Today, I’m talking with Einar Vollset, a General Partner at TinySeed, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers, and the Managing Partner at Discretion Capital, a technology enabled Investment Bank focused on M&A, due diligence and strategic partnership development. We’ve had this call scheduled for today, Wednesday, March 18th, for a while and planned to talk about TinySeed Fund 2, but obviously a lot has changed recently. We still get into what’s to come with the next, larger TinySeed Fund, but Einar is one of the most thoughtful investors I know so I wanted to get his perspective on the Coronavirus pandemic and what founders should be thinking about. My company, SaberSim, has been hit pretty hard by all of this. We serve the daily fantasy sports market and with all major sports leagues suspending operations, we decided to pause all billing for our customers, putting a stop to revenue until play resumes. It sucks, to be honest, but we’re fortunate enough to be able to strengthen our cash reserves so we can weather this out without any layoffs and keep building in the meantime.  Many companies won’t be as fortunate as we are while others will actually benefit, but every company will feel this in some way. Our chat is realistic and I can’t say we painted a rosy picture, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Einar draws on his experience to offer a unique perspective on what the Coronavirus pandemic means for your business. You won’t want to miss this…

The Early Stage Founder: B2B SaaS Startups | Marketing | Sales | Growth Hacking

Einar Vollset on COVID-19, TinySeed, and more

Today, I’m talking with , the founder of , an agency that helps SaaS companies scale with pay-per-click ads. It is so hard to find advice for Facebook ads that actually applies to SaaS companies. It seems like everybody out there is selling a course on “How to Get Rich with Facebook Ads” with scammy tactics that I don’t want my brand associated with and aren’t going to fly in B2B. Aaron’s advice stands out from the crowd not just in terms of strategy but also because of his hands on experience applying it with SaaS companies. In our chat today, Aaron lays out how to evaluate the different PPC channels, what goes into effective ads, and how to put all of it together for your first successful campaign. I even got him to share the exact image his clients have been having huge success with in their ads. This is one you won’t want to miss.

Aaron Zakowski of Zammo Digital

Today, I’m talking with David Abrams, the co-founder and CEO of Demio, a webinar platform built for marketers to engage and convert their audiences through live conversations. We get into numbers on the show, but Demio has seen some serious growth recently and their team has dramatically expanded. I’m in the early stages of growing our team at SaberSim and jumped at the opportunity to have David on the show to pick his brain on hiring and handling growth in general. I got a ton out of David’s “behind-the-scenes” look at a growing bootstrapped SaaS company and the lessons he shares will help any founder level up.

David Abrams of Demio

Today, I’m talking with Chris Ronzio, the Founder and CEO at Trainual, a B2B SaaS startup that makes it easier than ever to onboard, train, and scale knowledge for growth. I first heard about Chris on The SaaS Podcast with Omer Khan and was blown away after hearing that Chris and his team scaled Trainual from zero to $2 million ARR in just 18 months using Facebook ads. The allure of paid advertising is obvious—put a dollar in and get two or more back. If only it was that simple. We know how hard it is because of how many horror stories there are out there about failed attempts. Most of us have moved past the old “Facebook ads are dead” cliche, but what’s replaced it isn’t much better—”Facebook ads don’t work for B2B” or “Facebook ads don’t work for my business.” I wanted Chris to come on the show so we could dig into what he did differently to make ads work and how other founders, especially B2B SaaS founders, can do the same. The success Chris and his team had was no mistake and in this episode you’ll learn exactly what he did.

Chris Ronzio of Trainual

In a recent interview on Startups for the Rest of Us (), Rob Walling and I talked about my thoughts on SaaS growth. I shared a lot of specific examples in that episode but I wanted to expand on my growth framework and how those tactics fit in. In this episode, I break down the framework I use to think about growth and share the steps you can take to start implementing it. If you have any questions along the way, I'm happy to help so please don't hesitate to reach out.

How I Think About Growth

Andy shares an end-of-the-year on what's happening with his SaaS startup, SaberSim, which makes .

SaberSim Update #3

Today, I’m talking with , the Co-Founder and CEO of , an all-in one app for parents to easily capture and privately share photos of their children, keep track of milestones in an organized and safe space, and print baby albums straight from their phone. There were two important areas I wanted to really dig into in this chat with Eddie: the role values play in Tinybeans and the system that Eddie and his team uses to run their business. We hear the word values thrown around all the time, but it’s rare to see a company truly prioritize living up to those values each and every day. Tinybeans is one of those rare companies so it was great to hear how they’ve done this and why it was so important to them. On the operations side, we talk about how Tinybeans uses as an operating system to keep their business running, and growing, smoothly. Too many entrepreneurs ignore the value of systems to begin with, but even those that “get it” often try to reinvent the wheel. Eddie shares why you don’t need to do that with The Great Game of Business. This was a wide-ranging conversation that I know you’ll get a lot out of.

Eddie Geller of Tinybeans

Today, I’m talking with , the Founder and CEO at , the fully remote company behind and . Todoist is the top-ranked productivity app that helps millions of people organize life and Twist is a communication app for teams who want a calmer, more organized, more productive workplace. Doist is a multi-million dollar a year bootstrapped and profitable company with more than 60 full-time employees and despite being able to command huge valuations, Amir has no plans to sell the company. In our chat, we go behind the scenes of launching, growing, and maintaining Twist when they already had a successful product in Todoist, but where we really dive in is how Amir has balanced profitability and growth along this more than a decade-long journey. I’m not even close to the heights Doist has reached, but this balance is still something I think a lot about.  While we all have different goals with our businesses, even with deep savings and a supportive partner, almost all of us need to have the business financially sustain us at some point and that means taking money out of the business—but every dollar we take out is one less dollar we can use to grow. There’s no right answer to this question, but hearing Amir’s philosophy had a real impact on my approach and I think you’ll get a lot out of it to.

Amir Salihefendić of Doist

Today, I’m talking with , the Co-Founder and CEO of , a leadership development company built on principles of psychology and management best practices. Leaders aren’t born, they’re bred.  Sure, some people may naturally be more inclined to exhibit leadership skills, but nobody becomes a great leader without real work. A certain amount of that needs to come from hands-on experience, but anybody learning exclusively through their own experience is make the journey harder than it needs to be. This is where coaching can be invaluable--it’s never an easy journey, but with the right coach you’ll be able to make faster progress and go further than you could on your own. Unfortunately, finding the right coach is anything but easy. Cameron and his team at Torch hope to change that by not only using technology to find you a coach, but also to bring accountability to the process and make sure you’re heading in the right direction. In our chat, we dive into what it takes to get the most out of coaching and we go behind the scenes to talk about the challenges of rapidly scaling the company to more than $12 million in funding and dozens of employees over the last 2 years.

Cameron Yarbrough of Torch

Today, I’m talking with , the Founder and CEO of , a podcast PR and production agency that helps brands like Freshbooks, HubSpot, and Four Sigmatic grow through podcasting. Erik and I first crossed paths a couple years ago when he was starting Be My Guest and had somebody he thought would be a good fit for my show. His email stood out to me because it was truly personalized; not just putting in my name and the name of my show, but making it clear he had done his research on me. There are tons of podcast booking agencies and I’d be surprised if any of the others out there spent more than a minute or two personalizing their emails, let alone actually seeing if their client is a good fit. It’s so frustrating getting these emails when it’s clear the sender has no idea what the show is about or when I get dozens of cold emails a week from some SDR who has no idea what my business is about. Erik’s preparation and attention to detail made him stand out to me and is why I’ve continued having clients of Be My Guest on the show over the years. What has been most impressive to me though is how Erik has been able to build a team that places the same amount of value on doing the job right. I’ve personally tried to hire people to do similar roles and know just how hard this is to get right so I’m excited to have Erik on the show to learn how he did it. In our chat, we dive into what it’s been like building Be My Guest while maintaining the quality of the service, everything from his successes to his failures and how these lessons can help make you a better founder. This episode is about much more than podcasting and cold email--it’s about how to build a high quality team, so you don’t want to miss this.

Erik Jacobson of Be My Guest

Today, I’m talking with Dan Martell, a 5x founder with 3 exits and currently a coach to high-performing SaaS founders, through The SaaS Academy. Dan knows what it’s like growing a SaaS company and how hard it can be to answer all the questions that I’m trying to address with this podcast. Questions like… Who should I be hiring next quarter? How do I build a productive sales process? What types of things should I be looking for from a CTO? How should I be leading my team? Over time, he found the right mentors, books, and advice to build up a bank of knowledge that he’s refined through years of experience in the trenches. Now he shares that knowledge with his students in the SaaS Academy. In our chat, we talk about Dan’s framework for building a SaaS business, what the biggest levers are for fast growth, and where founders often get tripped up. This is a wide-ranging, high-energy chat that you don’t want to miss.

Dan Martell of SaaS Academy

Today, I’m talking with , Co-Founder and General Partner at , a year-long, remote accelerator designed for early-stage SaaS founders. Rob is also the Co-Host of , Co-Founder of , and Co-Founder of , which he successfully exited, along with a long list of other businesses and projects over the years. Rob has been on the show a few times before and this time around I wanted to dig into a new project he’s working on to give non-venture track founders more data to help them make better decisions as they grow their company. The project is called and to put it together, hundreds of revenue generating SaaS companies were surveyed and the result will be an epic report filled with benchmarks, growth rates, demographics, validation approaches, and more. When Rob was last on the show back in episode 6, he had just opened the doors for TinySeed’s first batch of founders and I also wanted to follow-up and see how things went. After receiving hundreds of high quality applications, the TinySeed team narrowed it down to 10 lucky founders and today we’ll hear what Rob and his team have learned and what is in store for the second batch, which will be accepting applications on November 1st. Most of my listeners are very familiar with Rob and have probably already skipped over this intro to get right to the good stuff, but if you’re still listening, stop and dive in. This is an interview you don’t want to miss.

Rob Walling of TinySeed & MicroConf

Today, I’m talking with Tim Campos, the founder and CEO of Woven, a startup making powerful scheduling tools built into a smart, collaborative calendar. Prior to Woven, Tim was the Chief Information Officer at Facebook for more than 6 years where he was responsible for the productivity of the entire workforce. That workforce was over 17,000 in his last year on the job and in his tenure he doubled the revenue per employee from $900,000 to $1.8 million. Those are insane numbers and it was great digging into them on the show. In our chat, we talk about how he approached productivity in such a large organization, where the biggest gains came from, and how to apply those lessons to smaller teams. Tim is an insightful entrepreneur with a ton of experience in teams of all sizes, and this is an interview you don’t want to miss.

Tim Campos of Woven

Today, I’m talking with Nigel Eccles, the Co-Founder and CEO of FanDuel and now Flick, an app that helps podcasters build a community of loyal, invested listeners. Two weeks ago, I had Albert Chen, author of , on the show to walk us through the crazy story of the daily fantasy sports market. That interview lays out the backstory in much more detail, but here are some key points: Hubdub launched in 2007 as a news prediction game In 2009, the team pivoted to the daily fantasy sports space and rebranded as FanDuel DraftKings entered the market in 2012 In total, DraftKings raised $776 million while FanDuel raised $363 million In 2015, the two companies spent a combined $750 million on marketing DraftKings was the largest advertiser in the country one month, beating Johnson and Johnson as well as Geico The next month, FanDuel was the largest advertiser FanDuel eventually sold to Paddy Power Betfair in a deal worth $465 million The founders and early employees got nothing in the deal Last week, I had Lesley Eccles, another co-founder of FanDuel, on the show to go behind the scenes on this journey. She was in charge of marketing and scaled their spend from $0 to over $300 million dollars a year. This week, Nigel rounds out the story with his perspective as the CEO and the impact his journey is having on his new company, Flick. In our chat, we talk about Nigel’s customer-focused approach to business, how he navigated pivots at both FanDuel and Flick, how he’s approaching fundraising the second time around, and much, much more. As I said in the other interviews, even if you have no interest in sports, gambling, or venture backed startups, there are a ton of lessons in these talks that will apply to any founder. And it’s just a great story :)

Nigel Eccles of FanDuel and Flick

Today, we’re continuing the dive into the world of daily fantasy sports by interviewing Lesley Eccles, co-founder of FanDuel and currently the Co-Founder and CEO of Relish. Last week I had Albert Chen, author of , on the show to walk us through the crazy story of the daily fantasy sports market but today we’re going to go behind the scenes. Lesley Eccles was a co-founder of FanDuel and in charge of marketing, including scaling their spend from $0 to over $300 million annually. She built FanDuel from a concept to a household brand name with 80%+ brand awareness in the target demographic in 6 years, growing the user base to 3 million active paying players. She also hand built a high-performing marketing team of approximately 50 people in offices around the world. Albert’s interview lays out the backstory in much more detail, but here are some key points: Hubdub launched in 2007 as a news prediction game In 2009, the team pivoted to the daily fantasy sports space and rebranded as FanDuel DraftKings entered the market in 2012 In total, DraftKings raised $776 million while FanDuel raised $363 million In 2015, the two companies spent a combined $750 million on marketing and advertising DraftKings was the largest advertiser in the country, beating Johnson and Johnson as well as Geico The next month, FanDuel was the largest advertiser FanDuel eventually sold to Paddy Power Betfair in a deal worth $465 million The founders and early employees got nothing in the deal Since leaving FanDuel, Lesley has started Relish, which is now the #1 relationship training app. In our chat, we cover how Lesley navigated seemingly insurmountable challenges, from FBI investigations to insane ad wars, what she learned from the experience, and how she’s using those lessons in her new venture.

Lesley Eccles of FanDuel and Relish

The early stage founder show is the podcast for B2B SaaS founders looking to accelerate their growth. Every Tuesday, your host, Andy Baldacci, will bring you a brand new interview with startup founders, venture capitalists, consultants, anybody who has been there before and can provide actionable lessons to help your startup get to the next level.

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The Early Stage Founder: B2B SaaS Startups | Marketing | Sal...

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