Podcasts about recurly

In this episode of the SalesStar Podcast - we welcomed Rachel Sherriff , Chief Customer Officer at Recurly to chat about the various customer service and success protocols that modern B2B SaaS teams should keep top of mind in 2025 and beyond: Key topics covered: What drives customer and success experiences? How can B2B teams use AI effectively to drive impact The impact of GenAI on sales and marketing

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Ongoing customer loyalty is widely agreed as being pivotal to any businesses long-term success, but how to best go about creating it is up for debate.On this episode of the Performance Marketing Unlocked podcast, Guy Meyers (28:29), Senior Director of Customer Success (Global) at Recurly, argues why – despite loyalty ultimately being an upper funnel, brand-building play – data is the most valuable asset for generating it.Preceding the discussion with Guy however, is a final Black Friday rundown from PMW's Premium Content Editor, Jyoti Rambhai. Alongside host Joe, Jyoti reviews all the important marketing trends to prepare you for the weekend ahead, with some breaking news interrupting the show.This podcast was hosted by PMW's Multimedia Editor, Joseph Arthur.~ Episode breakdown ~ (3:50) PMW discusses the upcoming Black Friday Cyber Monday Weekend(19:31) Breaking news!(26:56) 60 second news round-up(28:29) Introducing Recurly's Guy Meyers(41:50) Can loyalty be measured?(53:57) PMW's famous 'resell me a pen' challenge~ Further reading ~ Adland on the cusp of ‘record breaking' Black Friday weekendEssential tasks every marketer should tick off before Black FridayWhy data privacy is a balancing act: navigating personalisation and trust in the digital eraPerformance marketing software market to double by 2032Netflix revenue grew 17% as hit series Baby Reindeer and Bridgerton attract audiences Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we have another episode of Better Done Than Perfect. Listen in as we talk to Sarah McCredie, director of product marketing at Recurly. You'll learn what marketing for humans is, which brands are nailing it, why you shouldn't be afraid to rebrand, and more.Please head over to the episode page for the detailed recap and key takeaways.Show notesRecurly — Sarah's place of workGlossier — one of direct-to-consumer pioneers in human marketingSlack — an example of human branding in SaaSState of Subscriptions: What consumers wantConnect with Sarah on LinkedInThanks for listening! If you found the episode useful, please spread the word about this new show on Twitter mentioning @userlist, or leave us a review on iTunes.SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — an email automation platform for SaaS companies. It matches the complexity of your customer data, including many-to-many relationships between users and companies. Book your demo call today at userlist.com.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

How can B2B brands become more authentic and straightforward in their messaging? In this episode, we talk to Sarah McCredie, director of product marketing at Recurly. You'll learn what marketing for humans is, which brands are nailing it, why you shouldn't be afraid to rebrand, and more.Visit our website for the detailed episode recap with key learnings.Recurly — Sarah's place of workGlossier — one of direct-to-consumer pioneers in human marketingSlack — an example of human branding in SaaSState of Subscriptions: What consumers wantConnect with Sarah on LinkedInThanks for listening! If you found the episode useful, please spread the word about the show on Twitter mentioning @userlist, or leave us a review on iTunes.SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — an email automation platform for SaaS companies. It matches the complexity of your customer data, including many-to-many relationships between users and companies. Book your demo call today at userlist.com.

Today on the show, we have Dan Burkhart, CEO and co-founder of Recurly, a subscription billing management service. In this episode, we discussed the importance of language-specific content for global companies, the inspiration behind Recurly, and the shift towards focusing on retention and churn in the subscription economy. We dove into various strategies that companies can use to improve their customer retention, including understanding customer behavior and preferences, offering the option to pause subscriptions, and developing personalized campaigns. Dan provides valuable insights into the various factors that contribute to customer churn and retention, and how companies can optimize their strategies to retain customers and drive revenue growth.As usual, we're excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, we would love to hear from you.

Roundtables are the perfect tactic to add value across the customer lifecycle. You just can't replicate such quality conversation and deep connections in any other event format. On this FINITE Podcast episode, Sarah McCredie, Director of Product Marketing at Recurly, outlines her approach to roundtables - Who to invite, where to host and what to talk about. The FINITE Podcast is made possible by:- Clarity: the fast growing, global marketing communications agency working with leading technology brands.- And 93x, the leading digital marketing agency for B2B technology, software & SaaS businesses delivering SEO & PPC strategy that drives leads, pipeline & revenue growth.Support the show

Today's episode was recorded live, featuring Refine Labs' VP of Creative: Triana Mills. Triana leads Cassidy and Carl through a Creative Teardown of Recurly, looking at their design choices in three programs: website, email, and paid social.  She assesses the use, effectiveness, and consistency of color, graphics, messaging, and more, sparking productive discussions on possible reasons behind each choice and suggestions for improvement. This walk through is an incredible opportunity to ask yourself the same questions and analyze your own materials for the same qualities.

About Mike Potter: Mike Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind, the leading data backup and recovery provider for cloud and SaaS data. While studying Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University, Mike began his start-up career as the founder of InTheHack.com, one of the most popular sporting websites in Canada. Since founding Rewind in 2015, Mike has focused on building a company culture that values and respects employees. When Mike isn't running backups, he can usually be found assembling LEGOs with his kids or walking his dogs.About Rewind: Since 2015, Rewind has been on a mission to help businesses protect their SaaS and cloud data. Today, over 100,000 customers in more than 100 countries use Rewind's top-reviewed apps and support to ensure their software-as-a-service applications run uninterrupted. The Rewind platform enables companies to back up, restore, and copy the critical data that drives their business.About Baremetrics: Baremetrics provides real-time subscription metrics for teams built with Stripe, Shopify Partners, Braintree, Recurly, Chargebee, Google Play, and App Store Connect. In addition to providing metrics, Baremetrics is the industry leader in SaaS growth tools that prevent churn and help you make more. Start a free trial of Baremetrics today: https://app.baremetrics.com/users/sign_up

Justice is an LA-based Marketer and Paid Advertising Expert, specializing in scaling Ecommerce & SaaS companies.He has scaled profits for companies such as Uber, Lyft, Amazon, crunchbase, bkr, Fujitsu, Thin Slim Foods, Recurly, BigTime, Spark Hire, Lyft, NiceQuest, Sandvik Coromant, Outdoorsy, Lever, and other incredible clients.Show Notes[00:15] Welcome this episode of the big possible show. Today's guest is a marketing expert and author, Justice Ekhaguere[01:53] Justice's story of when he first started in the marketing agency world and took on a big gamble with a client.[07:01] Justice's philosophy around making sure he always shows up and gives the project his all.[09:15] How he learned about a dropshipping project that has him excited about leveraging new platforms[14:30] Justice shares his practical tips around unlocking greatness.[15:30] “But what I've realized is that you being really good at something, instead of you just like blanketly being a successful person, you really just have a higher success ratio than the average person in this skill.”[18:29] “Encouragement comes from when I can kind of base it off of like data or something, that's like tangible instead of my own feeling. Cause you're not always going to feel good, but I can't argue with math.”[20:30] Justice's decision-making framework to always be testing whenever you're making decisionsConnect with Justice:Website: https://justiceekhaguere.com/Get more from The Big Possible show:Website: https://www.thebigpossible.comRSVP for our next epic retreat hereFollow us on social: @follownoah @thebigpossible

“Any idea is a hypothetical solution to a problem. It is basically spending time to figure out if your solution to the problem is the right problem to solve first of all”— Hiten Shah Our guest today is Hiten Shah (@hnshah), co-Founder and CEO at Nira. Hiten has started multiple software companies since 2003 including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Nira. Here are some of the topics we discuss: Two approaches to entrepreneurship — the difference between pirates vs. explorers Hiten talks about his own approach and helps you understand which one you should choose Finding the courage to be disliked in order to progress His personal development journey and how it's reflected in his professional life Product development and Hiten's approach to solutions and problems Why you should base your product on people's stories over what they say they want Just a quick note: this episode was recorded last year (2020). Welcome to the Conscious Creators Show; where through intimate and insightful interviews with authors, actors, musicians, entrepreneurs, and other podcasters, you'll learn tools and tactics to 10x your creativity and improve your business and life. Like this show? Support us by following the show, leaving a review here, and helping us spread the word by sharing the pod with one (or three) friends: https://refer.fm/creators Do you want to learn how to make a living as a creator? Check out the CreatorsMBA where we show you how to get paid to create online: http://www.creatorsmba.com Follow our host, Sachit Gupta, and get it touch if you have any questions or ideas related to the show: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Please enjoy today's episode and thank you for listening! Show Notes 01:14 - Building a business as a Pirate vs. Explorer 03:29 - How innovation can happen 06:01 - The building of business with Hiten's explorer tendencies and the pioneering outcomes 11:41 - The importance of self-awareness, being genuine to yourself as a framework 16:47 - How you can value yourself more while respecting your personal goals 21:53 - Why is better to have a conversation, or when is better to ask a friend than to ask Google 23:28 - The Ups and Downs of building a business 28:26 - How to get rid of stress by finding the answer within yourself 34:46 - Your way to finding a path to be non-judgmental 35:44 - The implications of self-awareness on pirates vs. explorers 37:17 - What Hiten wants other founders to know to progress professionally and personally 43:12 - The style of content on Hiten's blog and research work, and his intentions behind it 48:35 - Tips for self-care while on the emotional startup rollercoaster 52:50 - How does the process of developing a framework for a product look like for Hiten 56:55 - The role of stories in defining the audience and their problems, and how to reach a solution 64:00 - Should you use intuition or stories or data on the product development journey? 66:52 - The principle of “measure twice, cut once” as a way of dealing with confirmation bias 69:58 - The power of talking on a podcast vs 1:1 conversation for learning and advice for current and potential funders 76:51 - On getting the right answer when facing with a conflicting advice 77:24 - How by being an example he can be of the biggest help 81:20 - The future envisioned by Hiten Tweetable Quotes "You can tell when someone is self-aware because they are able to clearly articulate why they are doing something, and how they are doing." — Hiten Shah “A pirate wants to see what's out there in order to copy it. An explorer wants to see what's out there in order to go against it and do the opposite.” — Hiten Shah “In reality, our collective experiences don't exist, there is only individualistic experience, which means we are all dreaming.” — Hiten Shah “The impact you can have on yourself and self-improvement on your mental health to understand what triggers you and why, and digging into it, is tremendous in order to look at actions as an observer, instead of a participant.” — Hiten Shah “The more prescriptive you are about the things you're doing, the more you keep it as close to business as possible and not personal.” — Hiten Shah “The children were taught to live with certainty, and that is not the world we live in anymore.” — Hiten Shah “Great product developers are good at intuitively knowing the problem, not intuitively knowing the solution.” — Hiten Shah “You save your creativity for the solution. Don't push your creativity on the problems.” — Hiten Shah About Our Guest Hiten Shah (@hnshah) is the Co-Founder and CEO at Nira. He has started multiple software companies since 2003 including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Nira. He also has a blog Hitenism in which he shares all the news and personal knowledge for anyone interested in SaaS businesses. Hiten builds data-driven solutions to help online businesses make better business decisions at KissMetrics. Hiten Shah serves as a Venture Advisor at 15Five, Inc., SpacePencil Inc., and Lean Startup Machine Inc. He serves as Advisor of Bitium Inc. Additionally, he Co-Founded Crazy Egg & Quick Sprout, an analytics tool that visualizes the user experience on a website. He serves as a Consultant of 500 Startups. Hiten Shah served as Advisor of CatchFree, Inc., iSocket, Inc., and Drumbi Inc. he advises startups about metrics, product & marketing. He started on the Internet by founding an Internet marketing consultancy, ACS. Hiten Shah serves as a Member of the Advisory Board of Recurly, Inc. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board at DailyFeats, Inc. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board at Classy, Inc.

Ep 131: How To Build A Successful Sales Career w/ Shane Oren, SVP Sales at Recurly Part of the TGIM (Thank God It's Monday) series hosted by Tom Alaimo.

In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Jenna Wyer (@Jenna W.), Vice President of Partnerships and Head of Payments at Recurly.Jenna has an impressive background in partnerships and payments from her time with Recurly, Spreedly, and as the founding VP of Sales at Braintree. This means she's no stranger to navigating relationships with payment giants like Stripe and the intricacies of how complex software work together.Topics covered in this episode:What partnership means at Recurly to generate revenue and marketing materialsHow to identify and approach a potential partnersShared pipeline: collaborating with partners to build pipeline and new businessWhy some partnerships fail and others succeedWhere to start for more information, content, and resources in the partnership spaceLinks and Resources:Jenna Wyer on LinkedInRecurlyCrossbeamPartnership LeadersBraintreeChartMogulListen to the episodeAs always, you can find this episode — along with all previous episodes — in your podcast player of choice. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”. If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it'd really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!

ABOUT SANTI:Santi Bibiloni is a Silicon Valley-based technology entrepreneur and co-founder & CEO at COR, an AI Management Software that serves Worldwide top Agencies and Consultants. Prior to COR he founded Balloon Group, one of Argentina's fastest-growing digital agencies, among other businesses. Today he also mentors on Sales & Fundraising in 500 Startups. ABOUT COR:COR is the Next-Generation Solution for Creative and Professional Teams that Intelligently Suggests How to Manage your Projects, Teams, and Finances, all in one tool. ABOUT BAREMETRICS: Baremetrics is the all-in-one metrics, forecasting, analytics, insights and engagement tool for teams using Stripe, Braintree, Chargify, Recurly and more.  ABOUT FOUNDER CHATS:Founder Chats is a podcast about starting and growing tech companies, as told candidly by the founders behind them.

Founder Chats is back! In this episode, we talk with Brian Parks, Founder and Managing Partner of Bigfoot Capital. Hear his story of transitioning from working at a local bank to running a tech company, his tips on managing your capital stack, and a whole lot more.Curious about you what heard? Check out the below links to learn more. Bigfoot Capital Growth oriented loans for B2B SaaS companies with $1.5M+ ARR. Baremetrics Metrics, forecasting, analytics, insights and engagement tools for teams using Stripe, Braintree, Chargify, Recurly and more. Founder Chats  A podcast about starting and growing tech companies, as told candidly by the founders behind them.  

7 Marketing Tools We Love For 2021 In episode #1667, we talk about seven marketing tools that we love for 2021! From old favorites like Metadata and All in One SEO, to Piñata Farms and Recurly, these tools are guaranteed to boost your content creation, targeted marketing and more! Tune in to hear our favorite picks for the year ahead. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: 7 Marketing Tools We Love For 2021. [00:30] The usefulness of Lately for optimizing your content. [01:08] How Recurly can help you with your subscription management. [02:00] The rise of meme culture and tools like Piñata Farms for meme creation. [02:27] Compiling and collating all your relevant data in Google Data Studio. [02:54] The power of the Circle community for content creators. [03:13] Get ready for the revamped version of the All in One SEO pack for WordPress! [03:35] Metadata for account-based marketing; finding specific targets.  [04:03] That is it for today! [04:24] Go to http://marketingschool.io/pro for a free trial of our Marketing School Community!   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:   Lately Recurly Piñata Farms Elon Musk Clubhouse Google Data Studio Circle All in One SEO Metadata.io   Leave Some Feedback:     What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.     Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

7 Marketing Tools We Love For 2021 In episode #1667, we talk about seven marketing tools that we love for 2021! From old favorites like Metadata and All in One SEO, to Piñata Farms and Recurly, these tools are guaranteed to boost your content creation, targeted marketing and more! Tune in to hear our favorite picks for the year ahead. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today's topic: 7 Marketing Tools We Love For 2021. [00:30] The usefulness of Lately for optimizing your content. [01:08] How Recurly can help you with your subscription management. [02:00] The rise of meme culture and tools like Piñata Farms for meme creation. [02:27] Compiling and collating all your relevant data in Google Data Studio. [02:54] The power of the Circle community for content creators. [03:13] Get ready for the revamped version of the All in One SEO pack for WordPress! [03:35] Metadata for account-based marketing; finding specific targets.  [04:03] That is it for today! [04:24] Go to http://marketingschool.io/pro for a free trial of our Marketing School Community!   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   Lately Recurly Piñata Farms Elon Musk Clubhouse Google Data Studio Circle All in One SEO Metadata.io   Leave Some Feedback:     What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.     Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

The latest PYMNTS/Recurly Subscription Commerce Conversion Index finds that some 15 million consumers have signed up for at least one subscription during the pandemic. Recurly's Emma Clark tells PYMNTS why many customers are staying beyond trial periods.

In episode #1512, you'll hear about seven tools you can use to grow your SaaS company from us. Whether you're working B2B or B2C, having the best tools for note-taking, A/B testing, decreasing churn, sales coaching, and more will help your SaaS company grow faster. Tune in to hear about the wonders of tools like ProductBoard, Gong, and Recurly. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today's topic: 7 Tools to Grow Your SaaS Company. [00:30] Using Notion as a daily to-do list and note taking tool. [01:03] Pick up any A/B testing tool such as VWO, Optimizely, or CrazyEgg. [01:25] Metrics and revenue operations with Stripe, Baremetrics, and Profitwell. [01:52] Lifting conversions using Convertly which offers many integrations. [02:27] B2B sales coaching with the help of Gong and Chorus. [02:56] Decreasing churn and increasing sales using chat tools like Drift and Intercom. [03:19] ProductBoard for customer development and product roadmap development.  [03:56] That's it for today! [03:58] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information or call us on 310-349-3785!   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   Notion VWO Optimizely CrazyEgg Stripe ProfitWell Baremetrics ConvertKit Recurly Gong Chorus Drift Intercom ProductBoard Sekoya   Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #1512, you’ll hear about seven tools you can use to grow your SaaS company from us. Whether you’re working B2B or B2C, having the best tools for note-taking, A/B testing, decreasing churn, sales coaching, and more will help your SaaS company grow faster. Tune in to hear about the wonders of tools like ProductBoard, Gong, and Recurly. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: 7 Tools to Grow Your SaaS Company. [00:30] Using Notion as a daily to-do list and note taking tool. [01:03] Pick up any A/B testing tool such as VWO, Optimizely, or CrazyEgg. [01:25] Metrics and revenue operations with Stripe, Baremetrics, and Profitwell. [01:52] Lifting conversions using Convertly which offers many integrations. [02:27] B2B sales coaching with the help of Gong and Chorus. [02:56] Decreasing churn and increasing sales using chat tools like Drift and Intercom. [03:19] ProductBoard for customer development and product roadmap development.  [03:56] That’s it for today! [03:58] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information or call us on 310-349-3785!   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:   Notion VWO Optimizely CrazyEgg Stripe ProfitWell Baremetrics ConvertKit Recurly Gong Chorus Drift Intercom ProductBoard Sekoya   Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

Are subscriptions the new retail? We know digital retail is way up, thanks to COVID. But … surprisingly ... subscription purchases are way up too. Streaming: jumped up to 89.8% Consumer goods: growth of 105%-145% Education: growth as high as 60% SaaS/Cloud: subscriber growth peaked at 51% That's interesting because we tend not to want long-term commitments especially during a downturn. We chat about all the details with Dan Burkhart, CEO of Recurly.

In episode #1399, we talk about seven unknown tools that will double your revenue. You'll definitely want to check out these tools that do everything from getting celebs to shout out your company to helping you upsell more effectively and eliminating background noise from your podcast recordings! Tune in to hear about them all! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today's topic: 7 Unknown Tools that Will Double Your Revenue. [00:30] Use Zest as a promotion tool to get more qualified clicks. [00:54] Book personalized video shoutouts from celebrities using Cameo. [01:10] Pay to have someone evaluate your copy using copytesting.com. [01:35] Add more payment options using FastSpring, Recurly, or Bolt. [02:10] Eliminate background noises during podcast recordings using Krisp. [02:44] Increase your revenue using sales platforms that add upsells. [03:08] Simplify your reporting using Supermetrics.  [03:20] That's it for today! [03:24] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information.   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   Zest Cameo copytesting.com ConversionXL Bolt FastSpring Recurly PayPal Krisp Shopify ReferralCandy SamCart ClickFunnels Supermetrics   Leave Some Feedback:     What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.     Connect with Us:  Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #1399, we talk about seven unknown tools that will double your revenue. You’ll definitely want to check out these tools that do everything from getting celebs to shout out your company to helping you upsell more effectively and eliminating background noise from your podcast recordings! Tune in to hear about them all! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: 7 Unknown Tools that Will Double Your Revenue. [00:30] Use Zest as a promotion tool to get more qualified clicks. [00:54] Book personalized video shoutouts from celebrities using Cameo. [01:10] Pay to have someone evaluate your copy using copytesting.com. [01:35] Add more payment options using FastSpring, Recurly, or Bolt. [02:10] Eliminate background noises during podcast recordings using Krisp. [02:44] Increase your revenue using sales platforms that add upsells. [03:08] Simplify your reporting using Supermetrics.  [03:20] That’s it for today! [03:24] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information.   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:   Zest Cameo copytesting.com ConversionXL Bolt FastSpring Recurly PayPal Krisp Shopify ReferralCandy SamCart ClickFunnels Supermetrics   Leave Some Feedback:     What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.     Connect with Us:  Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

Top News In Payments: Grubhub CEO Open To Deals; Chinese Consumers Shut Wallets In Face Of Coronavirus

Bloomberg News Reporter Chris Palmeri speaks on what subscription billion company Recurly found in their research on streaming services.

Derrick spent his birthday at the north shore of Lake Superior to disconnect and getaway. Yet, he found some time to brainstorm and problem solve for StaticKit. Ben’s back from Martha’s Vineyard, only to experience less positive updates for Tuple. For the first time, Tuple is shockingly “in the red” financially. So, he feels guilty about going away. Today’s Topics Include: Slow Growth: Substantially fewer Tuple trial signups than previous time periods Marketing and Sales Strategy: From being the new tool on the block to steady state where Ben has to earn new Tuple customers Bullseye Framework: Derrick re-read his go-to startup guide to select StaticKit’s repeatable traction channels Tuple’s Q4 objectives and key results (OKRs): Fill top of funnel to increase new email subscribers and trials to continue to grow Ben’s future plans to gather marketing and sales information/intelligence by advertising and appearing on dev-related podcasts Design Matters: Impacts people’s perception of product and builds trust Links and resources: Art of Product on Twitter (https://twitter.com/artofproductpod) Derrick Reimer (http://www.derrickreimer.com) Website Derrick Reimer on Twitter (https://twitter.com/derrickreimer) Ben Orenstein (http://www.benorenstein.com/) Website Ben Orenstein on Twitter (https://twitter.com/r00k?lang=en) Tuple (https://tuple.app/) Tuple’s Pair Programming Guide (https://tuple.app/pair-programming-guide) StaticKit (https://www.statickit.com/) Using Tailwind CSS with Next.js (https://statickit.com/guides/next-js-tailwind)  Level (https://level.app/) Slack (https://slack.com/) Zoom (https://zoom.us/) Upcase by Thoughtbot (https://thoughtbot.com/upcase) Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares (https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Guide-Getting-Customers/dp/0976339609)  Ruby on Rails (https://rubyonrails.org) HubSpot (https://www.hubspot.com) Rob Walling (https://robwalling.com/) Drip (https://www.drip.com/) Adam Wathan (https://adamwathan.me/) Full Stack Radio (http://www.fullstackradio.com/) Syntax.fm (https://syntax.fm) Steve Schoger (https://www.steveschoger.com/) Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org) Recurly (https://recurly.com) Chargify (https://www.chargify.com)

Recurly And AI News

Monday Newz Recurly

This week, I bring a friend from a past job to share his insights on observability and other aspects of a weird life in technology. This is one of my favorite chats because Joe is one of my favorite people in tech. "Customer-concerned Operations and Systems workers turned Cloud Native lab-rat at Packet, previously of DigitalOcean, IBM, Recurly, Platform9 Systems. Approach to Production engineering relies on an iterative combination of programmatically-led audits, collaborative remediation, and mental health check-ins to ensure the observability scheme is serving the organization and its workers, and not leaving burnt out engineers at the on-call rotation's mercy. " Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA5q31e https://twitter.com/jmarhee https://github.com/jmarhee https://www.packet.com/

Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about SaaStr annual and billing system rebuilds.Helpful links from the episode: SaaStr Annual conference 5 Questions CEO's Struggle With and How To Answer Them - Dave Kellogg presentation at SaaStr A Step-By-Step Guide To Revenue Growth (PDF) - Mark Roberge at SaaStr Billing systems mentioned:  Recurly, Chargify, Chargebee FULL SHOW NOTES00:09 Aaron Weiche: We're bringing you episode 3 - SaaStr Annual Recap and Rebuilds.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. Darren, both of us have... We've been on the road and doing some travel, are you back and settled into the daily desk, in the daily grind? 00:54 Darren Shaw: I am still trying to catch up on email. Oh man, it's tough to take a week off of email, just piles up. And then every time I look at it, it's this weird thing where when I've got like 300 emails that are real messages, it almost becomes a lottery, where it's like, I go through my inbox and just something stands out to me, and I just jump on it and reply right there. But then there's other stuff that's also important and it's just like, "No, you never get replied to, sorry." It's just this weird thing when you're away for a week. But yes, I'm back, it was a good trip. Local U was amazing. Probably the best Local U ever. It was awesome, you missed it.01:32 AW: Yeah, well fitting that it was the best ever when a first advance that I've never not been a part of, so that's too bad. I was trolling you guys from just up the road in San Jose, but I definitely missed out. Mostly, I just miss out seeing all the great people that are part of kind of that Local U family and community.01:53 DS: I definitely missed hanging out with you.01:55 AW: Yep, there's nothing like beers in real life over talking on podcasts and emails and all of the other ways we end up communicating.02:03 DS: Sure, yeah, this podcast is a good second best, though.02:06 AW: It totally is, it's given us a lot more regiment in our interactions, which is a great thing.02:12 DS: And now we have a schedule of chatting so that's good.02:16 AW: So, I've been refreshing my Twitter feed every like 10 seconds waiting for you or Whitespark to announce that your review tool, or your new tool that we've been talking about has launched. But did I miss the tweet, or where are we at? 02:32 DS: Yeah, no, you're probably a little over-zealous with your refreshing there. We're not quite ready to launch. It's amazing, honestly, it's been day after day, where I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm waking up in the morning and we're gonna launch this thing, there's just that one last little thing to do." And so we start looking at that one last little thing, and then we find five other things. It's like, "Oh well, it doesn't work if you try a business in this particular way, or if you search in this way," or it's like, "Oh, it's this weird bug on the PDF export." Just all these little tiny things that keep cropping up, and it feels so close, day after day after day. We could have launched it, but then you get a bunch of people emailing saying, "Oh hey, it didn't work. Or my business... It didn't return the right results." So we keep finding things, and I figure it's a free tool, so there's not like anything pressing to launch it, so we might as well just hold it until it's really polished, to make sure that we found all the bugs.03:29 AW: Yeah. Do you start to lose your mind at all with that stuff? Where it's... You feel like it's Groundhog Day, and it's always just a couple more things, just a couple more things a couple more things, 'cause I don't deal with that very well if that ever happens to our team.03:44 DS: Yeah, it doesn't really feel... It doesn't make me lose my mind, but it does feel like Groundhog Day, it's just like, "Oh, man, every day there's something else." Which is quite irritating. I don't really... I just kinda like, "Oh, it's not today." I look at it in the morning for about an hour, or I run a few tests, we try for a few things. I write up the next, the list of tweaks to make, and then I move on with my day. It's no big deal. But it is annoying, a little annoying.04:13 AW: You have better patience than I do 'cause I really start... I just start focusing... Like I don't wanna wake up another day and be testing this again, or see the same bugs, or new bugs, or anything else. I get to a point where we have this, "Enough is enough," talk and we map out an hour by hour plan on how this is going to change. And most of it's the result of my frustration because I end up feeling like, "Well, we can't get to the next thing, that we need to get to, without getting this out there or whatever." And I get what you're saying that putting out a free tool is probably a lot more excitement over it than a necessity. Like a big feature is...04:54 DS: Yeah, so I think that's exactly it. There's two things. One it's this free tool, it's almost... It was a side product that gave our new part-time developer employee. He's a computer science student at the U of A. And so, one, he's a busy student, so he's not available to work eight hours a day on this. So I just put in the to-dos and he gets them done when he can. And two, a free tool, it's not that stressful, it's not a big deal. And we don't have any clients relying on this, waiting for it, it's just gonna be another marketing vehicle for us when we launch it.05:29 AW: Yeah, I would still have trouble with my own excitement, keeping that at bay, 'cause I'd wanna share it with the world.05:35 DS: No, I do wanna share, like I showed it to people at Local U, and they're like, "It's so awesome." And I'm like, "I know, I really wanna launch it." I'm excited about how it's gonna be received. I think everyone is gonna quite like it. And so I think it's gonna be great from that perspective.05:48 AW: Well, good, I'm continuing to keep my anticipation level high.05:53 DS: Great, thank you. I know. It won't let you down, you just gotta pretend I didn't say anything. Pretend I just announced it to you today that we're building this new tool. [chuckle] So you had no prior thing, so you can keep that anticipation high.06:07 AW: I can fake being surprised really well, so I'm in on that.06:11 DS: Okay, perfect. I wanna hear about SaaStr. You went to this awesome conference, all about building SaaS apps and all the things that go into that... So I'm just curious to hear, what are some of the takeaways, how was the conference? 06:26 AW: Yeah, the conference was awesome, it was my best SaaStr Annual experience I've had. This was the third one that I've gone to. All three have been at different venues. This one actually moved, the first two were in San Francisco, this one was in San Jose. And for me, this was the best venue... Each time the venue had its own little quirks on how much room there was to get around, or room sizes, and how many rooms. And it really felt like... Cause I think this is the 5th or 6th year of SaaStr Annual total, but it really felt like they had nailed a number of those past problems, and alleviated those in the space they were in and everything else. One, that was a really nice relief that we had that taken care of that time. And then it just started off, the very first talk I went to was a topic of five questions that CEOs struggle with. That one was just a fabulous talk that really gave a lot of insight to what things that I definitely deal with on a daily basis. So it was great to see someone else's view of that.07:38 DS: Yeah, what are these five questions CEOs struggle with? 07:42 AW: Yeah, and the interesting thing with it is so many of the speakers of this... This conference is definitely built around a lot of VC-funded companies, so we're a little bit of an outlier there as a bootstrap company. But you come in with it through the frame of mind that there's a lot I can learn by just kind of switching from, "Hey, we have a whole bunch of money and can hire who we need to, and it's just about putting the process in place and scaling and everything else." And so you adapt to reading between the lines on some of the talks that were there, which makes it a lot... A lot easier. Yeah, but the, that very first talk there was really one piece of it that I really liked as the speaker got into, and that more or less had to do with the frame of mind and what you focus on, or what you speak about, and how you look at it.08:39 AW: And the cool thing was the way that he put it was looking at how you align things where you speak about your business like you're vision-driven, you create a culture that's customer-driven, and then you build strategy and goals like you're competitor-driven. But yeah, make sure you don't obsess too much about who your competitors are. And that to me was a really great framework for a CEO to approach your business where you have to keep that vision at the center of what you're working towards, and decisions you make, and how you progress. But then also having a culture, and this is something, you know I liked it probably because it is how I view us at GatherUp is one of our main core values is that it's customer first. And we think of it a couple of ways down is one, we've built our tool to help businesses interact so they can put the customer first. And it's the same with our team, where we bend over backwards to provide as much service as we can for that customer.09:48 DS: And I can speak to that as a customer, really, because you guys are always really helpful when we need something. And you're responsive, and that's the way we try to be at Whitespark as well. And I've heard about some competitors that are not as easy to work with, and so I think it's super key. We see people leaving competitors and coming to us because of that. When the customer service isn't good over there, then they start looking around.10:18 AW: Yeah, we're starting to see that in our sales cycle, where we're seeing people who have chosen another review or reputation management platform, and they've gone through their one or their two-year contract with them, and they're going back into the market, and they're talking to some of the other ones that's there. And when you read between the lines on when you're asking them what they liked, and what they didn't like, and things like that, you really see a lot of being shared there has to do with how they interacted with that company. And it's really important piece, as I point out all the time, in being a bootstrapped company, we are just never ever going to out-feature someone. We're not gonna win the feature war because we don't have 50 or 100 developers that are there. But where we can win is by being able to out-service them by caring more, more consistent, and things like that. So it's really, I think it's extra important in a bootstrapped environment.11:22 DS: That makes a lot of sense. At SaaStr, you mentioned that it's kind of driven and geared towards VC-funded companies. In our... I'm just curious, how much of a minority are we bootstrapped SaaS companies versus VC-funded companies? 11:40 AW: I don't even know if I would have a sense in the overall space. But definitely at this conference, there's over 10,000 attendees. I felt like one out of every 10 that I talked to, was bootstrapped. And again, it's attracting people, there's VCs there you can go pitch VCs there, there's a lot of things like that. But it definitely seems like, in the overall scheme, lower and much less given the climate of what's there right now. And I'm just amazed at the amount of money constantly being thrown around in that space. It's mind-blowing to me, and a little bit different from the way I'm wired, that's for sure.12:18 DS: Yeah, it's very different from the way I'm wired. I'm curious, would you... Let's say someone said, "Hey, here's $5 million, you can use it to hire some more developers, and accelerate your development, and improve all your marketing, your sales whatever." Would you take it, would you want it? 12:35 AW: Yeah, right now I wouldn't want it. I would just... Obviously, it comes with some type of attachment, right? If it's a free $5 million, yes, please. [chuckle] But between equity and being driven by a board, things like that, that's where it starts to get a lot trickier.12:56 DS: Same, yeah. I would never take it. I would not take one, five or $10 million to do it because the main thing for me is being able to set the vision for the company and develop what I wanna develop without anyone else having any input on that. I feel like I have a good vision, and I don't wanna have to justify it to a board or anything like that.13:20 AW: Yep, no, totally, totally agree with you. And one of the other things I liked about the initial talk on the five things for CEOS, a lot of it had to do with hiring and finding the right people too. And one of his comments was about make sure that you're bringing people on that give energy instead of take energy. And that was one that just really hit in a very simplified way, and really made me think about... Cause we've just hired someone new again this week, and these are all like adding positions to our team. We continue to grow and add positions, and it's not replacing something that was already there.14:00 AW: As we're adding these new folks to the table, those are very important things. And we recently did have a... We had a failed sales hire that lasted all of about 90 days, and some of the things that he touched upon in the hiring process that they look at, and what's important, and one other talk that I'll give you a little download on really kind of solidified when you're ranking and looking at what's important in your position. I really thought that I needed someone who was a good closer, and just had a lot of just sales moxie to them. And I think what I found out is just the way we're built, and already in the culture of our company, we really need someone who's knowledgeable in our space and in our product, because all of us are, and me, especially, I'm an education-based sales person is the way I refer to it. I wanna teach you everything, and if I teach you well enough, you will see how we solve the problem.15:00 DS: But you're also adding value and integrity through that approach, I find. When someone talks to a vendor that is mostly just all about, they discuss the features and whatever, and then they talk to someone like you who's educating them on what's best for them, it's like they can tell that you have their interest in mind. You're trying to help them find the best solution. And that, I think, is an excellent sales approach.15:24 AW: Yeah, and it definitely it made me think about... Alright, so when we go back to the table, 'cause we're gonna need to hire some more salespeople. I need to keep that in mind. I saw what happened when I placed more value somewhere else. And so this next time through, I definitely need to place more value on someone who's passionate about our industry, knowledgeable, experienced. That doesn't mean knowing everything, but they're much further down the line of our last hire we really had to teach a lot, and just the uptake didn't happen, so they weren't really empowered by it, and it didn't lead them to then have confidence to be having those conversations at the level you need to have them to bring on the right type of customers.16:07 DS: One thing you said that I thought was interesting was hiring people that give energy, rather than take energy, and I was wondering how can you assess that in the interview stage when you are just trying to find employees, how can you determine that, at that point? 16:23 AW: Yeah, and I don't have a good answer for you on that. I would think you probably need to devise some scenarios where you're trying to understand how they approach things like problem solving, and pick through that to figure out what they are. Or to some extent, too, is realizing that if you have somebody that's taking energy on your team, that's something you need to do something about, or remove from the team. And I think that was probably more along the lines of what they're saying of, "Be aware when you have that going on. It's already hard enough. Don't continue with someone making it that much harder."17:03 DS: Yeah, it's like that classic saying in HR, "Hire slow and fire fast." Once you get a feel for it, if it's not working out, then you cut your losses.17:12 AW: Yep, absolutely. And I would say after our recent failure on one of our hires, I totally feel that way. The good news when I look... Last year, I think we hired seven people total, and there was one that didn't work out. So if I can hit on six out of seven again this year, I will be extremely happy with it. I'll take that winning percentage all day long.17:34 DS: Yeah, yeah, for sure. The hiring has been pretty good for us too. We've generally not had too many duds in the history of the company. So, yeah, it's been pretty good. It's hard to fire, too. I hate that. It's the worst thing. That's why hiring slow is so important to really take your time and make sure you have the right person. There's nothing worse than having to let someone go.17:53 AW: Absolutely. So the next talk that I really loved was kicking off the second day and it was a presentation called The Step-by-Step Guide to Revenue Growth. And this was from Mark Roberge who was the Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, and now he's a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. And it was hands down probably one of the best presentations I've ever taken in. And, yeah, it was all focused on sales, marketing, churn, and a little bit of hiring as well. And he just laid out in such a concise way how to look at, how to accelerate growth, and where to focus on, and really understanding just a lot of self-awareness on what your product fit is, and what your go-to-market fit is, and then how do you grow and build a mote around what you're doing once you're ready to scale.18:53 AW: So it was one of those where I was like, "Man, I didn't know at first if his slides we're gonna be available." So I was literally... And as well as the rest of the crowd taking photos of every slide. It was just really well laid out and told you exactly what you needed to be looking at with it.19:10 DS: Are these the actual slides he presented with? 19:12 AW: That we're taking photo or that I gave you in the link for our show? Yes.19:16 DS: They are so packed with text content. Were you not struggling to follow him and read the slides? 19:23 AW: No. Great presenter and just went through 'em. And, yeah, as you can see from the slides, they're not like this visual like, "Oh they're so beautiful," right? 19:33 DS: Right.19:33 AW: Just really content-driven and it really embodied everything that he was talking about. And one of the first points that he really hit upon was really understanding what product market fit is and finding out what is that metric that helps you understand that a customer is successful with you. How do you define that leading indicator that they're successful? And then what you wanna do in your company is make sure how can you optimize, how fast you're delivering on that leading indicator. So how do you take it from happening at month six or nine or 10? And making sure a majority are hitting it in month one because if you don't, more of those are gonna drop out. They're not gonna meet their level of value in the product. And it was just a really clear way and a little bit different. There's so much all the time in the SaaS world on product market fit and how do you know you have it and the gut feeling of it and what the numbers tell you and churn numbers. But churn is this trailing thing where... How he laid it out puts it into something where you can start looking at it like month one. Do I have 70% of my customers achieving this leading metric that we know leads to success right away in month one? Yeah.20:55 DS: And these slides... I don't know if you can share these with podcast listeners but these slides are packed with info. This is, it's the whole presentation, completely consumable in the slides.21:06 AW: Yeah, yeah, that's a great part about it is that... And that's why it was such a bonus when he's like, "I'll tweet out the link for these slides." I was like, "Thank you 'cause I am saving these straight to my desktop and reviewing them constantly." So it was just a really great walkthrough on how to analyze those things and what to look at. Another area of it that I really liked was understanding how to market and sell to the right fit for you. In his slides, it's like slide 25, he's able to show, "All right, you have different channels to reach customers inbound, outbound and partners. And then you might have different categories of SMB, mid-market and enterprise." And he lays out a grid so you're able to analyze and say, "Okay. Who are we reaching and what's our best channel that we are reaching them?" And instead of always trying to make one work, find the one that really is your go-to and that's where you really really want to invest. And just maybe you experiment or even ignore the other segments but I could definitely look at this with our team and there's a few things...22:17 AW: We do inbound very, very well. 99% of our business comes from inbound marketing of writing blog posts, social, speaking at conferences, all those kind of things. But we really badly... There's parts of us that, "Oh, we'd love to have a great partner channel. We'd like to figure it out in this way," or "We'd like to do more outbound." And so some of it was just realizing. Like find out what does work for you, and then just completely max that out because you know it works.22:46 DS: Yeah, it makes sense. I always think about outbound sales and I'm like, "Oh, should I be doing that like everyone else seems to be doing that?" And I get these emails and I'm like, "Oh, that's a pretty decent email." And I can see all these companies doing it and I think, "Man, maybe we should get into that." But honestly, we have a hard enough time managing the leads that are coming in right now anyways, that's why I should probably hire a sales person because we don't respond fast enough where I'm just like, "Yeah, I could set up a call with you, like, in two weeks." It's like, "Those leads are going cold by the time I ever talk to them," and so I just need to hire a sales person, I think, 'cause we have enough inbound coming in that I don't need to worry about outbound.23:25 AW: Yep. Now and we're kind of the same way. I definitely have some areas where there's a lot of interest with, like, our agency partners and resellers, but for our mid-market, for businesses that are 50 locations on up, like, we do need to do more outbound to start those conversations and to at least be on their radar as much as anything because that's... Our competitors are doing that. And so to expect when there's, you know, 10 different products all reaching out and cold emails and ad conferences on expo floors, and calling them and connecting with them and we're not doing that, like, we are gonna miss the boat on a bunch unless they decide, "Well, the only way I'm picking a vendor is by who I'm gonna search for and what of their content I like to read." So, yep, to some extent, we have to because everyone else is in that arena.24:23 DS: Sure, and are you experimenting with that? 24:25 AW: Yeah, we definitely are. I mean, I do some of it myself. I see businesses and I know really fit our mold well and I'm able to do, kind of, a quick glance at what they have available online, and are they displaying reviews on location pages and things like that, and make a good determination that it's somebody that I wanna go after. So I definitely do that. The sales person that we hired and then didn't work out, that was their role, and they really didn't even get to doing the outbound part because they just couldn't get enough knowledge and confidence in the product, so...25:00 DS: Yeah. I often think, like, your customer support people, if someone on that customer support team that really knows the product, that has been supporting the product for a while also has the sales acumen, then they would be a good person to put into a dedicated sales role.25:18 AW: Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. What I've found with our current customer success team is those guys love to help and they don't love to talk money. So I don't have anyone that's a fit for that right now, because the minute it comes to bringing up even the smallest dollar amount, they're uncomfortable, it's just not in who they are. So I don't have any of those candidates right now, but yeah, it'd be great to be able to bring some people from that role into more of a biz-dev role, more of a sales role with having that great underlying base of nothing but product and customer knowledge.25:56 DS: Yeah, totally. Yep.25:57 AW: Outside of the talks, the other stuff is just networking. I mean, there's just so many great network opportunities because every time you sit down in something and introduce yourself or you're standing in line to go into a session, it's someone else who is a VP of sales or a founder or CEO, or runs marketing for a SaaS company you've either heard of or it's somebody you never even knew existed. So you have all these great mini conversations in between sessions, and at the happy hours, and at the events at night, where it's just one big group of your people. And so, I mean, imagine Local U of the 100 that are there, and then you multiply that into 10,000 and the conversations and the exposure and the insight you get into other people's companies and what they do is just unbelievably fantastic.26:51 DS: Sounds so great. Next year, next year I wanna go with you.26:53 AW: Totally.26:54 DS: Hopefully it doesn't conflict with the Local U Event.26:57 AW: Yeah, no, totally. You would love it. It was fun for I brought another member of our team and it was his first SaaS type... He used to work for me at agencies that I was part of before and so this was his first immersion deep into the SaaS world, and he was just like, he was blown away by it. And it was also great because some of the things he heard in some of the talks, he realized we're already using that framework or thinking about it that way, or doing those things. So there was a lot of... And I had some of these things too where you're in your own bubble so much an in your own head. It was so great to get outside affirmation like, "Okay, I am thinking about this right." Brand is really important and that's why we re-branded and it put so much into that. And here's somebody really talking about how big of a differentiator that is.27:46 DS: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Your new brand makes a lot more sense, I really like it. It's more all-encompassing. So, yeah. We talked about that last time.27:54 AW: Yeah. But yeah, so good from all those different pieces and then one other thing where I wanted to transition and touch on this a little bit is, I was also there seeking out a new vendor for our billing system because our billing system we built it ourselves, an in-house built, we have a lot of little wrinkles and just unique things about the way we bill on a per location and how many get added in a month and our re-sellers can sell and add or remove and at the time we built it there just wasn't a billing solution that fit all of the different combinations and possibilities that we have and so it's gotten us by and it's gotten us through but now we have a lot of other needs, we have four different plans, we have all these pricing levels, we wanna do promo codes and discounts, there's a lot of other things we wanna look into and so we're basically at the point of we either need to completely rebuild it and do its version 2.0, new life and have it be so much more robust or find a provider.29:00 AW: And the common thing that I keep looking at, it's like it's already all of our work to build and run one product and to me that billing system just ends up looking like a second product. And do we even want to try to maintain that and pay as a much attention to that as we have to pay to our main product of helping with customer feedback and online reviews? 29:23 DS: Yeah, we're in a very similar situation because we have an account system that we built in 2010, and it's been meeting our needs but it is like it's this terrible system to work with and whenever we have anything to add it's a real pain and so, yeah we've been working on updating it. We actually, we have another problem is that we use three different payment providers, we've got a pay flow accounts, we have a bean stream account, we have legacy clients on these old payment processing accounts and so we have multiple payment providers all hooked up into this account system and we have promo codes, we have all this stuff but it's just all hacked together in such a terrible way so we've re-conceptualize our account and about six months ago we started working on a rebuild and I'm gonna have two of my team members dedicated to building this thing right now, so we're building our brand new accounts. But the thing about the account system is that it's also the underpinning of our whole new platform.30:24 DS: Right now, we have all of our applications as separate things you can sign up for but we're building a single platform that everything will be tied into that you'll just sign up for white spark rather than these people that come to our website and they're like, "Well, what should we sign up for? You've got this, you got that, what do I want? I kind of want a demo of your platform." And we're like, "Euu, we don't really have a platform to show you." So we're trying to build a platform and the accounts becomes the basis of that. But then I think about what you said earlier as you were looking at some of those Chargify and Recurly and maybe it would be smarter for us to just use one of those but they get really expensive. So it's either pay once now and then we have our own system that we can manage and have complete flexibility over or pay forever, you're gonna lock into one of these systems and just always pay for it.31:13 AW: Yeah, but I see some of that as like a cost of success. It's no different back in the day when hosting could be something a little bit more expensive and you'd have to lay out to someone you're building a website for in the early 2000s, like if you do this much traffic, you might need a shared server and if you did this much traffic you might need dedicated and where they look at it like, "Oh wow, If I needed a dedicated server for $1000 a month, that would be terrible and be like, "No, there will be a reason you needed that dedicated server because you had so many visitors and so much traffic to your website", you actually want that happen, right. So.31:51 DS: Yeah, it's really interesting. I still think we'd have to build all the payment pages and all that. It almost feels like it's just the billing system and so our account system that we're building we still need it anyways and I don't know if we're gonna get that much benefit out of using something like Chargify or Recurly.32:08 AW: Yeah, yeah, well I'd be happy to give you a little in a test account with one and I have calls coming up with a couple of the others, 'cause I'm definitely gonna put them through their paces and vet them but I've already been impressed when what ours is in... That's not to say our system won't still have to do some billing-related things but there's so much more that that can handle where we just need to inform them, here's the account, here's the locations and plans and whatever else. Now, it assembles the bill, does the billing, contacts the processor and then there's a lot of reporting mechanisms that can come out of that too that can be a lot more helpful.32:48 DS: That is one thing we tried to build reporting dashboards out of our current account system, it's just we never quite get what I want I have this... I still cannot calculate churn which is crazy. I don't even know how to calculate my MRR and ARR and all that stuff. I just don't have those numbers which is quite pathetic really.[laughter]33:11 AW: We have those incorporated into our home-built tool and everything else and we've also done some good things like predictive billing. I can see where we're likely to land already for February here in the middle of the month, based on what's there. That yeah, some things could change a little bit but also able to see a pretty clear path to where we will likely end up with it.33:36 DS: Right.33:37 AW: Every time I would need a new report or I need that addition, it's pulling one of my team off of something that's a feature in our product that will allow us to get a new customer, a new whatever else to bring them over to build that on this other side, right? And that's where I've just kind of arrived at for our growth and where we're at, and we're passed a couple million dollars of... We're in the multiple millions of ARR. So, it's definitely at the point for me where it's like I see it as an investment and a cost of doing good business as opposed to taking money from us where it's just not worth the value, and I think that can vary for everybody at what point that time is.34:14 DS: Yeah, I think I'll look into it a little bit and reassess. We're not too deep into it. I still think a lot of what we're building will still be needed, so there might be an opportunity for us to offset and accelerate the development. 'Cause the ideal thing is I'll get these guys off of accounts and working on the software, right, so that's my goal, I wanna get there, get them there, as soon as possible. So if I could do something like Chargify then I think it's worth looking into.34:40 AW: Yeah, and I'm happy to pass along my notes. Like I said, after I've talked to all of them. Happy to share. It was nice. That was really nice about the conference to have that. And to have five different ones all on the same sales floor and to be able to go spend 20 minutes with each one and explain a little bit about our system, get some early answers and just anything that was gonna be a no-go or needs to be dug into... And then set up a next step in a call was definitely helpful, where that would have been harder to do one by one over the web to some extent.35:15 DS: Yeah, definitely, yeah.35:16 AW: Well, cool, man. What's your next couple of weeks? What's on your radar that's big in your world, or that you're looking after until we talk again, in a few weeks...35:26 DS: Well, we're gonna maybe launch a new free tool if we're gonna...35:30 AW: [laughter] Well, what if we just for the entire life of this podcast, you're always launching this free tool.35:37 DS: That would be awesome. [chuckle] one day we finally launch it. It becomes like the most ultimate free tool. Does everything you can ever imagine.35:45 AW: That's the cliff hanger, people are gonna download every episode just to find out when is the episode that the free tool launches? So this might be a little hard on the business, but it might be really great for our podcast.36:00 DS: [chuckle] Exactly So there's that. I'm also a little stressed because I'm speaking at Brighton SEO in April, and so I have my presentation there, so I'm doing a case study for that presentation. But I also have to do a good seven hours of training, and in that training, I gotta make all the slide decks for all the different aspects of local search so... I'm gonna be very busy with mostly that over the next six weeks or so.36:29 AW: Woo, Yeah.36:29 DS: But I'm going to Local Search Association in California at the end of February, and then I got a little ski trip to Jasper with the family, so. I got some nice stuff coming up too.36:38 AW: Nice, yeah, no, that sounds daunting to put... Any time you have to put together... I think the biggest thing I've ever done is like a three-hour session. And that was very daunting where it slides and I put together a workbook and a lot of interaction and things like that and that that was a lot of work... I was like, "I don't know if I ever wanna do that again."37:00 DS: Yeah, it is gonna be a lot and I'm just kinda, I haven't fully started on it yet, so it's not as scary yet until I actually write that outline and realize, "Oh damn, this is way bigger than I imagined." I'm always overly optimistic about things until I start on them and Then I realize, "Wow." But yeah, if I think about my slides, I usually do about, for 20 minute talk, I'll have about 90 slides, so for seven hours, I'm gona have a lot of slides to make.37:27 AW: [chuckle] Your slide totals are going to be, you're gonna approach like four digits. That's impressive.37:33 DS: I think so. Yeah I'll have like 1700 slides.37:36 AW: Nice Well, I'm gonna be interested to see... We just added another team member this week, a product manager. So I'm gonna be excited, just... Any time in a young company, when you're onboarding and especially in a remote company, there's so much we learn and we get better at our onboarding and our training process, and this is the first time where we've hired another product manager so to see what that first hire goes like there and the training there, it's definitely gonna be interesting to me. We just signed off this morning actually on some co-working space, so we have five, six people around the Minneapolis area now, and they were kind of seeking somewhere where they could get some face time and interaction and so we pulled the trigger on that. So it'll be fun to see how that adds and hopefully gives people around here more options. And then for me it's just tough too then kinda balancing out for those where we only have one in a place or two in a city. How do we afford them some of the same opportunities or try to bring them in from time to time so that they can see more of the team face-to-face is gonna be some interesting challenges.38:47 DS: Yeah, I was thinking about that with co-working spaces as well because I would do it maybe in Edmonton but then I have employees in four other cities. Right? And so do I sign up for co-working spaces in all those cities. It gets a little tough and it's hard to be fair to every... All employees, right? 39:03 AW: Yap, yeah, well, maybe that would be a great topic for us to talk about next time is just some of the things that are challenges in remote work and those types of pieces and for everything from finding the right people who thrive in remote work to training them in to getting collaboration and communication. There's definitely a lot of different finer points to it.39:25 DS: Yeah, definitely. All right, well I'll definitely put that on the agenda for our future podcast.39:30 AW: Sounds good. Well, thanks my man. Another good episode in the books and I hope you have a great couple of weeks until we sit down and talk together again.39:41 DS: Yeah, thanks Aaron. Always a pleasure. Talk to you next time.39:44 AW: All right. Thanks everybody for listening to episode three of the SaaS venture podcast. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks.39:53 DS: See ya.[outro music]

Bryan Caplovitz is the president and CEO of SpeakerMatch.com, the world's largest online speakers bureau. Speaker Match helps line up thousands of speakers on all topics with meeting and event planners who need speakers, from local service clubs to the biggest speaking events in America. Speaker Match has been in business for nearly 20 years. Screw The Commute Podcast Show Notes Episode 068 Wake 'em Up Video Professional Speaking System - https://www.antion.com/speakervideo.htm Internet Marketing Training Center - https://imtcva.org/ Higher Education Webinar – https://screwthecommute.com/webinars 02:14 Tom's introduction to Bryan Caplovitz 03:18 Bryan coming up through the ranks as a geek 04:57 Transition from working world to entrepreneur 14:56 A typical day for Bryan 26:41 Getting screwed over in business 27:43 Funny and bizarre, but really extortion! 29:44 The best and worst thing about working for yourself 32:59 Sponsor message 34:14 How Bryan stays motivated 39:01 Parting thoughts for us Screwballs Entrepreneurial Resources Mentioned in This Podcast Higher Education Webinar – It's the second webinar on the page: https://screwthecommute.com/webinars Screw The Commute - https://screwthecommute.com/ Speaker Match - https://www.speakermatch.com/ref19192734.html Taboola - https://www.taboola.com/ Outbrain - https://www.outbrain.com/ Recurly - https://recurly.com/ Internet Marketing Training Center - https://imtcva.org/ Related Episodes Top Ten Ways to Make Money Speaking - https://screwthecommute.com/7/ How to Refer Me and Others for Money - https://screwthecommute.com/67/ More Entrepreneurial Resources for Home Based Business, Lifestyle Business, Passive Income, Professional Speaking and Online Business   I discovered a great new headline / subject line / subheading generator that will actually analyze which headlines and subject lines are best for your market. I negotiated a deal with the developer of this revolutionary and inexpensive software. Oh, and it's good on Mac and PC. Go here: http://jvz1.com/c/41743/183906 The Wordpress Ecourse. Learn how to Make World Class Websites for $20 or less. https://www.GreatInternetMarketing.com/wordpressecourse Join our Private Facebook Group! One week trial for only a buck and then $37 a month, or save a ton with one payment of $297 for a year. Click the image to see all the details and sign up or go to https://www.greatinternetmarketing.com/screwthecommute/ After you sign up, check your email for instructions on getting in the group.  

Kamran is a Venture Partner at Greycroft, where he has led a number of deals for the firm in the areas of mobile platforms, payments & commerce, and financial technology. At Greycroft, Kamran has led the fund’s core investments in Azimo, Boxed Wholesale, Fortumo, and Recurly, and driven the firm’s seed investments in Bread (fka Lon), Highlight, Cord, and Dasher. He also led Greycroft’s prior investment in Venmo (acquired by Braintree), Braintree (acquired by PayPal), and BalconyTV (acquired by Orchard). **Links:** Kamran: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamranansari1/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamranansari1/) Greycroft: [https://www.greycroft.com/](https://www.greycroft.com/) Benzinga Fintech Summit: [https://benzingafintechsummit.com/](https://benzingafintechsummit.com/)

Recurly is looking for a Senior Technical Recruiter who will be responsible for hiring across the entire organization for both our San Francisco and Boulder office locations. You will help us grow teams within Data Scientists, Software Engineers, Product Managers and Infrastructure Engineers as well as non-technical positions such as Customer Success Managers, Sales, and Marketing. Apply today - www.recurly.com/careers Did you love it? Live us a comment. Share it with your friends and don’t forget to head over to iTunes or where ever you listen to podcasts and subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening to us on Alexa make sure you add us to your Flash Briefing. FOLLOW MY CAREER FIT:LinkedIN.com/mycareerfitfacebook.com/mycareerfitInstagram @mycareerfitTwitter @Mycareerfit ````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````Intro & Outro Music by BENSOUND www.bensound.com/royalty-free-...Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/b...Music promoted by Audio Library youtu.be/m7L_nc2QZq8 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/my-career-fit-podcast/message

Jack Altman is the Founder & CEO of Lattice, actually our partners for this month on the show and as you will hear, they are the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. Lattice have raised close to $10m in funding from some of our favourites in industry including the likes of Miles Grimshaw @ Thrive, Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil, Alexis Ohanian and YC’s Daniel Gross. Prior to founding Lattice, Jack was the Head of Business Development @ Lattice where he saw the firm move into hyperscaling. Jack has also build an incredible angel portfolio including the likes of Gusto, OpenDoor, Instacart, Zenefits and Soylent. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Jack made his way from leading angel investor to Head of Business Development @ TeeSpring to the world of SaaS with the founding of Lattice? 2.) What does Jack mean when he says "founders must do what it takes to get the best people on board"? To what extent does Jack believe that great investors provide social validity to future hires? 3.) How does Jack think about really getting the best from his team? What is core to empowering them? Why does he believe that EQ is the most important skill for managers? What does Jack believe is the right way to give clear and direct feedback? 4.) Why does Jack believe that the best relationships with investors are less formal? What does Jack really look for in his relationships with investors? What does Jack mean when he says ''investor advice is right on valuation''? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Jack’s Fave Book: Meditations Jack’s Fave Blog: SaaStr As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jack on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Paul Buchheit is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world’s most successful accelerator with portfolio companies including the likes of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits, Twitch, the list goes on. Before YC and starting from the beginning, Paul was the 23rd employee at Google where he created Gmail, developed the original prototype for Google AdSense and even suggested the company's former motto, "Don't Be Evil". He then started FriendFeed in 2006 where he created the like button as we know it, the company was later acquired by Facebook where Paul worked until his move to Y Combinator in 2010, where he is a partner. Paul is also a prolific angel having created an immense portfolio with the likes of Gusto, Checkr, Optimizely and many more incredible teams. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Paul made his way from creating Gmail in the early Google days, to founding the like button we know today, to being with Y Combinator currently? 2.) What does Paul believe it is that makes Paul Graham (PG) the special individual that he is? How has Paul seen the scaling of PG and Jessica Livingstone as leaders with the scaling of YC? 3.) Why does Paul believe it is fundamental to attain 100 happy users? How can one stress test levels of customer satisfaction accurately? How can founders determine which users and which advice to incorporate and which to disregard? 4.) Having worked alongside the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Paige, what does Paul believe makes the truly special founders? How does Paul assess the balance between stubbornness and vision? What is the telltale sign of stubbornness beginning? 5.) Question from Justin Kan: How does Paul look to determine the 10% that delivers 90% of the value? Where has Paul made mistakes and seen others make mistakes in trying to implement this level of focus? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Paul’s Fave Book: Eckhart Tolle Paul’s Most Recent Investment: Greo As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Paul on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Ali Rowghani is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world’s most successful accelerator with portfolio companies including the likes of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits, Twitch, the list goes on. At YC, Ali leads the Continuity Fund where has made investments in the likes of Segment, Convoy and Lob, where he also sits on the board of all 3. Prior to investing with YC, Ali spent 4 years at Twitter, starting as CFO before becoming COO. Whilst at Twitter, Ali saw the company scale from $0 revenues to over $2Bn and 20m users to close to 300m users. Before Twitter, Ali was the CFO @ Pixar Animation Studios. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ali made his way from CFO @ Pixar and COO @ Twitter to now leading YC's continuity fund? 2.) Ali describes a story of his time at Pixar working with Steve Jobs? How did he carry himself both as a leader and an operator? What was it about Steve that makes Ali say he is the most impressive exec he has ever worked with? 3.) Having seen the likes of Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, Jack Dorsey in action what have been Ali's biggest takeaways with regards to what makes the truly great leaders? Why does Ali believe there are 3 traits all great leaders share? What are they? 4.) How does Ali look to bring that experience to his role now, investing with YC Continuity? How does that affect his mindset and evaluation when assessing investment opportunities today? 5.) Why does Ali believe that too many startups have been damaged by the amount of capital they have raised? As a former CFO, how does Ali analyze the capital being raised today and some of the burn rates in the valley? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ali’s Fave Book: Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris Ali’s Fave Blog: Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd Ali’s Most Recent Investment: Segment As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ali on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Adi Sideman is the Founder & CEO @ YouNow. Since founding the company in 2011, Adi has grown YouNow to be a global social network with more than 100 million user sessions a month, and creators now producing more than 50,000 hours of original live content each day. They recently released PROPS (Telegram available here), the next generation platform that leverages the power of crypto economics & participation in digital media. To fund this growth, they have raised over $25m in funding from some of the greats of the investing world including Andy Weissman @ USV, David Pakman @ Venrock and future guest Oren Zeev. Due to this incredible progress, YouNow has been named one of the most innovative companies of 2016 by Fast Company and was a finalist for Fastest Rising Startup of 2016 at the Crunchies Awards. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Adi made his way into the world of participatory digital content, came to found the world's first online karaoke company and then found YouNow? 2.) Setting the scene now, where are we at with TV? What platform does Adi believe will rise formidably in it's place? How does that affect the age-old industry of advertising? Why does Adi believe after so many years, now is the time for micro-payment content creation? 3.) Why does the digital media content landscape need to be decentralized? What is fundamentally broken with the current centralised networks? What are the benefits of such decentralization? 4.) How does Adi envision this decentralization to be? Does Adi believe we will build new decentralized protocols and exact the decentralized network through them or does he believe we will integrate new protocols into existing services? 5.) Why does this decentralized network be crypto-based? With centralized networks the value largely accrues to investors and founders, how does Adi sell the value of a decentralized network to an investor base with fiduciary responsibilities? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Adi’s Favourite Book: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill  As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Nicole Quinn is a Partner @ Lightspeed, one of the world's leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Nest, StitchFix, AppDynamics and Max Levchin's Affirm, just to name a few from their incredible portfolio. At Lightspeed, Nicole focuses on the consumer market having made investments in the likes of Cheddar, Zola and Rothy's. Prior to Lightspeed, Nicole worked at Nutmeg, one of London's leading fintech players and before that spent 8 years covering consumer, eCommerce and brands at Morgan Stanley on the equity sales and research side. At Morgan Stanley, Nicole worked on the IPOs for Facebook, Groupon and Pandora. Fun fact: Nicole is also a star of the big screen featuring on Apple TV's Planet of The Apps. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Nicole made her way from Morgan Stanley to a leading London Fintech player to now, a partner a Lightspeed in San Francisco? 2.) How does Nicole define "digitally native brands"? What are the core benefits of owning the entire customer journey? Why does Nicole believe that brand is a key network effect today? 3.) Why does Nicole disagree that we are in a fallow period for consumer? How does Nicole analyze the incumbent heavy competitive landscape? Does Nicole believe that Amazon does more to make the market than destroy it? 4.) Why does Nicole believe we are in a consolidatory environment? What about the current ecosystem makes now the most exciting time for M&A in a long time? How does Nicole analyze M&A's ability to move the needle with transactions like Bonobos' acquisition? 5.) Being a star of Planet of The Apps, how important does Nicole think it is for investors to have public brands today? How does Nicole view VCs and digitally native brands in the same way? How does this mean that VCs should act in market? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Nicole’s Fave Book: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton Nicole’s Fave Blog: Lean Luxe Nicole's Most Recent Investment: Rothy's As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nicole on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Semil Shah is the founder of Haystack, an early stage investment firm now investing out of it’s fourth fund, with previous investments in the likes of Instacart, DoorDash, Giphy, OpenDoor & Managed by Q. Semil is also a Venture Partner @ GGV Capital, one of the leading multi-stage funds and in the past he has also been a consultant to the likes of Kleiner Perkins, DFJ, General Catalyst and more. If that was not enough, Shah also has an extensive career in media having been a contributor for both TechCrunch and the Harvard Business Review in the past. Due to all of this, Shah is known for being on the speed dial of some of the industry’s most respected VCs with the likes of Marc Andreessen naming him one of his ’55 Unknown Rockstars in Tech’. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Semil made the transition from the world of writing to investing alongside some of the best in venture with Haystack? 2.) Why do more and more managers want to introduce institutional capital into their LP base? What are the advantages? What are the drawbacks? Where does Semil see most managers going wrong when pursuing institutional capital for the first time? 3.) What does Semil mean when he states the importance of "pre-marketing"? How open is one in these pre-discussions with potential LPs? What is the right amount of time to be pre-marketing for? How does Semil determine whether to adopt a piece of LP advice and when not to? 4.) In the raising process, why does Semil never like to the use the deck when meeting in person? What core elements of the presentation did LPs always hone in on? What tips does Semil have to potential managers to ensure they can pitch at any time, not just the boardroom? 5.) How has moving from non-institutional to institutional fund, changed how Semil thinks about reserve allocation? Why does Semil believe that the majority of LPs have a wrong thesis to reserve allocation? 6.) Why does Semil believe the VC business model is severely constrained in terms of exits through IPO and acquisition? What does this mean for the use of secondaries? How will managers need to incorporate this into their strategy? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Semil’s Fave Blog: AVC  Semil’s Most Recent Investment: Ironclad As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Semil on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Julia Hartz is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Eventbrite, the unicorn startup that is the world's largest event technology platform, powering over 2 million events around the world each year. They have raised over $330m from some of the greats of industry including Roelof Botha @ Sequoia Capital, Jeff Clavier @ SoftTech, David Saks, Bebo's Michael Birch, Tiger Global and many more. Under Julia's leadership, she has taken Eventbrite to become the world's largest event technology platform and has received multiple accolades for workplace culture, being named the best place to work in SF for 7 years running. Personally, Julia has won numerous awards including Fortune's 40 Under 40, Inc's 35 Under 35 and Most Powerful Female Entrepreneurs. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Julia came to found Eventbrite with her husband Kevin from a small apartment in Potrero Hill and turned it into the unicorn it is today? 2.) How did Julia and Kevin meet? What was the meet-cute? How did that translate into the founding of Eventbrite? How did Julia think about partnering with her fiancee at the time, as a business partner? What made it also a great business partnership? 3.) Why does Julia believe that creating a company is like creating a family? How has Julia seen herself scale as CEO of the company, with the immense scaling and growth of the firm? What have been the challenges and how did she overcome them? 4.) What does Julia believe are the requirements for successful CEO transition? How can this be managed correctly both internally and externally? What other elements made last year a particularly momentus year for change at Eventbrite? 5.) How does Julia think about balancing the immediate elements of the present day with the long-term vision for the roadmap? What is the right mindset to adopt? How does one look to prevent "Innovators Dilemma"? How does Julia split her time? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Julia’s Fave Book: Overwhelmed Julia's Fave Blog: The Skimm As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Julia on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Sam Arbesman is the Scientist-In-Residence @ Lux Capital, the fund that supports scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time, the more ambitious the project, the better. Sam works with companies and founders that recognize the future happens at the boundaries of science and technology infusing computation into everything from biology to manufacturing.Sam’s scientific research has been published in everything from the Wall Street Journal to The New York Times and The Atlantic. Sam is also the author of the award-winning The Half-Life of Facts and the new book Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Sam made his move from being a best-selling author to Scientist in Residence for Lux Capital? As Scientist in Residence, what does Sam do on a day-to-day basis? 2.) What does Sam mean when he says that startups need to embrace "radical interdisciplinarity"? What really is "radical interdisciplinarity"? What are the benefits it brings to an organisation? Does this go contra the importance of specialisation? 3.) How does Sam view the partnership between man and machine? Why does Sam believe we will see computational creativity in a way never seen before? How does Sam view the societal barriers to the embracing of this partnership? 4.) How does Sam view the promise of analogizing in the face of such complex systems? How does Sam assess the perils of such analogies? Does Sam believe that VCs of today are equipped to invest in such complex systems? What must they remember? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Sam’s Fave Book: The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, The Three Body Problem Sam's Fave Blog: Marginal Revolution As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sam on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Aaron VanDevender is the Chief Scientist at Founders Fund, one of the world's leading fund with investments in the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX, Spotify and many more incredible companies. At Founders Fund, Aaron monitors the scientific impact of the portfolio, works with portfolio companies, assesses new technologies, and conducts his own research. Prior to Founders Fund, Aaron has designed single-photon and single-atom quantum computers in academia and government (NIST), advanced the quantum-mechanical theory for microscopic black holes, patented the fastest transparent optical switch, and is a co-inventor of yoctotechnology. He then developed next-generation DNA sequencing technology at Halcyon Molecular. His broad scientific interests encompass energy, biotech, nanotech, and computing. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Aaron made his way from microscopic black holes and DNA sequencing to the world of Founders Fund? What does a Scientist-In-Residence do? 2.) Why does Aaron believe that AI is mostly a scam? Where does Aaron see and then want to see further progression in the field of AI and ML? How does Aaron distinguish between crazy and genius? What are the signs? 3.) Why does Aaron believe that the value of massive datasets is largely overplayed? What characteristics of datasets are exciting for Aaron to see when evaluating an opportunity? Where and how can datasets be misleading and lose their value? 4.) How does Aaron view the societal effects of 4m truck drivers being unemployed by the rise of self-driving? How does Aaron view trucking both as goods distribution and wealth distribution networks? 5.) How does Aaron view the implementation of universal basic income? Why does Aaron believe we have a challenge decoupling wealth and virtue? To what extent is this a core problem? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Aaron’s Fave Book: Tales From The Thousand & One Arabian Nights Aaron's Fave Blog: Slash Dot Investment Aaron is Most Excited By: Ayar Labs As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Aaron on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Luis Von Ahn is the Founder & CEO @ Duolingo, the leading language learning platform with over 100m users. They have backing from some of the best in the investing world with over $100m in funding from the likes of USV, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Google Capital and even Ashton Kutcher. Prior to Duolingo, Luis is known for inventing CAPTCHAs, being a MacArthur Fellow (“genius grant” recipient), and selling two companies to Google in his 20’s. Luis has been named one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine, one of the 20 Best Brains Under 40 by Discover. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Luis, a man as he describes "never great at learning languages", came to found the leading language learning app, Duolingo? 2.) Why do VCs generally believe Edtech to be such a "hard" space? Is that really a fair assumption? How does the role of government change the distribution and landscape of edtech? How does content creation play a pivotal role in edtech today? 3.) What role does Luis believe AI and ML will play for the future of edtech? Will the transition to bots represent a transformational shift in the interface paradigm? How does gamification and edtech integrate? Why does Luis always measure themselves against the most addictive of games? 4.) How has Luis seen himself scale and change as a leader with the scaling of the firm? What story shows an element that Luis struggled with and how did he overcome it? What were the major inflection points in the growth of the firm? 5.) Duolingo recently raised their $25m Series E, how did this round differ from prior rounds? Why did they want to negotiate down the figure they wanted to raise? How did Valley based VCs present herd mentality for the duration of the recent raise? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Luis’s Fave Book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid  Luis' Fave Blog: AVC by Fred Wilson As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Luis on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Samir Kaji is what one might call, a master of all things seed stage and micro VC financing. Over his 18 years in venture capital, Samir has assisted or advised over 700 companies and 300 VC firms and has completed tech financing transactions totaling over $4.0 billion in committed capital. Today, Samir is the Senior Managing Director @ First Republic Bank where leads the technology banking team managing venture capital and startup company relationships. He joined First Republic in 2013 from Silicon Valley Bank, where he was also a managing director. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Samir made his entry into the world of VC from the ground up and has come to advise and assist on over $4Bn worth of capital commitments? 2.) Where is the micro VC and seed market today? What is the overview? What has fundamentally changed over the last few years? Are all increases in capital supply good or is this too much? Why is Samir concerned by valuation bloat at seed? 3.) How are LPs reacting to this explosion in seed and micro fund managers? How does this differ when assessing the differing classes of LP from institutions to HNWs and family offices? What are the likelihoods of 1st-time funds attaining institutional capital? 4.) How should potential managers think about the right fund size to raise? How long a timeline should be given to the raising of micro and seed funds? What exceptions are there to this timeline? How does the role of multiple closings play into this timeline? 5.) How does Samir differentiate between raising a fund and building a franchise? What does this mean about how a certain set of anagers not only engages in the fundraising process but also depicts the narrative? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Samir’s Fave Book: Hard Thing About Hard Things Samir’s Fave Blog: Strictly VC, AVC by Fred Wilson As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Samir on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Michael Dearing has established himself as an icon of early-stage venture over the last decade. With his founding of Harrison Metal in 2006, he has backed the likes of Twitter, MoPub, Birchbox, 99Designs and PagerDuty just to name a few of his incredible companies. Prior to being in VC, Michael spent 6 years at eBay across numerous roles and before that held positions at Shoe Warehouse as CEO, The Walt Disney Company in corporate strategy and then Bain & Co as a consultant. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Michael made his way into the world of venture from selling shoes with Shoe Warehouse to eBay to founding his own fund? 2.) Michael has said before that he looks for "personal exceptionalism" within the teams he backs, what does that really mean? How does he distinguish brilliance from arrogance? What is the balance between vision and stubbornness? 3.) How does Michael think about price sensitivity? How does he use it as a determining factor to test his level of conviction in the deal? More broadly, how does Michael view pricing in the market today? Why are the convertible debt markets so toxic? 4.) How does Michael view strategy around reserve allocation? Why does Michael believe reserves are where he has made the biggest mistakes? What are his takeaways from those mistakes? Why does recycling not feature as a core tenet of his strategy? 5.) Why does Michael believe that "benevolent dictatorship" is a beautiful thing? Does this thesis change in the debate over founder vs company first? How does Michael use McCallum's 5 key principles to assess founders and their ability? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Michael’s Fave Book: Confederacy of Dunces Michael’s Most Recent Investment: Astro As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Michael on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

Dan Burkhart is the Founder & CEO @ Recurly, the startup powering much of the subscription success, trusted by the likes of Twitch, CBS Interactive and Hubspot just to name a few. They have raised over $20m in VC funding from leading investors including Greycroft, Freestyle, Harrison Metal and more. As for Dan, his background spans 14 years with the likes of eBay and NBC Internet in the marketing, business development and strategic partnership realm. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Dan make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found Recurly? How does Dan perceive a good CAC/LTV ratio? Does he agree with the hallowed 3:1 often cited by founders and investors? How does Dan manage and measure customer churn? How does he approach regrettable and non-regrettable customer churn? What is the post-mortem analysis of customer churn? How does Dan insert an element of accountability without creating a sense of churn? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Dan Burkhart

Today, I'm really excited to be talking with Josh Pigford of Baremetrics which provides zero-setup subscription analytics and insights for Braintree, Stripe, and Recurly. Josh launched Baremetrics in 2013 and hit 5k MRR within the first five months completely bootstrapped, doing everything himself. Since then, Baremetrics has raised 800,000, built a team of 7, and grown to 55k MRR. In this interview, Josh talks about what it's like to get off to such a fast start, the decision to raise money, their plans for growth in the future, but above all else he talks about his decision to embrace transparency and how he is able to drive forward in the face of all the armchair quarterbacks it brought out.

Today we’re launching the biggest update in Baremetrics history: we’re expanding our platform to support Braintree and Recurly, in addition to the Stripe support we’ve always had (with more data sources on the way!). A chapter I didn’t plan on writing One of the most interesting parts of being an entrepreneur is the constant evolution. So much of my role is just putting things in motion. It’s sort of like pushing a snowball down a hill. Maybe it gets huge. Maybe it crumbles before it gets to the bottom. Maybe it makes it to the bottom then hits a tree and explodes. The fun part of that is you just don’t know how things will play out. And I think that’s exhilarating. What we’re launching today is a chapter in our book that I legitimately never planned on when I had the idea for Baremetrics nearly three years ago. The scope of my thinking was just, “I need this thing for my business that uses Stripe, so I’ll just stick to that.” It was going to be a side project to two other SaaS businesses I had at the time. What I didn’t anticipate was the nerve this would strike with founders. Every founder wants easily accessible insights into their business, and Baremetrics is equipped to do that. I also didn’t anticipate how much I’d thoroughly love helping other founders. I’ve had thousands of conversations with founders over the years about every facet of business, and if I’m being honest…helping other founders is just plain fun. And really that extends deeper in to our team as a whole…it’s not just me, it’s all of us. The intersection of those two things puts Baremetrics in a really great spot to serve the needs of a lot more businesses. There’s no reason we can’t help all online businesses. And today marks our first step towards bringing that to fruition. Using the mission to steer the ship Our mission is to equip businesses with the tools they need to grow. By providing tools, insights and education with minimal effort on the business's part, the barrier to making actionable business decisions is lowered dramatically. Everything we do is driven by this mission. Everything we do needs to positively answer the question, "Does this help businesses grow?" And that mission shouldn’t be limited by data source or business model. That’s really the impetus for our expansion. Today, we’re launching support for Braintree and Recurly. In the coming weeks and months we’ll also be adding support for PayPal and Chargify, as well as our own API for sending us your data directly. I’m seriously giddy about getting to meet and help out so many news (to us) businesses. Sign up for a free trial today. And if you have any questions, whether it’s about Baremetrics, business in general or just want to talk about life, please reach out!

Matt Applegate chats with Dan Burkhart, Co-Founder and CEO of Recurly. Recurly was born in 2009 from the changing needs of businesses. With the industry’s movement to subscription-based models, the need for a sophisticated recurring payment management platform has exploded. By automating the complexities of subscription billing management, Recurly helps businesses eliminate the pain of scaling recurring billing operations with an easy, self-serve, pay-as-you-go platform. https://twitter.com/danburkhart https://twitter.com/recurly https://recurly.com/