Podcasts about b2b saas

AI search is changing how people discover information and how brands need to think about visibility. Daniel and Chris talk with Liam Dunne and Ben Moore, co-founders of Discovered Labs, about the shift from traditional SEO to AI search, what happens behind the scenes when an LLM generates an answer, and why retrieval and citations don't always tell the whole story. They dig into AI visibility, Reddit strategy, query fan-out, representation in model weights, and consensus. They also look ahead to a world where AI agents don't just discover websites, but interact with them and take actions on behalf of users.Featuring: Liam Dunne – LinkedInBen Moore – LinkedInDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, XLinks:What AI models know about 1,000 B2B SaaS brands before web searchDiscovered LabsSponsors:Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#ticketsFramer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at framer.com/practicalaiResources and Events:Register for upcoming webinars here!Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction GuardMidwest AI Summit 2026

Send us Fan MailThe people building AI are starting to sound scared of what they're building. Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias take on the AI safety debate that broke into public view this September: a researcher's resignation from Anthropic, alignment lead Evan Hubinger's one-in-ten estimate of catastrophic risk, and the "Pacing the Frontier" letter that put OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind leadership on the same page. They trace what happened when OpenAI's agents hacked Hugging Face, unpack Dario Amodei's call to slow the pace of frontier capabilities, and sit with the tension between racing ahead and pumping the brakes. Then they turn practical, walking through the five things - the ground, the model, the data, the autonomy, and the scope - every association can control no matter what the labs decide. Amith argues that responsible AI adoption and aggressive AI adoption aren't actually in conflict. Whether you're unsettled by the headlines or building your own AI roadmap, this episode offers a clear-eyed way to think about both. 

AI gives confident answers built on missing context. Kelly Hopping, four-time CMO and current CMO at 6sense, breaks down where that context gap hits go-to-market teams and how her CPG training shapes the fix. She explains treating brand marketing as full P&L ownership, not logo management, and applying classic 4P discipline—pricing, distribution, promotion, and messaging—as one system instead of disconnected levers. She contrasts this GM-style, cross-functional execution model with the narrower brand role common at most B2B SaaS companies.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI gives confident answers built on missing context. Kelly Hopping, four-time CMO and current CMO at 6sense, breaks down where that context gap hits go-to-market teams and how her CPG training shapes the fix. She explains treating brand marketing as full P&L ownership, not logo management, and applying classic 4P discipline—pricing, distribution, promotion, and messaging—as one system instead of disconnected levers. She contrasts this GM-style, cross-functional execution model with the narrower brand role common at most B2B SaaS companies.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if spending more on marketing is actually making your marketing worse?

Send us Fan MailIntelligence is turning into a resource you can scale like electricity, and that shift changes what's actually worth your attention in the AI news cycle. In part two of their refreshed Fundamentals of AI series, Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias pick up exactly where part one left off, moving from definitions and building blocks into what abundant intelligence means in practice for associations. They trace AI's growing role in drug discovery, diagnostics, and materials science, explain why a model's black box matters less now that reasoning is visible, and reframe hallucinations as a byproduct of the same creativity that makes these tools useful. They also break down how to weigh AI's energy and water costs against everyday technology, and why picking an AI vendor should never be treated like a slow, locked-in AMS purchase. Amith's throughline: build for a world where intelligence keeps getting cheaper, and protect your flexibility by keeping your agents decoupled from any single provider. 

Jake Moshel built Apexsendco from cold Instagram DMs and print-on-demand into a profitable, niche e-commerce brand at 14 before selling it through ⁠⁠⁠Acquire.com⁠⁠⁠ at 16.Instead of chasing a massive audience, Jake focused entirely on mountain bikers, creating custom phone cases for specific bike models. With operations running on autopilot, he built a simple, sellable business that closed in just two weeks once the right buyer showed up.In this episode, Jake shares how he found product-market fit with zero ad budget, why he chose to exit to build in B2B SaaS, and what founders can learn from preparing a data room for a quick close.You'll hear:How niche validation via Instagram DMs created early cash flowWhy running an automated print-on-demand store made the exit simpleWhat happened during the two-week due diligence and escrow process3 Lessons from Apexsendco:Micro-Niches Lower Acquisition Costs: Speaking directly to a passionate subculture beats broad marketing when starting from scratch.Clean Data Rooms Speed Deals: Having metrics, assets, and business descriptions organized beforehand made closing effortless.Patience Leads to Better Buyers: Waiting for a buyer aligned with the niche meant an immediate offer and zero deal friction.For founders, this episode shows that a business doesn't need to be venture-scale to create real liquidity when lean systems and clear focus are in place.Follow the Guest:⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠ (Twitter)⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠Novix AI⁠ ⁠

Besfort Behrami is a growth marketing and paid advertising expert specializing in turning digital campaigns into qualified leads and measurable revenue. With experience across B2B SaaS, e-commerce, and international markets, Besfort combines Meta and LinkedIn advertising, analytics, storytelling, funnel strategy, and automation to build marketing systems designed to convert. In this episode of From Stuck to Successful, Besfort and Dave break down what actually makes paid advertising work—from understanding the details behind high-performing Meta campaigns to telling better stories, improving lead generation, and connecting marketing performance to real sales and ROI. Besfort also shares how lessons from his background as a competitive soccer player shaped his approach to discipline, continuous improvement, and growth.   Links: ·         https://www.linkedin.com/in/besfort-behrami/ ·         https://besfortbehrami.com/

You drop off your engagement ring to be repaired. You get a handwritten paper ticket. No confirmation, no updates, no idea when it's coming back. For something with that much value, it's a stressful experience. And for everyday items, that same friction is often enough to make people skip the repair and buy new instead.In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane speaks with Emily Watts, founder and CEO of Coblr, a company building the digital infrastructure to connect and power the repair economy for the first time.Emily spent years in corporate operations, was COO of a scheduling startup that sold to Toast, and then did something unusual: she ran her own mail-in repair business for two years, not as the endgame, but to understand the problem from the inside. What she found was an industry running on software from the early 2000s, brands managing repair manually even at scale, and consumer intent dying because the process was just too much hassle.Her thesis is simple. She compares repair to resale: shopping secondhand used to mean sorting through racks at a charity shop. Technology removed that friction and the market exploded. Emily believes repair is sitting in the same place right now, with the demand already there but held back by a broken experience. Coblr's job is to fix the experience.✨ In this episode:Emily explains why repair is where resale was before technology removed the friction, and why she thinks the same growth is comingWe hear how she ran her own mail-in repair business for two years to understand the problem before building the softwareEmily describes how Coblr gives repair providers purpose-built software to replace legacy tools and automate the administrative work that costs them at least eight hours a week. For consumers, it's a little like a Domino's Pizza Tracker for your repair: status updates, text notifications, and full transparencyBarry and Emily discuss how brands can embed repair into customer service, retail, and online channels without building anything in-houseEmily explains the aligned incentives: brands get loyalty and data, repair providers get consistent revenue, consumers get a modern experience, and items stay out of landfillWe hear about Sal, Coblr's AI diagnostic tool that can assess damage from a photograph and estimate the cost of a fixEmily shares how repair providers in Coblr's network are making 20% more monthly revenue and scaling their teams for the first time

Send us Fan MailA drug company CEO just made the best case yet for why platform choice matters less than most associations think. Marking three years of Sidecar Sync, Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias dig into Pfizer's new playbook for organizing around AI, Thomson Reuters' $40 million bet on building its own legal model instead of renting one, and the six-day mystery of Ox Alpha, an anonymous coding model that became OpenRouter's biggest launch ever. They trace Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla's three moves — structuring data, federating decisions, and building AI fluency — and translate each for associations of any size. They also unpack why Thomson Reuters trained its own model on Alibaba's open-weight Qwen instead of paying frontier labs, and how that differs from deploying a knowledge agent like Betty. Whether you're weighing a custom model or just trying to get your team AI-fluent, this episode lays out what actually moves the needle for associations. 

Is creativity really about coming up with beautiful campaigns—or is it simply finding clever ways to solve difficult problems?In this special in-person episode, Emma and Ruta are joined by the team behind Technology for Marketing and eCommerce Expo to explore this year's theme: Creative Intelligence in Action.We talk about what creativity actually looks like inside a modern marketing team, particularly when budgets are tight, workloads are growing and AI can produce almost anything at the click of a button.Marketing confessions include telling a senior stakeholder that a budget cut felt like “a slap in the face” and repeatedly cloning email campaigns without checking the subject line, sender details or reply-to address. Cue 30,000 emails—and one very unhappy inbox owner.We get into:✅ Why creativity is much broader than design, copy and campaign concepts✅ How problem-solving, communication and data storytelling are creative skills✅ Using AI to brainstorm, sense-check ideas and adapt campaigns across channels✅ The risk of outsourcing your critical thinking and personal judgement to ChatGPT✅ Why audiences are pushing back against AI influencers, artwork and synthetic content✅ How marketers can use AI for learning, admin and the work they genuinely struggle with✅ Efficiency versus effectiveness—and why giving people more tools often just creates more work✅ Why growth requires experimentation, waste and the occasional failed campaign✅ How to test properly instead of changing everything and declaring that marketing “didn't work”✅ Burnout, boundaries and the importance of having colleagues you can have a proper moan withPlus, we discuss parasocial relationships with creators, senior salespeople misusing the term “demand generation,” and why nobody should leave their dinner getting cold after being told it's ready.Technology for Marketing and eCommerce Expo take place on 23–24 September 2026. Emma and Ruta will also be there with the Blame It On Marketing confession wall, ready to hear your marketing sins—and validate how much you hate your boss.#MarketingPodcast #CreativeMarketing #AIinMarketing #MarketingLeadership #MarketingBurnout #TechnologyForMarketing We're Ruta and Emma, the marketing consultants behind Blame it on Marketing. If you're in B2B SaaS or professional services and looking to do marketing that actually drives revenue and profit, we're here for it.Visit blameitonmarketing.com and let's get this show on the road.

Translation is getting the words right. Localization is making the culture fit. In this episode of Content Amplified, Lina Tonk, three-time SaaS CMO and current CMO at Smartling, breaks down why "just translate the website" is the mistake almost every team makes when expanding globally. Lina shares the moment a customer presentation in EMEA lost her completely because the deck used US spelling, and why German buyers take entirely different steps to reach a click than independent, skip-the-meeting US buyers do. She explains how OpenAI's localization team lifted click-through conversion just by reviewing what their buttons said in each region, why localization teams are increasingly landing under marketing and struggling to speak CMO language, and what "true localization" looks like when AI makes it possible to localize down to the individual, not just the region. If global expansion is anywhere on your roadmap, this conversation will change how you think about every word on your website.About LinaLina Tonk is the CMO of Smartling, a localization software company whose customers include OpenAI. She has spent her entire career in B2B SaaS, much of it in PE-backed companies, and has now been a CMO three times at three different SaaS companies. Originally from Colombia, Lina started out as a graphic designer before realizing she was a marketer and storyteller at heart, and she has built marketing teams from a team of one to more than seventy. She measures her legacy by the growth of the people on her teams.Show NotesConnect with Lina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linamtonk/Text us what you think about this episode!

A founder can be burned out enough to want an exit and still not beready to let the business go.Juan Ignacio knows that tension from both sides. He built a B2B SaaSlending platform from Madrid, raised tens of millions in venturecapital along with a $100 million debt facility, and exited four yearsafter launching. The deal created relief, but it also exposed aquestion the transition could only postpone: What do I do with my lifenow?In this episode of Your NEXT, Juan joins Jerome Myers to unpack whathis own near distressed exit taught him about preparation, runway, andthe danger of waiting until the company needs a transaction. He alsoexplains how that experience led him to found L40, a sell side M&Aadvisory firm focused largely on B2B SaaS companies.Together, Jerome and Juan explore why founders sometimes sabotage thetransactions they say they want, how valuation expectations and markettiming affect the likelihood of a sale, and why “I just need themoney” may be a signal to examine the real problem before hiring anadvisor.Juan also explains the Rule of 40, what makes an advisor a genuinefit, and why a healthy company is not automatically a desirableacquisition target.The hardest part of an exit is not always finding a buyer.Sometimes it is helping the founder become willing to leave.Learn more about Juan and L40:https://www.l40.comTake the Exit Readiness Assessment:https://www.exittoexcellence.com/eraLearn more about Jerome Myers:https://www.exittoexcellence.comThank you,Jerome Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week's One Vision Podcast, Theodora Lau hosts Kathryn Outlaw, Co-Founder and COO of Spheros, a B2B SaaS platform that aims to unify client data into a single source of truth, enabling accurate, consented data sharing and supporting reliable AI agents. Kathryn talks about her entrepreneurial journey, the inspiration behind the startup, and the goal of making Spheros as essential as DocuSign for on-boarding.

Send us Fan MailWhen Spirit Airlines went bankrupt, its planes and gates weren't the only assets on the auction block — Google paid $10 million for its data. Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias use that sale to dig into what's actually valuable in AI right now: not bigger models, but the specialized data only your organization holds. They trace the Spirit Airlines deal, unpack OpenAI's Astra model solving open math problems that had stumped researchers for decades, and explain Neoclouds, the specialized companies renting out the GPU capacity behind the AI boom. They also break down Google's fast, cheap Gemini 3.7 Flash release and why it might be all the model most associations need. Amith makes the case that associations sitting on rich member and industry data have a real opportunity to build and monetize AI products, not just cut internal costs. 

What if you could beat a higher offer without paying more? Justin Butlion knows how. He’s completed five micro SaaS acquisitions, built a 10-app portfolio, and spends roughly three hours a week managing it. His biggest deal? $98,000 with 50% seller financing. And that’s where this gets interesting. Justin isn’t trying to outbid everyone. He’s learning how to become the buyer sellers want to choose. Move fast. Understand the seller. Know the industry. Structure the deal so it works for both sides. And seller financing? Justin calls it a powerful weapon. He reveals how he negotiated deals with financing at under 2% interest, why developers often make surprisingly motivated sellers, and how the right terms can let you acquire more without putting all your cash on the line. But the real edge starts before you make an offer. Justin breaks down exactly what he looks for in a micro SaaS: B2B customers, sticky recurring revenue, low churn, simple tech, built-in distribution, and minimal operational risk. He also walks through how he analyzes the SaaS funnel to spot opportunities that the headline numbers might completely miss. Then there’s the part most acquisition conversations skip. What happens after you buy? Justin gets brutally honest about cash flow getting squeezed by seller payments, the hidden cost of managing multiple small businesses, his costly lessons with U.S. business structures, and why bigger acquisitions may ultimately make more sense. Because the goal isn't to own the most businesses. It’s to build the most valuable portfolio without giving up your life in the process. If you’re buying micro SaaS, negotiating acquisitions, or looking for ways to win deals without simply offering the highest price, this conversation is packed with strategies you can actually use.

Struggling to scale your ads? Spending more won't fix the problem. Let's figure out why your growth strategies are not working. Talk to us at https://www.tiereleven.com/apply You've hired agency after agency, and no matter what they try, you can't scale your Google Ads. You don't have a Google problem. It's a creative strategy problem. Until you fix demand creation, no amount of campaign optimization is going to get you unstuck.In this episode, I break down a real client situation: a 14-year-old B2B SaaS company spending upwards of $200K a month on Google Search with no good answer for why growth has stalled. I'll walk you through why Google is a demand-capture platform, not a demand-creation one, and why 80% of any market lives in what I call the "zone of indifference." We also look at why the real fix lives in creative strategy on Meta, programmatic, and connected TV, not another Google audit. If your cost of acquiring new customers keeps climbing no matter what you spend, this one's for you.In this episode:- Why Google Search has a demand capture ceiling- The difference between demand capture and demand creation channels - Why branded search clicks cost 10-20x less than non-branded keywords - The "zone of indifference" and why it's 80% of your market - Why the agency rotation trap makes Google Ads more expensive- Why hook rate and hold rate matter more than landing page optimization - The B2B creative mistake of writing ads for users instead of buyers - How messaging extraction uncovers what decision-makers care about - Three questions to ask your agency if your Google spend has stalledMentioned in the Episode: Case Study on Optimizing Ad Spend: https://perpetualtraffic.com/podcast/episode-801-from-2-5m-to-4m-a-month-ad-spend-barely-changed-heres-why/ Tier 11's Data Suite: https://www.tiereleven.com/what-we-do/data-suiteJoin Ralph Burns and John Moran every Friday for The Ad Lab Live: https://www.youtube.com/@Tier11/streams Listen to This Episode on Your Favorite Podcast Channel:Follow and listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/perpetual-traffic/id1022441491 Follow and listen on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/59lhtIWHw1XXsRmT5HBAuK Subscribe and watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@perpetual_traffic?sub_confirmation=1We Appreciate Your Support!Visit our website: https://perpetualtraffic.com/ Connect with Ralph Burns: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphburns Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ralphhburns/ Hire Tier11 - https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now Mentioned in this episode:https://perpetualtraffic.com/advertise-with-us/

In this week's One Vision Podcast, Theodora Lau hosts Kathryn Outlaw, Co-Founder and COO of Spheros, a B2B SaaS platform that aims to unify client data into a single source of truth, enabling accurate, consented data sharing and supporting reliable AI agents. Kathryn talks about her entrepreneurial journey, the inspiration behind the startup, and the goal of making Spheros as essential as DocuSign for onboarding.

What is the highest-returning ad channel most brands ignore? Podcast advertising. On average, podcast ads return 4.2x on ad spend, compared to roughly 3.6x for social media advertising, with TV and display lower still. Yet half of all podcast ad spots go unsold. In this episode of Test. Optimize. Scale., host Jason Fishman, CEO of Digital Niche Agency (DNA), interviews Cam Pritchard, CEO and founder of SpotsNow. SpotsNow is a podcast advertising marketplace that lets brands research shows, see which podcasts their competitors advertise on, plan a campaign in five minutes, and book host-read ads directly, the way Thumbtack simplified booking home services. Cam Pritchard is a former Thumbtack product manager who founded New Zealand's first textbook rental platform and worked with Travis and Jason Kelce on the fan engagement platform for their New Heights podcast before founding SpotsNow. Questions this episode answers: Why do podcast ads outperform social, TV, and display advertising? What ROAS can advertisers expect from podcast advertising? (Average: 4.2x) Why do host-read podcast ads convert better than produced ads? How did BetterHelp build its business on podcast advertising? (Roughly $100M per year in spend) How do audio pixels track podcast ad conversions to the dollar? What is the fastest way to plan a podcast ad campaign? (Five minutes on SpotsNow vs. a full day manually) How do advertisers buy unsold podcast inventory at a discount? (SpotsNow's last-minute booking model, similar to Hotel Tonight) Which industries advertise on podcasts? (Consumer brands, B2B SaaS, legal AI, fintech, retail) Why should B2B brands advertise on podcasts? (Executives and decision makers listen; companies like Vanta and Oracle buy the channel) How do you optimize a podcast ad campaign? (Portfolio approach: identify top-performing shows, cut underperformers, scale with lookalike shows) Why would a health brand like Oura Ring advertise on true crime podcasts? (Audience demographics beat category matching) Connect with Cam Pritchard and SpotsNow: Website: spotsnow.io LinkedIn:   / campbellpritchard   Connect with Jason Fishman, host of Test. Optimize. Scale.: LinkedIn:   / jafishman   Connect with Digital Niche Agency (DNA), the growth marketing agency behind this podcast: Website: www.digitalnicheagency.com Test. Optimize. Scale. is a weekly podcast from Digital Niche Agency covering growth marketing, advertising, capital raising, and business strategy, hosted by Jason Fishman. Subscribe for new episodes every week. CHAPTER TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Who is Cam Pritchard and what is SpotsNow? 0:49 - From New Zealand's first textbook rental platform to Thumbtack 2:02 - Working with Travis and Jason Kelce on the New Heights fan platform 2:59 - Why half of all podcast ad spots go unsold 4:17 - Why host-read podcast ads convert better than other ad formats 6:16 - How BetterHelp built its business on $100M a year in podcast ads 7:48 - Why trust is the marketing currency of the AI era 9:23 - How SpotsNow turns podcast ads into direct response advertising 10:54 - Buying unsold premium podcast inventory at last-minute discounts 12:05 - How audio pixels track podcast ads to the dollar 15:14 - How to plan a podcast ad campaign in five minutes 16:47 - Why instant booking changes podcast advertising 18:54 - Are podcast ads better for prospecting or mid-funnel? 20:50 - Podcast retargeting and B2B lead identification 23:00 - The portfolio approach to buying podcast ads 26:02 - Which industries advertise on podcasts: consumer, SaaS, legal AI 28:16 - Podcast ad ROAS vs. social, TV, and display: the numbers 29:57 - How to run your first podcast ad test campaign 33:17 - How to optimize a podcast ad campaign that is underperforming 35:32 - How to scale podcast advertising with lookalike shows 37:21 - Why Oura Ring should advertise on true crime podcasts 39:13 - Where to find Cam Pritchard and SpotsNow

High income is not the same thing as wealth. For a revenue leader, the bigger question is whether the next five years should be spent maximizing cash compensation, or whether the next 20 should be spent building and owning an asset.Sam Jacobs is the founder and CEO of Pavilion, co-host of the Topline podcast, and author of Kind Folks Finish First. He has spent his career building and leading go-to-market organizations, from early-stage companies to global sales and customer-success teams.In this conversation, Sam Jacobs and Sam Silverman unpack the economics behind revenue leadership: the short tenure of a CRO, the value created between $1 million and $10 million in revenue, the practical limitations of employee stock options, and the lifestyle pressure that often follows a breakout year in sales. They also compare short-term cash optimization with long-term career development, outline a diligence process for evaluating sales roles, and consider what AI changes - and does not change - about complex human buying decisions.In this conversation:Why senior revenue roles become less secure as their impact growsHow operators can create enterprise value without sharing proportionately in the upsideWhy fast-growing AI companies and slower-growth software businesses face radically different valuation marketsWhy there is no separate set of unit economics for AIHow stock-option exercise costs and taxes complicate employee equityWhy lifestyle inflation can turn exceptional income into a higher break-even pointHow a large annual commission can mimic some of the discipline of a liquidity eventWhy ownership becomes more attractive as the time horizon expandsHow to diligence a sales team before accepting an offerWhy a difficult product can sometimes teach more than an easy quotaHow compensation plans change after a seller breaks themWhy AI may increase productivity without removing the human saleHow Pavilion is being built as an enduring, cash-generating institutionTopics covered: revenue leadership, sales compensation, CRO tenure, employee equity, stock options, lifestyle inflation, business ownership, entrepreneurship, B2B SaaS, unit economics, go-to-market strategy, AI and sales, career planning, wealth creationGuest: Sam Jacobs, founder and CEO of Pavilion  https://www.joinpavilion.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/Newsletter: https://www.mechanicsofmoney.co  Website: https://silvermancapital.comSubscribe to Mechanics of Money for weekly conversations on private markets, alternative investments, and the mechanics behind building real wealth.#salesleadership #revenueleadership #businessownership #entrepreneurship #equity #b2bsaas #futureofwork #mechanicsofmoney

In this episode of Strap On Your Boots, I explore why I've stopped treating five-year business plans as predictions of where a company will actually end up. After years of building startups, I've learned that customers, technology, competition, and entire markets can change faster than any spreadsheet can anticipate. I share how Vengo AI evolved from consumer to B2B SaaS to enterprise, why I now plan more specifically for the near term, and how founders can balance having a long-term direction with staying flexible enough to respond when the market tells them something new.

Michael Gants, founder and CEO of Encore, breaks down how apps can turn unused "streak" and celebration screens into a new revenue stream, without a single ad or paywall. He shares how brands like Disney, Uber, and Apple are paying to reach users in their happiest moments, and why founders should be more afraid of a broken CAC/LTV ratio than of running a monetization experiment.

The introvert who was told he looked too free-spirited, and whose software now runs ordering for the UK's biggest food brands. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/founded. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. "This poor lady had to say to me, 'There are concerns that you look a bit free-spirited.' They were worried I was suddenly gonna disappear and become a yoga teacher in Goa or something." Simon Bos has spent more than 20 years building other people's startups at Gravitywell, his Bristol venture studio, watching entrepreneurs' hearts break over cheap builds that couldn't be rescued, and learning exactly what separates the products that work from the ones that die. Then he found his own gap: one of the UK's largest food-to-go manufacturers taking thousands of daily sandwich orders through a call centre. "Three BLTs, two chicken and bacon... no, three chicken and bacon." On the phone. Every day. That absurdity became Mezze, the B2B ordering platform for food manufacturers. Since we recorded this conversation, it has grown into exactly what Simon describes planning here: the platform now handles over £10M of orders a month for names like Samworth Brothers, Pieminister and The Real Wrap Co. It has expanded into AI features and the US market. The playbook he lays out in this episode is the playbook that worked. Along the way: a prime example of being an introvert founder, from months without networking to discovering that one-to-many content is the introvert's cheat code, plus the no-suit mantra, the three-month reset in Laos, and the client work (including the ADHD Love app) that reminds him why any of it matters. 3 KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Cheap builds break hearts. Simon has had to tell founders "there's no way of fixing this, it's gone." Under-investing in your foundation doesn't save money; a bad build is often unrescuable, and rebuilding costs more than doing it properly once. 2. Introversion is a design constraint, not a defect. Simon went months without networking and felt guilty. The fix wasn't forcing himself into rooms; it was one-to-many: content, talks, a strong product. Build the version of visibility that suits your wiring. 3. Perspective is a tool you have to schedule. From regular stakeholder mapping to three months in Laos, Simon's pattern is to step back deliberately. When the day-to-day consumes you, you can't see the business; distance is what shows you where you actually sit in the ecosystem. WHAT WE COVER - 25+ years of Gravitywell: what building hundreds of products teaches you about founders - "Entrepreneurs' hearts breaking": the truth about unrescuable builds - The call-centre absurdity which became Mezze - Spotting your place in the supply chain instead of trying to be the big thing - The introvert founder: networking guilt, one-to-many, and deep 1:1s over room-working - "You look a bit free-spirited": appearance bias, procurement, and the no-suit mantra - The ADHD Love app, body doubling, and the messages that say "it changed my life" - Three months in Laos and what stepping back showed him - Asking for help with an explicit ask, and failure as raw material - Simon's question for you: is introversion a barrier or a gift?

→ Wanna use SEO to generate revenue?  Book a call here  https://www.breakingb2b.com/book-a-call   Episode #497 -  In this episode, Sam maps out his own founder's journey - from grinding out B2B SaaS cold calls solo, to building a compounding content and SEO engine that now drives $300k/month in bootstrapped revenue. Sam details how & why cold calling can't scale as a standalone strategy anymore and lays out the specific inbound system he has used to get to where BB2B is today!    Here's what you get with this one:

Send us Fan MailAI may feel like it arrived overnight, but its foundations have been decades in the making. In part one of a refreshed Foundations of AI series, Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias unpack the essential concepts association leaders need to understand in today's rapidly evolving AI landscape. They trace the convergence of compute, data, and algorithms that fueled the generative AI boom, challenge assumptions about whether we've already reached some definitions of AGI, and explain the difference between training and inference. They also break down large language models, multimodality, open versus closed models, and the weights that form the heart of artificial neural networks. Along the way, Amith makes the case for building flexibility into your AI strategy as models and inference providers continue to change at breakneck speed. Whether you're new to AI or ready for a fundamentals refresh, this episode provides a practical foundation for understanding what's happening under the hood—and why it matters for associations. 

Ricardo Sequerra Amram⁠ takes the stage following ⁠Point Nine⁠ after Point Nine was named Firm of the Year 2025 in the sub-€200 million category at the EUVC Summit & Awards Show 2026.The award takes a holistic view of a venture firm, considering financial performance, firm building, founder and LP value creation, impact, diversity, transparency and fairness.Ricardo is a Partner at Point Nine, a thesis-driven early-stage venture firm based in Europe and investing globally. Point Nine operates as an equal partnership and has remained focused on leading pre-seed and seed rounds, with each partner making only a small number of new commitments each year.In the discussion, Ricardo explains why the firm has deliberately resisted scaling into later stages, how its thesis has evolved from B2B SaaS and marketplaces towards AI and other emerging technologies, and why staying close to what is genuinely new matters at seed.He also shares how Point Nine thinks about identifying founders before the opportunity is obvious, from the “magnetism” of people who attract talent, capital and customers to three qualities the firm looks for more deeply: insight, obsession and taste.The EUVC Summit & Awards Show returns in 2027. Find out more and secure your spot here⁠.

https://youtu.be/_OpJcRFbACk Abhi Jadhav, Founder and CEO of Bay Leaf Digital and Founder of Brazenly, helps B2B SaaS leaders create operational rigor while embracing AI, innovation, and disciplined execution. Driven by the freedom to experiment, anticipate change, and take the road less traveled, Abhi builds businesses that combine human expertise with AI-powered systems to help teams remain competitive and shape their own futures. In this conversation, Abhi introduces The Operational Rigor Framework—Aggregate To-Dos, Import Them into a System, Prioritize Weekly, and Execute. He explains how turning commitments into organized, prioritized tasks prevents work from falling through the cracks and improves execution across client projects, internal initiatives, and personal responsibilities. Abhi also discusses keeping humans in the loop when deploying AI agents, responding to rapid changes in the SaaS market, and driving growth through visibility, exceptional people, and innovation. — Create Operational Rigueur with Abhi Jadhav Good day. Steve Preda here, and today I’m joined by Abhi Jadhav, founder and CEO of Bay Leaf Digital, a B2B SaaS marketing agency he’s run since 2013. And he’s also the founder of Brazenly, an AI agent orchestration platform he’s building for marketing teams. Abhi, welcome to the show.  Thank you for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.  Well, great to have you here. And I’m super interested in how you are evolving your business and your focus on SaaS companies, which is very interesting. But I’d like to start with the question, your personal why. So how are you contributing to human flourishing? What is your personal why, and how do you manifest it in your business, in Bay Leaf Digital?  Yeah. So I gave this some thought. It’s been several years since I’ve been running the agency, so it took me back a few years to figure out, well, why did I even start this? So I’m going to date myself, and this is way back when I was in business school. One of my dear friends and classmates at the time, she pointed to me when she was asked, “Who’s most likely to strike it out on their own and run their own business?” And I thought that was really funny at that time because I had no desire to be my own entrepreneur or guy running your own business, et cetera. I was through and through a corporate guy.  And a few years later, I realized that I don’t really get energized by playing corporate games to climb the ladder. I prefer freedom to do things and to experiment. And I love taking the road less traveled, and it’s not just speak, it’s actually doing. Yeah. There’s a sign here. It’s a Jeep sign that says, “Road ends and fun begins.” And that kind of encapsulates who I am, really. Yeah. So when I saw this sign, I’m like, “This is me. It needs to go on my wall.” Okay. So that’s my personal why, how I ended up doing what I’m doing.  So how does it manifest in Bay Leaf or even Brazenly? What is that road that has not been traveled yet that you are embarking on?  So it is more about being able to anticipate what is coming and being able to be ready for it. I think that is primarily the difference, or to me, that is being my own business owner, it allows me to do that. So moving from an agency and seeing what is coming, AI is going to touch all of us. It already has in so many different ways.  So understanding where we are going and being able to do something about it rather than wait for someone else to come along and tell us, “You guys are now obsolete, and we are now moving on to something else.” So it allows me to chart my own path and be able to control, to a certain extent, I can’t say 100%, to a certain extent, what our business destiny is going to be.  So where are we going? What is your vision of the direction?  AI has tremendous power, right? And we are still very early, in the early stages of where it’s going to take us. But I’m a firm believer that the human in the loop is extremely important, and that we need to shape AI systems, our posture, in a manner that we maximize the use of AI while making sure that it is being run for the benefit of humans. So the way we approach it is, yes, we will adopt AI, but at the same time, we will never compromise on human in the loop in that process.  So our approach is, let’s take things that are easily automated. Let’s take things that we would otherwise not have been able to do. I have a framework on how we deploy AI, and the lowest part of that framework is obvious processes need to be automated. Top part of that framework is things that you could not ever do because it was impossible, impractical to do, automate that.  But in all of that, there is a certain amount of co-piloting or piloting that is needed in order to get valuable outcomes. Where I see us going is we will become pilots or co-pilots with extremely efficient and informed agents that will do the work, but they will not do the work exactly as is needed unless there’s a human in the loop that’s guiding it, right?  Yeah.  And I foresee this for the next several years. At some point, and this evolves all the time, but that’s kind of our posture at the moment.  Very interesting. So basically, AI agents do the work, or much of the repetitive work, a big part of the work, and the humans are directing the agents. Is that your vision?  Humans are directing the agents as well as checking on agent outputs, basically being the guide on making sure that things get done the way they should be done. So more and more, we are leaning on domain expertise, people who know what needs to be done, have that knowledge to be able to man these agents today.  Yeah. That is fascinating. So you mentioned that you have a framework. So what is your framework?  I have multiple frameworks. Let me talk about probably the most fundamental, foundational framework that can be used by anyone and everyone. Again, going back to my days before the agency, when I was in the corporate world, we would do 360 feedbacks. And at one point, one of the feedback I got, obviously it was constructive feedback, but it was that, “Abhi’s got a great team and he’s a great leader, but sometimes the team does not follow through on things that we’re committed to.”  I looked at that feedback and I said, “This is not something that my team needs to fix. This is something that I need to fix. It’s not a team problem.” So we took that weakness and we turned that into a core strength. That is one of my foundational approaches to the way we work, the way we run the business. I’ll break it down for you. Here’s what we really do.  Yeah, please.  So you and I are having a conversation. Something comes out of that conversation and I tell you, “Hey, I’ll follow up. I’ll get back to you.” And great, I’ll make a note of it. We have 100 different conversations like this throughout the day. I talk to my clients, I talk to my team. Everyone has something that they need or they’re going to offer. So there’s a pile of things that need to be done.  And without having operational discipline around it, things fall through the cracks, right? So a very simple manifestation of that is, hey, make a list. Make a list of things. But there’s a lot more to that. Yeah, you can make a list. You can write it in pencil on a pad, and then it gathers dust, and then you look at it after a few months, you’re like, “Oh, I never really got back to this person, didn’t really do it.” So what we’ve done is we’ve evolved that into an operational rigor where nothing, almost nothing, ever falls through the cracks.  We talk, we’ll organize our thoughts. We’ll put it—it doesn’t matter. It’s a framework, right? It’s not a set of rules. So people might take down notes. They might use Zoom meeting transcripts, whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, we are constantly putting together a list of to-dos. And that’s never enough because at the end of the week, you need to make sure that you’re working on the most important things. So we’ll go through a prioritization process.  I go through it, my team goes through it, and then that defines what we do in the following week. It’s very agile-like, but it’s not quite agile. It’s a set of tasks that eventually kind of come together for a greater purpose. So we’re looking and we are prioritizing and going, “Which is important, which is not?” So the conversations that we have with our clients, I have internally with the team, the conversations are never about, “Hey, whatever happened to that thing?” It never happens. The conversations are more about, “We talked about this last week. Here’s where we are.  Here’s why we are going to either change course, not do it anymore, or we have found a different way of doing it.” In terms of just an extremely important skill, whether you’re a business owner, in the corporate world, to me, operational rigor that leads to disciplined execution is absolutely key.  So what are the steps to this operational rigor framework? How do you actually do it? What are three to five steps or elements that will allow us to communicate to our listeners and maybe for them to try it out?  Yeah. Let’s just list them out. So the first thing is just pulling together the to-dos, right? So whether it’s from OneNote or a pad or transcripts, at the end of the day, set aside 30 minutes, an hour max, typically towards the end of the week, to allow you to go through that list of things that you want to do, okay? Put them into a system that allows you to keep track of the status.  We use our systems. We use a tool called ClickUp. We’ve used many, many different tools, but today we use that tool. We are able to change priorities, we are able to increase or reduce the size of those tasks, and we are able to collaborate with people on those tasks. So we’ll organize that, spend an hour or so, put it in ClickUp in the agile framework, if you will, and then we execute throughout the week. Monday morning, I look at—there’s never a question about, “Hey, what am I going to do today?” Right?  There’s never a question of, “Oh my God, there’s such a long list of things to do. How am I ever going to get through?” By the time Monday morning hits, I know exactly what I’m doing. By the time Tuesday morning hits, I know how much I accomplished on Monday and what I’m accomplishing on Tuesday. So it becomes very well-oiled, and it’s execution through and through without letting anything fall through the cracks.  Okay.  And this is not just me. The entire team behaves this way, and that is what is different, right? This was my feedback I got so many years ago, is follow-through is not there. Okay, we turned that around, made it a strength.  Love it. So aggregate the to-dos, import them into the system, prioritize, and execute.  And execute. And throughout the week, if you need to reprioritize, reprioritize. It’s okay.  And this pertains to your client work, or that also pertains to your internal projects that are improving your business, your own business?  It pertains to everything. It’s fundamental to everything we do, right? When we are improving our own business, we break it down to a series of steps, and then we prioritize the steps. For example, Steve, I could have come to your podcast seeing that, oh, I have a meeting at 8:00 AM on Friday. Let me just make sure that I have a shirt on and come to it.  But the way I approached it is the same operational rigor, which is, okay, sometime during this week, I’m going to make sure that this wall behind me is clean. I’m going to make sure that I have my talking points, and I’m going to go through a dress rehearsal myself before I come to you. So this operational rigor offers a much higher quality of output.  So it’s not just client-facing, it’s not internal. It’s in everything we do, and that includes my personal life too. To a fault, I use lists to organize my life, but it’s the same concept. It’s not as rigorous, but it is, I have this big to-do, let me break it down into a smaller to-do, knock it out, move to the next one.  Love it. That’s great. It’s a good framework. We can call it the Operational Rigor Framework, perhaps.  Operational rigor? Yeah, absolutely.  Yeah. Okay. So let’s switch gears here, and I’m really curious what drives growth in your businesses, in Bay Leaf Digital and your new business as well?  Okay, so we’re a marketing agency, but more specifically, we are a SaaS marketing agency. So we are niched down into SaaS, and then we niched down further. We are a B2B SaaS marketing agency, right? So it’s a very specific niche that we operate in. But some of the forces that affect us are the same as other agencies, other marketing agencies. So we live on this edge of constant change. And let me explain what these changes are. Number one, marketing channel change.  You’ve got Google, Meta, LinkedIn, you name it. They’re all making changes to their platforms all the time, right? Some of my marketers tell me they go in one day into the Meta advertising platform, and the next day they see something completely different. A feature has changed, and what they thought was working yesterday no longer works. So we are living on this edge of constant change as far as the marketing channels are concerned. Then it’s very surprising how much the economy actually affects us.  Because we serve a startup audience, B2B SaaS startup audience, whether there is money flowing in the economy or not actually affects us quite a bit. Post-Covid, when suddenly there was contraction, we felt it. So there’s that external force. And then our competitors are not sitting down napping. They’re also on top of these things. So we have these three external forces affecting us all the time. So for us to live and thrive on this edge, we have to be forward-looking, and we have to be extremely methodical. It goes back to that operational rigor.  Imagine you’ve got 20 different things coming at you. You have to figure out, “Hey, what is the most important thing here, and how do I respond to that? How do I respond to the change?” Being able to anticipate, being able to be forward-looking, and responding has allowed us to weather storms. It was post-Covid, obviously Covid too, but post-Covid was more important from a business perspective. And then you may have heard about this in maybe other conversations, when Claude released their latest version of Claude Code, they unleashed what is called the SaaS apocalypse, meaning SaaS companies, right?  SaaS companies are outdated. They no longer are needed because you can create your own app and you don’t need a SaaS company. So companies that help SaaS companies such as ourselves, B2B SaaS marketing agencies, were in that first line of companies to get affected. But we saw that coming. We saw that coming a year before, right? And we were working, we were preparing for it. So six, eight months in, it doesn’t hurt us as much as maybe it has hurt other companies. These are the things that help us grow. Yeah. Go ahead.  No, no. I’m just wondering, I understand that you are very agile. I mean, you use an agile system, but you’re also agile in the way you are responding to the market changes. You adjusted well with the SaaS apocalypse, or whatever it’s called. But just because you are avoiding a major landmine doesn’t mean it’s going to grow your business. So I wonder what drives the growth beyond being agile. So as the market changes, does it automatically help you create more revenue?  That’s a good question. Yes. Yes. So I’m probably talking very big picture. So let me convert that into how this actually drives growth for us. So a change happens, we respond to that change. Sure, it helps us survive. But think about a change in the LLM, the large language models such as Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, the way they process information and the way they present that information to you.  Because we see that, we respond to it, we are able to make sure that when, Steve, maybe you go into Claude and you ask for, “Hey, I want to work with a SaaS marketing agency,” we make sure that we are on top over there because we are responding to changes that are happening in the back end, right? So it’s not just thriving, it’s making sure that you know what is happening so that you can always be at the forefront. Wherever people go to find you, you need to be there. But I’m simplifying this significantly. So that is just responding, still responding. The thing that really drives growth for us internally is we find and work with really, really good people, great team members. We put in a lot of effort to find these great people, and when we find them, we hold onto them. This did not happen overnight. Finding great people is extremely hard, especially for a small business. So we came up with a methodology to actually finding those people. I looked at various methods, but the one method that appealed to me was this method called Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, these two authors.  I started there, but then I evolved that framework significantly over time to where it is now a core strength. So whenever we hire people, we know exactly what are the areas of strength they have, what are the areas that we’ll need to help them improve in. And so we know who is coming in and how we can best leverage them. So once we know that, we’re able to move forward fairly easily. So that’s one of our core things that helps us.  So what drives growth is, if I hear it correctly, what drives growth is staying visible with all the algorithm changes and the platform changes. You’re going towards more AI visibility as opposed to SEO visibility. And then also being able to recruit those people who will be able to do the work that is going to respond to the market demand.  Exactly. And the third part, the third lever to all of this is innovation. I mean, you would think that an agency would not innovate, but there’s innovation happening all the time in various things. Whether it’s marketing approaches, whether it’s putting together a marketing operational platform or whatever else, you have to innovate to stay ahead. So I would say these are the three things that help us grow.  Yeah. Love it. That’s great. So visibility, people attraction, and innovation. That’s the three legs of the stool. Yeah. So what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now?  One thing we’re trying to actively figure out? That’s such an interesting question. There’s so many things happening all the time, right? So let me pick one that comes right to mind. We’re trying to figure out whether we should raise capital or not. Because we look at some of the greatest recent successes in AI platforms and companies, and they’ve come from one-person to five-person teams. So the question now becomes, when there is no technology moat, there is no reason to hire 100 people to thrive, what is the role of capital?  So that is something that I’m debating internally about what should we do here. Do we need it? Do we not need it? And there are so many other things that we work on all the time. But I would say this is, at the moment, today, June or July 2026, what’s top of mind for me.  Yeah. It’s a great question. If you don’t need more people and it’s a professional service that you’re providing, you’re innovating with your own resources and AI, then what is the capital need of the business?  Right.  So to what extent can a business grow today without adding people? Is it possible to scale a business without adding people?  The popular word on the street is grow a business without people. I don’t think that’s possible, to grow a business without people. If you have domain experts and you have people with the right traits, you can grow with a very small company. And those traits are things like: you need to be a critical thinker. You need to be able to question and analyze things a bit differently. You need to have domain expertise.  Most important for me, you need to have operational rigor. And when you have these kinds of people, yeah, I think you can grow with a very small team, but not a one-person company. Maybe in a few years, maybe in a few decades, that might be possible. But today, you can significantly speed up what you can do using AI, but you definitely need people who can manage those systems, who can squeeze the most out of those systems. You need those people manning those systems.  I also wonder if there is a threshold below which you don’t actually have a business. If you don’t have enough people to reduce your dependency on any single individual, including yourself, then do you actually have a business, or is it more like a professional practice?  Right. Right. Yeah. So it’s like you design a system and you just deploy it and it just runs on its own. So is that the business? I don’t know. It’s not really a business at that point. It’s just a tool that you put out there in the universe and it’s doing its thing. It’s a very philosophical question about where we end up as a result.  Yeah. And then things are changing all the time, so can you just rely on the system rejuvenating itself, or do you still need human energy to keep improving and keeping that business competitive in a fast-changing environment?  Right. It’s a question of the autonomous agents, right? How autonomous can autonomous agents really be today, and where does that lead us eventually? Does it lead us into AGI? We’ll see. But today, no. I would say strongly that autonomous agents are good within certain guardrails.  You can provide a lot more freedom for them to do it as long as they don’t break certain rules, and that’s where humans come in to make sure that those guardrails are maintained and the guiding happens. In today’s world, I don’t think that business exists without any employees. In tomorrow’s world, it might. Yeah. And that changes the economy, that changes everything.  Yeah. That’s an even bigger question.  Yeah.  Well, if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?  Learning curves. I would love to skip past learning curves. And by that I mean, even when we find the best people with all the best traits, frequently what we see is we end up having to train people on what we know and what we know works, and that takes several months. It takes several months to get there. So it’d be amazing if I had a magic wand and day one they’re ready to go.  Yeah. So you’re deploying these agents for SaaS companies. Who is the ideal client that you would like to contact you when they hear this podcast?  We serve B2B SaaS companies, right? And so we work typically with companies who have what is called product-market fit, meaning their value has been articulated and they’re looking to grow. Those are the companies that we normally work with. And as we deploy Brazenly, our marketing operations orchestration tool, we’re looking to help marketing teams. And those teams could be a three-person team.  It could be a 20-person team. It doesn’t matter. It is built to scale. But that part of the business is definitely focused more on team productivity or automation of marketing teams as opposed to an individual. That is what ChatGPT and others are focused on, individual productivity. We focus on the team productivity aspect of it.  So you need companies that have figured out their product and they already have multiple people in marketing that need the support?  We normally work with companies that have figured out their value proposition and are looking to grow, so they don’t have, this is on the marketing agency side, right? So they don’t have all the people in place in order for them to grow, and that’s where we come in. We come in as a marketing department, and we will help take over all those marketing functions. That is on the agency side.  On the AI platform side, it’s a slightly different focus, which is we are helping ourselves. We are helping ourselves become more efficient as we help our clients. That’s one. But for someone else to use a marketing platform, they need to have a marketing team that can actually leverage the marketing operations platform. So there’s the agency focus, and then there’s the Brazenly marketing platform focus.  So you have the done-for-you version, which is the professional service as an agency, and then you have the DIY version, which is them using your platform to do it themselves, basically.  You’re exactly right. So there’s the done-for-you, there’s the done-with-you, and then there’s the DIY, right? Okay. Done-for-you is the agency. The done-with-you is, as much as there’s promise with AI platforms, you still need to build the agents. You still need to deploy them. That is the done-with-you, which is we’ll consult with marketing teams to help them deploy these agents. And the DIY is, here’s the AI operations platform. Go and use it yourself. That is the DIY. Okay. So you’re exactly right.  Yeah. Love it. Love it. That’s a great slate of services. So if people would like to learn more, I get it, they should not go to LinkedIn, but where should they go? Where can they find you?  Yeah. So you can always contact me on various platforms, Twitter, email, Instagram, and such. But if you want to get in touch, I would say the best way is to just drop me an email. My email is aj@bayleafdigital.com.  So Abhi Jadhav, the CEO and Founder of Bayleaf Digital and Brazenly. So if you’d like to accelerate your marketing, if you’re a B2B SaaS company and you want to accelerate your marketing, whether it’s complete done-for-you, done-with-you, or DIY, Bayleaf Digital and Brazenly can take care of you. So reach out to Abhi Jadhav on Twitter, email, or through the website, bayleafdigital.com.  And if you enjoyed this episode, then make sure you subscribe and you follow us because we come out with a couple of interviews every week with exciting entrepreneurs who are building great businesses. So thanks for coming, Abhi, and sharing your wisdom, and thanks for listening.  Thank you very much for having me, Steve. It was a pleasure.  Important Links: Abhi's LinkedIn Abhi's website Abhi's email: aj@bayleafdigital.com

Send us Fan MailMeta and NVIDIA are turning up the heat in the open-weight AI race, while Anthropic is taking a very different approach by watermarking Claude-generated content. Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias unpack what these moves mean for associations, from choosing models and inference providers to avoiding lock-in at the agent harness layer. They also explore why AI models are becoming increasingly commoditized, where proprietary models may still have an edge, and why Claude's new watermarking strategy probably isn't a foolproof solution for detecting AI-generated work. Plus, Amith shares lessons from Blue Cypress's latest AI hackathon, including how associations can use focused offsites to accelerate adoption and generate new ideas, and the hosts discuss a more productive approach to AI-generated submissions: using AI to evaluate quality, relevance, and originality rather than trying to ban it outright. 

Today, we're joined by Alex Yakubovich, co-founder and CEO of Levelpath, the AI-native procurement platform transforming how global enterprises manage indirect spend. We talk about:If software apps must become autonomous to be successful in the futureUsing AI to help build softwareDoes SaaS have a future, or strictly AI as a service?Why the question, “Is SaaS dead” is mootHow some SaaS pricing models can feel icky

Brook Schaaf, co-founder of FMTC and author of the new book Affiliate Hypotheses, joins Tye to make the case that affiliate marketing might be the internet's best — and sometimes only — way to monetize the open web. They dig into why walled gardens like Google and Meta get outsized credit for conversions, and why AI search is putting the open web's survival at risk.

In this episode of Strap On Your Boots, I explore one of the biggest advantages startups have over much larger competitors: speed. Drawing from my experience building companies and the evolution of Vengo AI from a consumer product to B2B SaaS and eventually enterprise, I explain how small teams can listen to customers, test ideas, pivot, and respond to the market incredibly quickly. Large companies may have more money, people, and resources, but all of that size comes with organizational weight. Sometimes the startup that can adapt in days has an advantage that money simply can't buy.

Vikram Chalana, CEO and founder of Pictory, joins the show to unpack how his AI video platform went from 50 customers to 5,000 in just 60 days — and why the breakthrough came from changing the market, not the product. He digs into Pictory's State of Video report (AI adoption has no Silicon Valley bias — Florida and Indiana are leading users), the design principles that keep Pictory out of the "timeline" trap of tools like Premiere, and what's next: code-generated, interactive video that could reinvent how content gets made and consumed.

Amanda Dyson is the Chief Marketing Officer at DemandTec, a Commercial Trade Intelligence platform connecting retailers and CPG partners through one shared system. With more than 20 years of B2B software marketing experience, she specializes in enterprise technology, supply chain, pipeline generation, and go-to-market strategy. She leads DemandTec's marketing organization and shapes how the market understands its retail trade intelligence platform. Before joining DemandTec, Amanda held marketing leadership roles at FourKites, Blue Yonder, and e2open. In this episode… B2B buyers are surrounded by polished content and increasingly similar brand voices. As AI makes publishing easier, how can a brand remain recognizable and trustworthy? Amanda Dyson, an enterprise B2B SaaS marketing leader with deep experience in pipeline generation, says the answer is an authentic voice supported by a clear point of view. Instead of using AI to manufacture finished thought leadership, she recommends using it for ideation, then bringing people back in to add judgment, originality, and trust. Amanda encourages marketers to focus on the audiences they can serve best, take bolder positions, and connect creative work to measurable business outcomes. Together, these practices give buyers something specific to believe in rather than simply more content to consume. In this episode of the Revenue Engine Podcast, Alex Gluz talks with Amanda Dyson, Chief Marketing Officer at DemandTec, about how B2B brands can stand out in a crowded market. Amanda explains how to build a distinct point of view, use AI without losing originality, and connect marketing to pipeline. She also touches on event strategy, buying committees, and customer advocacy.

Send us Fan MailIn this interview episode, Mallory Mejias and Amith Nagarajan sit down with Torey Carter-Conneen, CEO of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), to explore what it really looks like when AI becomes embedded in everyday work. Torey shares how ASLA moved beyond experimentation to fully operationalize AI across the organization—from internal, tiered training programs to AI-powered member service workflows that generate reports and respond to inquiries in minutes. They dive into how automation is freeing up staff time to focus on higher-value work, enabling deeper member understanding and more meaningful engagement. The conversation also tackles leadership mindset, the importance of starting before you feel ready, and how associations can rethink their role by building tools that directly impact members' day-to-day work. 

There's an instinct every marketing leader is trained to have: fight for credit on pipeline. The best CMOs have realized it's exactly what's holding them back.In this episode, Carolyn breaks down the behavioral traits that separate the best CMOs from everyone else — the patterns she sees every day working with marketing leaders across B2B SaaS. Rather than another set of tactics or a borrowed playbook, she unpacks why the highest-performing CMOs let go of credit, obsess over data integrity, stop waiting on RevOps, and build a culture of making decisions from evidence instead of assumptions.In this episode:(01:45) Why the best CMOs let go of marketing credit and what they focus on instead(07:33) Why a relentless commitment to data integrity is the foundation every good decision rests on(09:55) How elite CMOs stop waiting on RevOps to hand them the numbers that matter(14:45) Why the strongest leaders play offense and defense with their board at the same time(19:55) How ruthless experimentation drives real breakout results(27:12) Why nobody understands your buyer better than your own team(28:56) What it actually takes to survive the mental grind of modern marketing leadershipIf you're trying to prove marketing's impact, make sharper decisions with your data, or build the resilience to lead through constant change, this episode will challenge how you think about what it takes to be a great CMO today.-----------------------------------------------------

Customer retention isn't glamorous, but it's the engine that funds everything else a business does. Andrea Bumstead, Founder & CEO of CS Impact, helps B2B SaaS companies transform post-sales customer experiences into a strategic growth driver. She unpacks why customer success functions are so often under-resourced, under-trained, and overlooked at the boardroom level, even though retaining customers is far more profitable that acquiring new ones. Discovery is foundational and recognizing how AI is reshaping the customer success function is non-negotiable. Andrea's leadership has been redefined by applying a "70% rule" which has strengthened her decision-making and she never forgets that growth and rest can coexist.

What if the person who shaped your entire career was someone you met on a soccer pitch at university? In this episode, Kieran Corbett, venture capital professional at StudioVC in New York, shares how a 13-year career in futures trading, a soccer club chairmanship at university, and one chance encounter at an event in New York led him to the second chapter of his career in early-stage venture capital. Kieran grew up watching his brother build Wayflyer, an Irish unicorn, from the inside. He watched a mentor named Kieran Nestor walk into any room and connect with anyone. Those two relationships didn't just shape who Kieran became. They pointed him directly toward the career he is building today.   [00:04:00] What He Does and Who He Serves Works at StudioVC, a seed-stage VC fund based in New York City Invests in B2B SaaS, enterprise AI, and fintech founders post-product and post-revenue Serves both founders looking for capital and investors looking to deploy it [00:06:00] How He Got Here: From Futures Trading to Venture Capital Started as a futures trader at Positive Equity in Dublin at 23 Traded a wide variety of products for 13 years; moved to New York in 2016 Started angel investing on the side while still trading Made the full move to venture capital in September 2024 [00:08:00] Finding StudioVC Joined the Venture Institute accelerator to build knowledge of the VC industry Got a residency placement at Geek Ventures, a fund investing in immigrant founders Met StudioVC principal Toby McCoy at an event; discovered they shared an investment in Wayflyer After several meetings over the following year, joined the team [00:10:00] What Inspires Him Loves being on the journey with founders as they grow and face challenges Finds it deeply satisfying to make introductions that unlock new doors for companies Sees AI as one of the most exciting spaces in early-stage investing right now [00:11:00] Client Impact: Helping Founders Raise Their First Capital Has introduced founders to investors who were the right fit for what they were building Raising capital at the seed stage is one of the hardest things a first-time founder can do Getting the right people in the room can be the single biggest unlock for an early company [00:13:00] The First Relationship That Changed Everything: Kieran Nestor Met Kieran Nestor through the UCC soccer club in Cork when he started university in 2006 Nestor was the chairman of the alumni and the first real entrepreneur Kieran had ever met Took Kieran under his wing, gave him enormous amounts of his time, and taught him how to build relationships Twenty years later they still talk; Kieran credits him with sparking the desire to own his own destiny [00:16:00] The Second Relationship: His Brother His brother founded Wayflyer, an Irish unicorn doing revenue-based financing for e-commerce businesses Gave Kieran an inside look at what building a successful company actually looks like That relationship also created a natural alignment with StudioVC, who were investors in Wayflyer His brother's journey pointed him directly toward the private markets career he is now in [00:18:00] The Impact That Shaped Him: Chairman of the Soccer Club Nestor made him secretary of the soccer club in his second year at university The following year he became chairman; a big responsibility at a very young age The role forced him to get comfortable with public speaking and building relationships That experience put him on the path toward wanting to be in rooms where he could make an impact [00:20:00] Vision Going Forward StudioVC has two performing funds and a talented small team in New York Wants to grow the fund to invest larger amounts of capital with more great companies Excited to build relationships with the next generation of founders in AI and technology [00:22:00] Final Word: Say Yes to Everything Met Joel Strauss in Madrid through his cousin; that relationship eventually led to this podcast Encourages people starting something new to say yes to every coffee, every event, every connection Not all of them will be great, but the ones that are can send you in a direction you never expected   KEY QUOTES "Say yes to everything. Not all of them will be fantastic, but the ones that are can really send you in a good direction." - Kieran Corbett "Someone who had that hunger, that drive, and was also very generous with their time for the next crop of people coming through. That gave me a lot of inspiration from a very early age." - Kieran Corbett CONNECT WITH KIERAN CORBETT Website: https://www.studio.vc LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kieran-corbett-a45b5a4 Email: kcorbett@studio.vc   Thanks for tuning in! If you liked my show, please LEAVE A 5-STAR REVIEW, like, and subscribe! Find me on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher

The Local Enterprise Awards for 2026 taok place recently in the Mansion House in Dublin. The awards are a celebration of the very best small businesses from across the country and serve to highlight the work that Local Enterprise Offices are doing with up-and-coming enterprises in every local authority area in the country.The 31 finalists have each been chosen by their Local Enterprise Office to represent them and their area at the awards, which are in their 26th year. The finalists feature a diverse mix of sectors and founders all competing for a share of the €80,000 prize fund and the chance to be named National Enterprise of the Year. There are also regional awards, and categories for Best Start-Up, Best Export Business, the Innovation Award, Digital Award, Green Award and the Female Entrepreneur award.I caught up with three of the finalists, and the second finalist I spoke to was Stephen O'Sullivan the founder of I left you a note and the Tipperary finalist. Stephen talks to me about his background, what I left you a note does, digital concierge, AI, National Enterprise Awards, LEO and more More about  I left you a note:I left you a note was founded by Stephen O'Sullivan, a former Deputy Chief Actuary at Met Life, Stephen wanted to address the problem modern hotels are having in the fact that customers ‘no longer complain to the front desk' but rather are quick to write a bad review online. Stephen estimates that a bad review can cost hotels up to €15,000 in lost bookings per month. I Left You A Note aims to address that gap in communication to an online B2B SaaS platform which allows guests to connect with the front desk of hotels instantly through scanning QR codes located across the hotel. The portal opens instantly on any phone and allows guests to submit feedback, raise service requests, interact with an AI concierge, and access hotel facilities and room service with one click. When an issue is raised, AI triages it, creates a service ticket and routes it automatically to the correct department.

#377 | 80% of B2B brands are completely forgettable - and it's not because their product is weak. Dave sits down with Louis Grenier, founder of Stand The F*ck Out and author of the book by the same name, to unpack a study he ran scoring 100 B2B companies on how distinctive their brands actually are. Louis breaks down the real difference between "distinctive" and "different," why almost no B2B SaaS company has a mascot (and why that's a missed opportunity), what Wiz and Mutiny are doing that most brands aren't, and why sound might be the most underused brand asset in marketing. They also get into how Louis built the entire 100-company study himself using Claude Code and parallel AI agents, and why picking a lane and committing to it beats chasing the "perfect" idea.Timestamps (00:00) - - What makes a brand distinctive vs. differentiated (03:35) - - Why brand distinctiveness matters more in the age of AI (05:54) - - Inside the study: scoring 100 B2B brands on 8 assets (07:49) - - Wiz and Mutiny: two brands that stood out (12:12) - - Why almost no B2B SaaS company has a mascot (15:39) - - How to get buy-in for a risky brand idea internally (17:29) - - The research behind how brand memories are actually built (20:35) - - Linear: picking a lane and going all in (24:01) - - Why sound is a brand asset most companies ignore (30:58) - - How Louis built the study using Claude Code and AI agents Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Zoom Webinars & Events – The virtual event platform built to help B2B marketers run webinars that actually drive pipeline, with branded registration pages, live engagement features, and built-in tools to repurpose sessions into clips and content. Learn more at zoom.com/exitfive.Customer.io - An AI powered customer engagement platform that help marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. Learn more at customer.io/exitfive.Vector - A contact-level ads platform that lets you build audiences from actual people on your site, clicking your ads, and checking out your competitors. Learn how to build an ABM program that scales at vector.co/exitfive.Join us in Stowe, Vermont for Drive 2026 - three days away from your desk to learn what's working in B2B marketing from the people who are actually doing it. Grab your ticket at exitfive.com/drive.Walker Sands - An integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency that helps marketing leaders turn strategy into measurable business impact through their Outcome-based Marketing model. Learn more at walkersands.com/exitfive.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

In this episode, Sai breaks down why he deliberately chose a services business over pure SaaS, how a human-in-the-loop model creates a defensible moat in a world increasingly disrupted by Claude and ChatGPT, and why acquiring books of business from retiring CPAs is one of the most underrated go-to-market strategies nobody is talking about. He also shares the three categories of SaaS he believes will survive the AI disruption — and why everything else is in serious trouble.If you're building in a high-stakes industry or trying to compete where trust is currency, this episode is essential listening.Key Takeaways4:12 – Guest intro: Sai Dhanak — two exits, four patents, from Caribou to Latch to Deduction4:33 – What shipping early and obsessing over design taught Sai about building products people want5:35 – The connecting thread across cybersecurity, IoT, and service design patents7:00 – Seven years at Latch: What going from seed to IPO really teaches you about scale7:45 – "More money, more problems" — why lean is a feature, not a constraint8:28 – The compounding risk of bad hires at scale8:57 – What Deduction actually does: AI-native H&R Block for a fraction of the price9:33 – Real-time example: How Sai's wife emailed a charitable donation to the AI agent mid-year12:38 – The deliberate bet on services over pure SaaS — and why it was the right call14:07 – The AI SaaSpocalypse: Three types of SaaS that will survive disruption16:27 – How the human-in-the-loop model works operationally (Deduction OS)20:04 – Why Sai left Latch right after the IPO — the mental playbook he was building22:00 – The co-founder advantage: Moving faster because you already trust each other23:33 – The fractional-to-full-time hiring model that built the team efficiently25:17 – The critical fork in the road: Full-stack tax firm vs. selling software to accountants28:00 – Why the B2B SaaS tax market is flooded and the personal accountant market is fragmented29:20 – The personal accountant market: 18B, fragmented, no dominant player except H&R Block32:00 – Why TurboTax and DIY tax software are getting eaten by ChatGPT and Claude30:00 – Email as the primary channel: The internal debate and why async won31:24 – Why email is more enduring than it looks — even for Gen Z32:23 – The trust premium of human touch in an increasingly AI world36:15 – The onboarding call insight: 15 minutes with a human = customers happily working with AI37:57 – Acquiring books of business from retiring CPAs as a go-to-market engine40:57 – The referral flywheel: Emailing taylor@deduction.com directly, no app required41:25 – What Sai would do differently: Start acquiring firms sooner; build partnerships earlier43:40 – Flat architecture, "everyone is a builder," and why the 1-person company is the wrong aspiration45:36 – The most fulfilling part of building a company is always the people46:10 – The question every founder should be asking: Do you love this problem enough to work on it for 10 years?Tweetable Quotes"The most interesting opportunity in the AI era isn't building tools that replace humans. It's building businesses that use AI to make humans dramatically better — while keeping the one thing AI can't provide: trust." — Jeff Mains"AI can process the data. But it can't sign its name to it. Can't sit across from a client and take the blame when things go wrong. That's still you." — Jeff Mains"The intelligence of AI with the trust of a human. That's Deduction." — Sai Dhanak"In an ever-increasingly AI world, the human touch will have an ever-increasing premium." — Sai Dhanak"People don't want to sit in front of a chat box doing their taxes. The whole point of having an accountant is so you can go do something else." — Sai Dhanak"More money, more problems. When you're lean and scrappy, you stay focused. Raise too much capital and focus becomes exponentially harder." — Sai Dhanak"Do you love this problem enough to still be working on it in 10 years? Not the trend — the problem." — Sai Dhanak"Every founder, when asked what the highlight was, says the same thing: bringing on amazing people who are now my friends." — Sai Dhanak"Trends fade. Trust doesn't." — Jeff MainsSaaS Leadership Lessons1. The three types of SaaS that survive AI disruption Sai identified a clear framework early: the only SaaS that holds value long-term are (1) businesses with hardcore integration moats you can't vibe-code (like Stripe), (2) ledgers and systems of record that are structurally difficult to disrupt, and (3) anything that requires a human liability backstop. If your SaaS doesn't fit one of those three, it's at risk.2. The human in the loop is a competitive moat, not a limitation Rather than chasing full automation, Deduction deliberately built a model where licensed tax professionals review, verify, and sign off on AI-generated work. That signature requirement — mandated by the IRS — is baked-in defensibility. In high-stakes industries, the human backstop isn't a workaround. It's the whole product.3. Ship early, obsess over design Going back to his first company, Caribou (sold to Mattel), Sai learned two lessons that still guide him: launch before you're ready to get real feedback fast, and invest heavily in design and experience. In an AI world where anyone can build anything, experience is what differentiates.4. Lean is a feature, not a constraint After watching Latch raise hundreds of millions of dollars and experience the chaos that came with it, Sai deliberately built Deduction as a lean, flat organization. The goal isn't a one-person billion-dollar company — it's high margins with a small team that can move fast, maintain quality, and stay culturally tight. Every hire matters exponentially more in a small company.5. Choose your channel based on operational reality, not trend The decision to lead with email over chat or SMS wasn't a legacy move — it was a strategic one. Email's async nature gave Deduction manageable response windows as an early-stage company while also matching the customer expectation: "I hired an accountant so I don't have to sit and do this myself." Build for your operational reality first, then open faster channels as you can guarantee the experience.6. Acquire instead of just acquiring customers One of Deduction's most powerful go-to-market moves is buying books of business from retiring CPAs. The market for small accounting firms is fragmented and surprisingly liquid — entire websites are dedicated to the sale of these practices. Instead of competing cold for customers, Deduction inherits trusted relationships already built. It's an asymmetric growth lever that most founders never consider.Guest Resourcessai@deduction.comhttps://deduction.com/www.linkedin.com/in/saayujhttps://x.com/SaiDhanakEpisode SponsorThe Futureproof Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfkXKUPZ5xuOqMPR7_gzGybncTtavyR1NThe Captain's KeysSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/https://jeffmains.com/books/SaaS Fuel ResourcesWebsite - https://championleadership.com/Jeff Mains on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/Twitter - https://twitter.com/jeffkmainsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/thesaasguy/Instagram - https://instagram.com/jeffkmains

Remy's Danielle Sakher explains how her team balances speed with observability and security as AI coding tools move from novelty to enterprise infrastructure. She shares what it's really like selling an AI builder to security-conscious industries like financial services, plus a wild stat: alpha users have already spent $300K in AI compute.

Adam Wexler played fantasy football since seventh grade — and turned that habit into a $4.15 billion exit. He built his first company out of a dorm room at the University of Georgia, launched a music discovery platform called Go Rankem in Athens, then pivoted into B2B SaaS with clients like Holiday Inn, IHG, Home Depot, UPS, and Coca-Cola before he ever touched sports. In 2015, he incorporated Side Prize. When the fantasy sports market collapsed under regulatory pressure that same year, he rebuilt from a shoestring budget and relaunched in 2017 as PrizePicks — built on a "stupid simple" premise: get sports fans in and out of the app in under 60 seconds. He ran it as CEO for a decade, scaled it into the largest daily fantasy sports platform in North America, and in 2025 sold a majority stake to Allwyn International in a deal valued at up to $4.15 billion — without ever raising venture capital. Rather than ride off into retirement, Wexler went back to where he started: music. He's now CEO of The Hidden Jams, a nonprofit platform funded by $5 million of his own money that crowdsources deep cuts and hidden gems from artist catalogs Make sure to check out Prize Picks at: https://www.prizepicks.com/ And The Hidden Jams at: https://thehiddenjams.org/   Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup   Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle   Sound is one of those things that makes or breaks a hosting experience — and we finally got it right.  We went with KICKER KB6 speakers mounted above the deck. Full-range, weather-resistant, built to throw sound across an open space without losing quality. Kicker's been in the game since 1973 — car audio, marine, powersports — and they've expanded into Home & Personal audio, with headphones, earbuds and a complete line-up of outdoor audio speakers & subs. Engineered for performance, wherever you need sound. If you're setting up an outdoor space for your home or business, and the audio isn't dialed in yet, start at Kicker.com.

What happens when a technical B2B SaaS company decides it doesn't need a twelve person marketing team? In this episode of Content Amplified, Jerome Stewart, a marketing leader who has spent the past decade building AI powered B2B SaaS brands in the analytics and observability space, explains how he helped shrink one marketing org from twelve people to four without breaking the work. Jerome walks through his "cover your bases" framework for deciding which functions still need a human at the helm (creative, communications, marketing ops, demand gen, product marketing), and how he builds "skills," reusable brand, PowerPoint, and social media instructions built from existing blogs, transcripts, and websites, so AI carries the last mile of production. He also digs into where AI quietly breaks down: content saturation, the em dash as an AI "tell," and a widening skills gap between AI fluent early career marketers and the business writing fundamentals that came before AI. If you're trying to figure out where to trust AI and where to still put a human, this conversation gives you a real framework, not just a hot take.About JeromeJerome Stewart began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer before going back to business school and starting out as a product manager at Microsoft, where he later moved into marketing. He lived in the Seattle area and overseas while at Microsoft, then relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area about ten years ago, where he has spent the past decade marketing AI powered B2B SaaS companies in the analytics and observability space. Jerome now spends much of his professional energy mentoring earlier career marketers, helping them pair their natural AI fluency with the business fundamentals it can't replace.Show NotesConnect with Jerome on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromestewart/Text us what you think about this episode!

Send us Fan MailPricing AI is the hardest pricing problem in software right now, and most SaaS leaders are getting it wrong on the first try. In this episode of Navigating the Customer Experience, host Yanique Grant sits down with Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, to unpack why the first AI price a company sets is always wrong, how to set usage caps when you have no historical data, and what smart B2B SaaS leaders do differently to turn pricing from a liability into a strategic advantage.Dan has spent more than 20 years in software, starting as an engineer before moving into product management and discovering that how a company captures value matters far more than how it builds the product. Today he advises B2B SaaS CEOs on the AI pricing and packaging decisions that keep them up at night, and in this conversation he shares the frameworks, the mistakes to avoid, and the practical playbook he uses with real companies.WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODEWhy the first AI price is always wrong, and why that has nothing to do with how smart your team or your consultants are. Dan explains the fundamental economic shift underway in software, where both sides of the pricing equation are moving at once. On the cost side, he points to a benchmark showing the cost per task for a top model dropping by roughly 390 times in a single year, a change no normal business ever absorbs in its cost of goods sold. On the value side, models keep getting more capable, handling this month what they could not handle last month. His research shows that every application layer software company he studied that released AI capabilities revised its pricing and packaging within 18 months. The lesson is not to price perfectly on day one. It is to build for change.How to set usage caps and pricing tiers with zero historical data. Dan frames the real problem plainly. You know what a token costs, but you have no idea what customers will actually do with a new AI feature. Products are full of features that barely got adopted, and AI features do not get to skip that step of the innovation cycle. On top of that, a small group of power users, often around 5 to 10 percent, can drive the overwhelming majority of usage and cost. That makes the tempting shortcuts unreliable. Using dashboard views as a proxy breaks down because good AI gets used far more than the dashboards it replaces, and a beta group rarely matches the usage profile of the full market.The early access playbook that sits between beta and general availability. Dan recommends a stage where companies announce their limits, put a price on the feature, and communicate it clearly, but do not enforce or meter it yet for a defined window that can run anywhere from six weeks to 18 months. This eases customer anxiety about surprise bills, encourages real adoption, and lets the company gather genuine usage patterns instead of guessing from proxies that break down.Why you should separate ordinary plan limits from fair use limits. Even when you are not metering usage, Dan explains, you can reserve the right to throttle or downgrade the rare customer using a capability a hundred or a thousand times more than the average, much like companies already do with API request limits. Those levers let teams keep experimenting during early access without the finance team panicking when the bill arrives.Why communication is where pricing changes succeed or fail. As Dan puts it, most pricing blowups come not from the change itself but from the fact that it was communicated poorly or not at all. Agility beats certainty, and reviewing pricing on a quarterly cadence beats the old annual or five year rhythm.This episode is essential listening for SaaS founders, product leaders, pricing strategists, and customer experience professionals who want to understand how AI is reshaping the economics of software and what to do about it before the market forces the decision for them.ABOUT DAN BALCAUSKIDan Balcauski is the founder of Product Tranquility, where he helps B2B SaaS CEOs turn pricing from a confusing liability into a strategic advantage. With more than 20 years in software, Dan began his career as an engineer before moving into product management and discovering that how companies capture value matters far more than how they build it. His work now centers on one of the most pressing questions in software today: how to price AI. Before founding Product Tranquility, Dan was a principal product strategist at SolarWinds and head of product at LawnStarter. He holds a BSc in computer engineering from Iowa State University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, where he also helps teach executive education courses on product strategy. He is the host of the SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast.QUESTIONS YANIQUE ASKEDCould you share a little about your journey and how you got from where you were to where you are today? You have said the first AI price is always wrong. Why is that, and what should a SaaS company do differently knowing they are going to get it wrong the first time? So many companies are trying to set usage caps and pricing tiers for AI with zero historical data. How would you advise a CEO to make that decision when they are essentially flying blind? What is the one online resource, tool, website, or application that you absolutely cannot live without in your business? Can you share one or two books that have had a positive impact on you, professionally or personally? What is one thing going on in your life right now that you are really excited about? Do you have a quote or saying that keeps you on track during times of adversity? Where can listeners find and connect with you online?KEY TAKEAWAYSThe first AI price is always wrong, and that is not a failure of intelligence. It reflects a fundamental economic shift where both cost and value are moving fast. Every application layer company Dan studied revised its AI pricing and packaging within 18 months. Plan for revision, not perfection. Agility beats certainty. Review pricing on a quarterly cadence rather than annually or every five years. Communication is where pricing changes succeed or fail. Most blowups come from poor communication, not the change itself. Usage proxies break down. Dashboard views and beta groups rarely predict how customers will actually use an AI feature. A small group of power users can drive the majority of usage and cost, so average user assumptions are dangerous. Early access is the smart middle stage. Announce and price the limits, communicate them, but do not meter yet while you gather real data. Separate plan limits from fair use limits. Reserve the right to throttle extreme usage even when you are not metering everyone. Do not borrow problems from the future. Anxiety about what has not happened yet only adds problems to the present. AI is making custom, personal business software economically viable for the first time, opening the door to tools built exactly the way you work.CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction and Guest Bio 01:51 Dan's Journey: From Engineer to Pricing Strategist 04:03 Learning That Pricing Is Different in Every Industry 04:49 Why the First AI Price Is Always Wrong 05:36 The 390x Cost Shift and the Moving Value Equation 06:49 Agility, Faster Pricing Reviews, and Communication 09:28 Setting Usage Caps With No Historical Data 11:32 Why Dashboard Proxies and Beta Groups Break Down 12:59 The Early Access Playbook Between Beta and GA 13:20 Plan Limits vs. Fair Use Limits 17:04 The One Tool Dan Cannot Live Without: Claude Code 17:38 Book Recommendation: Monetizing Innovation 18:31 Building Custom Business Software With AI 19:55 How to Connect With Dan Online 20:27 Dan's Guiding Quote: Don't Borrow Problems From the FutureFEATURED RESOURCESBook mentioned: Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg TackeTool mentioned: Claude Code, Dan's work surface and the engine behind his custom business softwareCONNECT WITH DANLinkedIn: Search Dan Balcauski on LinkedIn, and mention that you heard him on the podcast so he can separate you from the spamWebsite: producttranquility.comPodcast: SaaS Scaling Secrets, wherever podcasts are foundDAN'S GUIDING QUOTE"Don't borrow problems from the future." Dan BalcauskiDan explains that most of our anxiety is about things that have not happened yet. Worrying about a future scenario pulls that problem into the present before it ever arrives, giving you more to carry now for no reason. Like debt, it is borrowing against your future self. His practice is to stay focused on what is real and in front of him, which keeps him grounded when challenges or uncertainty threaten to pull him off track.ABOUT N

In this episode, Carolyn sits down with Liam MacCormack, a fractional head of growth who's spent years in the weeds of B2B paid search, to unpack why the channel keeps burning B2B budgets and what to do about it.They get into the market forces making paid search harder than ever: rising CPCs, zero-click search, and agencies still optimizing like it's 2015. Then they go tactical on a real client scenario — a high-ACV company that's switched agencies multiple times and still can't make it work — and what that reveals about when a channel is worth fixing versus when it's just draining spend.Topics covered:Why "you need to spend more on impression share" is the most seductive upsell in paid search, and the one metric that actually tells you if it's trueThe profile of a company paid search works for, and the profile where it's a waste of moneyWhy paid search is a demand-capture channel, and what that means for how you budget itHow to know when to cut the channel, cut the budget in half, or let it run as a tertiary sourceWhy branded search is propping up most agency reporting, and the one question to ask to find outIf your paid search has been underperforming for quarters and the answer is always "give it more time," this one's worth your attention.-----------------------------------------------------

The MQL is marketing's worst open secret. Everyone in the room knows the number is gamed. The leads are low-intent, the scoring is guesswork, and the pipeline isn't growing. Yet marketing keeps getting graded on the one metric nobody actually trusts.In this workshop, Carolyn and Amber sit down with Jon Miller to take apart the metric the entire B2B playbook still runs on and walk through anonymized customer data showing exactly what it costs. Hand raisers in this account converted 83X better than MQLs and qualified faster. The MQLs that didn't convert got worked for two months before anyone disqualified them. That's the drain nobody puts on a slide.What this workshop covers:Why the MQL became gospel and the moment a sound idea turned into a volume game sales learned to ignoreThe gumball machine fallacy: why "more budget in, more pipeline out" assumes a linear process that buying stopped being years agoNonlinear buying, the dark funnel, and why one overwritten lead record erases the history you actually needReal customer data: MQLs accounted for under 6% of pipeline while hand raisers drove 39% of closed-won revenueJon's three-tier lead model and why waiting for hand raisers alone forfeits first-mover advantage and your future pipelineThe KPI cheat sheet: pipeline velocity, brand-question surveys, post-sale revenue metrics, and the numbers a board actually speaksWhat the shift means for your MarTech stack as AI moves orchestration from rules to reasoningThe leaders who get out from under the MQL don't kill it overnight. They layer in metrics their CFO and head of sales already recognize and stop defending volume that was never converting.-----------------------------------------------------

One Big Idea 3 - Driving Enterprise Value: From Funding Architectures and Radical Letting Go to Systems-Driven RevenueIn this episode of One Big Idea, host Josh Elledge connects with Anthony Rose, Latif Hamilton, Dan Rochon, Ronald Robinson, and Mark Osborne to dissect the foundational operational strategies required to elevate enterprise value, optimize leadership psychology, and construct predictable growth engines. Anthony Rose, Founder and CEO of SeedLegals, kicks off the discussion by introducing a fairer, more transparent fundraising mechanism designed to protect early-stage founders. Latif Hamilton, Founder of SpiritHoods, then shifts focus to executive psychology, mapping out structural frameworks to help founders overcome cognitive biases and master the art of letting go. Next, CPI Community Founder Dan Rochon outlines a guide to replacing high-pressure sales with consultative, guidance-based relationship building. Ronald Robinson, Founder of Expanded Learning Academy, dives deep into the profound link between childhood social-emotional competencies and adult executive leadership. Finally, Mark Osborne, Fractional Revenue Leader for Professional Services & B2B SaaS at Modern Revenue Strategies, closes the episode by delivering a blueprint on transitioning from hustle-centric business development to completely automated, system-driven revenue architecture.Smarter Fundraising for Startups Using SAFERs Instead of Traditional SAFEs with SeedLegals' Anthony RoseEarly-stage fundraising has long relied on Simple Agreements for Future Equity (SAFEs) to bypass the slow, expensive legal hurdles of traditional priced funding rounds. However, legal tech pioneer Anthony Rose argues that his "one big idea" exposes how traditional SAFEs routinely blindside founders with massive, compounded dilution once conversion math kicks in at the next priced round. Because SAFEs don't update the cap table in real time, founders frequently underestimate their stacked equity obligations, sometimes waking up to find they have accidentally surrendered a majority stake in their own company. Furthermore, SAFEs present critical tax ambiguities for savvy investors regarding when the five-year Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) holding clock officially begins.To solve these hidden structural hazards, Anthony introduces the SAFER (Simple Agreement for Future Equity and Regular Shares). This framework retains the rapid, low-cost execution speed of a traditional SAFE but requires that investors receive their stock immediately upon investment. This instantaneous cap table visibility ensures founders see the exact equity impact of every dollar raised in real time, preventing unexpected minority status down the line. By utilizing automated legal modeling tools, early-stage companies raising between $500K and $2M can establish flawless financial transparency, kickstart the investor's QSBS tax clock on day one, and secure institutional-grade corporate clarity without the bloated fees of legacy law firms.Breaking Free by Outsmarting Your Brain and Letting Go Like a Pro with SpiritHoods' Latif HamiltonOne of the greatest operational barriers to scaling an enterprise is the founder's own psychological attachment to underperforming elements of the business. Latif Hamilton explains that his core thesis addresses why entrepreneurs struggle to cut ties with failing product lines, toxic corporate cultures, or stagnant business models. This operational paralysis is driven by two hardwired cognitive biases: the endowment effect, which causes leaders to artificially overvalue an asset simply because they own it, and loss aversion, where the psychological pain of losing an asset is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining an equivalent win. Left unchecked, these biases trap executives in an expensive cycle of protecting sunk costs instead of pursuing high-yield commercial opportunities.To bypass these emotional roadblocks, Latif provides a tactical toolkit designed to decouple human emotion from strategic analysis. Founders must routinely challenge their operations by asking the "starting fresh" question: If I didn't already own this product or employ this person, would I choose to buy or hire them today? If the answer is no, immediate divestment is required. By mapping out a physical grid to calculate the true cost of inaction—including opportunity cost and team morale drain—leaders can clearly see the numbers in black and white. Transitioning into authentic thought leadership through platforms like Substack and high-level podcast guesting allows founders to pivot their energy toward market authority, turning perceived organizational losses into scalable future gains.Building Client Trust While Breaking Through Internal Resistance with CPI Community's Dan RochonIn a transparent and highly competitive marketplace, traditional, aggressive sales closing tactics create immediate buyer friction and erosion of brand trust. Sales consultant Dan Rochon outlines his "one big idea" that modern sales must pivot completely away from psychological manipulation and transition into an act of collaborative leadership and client guidance. The primary obstacle in a commercial transaction is rarely external market competition; rather, it is the prospect's internal resistance, driven by unvoiced fears, self-doubt, and structural uncertainty. By stepping into the role of a guide rather than an aggressive closing hero, the sales professional shifts from an administrative solicitor to a trusted advisor.To execute this consultative framework consistently, Dan structures his methodology across three actionable operational behaviors: connecting authentically to build immediate rapport, asking deep questions that target the prospect's root motivation, and actively listening to emotional hesitation rather than just verbal compliance. This client-centric approach forms the bedrock of consistent and predictable revenue, allowing founders to easily transition away from founder-led sales. By thoroughly documenting these conversational processes into corporate playbooks, leveraging CRM data tracking, and utilizing podcasts for high-level ecosystem networking, organizations can seamlessly scale their business development teams beyond the personal bandwidth of the company founder.The Hidden Link Between Childhood SEL and Adult Workplace Success with Expanded Learning Academy's Ronald RobinsonTechnical expertise and operational software systems are useless if an organization lacks the foundational soft skills required to execute effectively under high-pressure conditions. Education strategist Ronald Robinson shares his core thesis that Social Emotional Learning (SEL) competencies are not merely childhood development concepts, but the primary drivers of modern workplace productivity and elite corporate culture. High-performing business units separate themselves not by raw technical capabilities, but by their team leaders' capacity to operate with high levels of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management, and responsible decision-making.To bridge the gap between abstract emotional intelligence and rigid corporate KPIs, Ronald introduces the advanced concept of SELF (Social Emotional Learning Fundamentals), which mandates that executives systematically prioritize self-care, self-confidence, and self-assurance. When corporate leaders fail to manage their internal emotional triggers, they inadvertently project impulsivity onto their direct reports, destroying psychological safety and driving up employee turnover. By embedding regular 360-degree feedback loops, active listening training, and strict emotional regulation boundaries directly into adult workforce development programs, companies can build inclusive, highly resilient environments. Ultimately, designing a culture where personnel thrive emotionally serves as a primary macro competitive advantage.Enhancing Revenue Systems Through AI and Strategic Leadership with Modern Revenue Strategies's Mark OsborneMany growing companies fall victim to the hazardous trap of "hero mode" growth, where top-line revenue numbers are driven purely by the ad-hoc charisma, brute-force hustle, and personal networks of the founding team. Fractional revenue expert Mark Osborne demonstrates that his core framework addresses why this personality-driven revenue is actually a severe structural liability that drastically tanks a company's enterprise valuation during an M&A or investment round. If a business cannot mathematically prove that its customer acquisition engine is entirely predictable, repeatable, transferable, and independent of any single rainmaker, buyers will view that income stream as high-risk phantom equity.To convert volatile cash generation into a verified corporate asset, Mark details a systemized architecture built upon three interlocking workflows: attraction systems (leveraging hyper-targeted client profiles), acceleration systems (streamlining sales pipeline velocity via automated proposals), and activation systems (maximizing client onboarding and referral loops). When integrating artificial intelligence into this revenue strategy, executives must strictly avoid the mistake of chasing popular software tools before defining their core processes; AI must be deployed exclusively as a force multiplier layered onto pre-existing, human-mapped customer journeys. By visually whiteboarding the entire critical client flow, assigning absolute ownership to each conversion metric, and conducting rigorous quarterly quality-of-earnings audits, business leaders successfully build an institutionalized revenue engine that functions flawlessly without founder...

Kako izgleda kada umesto sedenja ispod masline završiš u marketingu, prkosiš pravilima najvećih svetskih sistema i biraš uverenje umesto prećutkivanja istine?

What if your next big business breakthrough started with owning your own blind spots?This Fan Favorite episode throws you in the trenches with Cameron Herold and SaaS Academy's former COO and current CEO Matt Verlachi, as they go far beyond surface-level business banter. From surviving firefighting chaos to building, selling, and now scaling SaaS Academy, Matt Verlachi exposes the real skills that make or break Second in Commands. They unpack why customer obsession cures more growth headaches than any software, how to weaponize one-on-ones for radical team development, and what most COOs get dead wrong about CEO dynamics.Miss this? You risk coasting on old habits while others engineer unfair advantages. Listen now for hard-won tactics you won't find in any business course from the world's largest SaaS coaching engine. Timestamped Highlights00:45 – The firefighting mindset that built decisive business instincts05:56 – The overlooked power of “small unit” teams to unlock real growth09:44 – Are you a COO trapped in a CEO's title? The unexpected identity test13:43 – Brutal truths about customer obsession and why most leaders fail here16:18 – The lesson no founder learns soon enough when selling their company18:22 – The surprising reason joining SaaS Academy changed his life21:31 – The founder's hidden block: How self-worth destroys pricing27:31 – The counterintuitive leadership split that 10x'd their decision speed41:07 – How his “full-person” one-on-ones rip open performance breakthroughs About the GuestMatt Verlaque was the former COO of SaaS Academy (now Precision), steering operational strategy for the largest coaching platform serving B2B SaaS entrepreneurs. With first-hand experience ranging from firefighting to founding and selling a SaaS startup, he delivers operating wisdom forged under real pressure. He is currently serving as the CEO at Precision, where they help growth-minded founders understand how their business actually works so they can scale with clarity, not chaos.