Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast Evergreen Podcasts

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to build a lean organization that has the power to win the biggest brands in the retail market. My guest is Ed Bradley, CEO of Virtualstock.
Ed started his career in wholesale distribution and has extensive international experience in Supply Chain across Australia, Singapore, United States, and Canada. 
In 2004, he co-founded VirtualStock. During this period, the company pioneered new ways for retailers’ to expand their product range, increase transparency with suppliers, and provide detailed order information for customers. 
It made the product evolve into a global drop shipping and marketplace SaaS platform
Today, the company has 20 years of experience in logistics, supply chains and e-commerce, as well as an extensive roster of blue-chip clients. 
Their mission: Sell more products online, without the risk
This inspired me, and hence, I invited Ed to my podcast. We explore the 20-year journey of building a lasting SaaS business. Ed shares what worked and what didn't, how he managed to grow the business without external capital, and how working with the largest retailers in the UK enabled this. He elaborates on why he's keeping the organization lean, and how that helped to create meaningful and durable differentiation, survive major setbacks, and win the bulk of the UK retail market as a customer. 

Here's one of his quotes
People will always buy from people. And so it's all got to do with understanding the customer. In our world, that means two things: our customer is the retailer, but we need to understand their customer, who is the consumer. And so if you get those two things right, if you really have that knowledge, and you care about their business, and you care about their customer, then the rest will follow. 

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How one customer can accelerate the trajectory of your business. 

Why he'd opt for bootstrapping the business again if he ever got the choice. 

How to keep your organization lean - and why that helps to grow defensible differentiation. 

How he survived a major crisis in the business, and how this made them come out stronger. 



For more information about the guest from this week:

Ed Bradley

Website: Virtualstock




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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to change the way we think and use about Business Intelligence. My guest is Ryan Janssen, Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic.
Ryan is a serial entrepreneur and visionary leader in data analytics and AI. He brings experience from previous roles at Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Private Equity and venture Capital funds, and Ex Quanta: AI Studio, giving him a strong background in AI and data analytics. 
His time in the VC world likely gave him valuable insights into what investors look for, how to pitch effectively, and how to strategically scale a business.
All his hands-on experience let him to co-found Zenlytic in July 2020. It's a BI tool for commerce brands and DTC businesses. 
Their mission: making data insights accessible and actionable for everyone.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what's still broken in enabling non-data scientists to create unique insights to compete with the largest brands in the world. Ryan shares his big lessons learned in building a company that pioneered the promise of generative AI. He elaborates on his first principles around value creation and what he's doing differently to stay lean while delivering high performance as a business. Last but not least he shares his tips on being able to prioritize long-term thinking as the company grows and create a business that lasts.
Here's one of his quotes
I think the real winners will be the people that are building nimbly. The people that are applying creative uses of this tech and finding creative new ways to deliver value that doesn't look very much like the generation of software that preceded them.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

What you can do differently to ensure faster development and better quality with a lean team.

Why you should break predictability to find new growth opportunities.

How you can outcompete much larger big companies on their own strength.

When you have lots of leads the challenge is not how to close them - but how you qualify them 


For more information about the guest from this week:

Ryan Janssen

Website: Zenlytic




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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve a global challenge: helping field sales sell more and faster. My guest is Zach Barney, Co-founder and CEO of Mobly.
Zach Barney is an experienced SaaS sales leader and entrepreneur. He has been building and leading SaaS sales teams since 2010 at companies like Vehlo, Nearmap, Teem, and HireVue. Over his career, he has personally closed over $4 million in ARR, and his teams have closed over $40 million. 
In 2023, he co-founded Mobly to reduce the high percentage (+25%) of sales activity that never gets logged into CRM systems.
Their mission: To redefine lead capture and qualification for event marketers.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Zach to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the lead generation process at in-person events. Zach explains his journey with Mobly to solve this problem - and elaborates how this fits in a much broader vision. He elaborates on the big lessons he learned around gaining traction and using pricing as a lever for growth. Lastly, he elaborates on how he's building a moat around his product.

Here's one of his quotes
We learned that we needed to change our pricing model. Our first handful of customers we were grossly under-charging them and it was largely due to the fact that we were pricing based on the number of seats. Somebody would openly tell us 'Yeah, well this person can share the license with this person.' So, we realized 'I guess we made a mistake on how we price this because this should be like a $20,000 contract and you're telling me that you're gonna pay 2000…'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How he and his co-founder managed to get very comfortable doubling down on building a product without hardly spending anything.

What he changed to his pricing strategy to increase average deal-size AND make grow each customer account from there onwards.

What strategic choices he made around phasing his product strategy to ensure they got traction as early as possible - and keep growing it.

Why he's decided to build defensible differentiation around data and not features. 



For more information about the guest from this week:

Zach Barney

Website: Mobly




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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to outcompete everyone in the category. My guest is JJ (Projjal) Ghatak, Co-founder & CEO of OnLoop.
JJ (Projjal) is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He held business leadership roles across technology (Uber), management consulting (Accenture Strategy) and corporate development (Essar Capital). Besides that, he's a proud naturalized Singaporean, SMU Scholar, Stanford MBA, and awarded World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2022.
In 2020, JJ founded OnLoop in an attempt to solve a problem he'd experienced throughout his career: How hard it is for managers to turn high potential individuals into high performing teams. 
Their mission: Convert every manager in the world into a great manager. 
And this inspired me, and hence I invited JJ to my podcast. We explore the broken world of employee & team performance. JJ shares his journey of solving this problem by driving everyday habits and feedback rather than mere documentation. He shares his biggest lessons on creating product market fit, demand generation, and how to strategically prioritize your focus as a CEO as your company evolves. Lastly, he elaborates on his approach to challenge the status quo and outcompete established players. 

Here's one of his quotes
Most enterprise software is built as a System of Record. So if you look at employee engagement software, what it is, is a quarterly survey, which is then creating dashboards and data. And so it's a System of Record, not a System of Action. 
What you need to drive behavior is a System of Action. So if you think about it from another analogy, people understand is, you don't get fit by doing an annual health checkup every three months. You get fit by going to the gym. And actually 10,000 steps is the best thing that happened to fitness because it made it very easy to drive a system of action. And we think about team health and team performance in the exact same way

During this interview, you will learn four things:

The framework JJ is using to help him ensure he's focused on the most impactful priority on his list - every day.

That founders should focus on creating value, and salespeople on capturing value. And why it will hurt you if you mix this up.

His perspective on identifying their ideal customer segment to capture value and scale revenue in a predictable, repeatable way.

His first principles when it comes to building remarkable products.



For more information about the guest from this week:

JJ (Projjal) Ghatak

Website: OnLoop




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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)
My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.



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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to win the global content plagiarism battle. My guest is Jon Gillham, CEO of Originality AI. 
Jon Gillham is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. Before he started his SaaS business, he ran a content marketing agency. 
Having been one of the earliest adopters of generative AI through his agency, he understood the wave of plagiarism problems that was coming, even before Chat GPT and GPT-4 were released.
That became the founding idea behind Originality AI - a company he founded in November 2022.
Their mission: help Web Publishers be sure they are producing Original Content and can hit publish with integrity.
This means: publishing unique, Human-Created content ... the kind Google and we, the readers wants!
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of AI-generated content -and how this impacts trust. Jon shares the challenges he's faced on his journey to solve the problem. He also explains why he decided to focus on a very specific niche and not education, while he was offered contracts with brand names as big as Harvard and Purdue. Lastly, he elaborates how they are able to build extremely competitive products with just 1 simple organizational tweak.

Here's one of his quotes
We built and ended up launching the weekend before Chat GPT launched. And when Chat GPT launched it kind of blew things up. We had people coming from all different parts of the world. Academia was coming our way. User-generated sites were coming our way to say - this is now a problem that we need to wrestle with.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

What to do / not to do when you want to create defensible differentiation with your product.

Why he turned away very big sales opportunities - and why that was a critical, but right choice.

How he maintained a good work-life balance (and what he learned from that in hind-sight).

How to outperform all your competitors on review sites.



For more information about the guest from this week:

Jon Gillham

Website: Originality AI




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(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)
My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to tackle a very challenging industry problem and scale impact. My guest is Theo Saville, Co-founder and CEO of CloudNC
Theo is a Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineer (M.Eng, University of Warwick), with a background in defense, laser-based metals 3D printing research at Warwick Manufacturing Group, and sales. 
He entered metals 3D printing expecting to be able to harness a technology ready to disrupt manufacturing but gradually became disillusioned with the state and future applicability of the technology.
When he was exposed to CNC machining, he quickly realized its disruptive potential if it could be automated to the same degree as plastic 3D printing. 
And that led him to co-found CloudNC in 2015.
Their mission: to make single-click manufacture a reality.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Theo to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's manufacturing world and how that's growing to a $400 billion industry. Theo shares his journey of solving a complex problem in a very unusual - but effective way. He elaborates how they're looking for leverage in everything - and how that's led to using video marketing to get over 10M+ impressions a month - showcasing software to automate machines. Last but not least, he stresses the importance of setting clear objectives - especially as your startup scales. 

Here's one of his quotes
The idea was to first build software that makes it automatic to program these machines. And we raised our seed rounds on the basis of that. We realized after, I think, two or three years that it would take 10 years to actually build software that was capable enough to be saleable to any factory with these machines, there's just too much variation from factory to factory. So we went, I know, let's reduce the complexity of the problem. Let's build our own factory, make it really simple and standardized, and then copy and paste factories, and in that way, disrupt the industry. 

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How they pivoted from selling a new platform to individual manufacturers to a model where they simply plug in what they already use.  

What made them decide to move from a product-led sales approach to an eco-system-led sales approach?

How they created defensible differentiation and a unique value proposition in the very crowded market for manufacturing software.

What unusual opportunities niching down has provided them.


For more information about the guest from this week:

Theo Saville

Website: CloudNC




Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection
Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here
Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed
(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)
My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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