using their platform right now 5:45 – How HiConversion has built numerous strategic partnerships 6:45 – Why 100 companies are paying to use their platform today 7:40 – How they've grown 10x in the last twelve months 9:05 – Why they've scaled to 27 full-time employees 11:10 – Why they are aiming for payback within one month 13:00 – How they've hit 10% gross revenue churn per year 13:45 – The Famous Five