Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast Evergreen Podcasts

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to create a sticky and healthy B2B SaaS business. My guest is Emeric Ernoult, Founder and CEO of Agorapulse.
Emeric is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in social media and SaaS. He co-founded affinitiz, one of the first modern social network SaaS platforms in France in the early 2000s.
In 2010 he founded Agorapulse, social media platform. He grew it from generating €140,000 in annual revenue to achieving the same figure every three days, without taking significant outside funding. 
This makes Agorapulse an inspiring bootstrapped SaaS success story. Hence I invited Emeric to my podcast. We explore his insights on what it takes to create a successful B2B SaaS company without having to rely on external funding. He shares is big lessons learned running the business through a PLG motion, and explains why they've pivoted to a sales-led SaaS motion, thereby moving up market. Last but not least, he elaborates on his approach to customer segmentation, creating measurable business value, and how to enable constant evolution

Here's one of his quotes
"Do not raise money. VC firms and investors are going to tell you that you're going to get more than money... if you don't know how to leverage that money, you're basically just given away part of your company for something that you're not going to get value from."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why you should prioritize investing in amazing customer support, especially when bootstrapping and the product is still evolving

How to go about hiring people that have the highest chance to bring your company success

What to focus on when you want to transition from PLG to a sales-led motion

His first principle when it comes to prioritizing features to create products people start talking about and keep talking about. 


For more information about the guest from this week:

Emeric Ernoult

Website: Agora Pulse




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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to turn a startup into a +$100M ARR growth business. My guest is Jim Yu, Founder & Exec Chair at BrightEdge
Jim Yu is the visionary. He started his career at Mercator Software (now IBM), serving as Director of Product Development, and then moved to Salesforce.com, where he was a Director of Product Management. 
He graduated from university when he was 16 years old, and holds an MBA from Stanford University, a Master's in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Dakota. 
In 2007 he founded BrightEdge where he's been at the helm as CEO for 16 years. He grew BrightEdge into a global leader, helping more than 8,500 of the world's largest brands drive measurable, predictable revenue from their websites and search engines
Their mission: to help marketers deliver content that resonates with their audience and drives business impact. More specifically, BrightEdge aims to transform online content into tangible business results, such as traffic, revenue, and engagement.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jim to my podcast. We explore his journey of building BrightEdge into a successful SaaS company that crossed the $100M ARR bar. He elaborates on his first principles when it comes to building core differentiators, being intentional about market choices, and setting clear milestones for each growth stage. Lastly, he shares his advice on managing go-to-market investments and staying driven by a strong mission to scale intelligently.

Here's one of his quotes
It really paid off was when we found the big box retail segment. So if you think about social networks, they have a lot of web pages that represent musicians or people or things like that. But on the retail side, they have a lot of products, they have a lot of categories. And if those show up well on search, it leads directly to purchases and revenue. 
So the next use case we built into our technology was connecting the dots back to purchases and orders. And so then you could see, as you optimize for organic search, what was the impact on revenue, and then that's when we started to really get forth. We ended up getting most of the big retailers.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why he has been intentional about certain GTM techniques and how he's picked his verticals to bet on.

His first principle on making strategic choices that are aligned with the core capabilities and DNA of the company.

His approach to scaling, and when to step on the gas and when not.

How he defined their unfair advantage and what makes them different as a company


For more information about the guest from this week:

Jim on Linkedin

Jim on Twitter

Website: BrightEdge




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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve the most challenging productivity challenge in Manufacturing: human action. My guest is Max Fischer, Founder and CEO of Deltia.
Max is a mechanical engineer. In 2014 he was a founding member of HackZurich, the largest hackathon Switzerland has ever seen. 
In 2015 he co-founded Actyx and digitized 40+ factories. In this startup, he led product management, sales, and marketing teams. 
Meanwhile he has established himself as a thought leader in the space of digital transformation for the factory floor.
In November 2022, Max founded Deltia, a startup focused on helping factory operators track, analyze and improve efficiency by identifying the best possible processes and assisting workers with digital tools.
Their mission: to make human work in manufacturing more productive and less error-prone by taking out the guesswork. 
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore what's broken in identifying productivity opportunities in manufacturing. Max explains how for the first time ever - this is possible. He shares some of his big lessons on building the company, especially when it comes to foundational questions like "who's it for" and 'what's it for' - and how that helped them remain highly focused. 
He elaborates on his first principes for building the platform - and how that helps them stay resilient and offer scalable solutions. .

Here's one of his quotes
There are a lot of decisions that you take both on the technical level and what customers you're serving. Who is the user that you're trying to focus on? We decided quite early on to not specifically target the Toyota's of this world. The automotive OEMs are basically the best-run manufacturing companies in the world. There are use cases, obviously, also for technology, no doubt about that. But I think a big opportunity is to help the 98% of other factories to come to a similar level to where Toyota of Volkswagen are today.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why functionality is important - but not as important as system design 

How to go about building for business scalability rather than just technical scalability of your solution.

Why the dream is not to help Toyota or Volkswagen - but companies much smaller and weaker than those brands.

What they are doing differently to accelerate stakeholder buy-in from IT, legal, and Unions.



For more information about the guest from this week:

Max Fischer

Website: Deltia




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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 redefine the way we learn and solve the growing skills gap. My guest is Ruban Phukan, CEO of Goodgist.

Ruban is a serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience building technology products that solve real-world problems. He's written books about AI and holds several patents in this field. 
He was part of Yahoo's first data scientist team, collaborating closely with co-founder David Filo to use data to address complex business problems. 

In 2005, he co-founded Bixee.com, India's first vertical search engine employing patented technology. This company then merged with market leader MakeMyTrip and DataRPM, a pioneering Enterprise AI platform for industrial IoT, which was then acquired by Progress Software in 2017.

He 2019 he co-founded GoodTrade.AI, an asset management and investment analysis platform centred around Generative AI.
Most recently he co-founded GoodGist, an AI startup for upskilling and research that tackles the challenges of scaling corporate skill development. 

Their mission: To organize the world's knowledge and make it universally accessible, conversational, and digestible in bite-sized chunks on demand.

Their belief is that this creates a significant moat for their clients against competitors in today's fast-paced landscape,

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ruban to my podcast. We explore the challenges of continuous learning in today's fast-paced technological environment. 
He explains his first principles for making his strategic bets and why he opts to take a platform approach rather than a point solution approach. Last but not least, he explains his lessons from niching down and verticalizing his GTM approach around the platform. 

Here's one of his quotes
We don't try to build a custom solution for a custom problem. We try to look at the problem and say, 'Okay, so we are not trying to only solve for a gas turbine failure, how do we build that technology, so that now instead of just only solving for data coming out of gas turbines, it can also look at data coming out of smart cars? How can it also handle data coming out of smart televisions? So, the focus has always been in trying to understand the problem and try to generalize, so that it can solve more business use cases, without having to recreate something new every single time.


During this interview, you will learn four things:

How he's accelerating traction by packaging his horizontal platform around highly valuable & business-critical problems.

How he goes about successfully serving the mid-market and large enterprise companies in their own unique ways.

His approach to identifying new value possibilities in the market that are worth building solutions for.

How he makes decisions on what to invest in, and what not. 


For more information about the guest from this week:

Ruban Phukan

Website: Goodgist




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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 that required a 180-degree pivot to find strong product market fit. My guest is Ryan Leitzeiser, Co-founder and CEO of Obie Insurance.
Ryan has over 10 years of experience in an executive role in technology and commercial real estate (CRE) investment and development.
Having worked at Hudson Capital Investments and as an Investment Analyst at Ram Real Estate, he has a strong background in CRE valuation, underwriting, asset management, and private equity. 
In July 2018, he co-founded Obie, a Y Combinator-backed startup that's set out to make some waves in insurance technology.
Their mission: To provide a simple, affordable, and transparent insurance experience for landlords and real estate investors.
This inspired me, and hence, I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of insurance, particularly when it relates to Real Estate. He shares his experiences and big lessons learned from having to pivot the business. He elaborates on what he did wrong, and the courage it took to correct course - the then turn that into a growth engine that is hard to stop. Last but not least he talks about some of the essential traits to develop to build a business that lasts.

Here's one of his quotes
Insurance is an admin nightmare for them [Lenders] during the closing process. We provide them with technology and tools as it relates to insurance for their consumers so that mistakes are not made. And ultimately, for a lender, this help that we provide them ultimately unlocks a ton of customers for us. In fact, we have lenders that will charge their customer base a fee, if they don't use us.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

What traits to look for in employees if you want to attract people who can solve customer problems and provide great experiences.

What to do differently if you want your customers to make your solution mandatory for anyone they do business with. 

His learnings on growing confidence and commitment from others.

What he's learned to be critical behaviors to adhere to in a company if you want to build a business that lasts. 


For more information about the guest from this week:

Ryan Letzeiser

Website: Obie Insurance




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Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed
(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)
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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




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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