14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life

Stephen Cummins
  • 5.0 (5)
  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP
14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life

Listen to wisdom from the true champions of SaaS. Stephen Cummins interviews founders of hyper-growth SaaS ScaleUps. Interviews are conducted face to face at major tech events in Dublin, Lisbon, Berlin, Hong Kong & New Orleans (no remote calls). We examine the personal histories, learnings & opinions of the world’s most successful SaaS StartUp entrepreneurs. And because they speak at these major events, they have strong communication skills. Stephen ensures that the core topic is the founder he's interviewing, and not just the current rocket ship the founder is helping scale. We cover most of these in each episode; short life history, the WHY, day in the life, personal motivations (many are financially secure), personal attributes leading to success, weaknesses, what makes the current SaaS company special & successful, advice for entrepreneurs, opinion on the future of work & future tech, what they’d do if they walked away, work-life balance, the city they work in, distributed or remote teams v co-located or in-office teams. Lend us your ears for less than 1% of one day in your week to gain a deeper understanding of the cutting edge of SaaS, as well as insights into the human stories behind it all. We’re interviewing the true champions of SaaS – from giants to exciting scale-ups. They will share their ups and downs, their vision of the future of human experience, how they approach innovation and sales execution, and how they stay grounded while driving extraordinary success in the cloud. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur (or if you are on that road already), join us! “To dare is to loose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” Soren Kierkegaard

  1. 08/10/2020

    Market beats Team beats Product - Peter Mühlmann, 3 of 3

    Episode 122 of 14 minutes of SaaS  – Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann – 3 of 3 –  chats with AppSelekt CEO Stephen Cummins in Lisbon: "Market beats the team, beats the product. In the sense that picking the right market is often more important than anything else. But then getting the right team in place is more important than you having a good idea or not because it's the initial idea ... it's going to evolve. It's not like you’re sitting in the bathtub with the rubber duck and saying this is what the company is and what it's going to do. It is rather the sum of a 1,000 ideas. And then 990 of them are not yours"

    11 min

  2. 08/10/2020

    Embracing Negative Reviews - Peter Mühlmann, 2 of 3

    Episode 121 of 14 minutes of SaaS  – Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann – 2 of 3 –  chats with AppSelekt CEO Stephen Cummins in Lisbon: "It’s ok to get negative reviews. Actually negative reviews can be more valuable for you than positive reviews ... We did an AB split test where we're showing consumers a page with one negative review. And the other page has zero reviews. And then we do a split test that says “so which one are people more likely to buy from? And people are far, far more likely to buy from the one with one negative review ... The notion that, 'oh, you have to be perfect!' is actually not believed by your customers"

    14 min

  3. 08/10/2020

    From the Basement - Peter Mühlmann, 1 of 3

    Episode 120, 1 of 3. Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann interviewed by Stephen Cummins, CEO & Founder of AppSelekt for 14 Minutes of SaaS. "I sold a lot on the eBays of the world and then I thought, actually I would like to start my own website also ... nobody bought because they suspected that it was just Peter sitting in a basement with his friend, two kids, selling electronics ... that was it was actually true. And I didn't want to refer them to the eBays of the world because all my competitors were there. So I thought, why isn't there a way where I can gather my customers' opinions and show it in a credible way so that people trust my business"

    16 min

  4. 06/08/2020

    Mobile is Personal - Bill Magnuson, 2 of 2

    "If something needs to be audacious and if something needs to be comprehensive in order for it to really make the change, you gotta figure out a way to invest in that. And I think that, you know, when you look at … a great example is looking at Space X where they have this big audacious goal but they’ve figured out, you know, in… in as lean as you can get in the rocket world. Like ‘How do we actually sell something to the market so that we can go in and we can learn? And we can fund the thing that is the big audacious thing as well?’" Bill Magnuson, CEO CoFounder of Braze

    17 min

  5. 06/08/2020

    Reading the Tea Leaves - Bill Magnuson, 1 of 2

    "Fundamentally, this problem that we’re trying to solve which is; 'How do we understand people better while they’re interacting with the brand in order to, kind of, communicate with them in a way that’s more valuable to them?' That’s a fundamental human reality and it’s one that’s not tied to any particular generation of technology. And it’s also one that’s not tied to a category of business" Bill Magnuson, CEO & CoFounder of Braze

    17 min

  6. 30/07/2020

    Adding Lustre to the Gem - Ted Krantz, 3 of 3

    App Annie CEO Ted Krantz in conversation with Stephen Cummins - part 3 of 3. "Keep your head down and get it done. There's too much of a tendency today to self-promote, to push and ask for the constant, you know, next level. And I think you have to … there's a mix of make it happen and let it happen .. And then you've got to round yourself out .. Sometimes executives, even at the highest levels, they have a very difficult time balancing execution and strategy"

    14 min

  7. 30/07/2020

    SaaS to DaaS - Ted Krantz, 2 of 3

    App Annie CEO Ted Krantz in conversation with Stephen Cummins - part 2 of 3. "So you have the full footprint of mobile performance. Then what we’re doing is we’re moving from metrics that we do traditionally like downloads, revenue, monthly active users, daily active users; to strategic C-Suite metrics that we can now calculate with these two datasets … that get us to customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, return on ad spend"

    14 min

  8. 30/07/2020

    Forged in B2B Software Sales - Ted Krantz, 1 of 3

    App Annie CEO Ted Krantz in conversation with Stephen Cummins - part 1 of 3. "I've had three legends that I've been pretty close to. Craig Conway early on at Peoplesoft, you know. And then I moved over with Tom Siebel at C3. I’m very close to Bill McDermott still today at SAP"

    14 min
See All (122)

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About

Listen to wisdom from the true champions of SaaS. Stephen Cummins interviews founders of hyper-growth SaaS ScaleUps. Interviews are conducted face to face at major tech events in Dublin, Lisbon, Berlin, Hong Kong & New Orleans (no remote calls). We examine the personal histories, learnings & opinions of the world’s most successful SaaS StartUp entrepreneurs. And because they speak at these major events, they have strong communication skills. Stephen ensures that the core topic is the founder he's interviewing, and not just the current rocket ship the founder is helping scale. We cover most of these in each episode; short life history, the WHY, day in the life, personal motivations (many are financially secure), personal attributes leading to success, weaknesses, what makes the current SaaS company special & successful, advice for entrepreneurs, opinion on the future of work & future tech, what they’d do if they walked away, work-life balance, the city they work in, distributed or remote teams v co-located or in-office teams. Lend us your ears for less than 1% of one day in your week to gain a deeper understanding of the cutting edge of SaaS, as well as insights into the human stories behind it all. We’re interviewing the true champions of SaaS – from giants to exciting scale-ups. They will share their ups and downs, their vision of the future of human experience, how they approach innovation and sales execution, and how they stay grounded while driving extraordinary success in the cloud. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur (or if you are on that road already), join us! “To dare is to loose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” Soren Kierkegaard

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