SaaS Breakthrough

Meet Indus Khaitan, Chief of Growth at Chargebee. Indus straddles on both sides of the venture ecosystem as an angel investor and an entrepreneur. Before Chargebee Indus built a mobile security company that was acquired by Oracle. In this episode, you'll hear about Chargebee and how four friends started building a business without even a product. You'll find out how content marketing was the initial growth driver that pushed them into a competitive space and how they are doubling down on partnerships that bring value to the customer. You'll learn about the Chargebee incubator program, what Indus is doing with that program and the lessons he's learned along the way and also his long term approach to events. And finally, you'll hear about the biggest mistakes that Indus felt he made over the past year and how to fix them. An incredible episode, enjoy!

Meet Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO of Chameleon, a SaaS Platform for Targeted In-Product Guidance and Marketing. Pulkit previously worked in data modeling and analysis in London and helped unemployed youth start businesses in rural India. In this episode, you'll hear how Pulkit founded Chameleon and found early product market fit over cups of coffee. You'll learn about the onstage launch event that he used to bring in qualified leads and customers early and the unspoken content initiatives that have been incredible growth drivers for their business. You'll also hear about the hard lessons learned along the way for Chameleon and things that you'll absolutely want to think about on your own journey in marketing. Finally, you'll want to hear about the big opportunity Pulkit spotted in SaaS marketing. Enjoy!

Meet Ryan Kulp, the founder of Fomo, a social proof marketing platform. Ryan is a self-taught developer, musician, and blogger with a new book "Fitness for Hackers". In this episode, you'll find out how Ryan acquired a small app and the marketing initiatives that took them from a few hundred users to over 5,500. You'll learn why building a brand may be the main differentiator for SaaS apps of the future and how Fomo has been getting brand love. You'll also learn about the creative risks that are the powerhouse growth initiatives for Fomo and how to have different ideas. And finally, you'll hear about the hard lessons that Ryan has learned along the journey. This is truly an incredible episode, with lots of ideas you can easily implement. Enjoy!

Meet Dan Taylor, an entrepreneur who has co-founded 4 startups, including a SaaS product acquired by WizKids in 2013. He currently runs two companies he founded: AppsEvents - a Google Professional Development Partner that organizes Google Education summits and training events worldwide and EventsFrame - a ticketing SaaS for event organizers with "no ticket fees". In this episode, you'll get a unique perspective into the early days of building a software project, especially if you have another company or another business that's already running and then you're creating something based on a pain you found on one of those previous businesses. You'll hear about the pros and cons of building your SaaS based on your own pain and what it's like to still be in the early stages of your SaaS. You'll learn the lessons that they got doing an AppSumo deal early on and the exact dos and don'ts for anyone thinking about doing a deal. You'll find out about early stage virality and how to build it, the integration marketing strategies you need to know, how to plan for strategic partnerships and what it actually takes to get momentum in the early days of SaaS. It's a really incredible episode, enjoy!

Meet Casey Armstrong, the CMO at Shipbob. ShipBob offers simple, fast, and affordable fulfillment for e-commerce businesses. Casey drives high-growth at B2B SaaS companies by integrating the entire marketing toolset to focus on rapid execution and aggressive, customer-centric strategies and has consistently acquired millions in net-new annual recurring revenue, managed millions in digital advertising spend across multiple channels, and driven billions of organic pageviews through a cross-functional, data-driven approach. In this episode, you'll hear about the mental switch that Casey had to make to go from a big tech company like BigCommerce to ShipBob, the outbound strategies that launched ShipBob and got them off the ground and some of the interesting lessons Casey learned from that. You'll find out about the digital partnership strategies that have exploded growth for ShipBob, their approach to finding the perfect partners and how they nurture those relationships to see massive ROI and finally, you'll hear what Casey's looking forward to in the world of e-commerce for marketers and that's pretty interesting and incredible. I truly hope you enjoy today's episode!

Meet Kevin White who leads the growth marketing team at Segment. Prior to Segment, Kevin has helped a handful of high-growth SaaS companies scale through team building and demand gen efforts. Segment makes analytics and data collection easy. Use Segment instrument event tracking once, integrate with 250+ tools with the flip of a switch, and power those tools with consistent customer data. In this episode, you'll hear about why personas are sometimes incorrect and how to accurately use the JTBD framework to find the right segments. You'll learn how to find audiences that are ready for your product at the exact right moment and really understand levels of awareness and intent and how that translates to perfect leads and sales. And you'll also hear about the hard lessons learned in marketing from the growth team at Segment and the new level of personalization they believe is required to make a big impact on users. It was a great interview, enjoy!

Meet Lissa Daniels, VP of demand generation, marketing operations, and analytics at Looker. Looker is a unified Platform for Data that delivers actionable business insights to every employee at the point of decision. Prior to Looker, Lissa spent her entire marketing career manically driving leads to the sales team. Over the years, she has worked at companies of all sizes and stages of growth, including, BEA Systems, VMWare, and Medallia. In this episode, you'll hear about the initial steps you need to do when joining an early stage company as the first marketer and how to handle having multiple customer personas - how to manage each one of them and how to look at them from a marketing perspective. You'll also learn the one phrase every marketer must make their mantra, key testing methodologies, how to make budget-driven decisions like Lissa does and finally, what needs to shift for marketers in 2019. Enjoy!

Meet Dan Levy, the Editorial Director at Smooch, which helps enterprise businesses connect with customers through conversation. An experienced manager, strategist, and leader, Dan specializes in helping mid-stage startups and SaaS companies build and grow their content strategies and teams. In this episode, you'll hear how Smooch utilized Dan's skillset to come up with an insanely powerful content strategy and his process to switch from a free trial (the self serve model of SaaS) to a higher touch enterprise model as he moved from his last job at Unbounce to Smooch. You'll learn about the key steps to create a strategic content plan, how to find the primary questions or content needs to answer to attract the right prospects, how to find and create winning distribution channels to get that quality content out to your audience and the exciting things happening in the world of messaging in 2019 that are creating amazing marketing opportunities for businesses. Enjoy!

Meet Patrick Edmonds, the Chief Marketing Officer of Proposify, a web-based business proposal software company. Patrick has helped 3x Proposify’s customer base to over 7,000 customers and more than 5x the annual recurring revenue to over $5.5 Million in the last 2.5 years. In this episode, you'll hear how the two founders created Proposify out of their own frustration and why sometimes even with a growing company, you have to step back and rethink where you're going and if you need to change direction and with that your target persona. You'll find out about the hard parts of growing and changing your sales process kind of midstream while you were already growing, how to align messaging with both your current user audience and your up market audience and how to go from a no touch sales system to a sales team and the scaling process they went through in 2018. You'll also learn Patrick's B2B content strategies and SEO concepts to grow your SaaS. You'll want to take notes of the actionable ideas or hacks that you're missing right now that you can actually go through to get some measurable results. Enjoy!

Meet Hailey Friedman, the Head of Marketing at Improvado, a tool that helps marketers automatically collect all their data into one place. Hailey has worked with startups around the world and writes about many of the lessons she learned going from novice to sophisticated marketer on her blog Growth Marketing Pro. In this episode, you'll hear about how Improvado used their marketing agency to find a perfectly fitting product into a niche they already knew about. You'll discover how Hailey created a growth engine that actually doubled the company ARR in about eight months, the affiliate program lead magnet that siphons and quality affiliates fast and how she came up with this amazing new idea, what her side hustles have taught her about marketing experiments and what actually works. And most critical, we talk about the huge success Hailey is having with webinars and why webinars are the most powerful sales method for SaaS. Enjoy!

Welcome to this special episode #50 of the SaaS Breakthrough show with our host, David Abrams, covering the top 2019 SaaS Marketing Trends and Top Skills you NEED to know from our past guests who are the world's leading SaaS Marketers. What a milestone*****!!! Thank you for being with us on this journey! We will be doubling down our efforts around this podcast in 2019, so stay tuned :). In this episode, you'll also find out about the big revamp in 2018 in Demio and the awesome things we have coming up in 2019!

Meet Corey Haines, the new Head of Growth at Baremetrics, a tool for SaaS and subscription companies to get the metrics forecasting and dunning they need to grow their startup. In this episode, we change slightly from the usual format around specific experiments or marketing channels that are working today. Corey recently got the position of Head of Growth and we talk about what that hiring process looked like, the tactical side of it, the tangibles of what you need to do to win these positions, who you have to become and what do you need learn. So for those of you who are looking to grow their career or apply to new opportunities, or to build into that head of growth or head of marketing position, this episode is for you! You'll also hear about Corey's background at Cordial and how he went from a new department to a growing marketing team and set that all up. You'll learn the key frameworks that Corey learned and uses to build into any marketing department, which are key things that you should absolutely know if you're going to be doing marketing, building a marketing team, or any of the sort in your SaaS company. You'll learn a ton on this episode, enjoy!

Meet David Ly Khim, a senior growth marketing manager at HubSpot, a business that offers a full stack of products for marketing, sales and CRM to power the world's small to medium-sized businesses. In this episode, you'll hear what it was like to join an extremely fast moving company with 18,000+ customers already and be a major part of growth initiatives to take the company to over 150+ Million in ARR (as of Q3 2018). You'll find out about the strategic partner outreach strategy that David created to find, promote and attract great strategic partners for them. You'll learn how to think about virality and how they build virality into a product and the strategic approach they have been following to leverage SEO for growth. You'll get lots of takeaways for growth marketing initiatives in this episode. Enjoy!

Meet Sophie Steffen, a Digital Marketer at TravelPerk a next-generation business travel booking & management platform for companies of any size and the world's first and only all-in-one platform for booking business travel that is 100% free. In this episode, you'll hear how TravelPerk became the number 4 fastest growing SaaS company growing 700% year over year. Sophie takes us behind the scenes of the last two years of explosive growth and dives into the marketing strategies and systems her team uses, from Adwords to partnerships, attribution models and optimizing SQLs. There are so many great insights to share. Enjoy!

Meet Matej Kukucka, Senior Growth Marketer at LiveAgent, a multi-channel customer service software, which helps companies deliver exceptional customer service through various support channels. Previously Matej was the Digital Marketing Manager at Fleming and the Digital Marketing Specialist at LIFARS. In this episode, you'll hear about the birth of LiveAgent from another SaaS product, solving the pain point they found while growing their company, the initial research steps for a growth marketer entering an existing product or service, the strategic outline for a marketing and growth plan, and how Matej specifically does this. You'll also hear about SEO from the inside out and what Matej does to excel in his SEO duties, and finally, you'll learn about the review gateway method to generate huge results that you're absolutely going to enjoy. In this episode, we really go deep into the ins and outs of systems and the exact steps to take. Enjoy!