20+ SaaS Leaders Share Their Secrets to Success

Ian Blair – BuildFire

The number one contributor to our success has been our ability generate leads and turn them into customers. Leads + Sales = $$ Pretty simple right?

But how you do that and at what scale you do that is going to determine the size and success of your business.

We have invested heavily into SEO because of the remarkable returns it can provide. In the last 3 years we’ve grown well into a 7 figure ARR business and the growth only compounds each year.

If you look at the market as a whole, software is only getting easier and easier to build, and the industry is even more crowded. There’s more available talent, more advanced technologies, etc. all lowering the barrier to entry to create software.

What’s going to make you stand out is your brand and your ability to find and connect with potential customers. Our channel to build this has been SEO.

Figure out the channel that’s going to let you connect with as many potential customers as possible and double down on it. One channel that produces is much better than 5 that don’t.

Ian is an entrepreneur at heart and SaaS Growth Hacker. He is the Co-Founder of BuildFire, a mobile app building platform that allows anyone to build incredible mobile apps for their business or organization. BuildFire currently powers thousands of apps in the App Store for organizations of all types, anywhere from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies. Ian started BuildFire while finishing college and has since grown it into an incredible business with over 30 employees.

Pablo Fuentes – Proven

The one thing that has brought us the most success is investing in high quality content. We went from having a sales team that cold/warm called businesses to generating all of our business from organic traffic. In two years, our blog went from 50 monthly readers to 50,000.

I also started a podcast called Small Business War Stories where I drive around the country interviewing small businesses about their successes and struggles.

I am in the process of writing a book about the lessons learned. This strategy has empowered us to deliver value to our customers while building a brand of being a company that is an ally to small businesses.

Pablo is the CEO and Founder of Proven, a leading small business hiring platform. He is also the host of Small Business War Stories, a weekly podcast where he interviews small business professionals. He was honored as a Champion of Change and has been invited to speak at the White House about Proven and mentoring minority and women entrepreneurs. He is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and a blues guitar player and builder. Pablo obtained a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Jeff Epstein – Ambassador

The one thing that brought Ambassador the most success was being “Always Customer Obsessed”. SaaS businesses live and die with their customers. Since SaaS is a recurring subscription, keeping customers is paramount to the longevity of the business. One of our values at Ambassador is “Always Customer Obsessed” because we must obsess about their business, feedback and success in order to over-deliver on value.

We do this in many ways, and more importantly, we leverage the feedback and information from our customers to inform upcoming product functionality along with sales, success and marketing messaging.

Our success and implementation teams lead the charge of being customer-obsessed. They are the primary point(s) of contact for our relationship with each client during the customer lifecycle. We train them to dig deeper into the clients’ business — understand why their marketing strategies and tactics are driving the results they are and, most importantly, to execute with urgency.

I’m humbled and grateful for the empathy and hard work exhibited by our Success team — they continuously raise the bar for our clients, and our company by being customer obsessed.

Jeff is the founder of Ambassador, a referral tracking, attribution and management platform for businesses. He built a startup in law school, sold it (still graduated & passed the bar), and never looked back. Lifelong entrepreneur, 2011 NYC TechStar, Ninja-like backhand in ping pong.

Alex Fishman – Bugsee

From our experience in the B2B market with Bugsee, our most successful avenues of growth are coming from blogging. Granted, our target market are mobile app developers, so results might differ in other B2B sectors.

We’ve tried every other option out there – Product Hunt, cold calls and email, and of course – ads on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. All these brought us non-zero results, however they were hardly justifiable on the cost – effectiveness axis.

For us, the most effective, after organic growth, turned out to be publishing blog posts on interesting and relevant topics to our industry. We use both Medium and a blog on our site. Both platforms are entirely free. However, creating quality content on developer-related topics is not a trivial task.

Coming up with an interesting or controversial topic and then writing an extended blog post that will intrigue our target audience is genuinely hard. Let alone, doing it regularly. However, if you are able to master the cadence, it is the most effective way to engage the audience and attract potential customers.

Alex spent more than a decade as an engineer, engineering manager, and business development executive for digital camera manufacturing giants Nikon and Lytro. A serial entrepreneur and longtime mentor and technology advisor to the startup community, WhatsApp was invented at his kitchen counter. At Bugsee, Alex brings his practical experience, business connections and enthusiasm for innovation to his role as Chief Executive.

Rami El Chamaa – Appointlet

What brought the most success to our SaaS business was not a magic wand, but rather a magic ear. Basically talking with customers & better understanding their problems & needs.

The thing is, a big portion of your customers are talking and giving feedback so things can get out of hand. The key is in focusing on those few voices that would have the most impact on your business.

Those little voices that come from people that are innovators in their own way. Listen, filter & take action!

I’m passionate about ideas. I’m passionate about technology. I’m passionate about linking ideas and technology to create innovations that make lives easier and more successful. I’m currently on my first journey: I co-founded Appointlet, a simple and modern scheduling tool that helps businesses sell more and sell faster.

Pietari Suvanto – Vainu

What really brought us the most success as a SaaS company was to keep our eye on the ball and begin selling our product from Day One. Our founding team at Vainu was determined to build a self-funded, sustainable and scalable SaaS sales intelligence platform and we realized, in order to do that, we personally had to be able to sell our product.

So, as founders, we rolled up our sleeves and began selling our product even as we were building it — finding prospects and viable customers as our tech team worked tirelessly to build a viable solution for our vision.

Ultimately, the drive to sell from the onset paid off — we learned how to sell our product and we built connections with customers early on who were some of our biggest advocates. Not to mention, we learned insights from early adopters, which allowed us to refine and further expand our offering.

In just several years, we’ve built a sales intelligence platform that uses machine learning and open data to help sales people track the buying triggers of more than 100 million companies globally. Vainu has grown to nearly 150 team members across seven offices in Europe and the United States, with $1 million in monthly revenue and bookings. And it all started because we began selling immediately.

“Pietari Suvanto is the Founder of Vainu.io, one of the fastest growing B2B companies ever out of Helsinki. The company was founded in 2014 and currently they employ over 150 people and have operations in the Nordics, Central Europe and the US.”

Chad Brown – Orangedox

Understanding our customers, not only who they are but what tools they used and where they were looking for help.

When we started Orangedox one of the first things we did was to locate what tools our customers used: this lead us to integrate with Dropbox and later a partnership which helped us greatly in growing the company.

Once we had an idea on what our customers wanted, and what tools they needed to be able to integrate with, our next step was to understand where they were looking for help. This lead us to a variety of key forum posts that helped us boost our Google search ranking and provide a steady stream of traffic to the product.

Chad Brown possesses a wide variety of experience in various technologies gained from working on Business Intelligence (BI) projects over the past 6 years with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Wells Fargo, Canfor and Cameco. In particular, he can provide an in-depth knowledge of BI systems and is SAP BusinessObjects XI R2, XI R3.5 certified. Additionally, he is proficient in web based technologies including ASP.NET and Java. Specialties: SAP Business Objects Architecture, Xcelsius Dashboard Design, Crystal Report Development, Custom Web Development, Universe and Webi Design, Certified Training.

Daniel Araújo – Attentive

After having a SaaS product with real users, building a repeatable machine for sales was fundamental for our success. Even with very few people, our process was simple yet scalable. This allowed us to hire sales people faster and deliver a much better experience to our customers.

The core components of the machine are a) having someone responsible for lead generation (MQLs, or marketing qualified leads); b) having someone qualifying those MQLs into SQLs (Sales Qualified leads), usually with a demo, and c) having another person closing the deal. Initially, we had the same person doing this, but we specialized the time with these functions in mind. This meant that with one person we had the process of a big organization. When we were ready to scale, our process was too.

Today, Attentive is used in small teams and big organizations, and we pride ourselves in being able to deliver a high touch sales process and customer success operation, even if our team is small. Some of our clients joke that it feels that they’re the only customer we have!

Daniel is currently the CEO of Attentive.us, a technology company that gives teams a scalable sales process with only one minute a day. In 2016, it was considered one of the “Top 10 B2B Startup in Europe” and in 2017 participated in the Techstars Boulder acceleration program. Worked at Google for 5 years in Dublin and London as a Data Scientist. Holds an MA in International Business Development from the American Business School in Paris and has a BA in Management from the Católica Porto Business School.

Blake Smith – Cladwell

The #1 thing that has brought our SaaS business the most success is knowing the metrics that are specific to my SaaS model. We’re a B2C subscription app – that means the metrics we track are very different than what you track for B2B enterprise SaaS.

If you can slot your company into its specific lane (more specific than just “SaaS”) you’ll find the specific metrics and levers that matter. Once you do that, you can see the outages and prioritize your behavior accordingly.

The best way to do this is talk to true business model peers, or hire an expert in your field.

Blake Smith is founder and CEO of Cladwell, a clothing company that doesn’t sell clothing. His goal is to fight for sustainability and humane labor practices by enabling people to buy fewer – but better – clothes. Cladwell resides at the intersection between math and art – much like Blake – who used his background in computational mathematics as a hedge fund analyst before joining the founding team of an agency that produced movies for Walmart, P&G, and many other Fortune 500 brands. In addition to Cladwell, Blake and his wife Chandler raise and homeschool 4 kids.

Sujan Patel – Sujanpatel.com

The biggest success for my SaaS company has come from proactively talking to and helping customers. It’s not scalable and it’s hard to measure the impact of this activity but it has helped my company on many levels such as improving retention and increasing our word of mouth growth. Most importantly it’s helped me better understand our customers and their needs so that we are able to build features/functionality that our customers actually need (vs what I think they need). On slide 18 I list out my daily customer engagement routine.

Sujan Patel is a data-driven marketer and entrepreneur. He is a high energy individual fueled by his passion to help people and solve problems. Sujan is the co-founder of WebProfits US, a growth marketing agency, and software companies Narrow.io & ContentMarketer.io, tools to help marketers build their Twitter following and scale content-marketing efforts.

Craig Fitzpatrick – PageCloud

PageCloud’s appearance as finalists at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield was the launching pad for our incredibly successful pre-sale campaign. It provided amazing content that was repurposed as Facebook and YouTube video ads, which drove well over $1M in pre-launch ARR. It also helped secure additional funding for the company. And it was all thanks to a well-research and meticulously crafted pitch.

The pitch is crucial to every SaaS Business: what is the existing landscape, how is product-X going to disrupt industry-Y or solve need-Z, and why are people’s lives going to change because of it?

Nailing this pitch is what helped fund PageCloud. It’s why TechCrunch Disrupt chose us from among the 1,000+ applicants. It’s what sold investors to buy in, pre-revenue. It was more than enough to get thousands of people to pre-pay for software that wasn’t yet available!

Practicing and perfecting this pitch to friends and advisors, at local meetups, and in online communities while soliciting immediate feedback helped us distill the most impactful value proposition for our SaaS product.

Craig Fitzpatrick is the Founder and CEO of PageCloud, a website creation platform changing the way people build online. A serial entrepreneur, Craig has been building web products and companies for over 20 years. Having witnessed the birth and rise of technologies like CSS/HTML, JavaScript, and CMS, he is poised to lead in best practices for web design in the industry. Craig founded PageCloud in 2014 on a mission to fix the web, by offering the first ever true desktop publishing experience to the public with a groundbreaking and innovative website creation platform.

Josh Haynam – Interact

One word, listening. Our company has grown almost exclusively through content marketing, and the source of all our content is questions that our customers and prospects ask us. If we didn’t spend 1000’s of hours on the phone with our target audience we’d never know what to write about, and wouldn’t have our content marketing to lean on.

We’re in a hyper-competitive and brand new space, so without our inbound efforts we could never afford to exist as a company. It’s only through the constant answering of questions through our blog content and our partner network that we manage to acquire customers at a low cost, and continue growing.

If there’s one thing you should do in your business right now, it’s to call up your customers and listen to them talk about their experience with your product and their frustrations with the industry you are in.

Josh Hayman is co-founder of Interact, a place for creating fun quizzes that also generate leads. Josh regularly writes about lead generation and conversion rate optimization (CRO). He also enjoys a good game of pickup basketball.

Justin McGill – LeadFuze

Finding product/market fit. This sounds so generic, but until you’ve actually investigated which customers are more likely to use your product AND have success with your product, you really don’t know if you have product/market fit. Once you think you have product/market fit you should write your website copy, your sales funnel, onboarding, etc around speaking to that market.

In LeadFuze’s case, we were going after founders who wanted to have an automated solution running to try and generate more opportunities. However, we realized that’s not really the pain we solve or the market to go after. Salespeople use us to eliminate all the dirty work in researching companies and people, and to automate their outreach and follow-ups. This changed the game for us. Owners don’t want to spend the time on a new tool for them to add more work for themselves, and sales reps want a solution to help them do the mundane work they are already doing.

I built a 7 figure digital marketing agency (Upswing Interactive), and I’m now focused on LeadFuze, an outbound marketing platform that helps B2B companies get in front of more leads. I infrequently blog about my journey and entrepreneurship at http://www.justinmcgill.net.

Noman Siddiq – Cloudlead

My success lies in a simple yet extremely effective “value chain” framework. It starts with keeping the workforce happy, which in turn helps them deliver exceptional quality work. Finally, all this translates to “customer delight” which has been my number one source for getting more referrals, improving our client retention and customer lifetime value stats.

Also, we aggressively built a B2B contact and account database to boost our sales margins, which is essential for any company and is not limited to a SaaS business model.

Lastly, I have a social mission that helps me stay motivated, that is, to play a vital role in improving job equality in my country, Pakistan. By providing education and empowering women,y dream is to ensure an equal opportunity workplace which is gender neutral and non-discriminatory.

Noman is a motivated, energetic, tech savvy, entrepreneurial, highly competitive, results-driven Business Leader with an impeccable record of driving accelerated revenue growth for a diverse client base. As the Founder & Director at www.CloudLead.co, his responsibilities include managing relationships with business professionals from North America, with the goal of helping all of their clients achieve maximum benefits through outsourcing. He has been directly involved in assisting SME’s with funding, large corporations, head-hunting, executive search and building B2B marketing databases, verifying data and accelerating their sales process. 

Wyatt Jozwowski – Demio

The one thing that has brought Demio, our SaaS company, the most success is easily hiring great people. We’ve made hires ranging from bad to great, and the difference is always drastic.

In fact, even the difference between a good hire and a great hire is almost unbelievable. The great hires we’ve made have always taken our company to the next level without fail. Great hires will go above and beyond, they’ll take initiative, lead others, deliver 10x more than a “good” hire, and you’ll learn a ton from them in the process.

Great hires will bring things to the table that the founders never did, and they’ll help you bring more great people into the organization as your team expands. My advice would be to avoid settling when you’re hiring, especially in the early stages; a great hire in the beginning can be the difference between success and failure.

Wyatt is co-Founder at Demio.com, Founder & CEO at DripApps.com. Passionate about software, design, and all things user experience.

Steli Efti – Close.io

The one thing that brought our SaaS Business the most success is understanding our customers better than our competitors. That might sound like a pretty generic, superficial statement. But for us, it was a guiding principle for everything we do at our company.

It prompted us to do very specific things:

• Our developers were sitting next to sales people making calls and sending emails to prospects while coding the software.
• Everyone at our company has to sometimes do support to understand the needs and problems of our customers.
• We visit our customers in their office to see how they use our tool in their actual work environment.
• We frequently conduct customer interviews to learn what our customers love about our solution, what they hate, and how we can build a product that makes them even more successful.

Most companies are focused on growth. They ask: How can we grow faster? How can we get more customers, and increase revenue? All of this IS crucial—you’re running a business after all. But ultimately a business is about creating value.

So we constantly ask ourselves: How can we make our customers more successful? To do that, we need to understand what they’re dealing with better than anyone else.

Steli Efti is the Co-founder and CEO of Close.io (an inside sales CRM that helps thousands of SMBs and Startups around the world  close more deals). He’s Silicon Valley’s most prominent sales expert, YC Alumni, SVP at Pioneer Fund and the author of 10 sales books including The Follow-Up Formula.

Henry Shuck – DiscoverOrg

We built a systematic sales and revenue engine. Everything that worked from a lead and demand generation perspective we shared and then systematized.

We got rid of Ad-Hoc processes and initiatives in sales and marketing and we focused on building a repeatable and scalable system that we could rely on to deliver leads to our closers everyday.

That means we operationalized prospect data into our crm and marketing automation campaigns, we operationalized what worked for our outbound calling teams so that everyone was doing what our best rep was doing everyday. Having a revenue engine that you can rely on to deliver opportunities is the difference between winning and losing in the SaaS space.

Henry Schuck is the founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg, the leading source for information technology sales intelligence. Henry founded DiscoverOrg in 2007 when he was 23, and has led the company on a rapid growth path without the benefit of outside funding. Henry is regarded as a market disruptor in IT sales intelligence. This led to his pursuing what he calls “innovation through dis-innovation”: building the industry’s most accurate contact database not through technology like webscraping or crowdsourcing, but by employing a team of 85+ data analysts continually calling into thousands of IT and finance departments.

Raviv Turner – CaliberMind

I think the one thing that brought our SaaS business the most success is hiring the right team and executive leadership and then moving out of their way! You see, startups are hard, the market can change, the product can change but if the core team is solid and can adapt quickly, the business will thrive.

The other key thing is to know how to let go. We hire the best people not to tell them what to do, but that they could tell us what to do and as CEO, after doing everything in your business for the first year or two, sometime it’s just hard to let go and trust the people you hire, but then again, this is the key to success.

In addition to being the Co-Founder & CEO of CaliberMind, I’m also an angel investor and mentor at Techstars and a regular speaker at marketing & AI events. Everyone is telling B2B marketers about the value of data. We have data but we can’t access the VALUE. CaliberMind helps B2B marketing leaders unlock the value of data to acquire new buyers, grow revenue and improve the customer experience.

Gerry Giacoman Colyer – Siftery

At Siftery, it’s all about providing something value first – even if it’s for free. People are busy and have many demands on their time. If you start off a relationship by providing value first then you can cut through the noise and build key relationships faster.

We have the world’s best technographic data (a database of 41,000+ software products and their usage across 1M top companies), yet we’ve made a lot of it accessible for free as a resource for investors and marketers.

We have also created many free tools that make use of the data in unique ways, and have several more planned. These tools have brought us the most user growth and helped us close our most valuable partnerships.

Business strategist and product guy focused on growth & analytics. Interested in game mechanics, web enabled products, and e-commerce. Believer in the fruits of globalization. At my core, I’m a liberal arts guy who fell in love with the potential for technology to improve human welfare.

Laurence Girard – Fruitstreet

One thing that brought me success in my SaaS business model was to focus on repeatable and scalable B2B marketing channels, such as LinkedIn. Platforms like these give you both the ability to generate leads on a cost-effective basis and to do this on a repeatable basis.

For a SaaS business model, if you do not have a repeatable way to generate high quality and low cost leads, you are destined for failure. In addition, I have found that for a healthcare business some of your best investors can be your customers.

Our company is funded by 225 physician investors and this helped us develop our SaaS product in collaboration with some of our potential end users. You also always have to focus on putting yourself in the shoes of your end users. If you can’t use your own product, then your customers will not be able to. Make sure you get the product into the hands of real users and then improve the software product based on their feedback.

Laurence Girard, CEO/Fruit Street Telehealth Co-Founder. Laurence Girard is the CEO and founder of fruitstreet.com. Laurence was a pre-med student in the undergraduate degree program at the Harvard University Extension School for two years before he decided to pursue FruitStreet.com full time and move to San Francisco. Laurence aims to build a team of physicians and technologists to help people worldwide improve their lifestyle and prevent chronic disease.

Omar Zenhom – WebinarNinja

Having an audience before we started WebinarNinja really allowed us to create and sell a product the market actually wants. Building an audience beforehand allows you to discover their pains and problems so you can create the perfect solution for these exact people. It also gives you someone to sell to when your product is ready for customers.

Making a serious effort to grow our audience via our podcast The $100 MBA Show and growing our email list, before we wanted to offer them something for sale allowed us to earn trust with them way in advance. This really was the best thing we ever did that contributed to our success at WebinarNinja.

Omar Zenhom is the co-founder and CEO of WebinarNinja, an all-inclusive, easy-to-use webinar platform that allows you to create a webinar in 10 seconds flat. WebinarNinja is one of the fastest-growing, self-funded software businesses. Omar is also the co-founder of The $100 MBA, the largest alternative business education online and host of the Best of iTunes podcast, The $100 MBA Show. The $100 MBA Show is one of the top ranking business podcasts on iTunes and has delivered 920 lessons and counting to over 60,000 daily listeners.

Peter Irikovsky – Exponea

I believe that Exponea is successful primarily, because our full focus is on delivering measurable value to customers as fast as possible. Our customers are always surprised that we actually deliver positive ROI within the first 2 month proof of concept phase.

Even our ratings show that we significantly outperform all competitors in time to value. We actually even give our customers an unconditional full money back guarantee, which works magic for us, because as salespeople know, they cannot oversell, and delivery consultants need to be sure, they can deliver what was promised on time.

Thanks to this approach, we’ve been able to score NPS of 50+ and have Net Retention above 130% for 2017. We are a long-term player and believe that customer satisfaction is the key to long-term growth and sustainability. Hence, out of 150+ people in Exponea, 110+ are in R&D and Customer Success.

Peter Irikovsky, CEO of the experience cloud Exponea, is (i) a tech entrepreneur with strong background in e-commerce (built the Slevomat Group to over €100m in revenue in less than 5 years), (ii) a frequent speaker (spoke at Forbes, StartupGrind, US Embassy or EU Commission events), and (iii) an investor (Managing Partner at LRJ Capital, a VC investment holding with a strong mission). Peter’s prior experience includes McKinsey, Groupon, Slevomat and KPMG. He holds a degree in Computer Science, and is a Singularity University graduate. On the non-profit side, he is the head of the supervisory board at Duke of Edinburgh International Award in Slovakia, board member of National Monuments Foundation and committee member at LEAF Award and Millennium Candler Prize.

Oscar Nelson – Musqot

Understanding that high-touch customer interaction is a very good thing, most SaaS companies prioritize best-practices focused on winning, onboarding and supporting customers with as low touch as possible (completely self-serviced customers are often described as the ultimate goal).

At Musqot Marketing Technology we have realized that the opposite is a strong success factor, because the more we engage with each customer throughout all phases of the relationship (first sales cycle, initial onboarding, extended implementation projects, renewals and long term support, etc.) the more profitable our customer relations become – and the happier our customers become.

There is an absolute 1-1-1 correlation here. Our happiest and most satisfied customers are the ones we spend most time with, and they are also the ones that generate the most revenue for us. Regardless what SaaS playbooks may tell you, B2B SaaS is a personal business which requires personal interactions (at least in enterprise sales).

Oscar Nelson has sixteen years’ professional experience in the marketing field, within product marketing, communications and branding. He has a mixed background, ranging from consulting over to media, telecommunications and IT. He considers himself a generalist within management and marketing, with successful experiences in value-based sales and a clear orientation towards business development. Looking forward, he will continue to generate results based on his integrated approach to marketing, business development and sales.