S4E12 – Learnings & Advice from Second-Time SaaS Founder With Gary Amaral

Learnings & Advice from Second-Time SaaS Founder.

In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, Host Joran interviews Gary Amaral, the co-founder and CMO of two SaaS companies, Unkover and Breadcrumbs. Gary shares his journey, insights, and challenges in building these companies, along with practical advice for SaaS founders.

The Passion Behind Startups

Gary emphasizes that startups are fueled by passion and conviction. He talks about the immense sacrifices that come with building a startup, including personal time, financial resources, and moments with family and friends.

Gary’s Background

Gary shares his background, highlighting his roles at Blackberry, Hootsuite, and Chargeify. He also discusses his entrepreneurial journey, starting with his marketing consultancy and eventually founding Breadcrumbs and Unkover.

Revenue Insights

Gary provides insights into the revenue streams for Breadcrumbs and Unkover. Breadcrumbs, which has been around for four and a half years, is performing well, with significant upcoming news. Unkover, still in its early stages, has a handful of paying customers, with most opting for an annual package.

SaaS vs. Services

Gary discusses the initial vision for Breadcrumbs as a purely SaaS-focused company. However, they realized the need for services to ensure customer success, leading to a mixed revenue model. Unkover, on the other hand, remains 100% SaaS-focused.

Competitive Intelligence

Gary explains the evolution of Unkover, which originated from their need for a competitive intelligence process at Breadcrumbs. They realized the market gap for affordable competitive intelligence tools for SMBs and decided to build Unkover.

The Importance of Networking

Gary highlights the importance of networking, mentioning how a serendipitous meeting at SaaStock led to the creation of Breadcrumbs. He also praises the SaaS Founder’s Membership (SFM) for providing valuable insights and support.

The YC Experience

Gary shares his experience with Y Combinator (YC) for Breadcrumbs. He explains why they chose not to go through YC again for Unkover, citing the continued access to YC’s resources and network as sufficient.

Overcoming Burnout

Gary opens up about facing burnout a year and a half into Breadcrumbs. He took a two-week hiatus to realign his priorities, which helped him overcome the mental breaking point and return re-energized.

Challenges of Adapting to Market Needs

Gary discusses the challenges of adapting to market needs, particularly the shift from a purely SaaS model to a services-enabled model. He emphasizes the importance of embracing change and iterating on processes.

Effective Go-to-Market Strategies

Gary attributes Breadcrumbs’ success to strong foundational marketing and continuous experimentation. They focus on quality content, organic growth, and leveraging partnerships for backlinks.

Effective Outbound Strategies

Gary explains their multi-channel outbound approach, which includes email, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp, and voice. He stresses the importance of using outbound for various purposes, not just for booking meetings.

Leveraging AI

Gary discusses how they are incorporating AI at Unkover to enhance competitive intelligence tools. He provides an example of using AI to generate starter battle cards for sales, emphasizing that AI should be used to do tasks faster and better.

The Future of SaaS

Gary believes the future of SaaS will include services to support technology. He argues that technology alone doesn’t solve problems and that businesses will look to technology vendors for people and process guidance.

Advice for SaaS Founders

Gary offers advice for SaaS founders at different stages. For those starting out, he recommends focusing on grind and learning from customer interactions. For those scaling to $10 million ARR, he advises obsessing over repeatability and scalability.

The episode wraps up with a summary of key takeaways, including the importance of passion, networking, adaptability, and leveraging AI. Joran thanks Gary for sharing his wisdom and encourages listeners to reach out with feedback and suggestions for future episodes.

Key Timecodes

• (00:00) – Introduction of Guest
• (00:50) – Guest Introduction and Background
• (01:22) – Startup Origins and Revenue Discussion
• (02:40) – Product and Service Revenue Breakdown
• (04:11) – Unkover’s Features and Customer Insights
• (05:32) – Gary’s Entrepreneurial Journey
• (07:31) – Motivation and Personal Goals
• (08:46) – Birth of Unkover
• (12:24) – Y Combinator Experience
• (13:12) – Overcoming Rock Bottom Moments
• (17:17) – Major Company Challenges
• (19:35) – Successful Go-to-Market Strategies
• (22:00) – Rapid Domain Authority Growth
• (23:17) – Outbound Strategies
• (26:34) – Scalability and Learning from YC
• (29:01) – Leveraging AI and New Technologies
• (32:12) – Advice for Early-Stage SaaS Founders
• (33:33) – Advice for Scaling to 10M ARR
• (34:39) – Episode Summary
• (35:56) – Closing Remarks

Transcription

[00:00:00.280] – Gary

A startup is fueled by passion. That is the only way to describe it. You have to be passionate, you have to be convicted, and you have to be willing to sacrifice immensely to make one work. When I say sacrifice, I mean sacrifice your own time, sacrifice financially, sacrifice moments with your family and your friends. If you don’t have a challenge on a daily basis, something fishy is going on. For people that think that they can generate hundreds of, pardon my language, shitty AI-generated blog posts, and they’re going to do well, they’re sadly mistaken, in my opinion, and it’s going to be even harder in the future. I as things change with Google.

[00:00:50.360] – Joran

In today’s episode, my guest is Gary Amaral. Gary is the co-founder and CMO of two SaaS companies, Unkover and BreadcrumbsIO breadcrumbs is a lead scoring tool, and Unkover, helps you to Unkover the secrets of your competitors. With Breadcrumbs, he participated at YC, summer of ’21 batch, and with Unkover, he did not. We’re going to dive into that as well. Before starting these two companies, he worked in various marketing roles at companies like Blackberry, Hootsuite, and Chargeify. Welcome to the show, Gary.

[00:01:20.050] – Gary

Thanks, Joran. Pleasure to be here.

[00:01:22.350] – Joran

Nice. We’re going to find out more about you with some quick questions. When did you start at Breadcrumbs, and when did you start at Unkover?

[00:01:29.620] – Gary

Breadcrumbs BrightCrumbs, we’ve been working on for about four and a half years. We actually established the company the same month that COVID became an official, legitimate thing. So interesting timing, to say the least. And Unkover, the kernel of the idea has been around for a couple of years, but we really started working on it about nine months ago, I would say.

[00:01:53.520] – Joran

Yeah. And is there any things you can share about revenue-wise?

[00:01:57.810] – Gary

Brightcrumbs is doing okay. There’s going to be some Interesting news coming out in the next little while. Can’t really share right now, but stay tuned. And Unkover very early days. We have been in market for two months post our beta. We have a handful of paying customers. It’s a self-serve, trial-to-paid type of motion. I’ll tell you one interesting thing that surprised us. We thought that most of the people that converted would go month to month, and overwhelmingly, Unfortunately, 90% of the customers that have signed up have chosen the full year package. Very interesting trend that’s not expected.

[00:02:40.120] – Joran

Nice. I’m going to dive more into that later. Sure. Is there any separation between product and servants revenue, or is it purely SaaS-focused?

[00:02:48.200] – Gary

Breadcrumbs, the initial idea was for it to be completely SaaS-focused. The reality is there’s a lot that goes into fully leveraging a lead score or any score. Like, breadcrumbs is really a scoring engine. You can score for a variety of reasons. What we learned over the course of time was that most businesses needed the help. It wasn’t about implementation, it wasn’t about getting the tool up and running. It was really about integrating lead scoring into their processes. It became a very much a services-enabled tech product. I would say the split was still primarily SaaS revenue, 80%, but there was definitely a chunk of services revenue to ensure customer success. Unkover is 100% SaaS. It is definitely a super easy to use product. It’s designed to deliver value almost instantaneously. It’s one of those products that’s designed to solve a nagging problem that most people just ignore. You know what I mean? It’s like having a stone in your shoe when you’re going for a walk. You ignore it, ignore it, ignore it until you can’t bear it and then you take your shoe off. It’s designed to solve one of those problems, and it’s designed to do so in a very easy way, as easy as taking off your shoe and throwing out the stone.

[00:04:11.070] – Joran

I mentioned for using Unkover, I’ve been running it, I think since the beta, you have a select notification which basically notifies us if competitors change anything on their site. I think you do a lot more already right now, but it’s really nice that you just get notifications if they change something, so it’s easy to keep track of what they’re doing, so you can iterate on that as well.

[00:04:32.620] – Gary

Yeah, that’s great to hear. That’s where we started. We’ve added a lot more. We’re doing some deeper content tracking and analysis. We’re tracking competitor reviews, G2 reviews, primarily, layering on some sentiment analysis there. The goal is to pick up on every relevant signal that someone who cares about their competition would want to know. Everybody from the competitive intelligence professional who that’s their job to the less obvious, which is all of the other people that have a need to be aware of competitor intelligence, from the founder or C-suite who just wants to know what’s happening in the market at large, to the salesperson who’s in a competitive deal and needs to be able to address objections based on the competition, to the product manager or product marketer who’s developing roadmap, who’s working on messaging. You’ll see the product grow quite quickly as we bring more features to address those use cases.

[00:05:32.160] – Joran

I think it comes down to what you did in the previous one, like the scoring or at least the intelligence you’re bringing it back to Unkover as well. Any employees do you currently have at Unkover?

[00:05:42.940] – Gary

We’re super lean. It’s seven people running the business.

[00:05:46.700] – Joran

To dive a bit more into yourself, may I ask how old are you?

[00:05:51.630] – Gary

I’m 44 years old.

[00:05:53.820] – Joran

I guess besides breadcrumbs and Unkover, are these your first startups or did you try anything before that as well?

[00:06:00.490] – Gary

I’ve been lightly involved in some other entrepreneurial ventures, some in the more traditional business world. I did run my own marketing consultancy for a couple of years. It was more of a solopreneur type of thing, a lifestyle type of business, which was fun. It gave me the ability to golf a lot, but I really like building stuff. I really like building high-performing teams. That brought me back into the world of tech/sas.

[00:06:33.440] – Joran

To dive one step deeper into that, to build teams, was that also that you always wanted to be an entrepreneur?

[00:06:39.560] – Gary

I would say I had an entrepreneurial spirit, regardless of whether it’s been my own thing or I worked for another company, including very large multibillion dollar companies. I’ve always treated it as my own business. I treated the budget as if it were my own money. I treated my team as if they were my employees. I think that is a good modus operandi, regardless if you’re an entrepreneur or you’re working in the corporate world. I think it forces you to think different ways, and I think it leads to better results. Maybe deep down, I was always an entrepreneur. I didn’t necessarily have an aspiration of building a tech company or whatever. In reality, it was a serendipitous meeting at SaaStock with a former colleague that led to breadcrumbs. If that meeting never happened, I might not have become a founder.

[00:07:31.660] – Joran

One more reason to attend SaaS Talk, I guess.

[00:07:34.460] – Gary

Yeah, it’s a great reason to attend SaaS Talk.

[00:07:37.220] – Joran

Nice. One question before we really deep dive, what keeps you motivated? Because you now started your second company, right? What keeps you going every day?

[00:07:46.980] – Gary

It’s a couple of things. One, I enjoy working. I’m not one of these people that describes to the idea of work-life balance and their two distinct things. To me, work is part of life. Life includes work. Work is for most people a big part of their life. You should be finding joy and fulfillment in it. I think that attitude keeps me motivated and excited to get up every morning and accomplish stuff. Then honestly, I like to win. I like to win. Regardless of how you keep score, winning is fun. I get up every morning, I have some goal, I have some goal post in terms of what winning looks like that day or that week or that month. Every morning, I want to win.

[00:08:35.090] – Joran

Nice. I think that’s a good goal to have for every day. Cool. Well, let’s do a deep dive. We’re going to talk more about Unkover. Take me back to the moment, I guess, where you came up with the idea of Unkover.

[00:08:46.800] – Gary

I don’t think it was really a moment. It was a series of things that led to an epiphany, I guess. As I said, we started breadcrumbs right at the beginning of the pandemic. We We entered a space where there was a handful of incumbent players where lead scoring was a not very loved feature as part of a large platform or a few point solutions. Then all of a sudden, There was a ton of competitors. It seemed like there was a new company every day. We’re keeping track of that for a variety of reasons. It turned out that we didn’t have a competitive intelligence process. We We had many. Our content people keeping an eye on what’s going on with our competitors. The exec team was keeping an eye from a strategic perspective. Our product folks are trying to keep track of roadmap and feature releases and using that to prioritize what we’re doing on our side. Our sales folks are periodically creating their own battle cards or cheat sheets. Everybody in the business was doing something related to CI. It wasn’t like nobody was spending countless hours, but you multiply 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there, times 8, 9, 10, 7, 6 people, whatever, every week.

[00:10:12.690] – Gary

It’s a lot. The extent of sharing was really the occasional Slack message to the entire organization in a non-purpose-built channel, just a general channel. Some people saw it, some people didn’t. Some people actioned it, some people didn’t. We were seeing this, that evolved into a dedicated competitive intelligence channel where, Hey, if it’s a competitive intelligence update, put it in there. That led to, Hey, maybe you focus on this competitive intelligence, you focus on that competitive intelligence, everybody else, just go to those people if you have needs. We saw this evolving, and at the same time, we were looking for a solution. Is there a tool out there that could help us with this? There were. The problem was they’re very expensive and they’re very much focused on the upper end of the mid-market into the enterprise. There really wasn’t anything for the SMB into the low end of the mid-market. That became abundantly clear when we would request demos and they would just ignore us or send us an email that says, Hey, you’re not important enough. You’re not big enough. All of these things combined led us to start building building some small tools ourselves to do some of this work.

[00:11:36.080] – Gary

At one point, the three founders are all talking. We all had had separate conversations with people in our network about this experience, and then we’re like, This is probably something that’s needed. The market could use this. That led us to build the MVP. That led it to the beta. That led to some really strong validation. Fast forward, here we We’re in market. We have our first handfuls of customers. We’re getting positive feedback, and now we’re trying to figure out how to blow this thing up.

[00:12:08.940] – Joran

Nice. With Brett Grums, you participated in Y Combinator. We’d Unkover on this so far, you did not. Are you still planning to do so? Are you still applying or maybe not because you already went through it? What is your view there?

[00:12:24.890] – Gary

We’re not planning on doing YC again. To me, once you’ve done YC once, I don’t know why you would do it again. The experience is nice. You are focused on a methodology for a period of time. You have access to a wealth of information and a wealth of expertise. Obviously, the ecosystem around YC, especially from an investment perspective, is unparalleled. But once you’ve done it, you have access to all those things in perpetuity. I don’t really see why you would go through it twice Nice, especially if it’s the same founding group. I’m doing Unkover with the same guys that I did breadcrumbs with. To me, I don’t really see a value.

[00:13:12.180] – Joran

Makes a lot of sense. When we talk about your journey, and I guess in general as a SaaS founder, everybody hits rock bottom one day. Either financially, personally, a lot can happen while growing a SaaS company. Are there any moments you can share? And I guess, how did you overcome those Rock Bottom moments?

[00:13:30.890] – Gary

I guess it depends on your definition of Rock Bottom. I think I’m lucky, I’m blessed that my Rock Bottom is probably not as bad as others. But I would say that probably a year and a half after starting Bread, I hit a little bit of a mental breaking point. A startup is fueled by passion. That is the only way to describe it. You have to be passionate, you have to be convicted, and you have to be willing to sacrifice immensely to make one work. When I say sacrifice, I mean sacrifice your own time, sacrifice financially, sacrifice moments with your family and your friends, The first year and a half, I really learned that with breadcrumbs. It hit a point where I was just burnt out. I didn’t realize it, actually. My cofounders realized it. We had a heart-to-heart. We had a hard conversation. They’re like, Dude, you’re not yourself. You’re not as sharp, you’re not as present. What’s going on? I had to do some self-reflection, and I just realized that I hit that breaking point. I had taken on too much. I was not willing to let go of enough. I had developed some bad habits in terms of time management and something that my entire career had been very good at, which is saying no.

[00:14:52.630] – Gary

I’ve always been very good at saying no. I lost that skill or I sacrificed that skill to the startup. Two breadcrumbs. They said, Hey, you need a break. I took one. I took a nice two-week hiatus and focused on myself, focused on my family, realigned my priorities, and came back re-energized and ready to go. Three years later, I’m still at it. That’s probably my rock bottom. During that two-week hiatus, I didn’t isolate myself. I actually spent a lot of that time talking to people in my network. We We were talking about Nathan Lotte and Patrick Campbell, Stephen Smalters, and Alex Stuma. These are all people that I’m lucky enough to count as, I would say, friends, definitely colleagues, and had lots of conversations with people like that who had gone through their own journeys, their own challenges, and that provided a lot of context and a lot of comfort. In fact, the other thing we were talking about was the SFM, the SAS Founder’s Membership. That group also became very, very helpful. Making sure I was attending those sessions, having those conversations, sharing the wins, sharing the challenges with other founders that are going through similar things, and leveraging that network really helped me come out of that rut, a better entrepreneur I’m part of SFM as well.

[00:16:17.760] – Joran

If you are experiencing any challenges, as you mentioned, other people already went through it as well. I mean, that’s why, for example, I do the podcast, but that’s why it always remains a bit, I guess, on on the surface. But when you go and actually talk to other people, for example, went to Morocco for SFM, 40 SaaS founders in the desert, there you can’t hide. You can go deep. You can talk about all your challenges. People already experienced it or would have ways for you to overcome them. I would definitely recommend a peer group like that for anybody.

[00:16:50.790] – Gary

Yeah, exactly that recommendation. It’s been a big part of my entrepreneurial journey for sure.

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[00:17:17.910] – Joran

when we talk about company challenges, are you able to share any big moments, challenges you had along the way?

[00:17:26.400] – Gary

Every day, there’s one. If you don’t have a challenge on a daily basis, something fishy is going on. That inflection point, I think, where we realized that services needed it to be a bigger part of our offering, I think that was a big challenge. Because I think when you start a SaaS company, you want to be a SaaS company. You don’t want to be a services business. There’s all of the baggage stereotypes, misconceptions of service in the context of SaaS. I was bought into a lot of those. For a long time, I think we had signal from the market that, Hey, we need services to support this offering. We’re like, We don’t want to do that. Eventually, rubber hits the road and you’re like, Okay, this is not going to work unless we’re supporting people with richer service offerings. That was a big challenge. Overcoming our own preconceived notions, our own preconceptions, figuring out what that looks like because it really changes everything. It changes your go-to-market, it changes your messaging, it changes your sales process, it changes your post-sales delivery, it changes your unit economics, it changes everything. That was definitely a big challenge.

[00:18:46.050] – Gary

I’m happy we went through it, and it’s actually completely changed my mind about a lot of things. I actually think the future of SaaS, the future of tech, including AI, which everybody talks about nonstop for some reason, is going to be services enabled. I think there’s massive changes in the workforce, in what teams look like, in what the skill sets are that are present in businesses. I think for most seasoned operators, the idea that technology by itself solves problems is no longer accepted. They understand that technology requires people in process to add value, and often Then they are going to look at the technology vendor as the source for that people and the guidance on the process.

[00:19:35.550] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, the people who understand companies will have the knowledge to actually implement things quickly and get them to roll faster.

[00:19:42.530] – Gary

Implementation, for sure. I think implementation has always been accepted as part of the deal. But I mean real services. Most companies are going to be looking to technology partners to help them figure out, Hey, how does this impact my processes? How do I optimize? How do I monitor? How do I use this thing to the fullest of its capabilities, especially in the context of everything else I have going on. I think that that’s the future. It’s really a return to the past, but most things are.

[00:20:13.230] – Joran

We talked about challenges. Let’s talk about something positive as well. Sure. What has been the best thing you’ve done, go-to-market to get to the company? Breadcrumbs in particular, what did you do certain things to get breadcrumbs to this point?

[00:20:26.890] – Gary

I think we’re really good at the fundamentals. We know how to build efficient content engines that scale. We know how to translate that content into traffic. Breadcrumbs gets 30-ish thousand visitors a month. We have a domain rank of somewhere north of 80, I think it’s 82. And that is a really cheap way to get leads. That’s an important part of a scalable SaaS business. Fast forward a A couple of years later, we just started Unkover. The Unkover domain, I think it’s been live for three months. We’re at a domain ranking of 52 in three months. That is incredibly fast. We’re really good at the fundamentals. We’re not precious. My cofounders have been around for a while. Our team is seasoned. We know stuff, but we also know that we don’t know stuff, and we know that things change, and we’re We’re completely open to not only open, we embrace experimentation, we embrace being challenged in terms of how we’re doing things, how we could do things better. I think those are the two things that we’ve done really well with both businesses. Build a strong core foundational marketing motion and then test and iterate and try to break that over and over and over again.

[00:21:57.650] – Gary

That would be the answer, I think.

[00:22:00.610] – Joran

Nice. I’m going to ask one follow-up question. Three months, domain authority plus 52, you said.

[00:22:05.760] – Gary

Fifty-two.

[00:22:06.670] – Joran

Yeah. How? My first thought would be you bought in a lot of backlinks which help you to increase domain authority, but I already see you nodding no. I’m happy to hear about the real answer.

[00:22:18.210] – Gary

No, we actually don’t spend a dime buying backlinks, and we actually pay very little for content. Most of the content we generate ourselves. Our internal team, myself included. I write a bunch of the content. My cofounders will write content. I think that’s a little bit of the magic sauce, right? Happy to share with the right people. Really, what it comes down to is quality over quantity. I mentioned AI before. People that think that they can generate hundreds of, pardon my language, shitty AI-generated blog posts, and they’re going to do well, they’re sadly mistaken, in my opinion. It’s going to be even harder in the future as things change with Google. Then partnerships, building a strong network that you can leverage to get quality backlinks, quality backlinks is a massive part of it.

[00:23:17.000] – Joran

Regarding this, everything you currently mentioned was organic growth, writing content, making sure that you start ranking, getting to the point where you had 30,000 users and 82 domain authority. But is Is this your only go-to-market motion or are you using different channels as well, for example, for Unkover right now?

[00:23:36.520] – Gary

Yeah, totally. We’re experimenting with paid. When I talk about things that have changed, paid today, very different than paid 10 years ago. Very, very, very different. But there’s still ways to make it profitable and make it work. We’re in the process of figuring that out right now with very good early signs. Outbound. Outbound gets a very bad rap. I think it’s because most people have a very limited view of what outbound is. But we do outbound at scale for breadcrumbs and for Unkover, and they’re both contributing significantly. For breadcrumbs, because it was a much higher ticket size and a much more involved product, it was very powerful, but it required power users. It required a certain level of sophistication on the operator side, on the customer side to get value out of it. We did a lot of events. The challenge with events is they have a very long tail. I think a lot of companies, a lot of marketers make the mistake of judging an event based on pipeline created within the event. They don’t even give it 30 days. Events have very long tails. They turned out to be good, not great, but the intangible benefits were significant.

[00:24:53.660] – Gary

Lots of people knew who we were. Lots of people were talking about us. I would go to events where we’re I’m not sponsoring, I’m just attending, and I say, from breadcrumbs, and people are like, Oh, I’ve heard of breadcrumbs. I’m like, Well, how? They’re like, I saw you at Collision, or I saw you at SaaS Talk, or I saw you at Saster, or whatever. Events were a significant investment. We learned a lot. I wouldn’t do it exactly the same way again, but it definitely had benefits.

[00:25:22.790] – Joran

You mentioned at the beginning, you’re now doing outbound at scale. What does it mean? Is it purely cold email outreach, LinkedIn outreach? Are you doing any other?

[00:25:32.730] – Gary

I think the only way to do outbound is multichannel if you wanted to really succeed. We do multichannel outbound. There’s very different costs and operational challenges with the different channels, be it email, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp, voice. There’s different challenges. We have a filtering process, a segmentation process to determine who makes it from touch one to touch five across the different channels. Outbound should be used for a variety of things. The idea for most people is like, I’m going to send a shit ton of emails to a shit ton of people to book a bunch of meetings, and I’m going to turn that into revenue. It can work. I’m not saying it doesn’t. It’s very hard to do that and getting much harder as the channel proliferates. Messages and different tactics that aren’t so on the add value to businesses over time, and we do a lot of those.

[00:26:34.420] – Joran

Yeah, nice. You’re now growing your second startup, right? You mentioned went to YIC, learned a lot of methodologies, a lot of probably frameworks and processes as well. When we look at, I guess, like Unkover, are there any things you took building the second SaaS? Like any processes, frameworks, methodologies you can share to other SaaS founders which they can take benefit from?

[00:26:56.480] – Gary

I’ll be really honest. The benefit, in my opinion to I see was more the network and the conversations. My two cofounders are seasoned entrepreneurs. They built the business and sold it to Hootsuite. That was one of several they had been involved in. I don’t think that there was a lot in terms of frameworks and methodologies that was super new to us or helpful. There were some of the assets that were very helpful for sure, templates and things like that. But it was more the network and the access to other entrepreneurs and investors that you could talk things through with. I think if you’re brand new, I think if you’re new to SaaS, new to tech, you’re a new founder, you don’t have a ton of work experience, something like YC is great. I think that’s the ideal profile for YC, personally. In terms of frameworks or methodologies, there are specific ones for specific tactics. I think the biggest methodology I would recommend is get to know the numbers for the thing that you’re doing inside and out, and don’t lie to yourself when you’re looking at your numbers compared to benchmarks. I think a lot of first-time founders, especially first-time entrepreneurs, think that their business is special, that they’re a unicorn, that there’s all of these other factors that make things different for them.

[00:28:20.260] – Gary

The reality is it doesn’t matter. The guideposts are there in terms of what success looks like, what good looks like. If your numbers don’t meet or beat those guideposts, you have a problem. That would be my tip.

[00:28:40.670] – Joran

Yeah, I think it’s really good advice because I think, like indeed, I speak to SaaS founders every day, and they all have their own unique situation, whereas you trust the benchmark because in the end, you’re not unique. Everybody’s somewhat doing the same thing, building a SaaS business, same metrics, follow the same thing. Keep that as the basis and compare yourself against that.

[00:29:01.590] – Gary

Right.

[00:29:03.580] – Joran

Nice. You mentioned it before a little bit already. I’m just curious, how are you leveraging new technologies like AI, machine learning, etc? I have to ask in, I guess, Unkover.

[00:29:14.720] – Gary

I don’t know. Maybe this is a hot take, maybe it’s not. The hype cycles in tech are crazy. We’re going through the AI hype cycle. Ai is here, it’s real, it’s here to stay. Things are going to change. It’s going to add value. All those statements are true. Most of the AI out there right now, things pitched as AI are not very good, in my opinion. In fact, they’re just wrappers around ChatGPT or some other AI engine. That being said, I use AI in my day-to-day job. Never to complete an end product, but rather to enable something that I’ve always done being done faster or better. That’s how we’re thinking about AI in the context of Unkover. How can we leverage it to do something that we were going to do anyways, faster, better? How can we get customers to value sooner? That type of thing. I’ll give you a sneak peek at one of the features that we’re thinking about using AI for. Ai right now is like, the best place is anything to do with language. It’s really large language models. It’s really natural language processing. That’s where it’s the most advanced, as far as I can tell.

[00:30:28.820] – Gary

One of the biggest outputs competitive intelligence are battle cards or cheat sheets for sales. The challenge with the way it’s done today, super manual, super ad hoc, they’re out of date the minute that they’re produced, and then they don’t usually get updated until they’re out of date and somebody is complaining about it. We’re looking at how can we use all of the signals that we’re collecting to generate a starter battle card for your competitors. There’s going to be areas where I think we’re going to be able to deliver great content. There’s other areas where I think it’ll be mediocre and other areas where I think we’ll fail miserably. We’re thinking about highlighting those in color code to say, Hey, green, high confidence. I think this is great. Yellow, medium confidence. You probably need to tweak this. Red or nonexistent, we suck. We can’t do it. You need to fill this out. But we can get you started really quick. You can add the things that you need to add, and then we can signal to you when things are changing and when they should be updated as they happen, as opposed to some ad hoc schedule or every six months or whatever companies are doing it.

[00:31:43.230] – Gary

I think that’s a great use of AI in Unkover, and we’re working on that right now. A general sentiment about AI that I’ll share. I think way too many people are worried about the rise of artificial intelligence, and not enough people are are worried enough about the decline of actual intelligence. I think that’s a bigger problem societally, and it has real implications for businesses. I think people should be spending more time thinking about that.

[00:32:12.720] – Joran

Yeah, I think that’s going to be a topic of itself to discuss.

[00:32:15.750] – Gary

For sure.

[00:32:17.590] – Joran

We’re going to wrap up. I have two final questions I always like to ask at the end. If we look at revenue stages of SaaS companies out there, and especially towards SaaS founders, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who is just starting out and growing to 10K money recurring revenue?

[00:32:33.430] – Gary

Focus on grind. I think sometimes people over-index on repeatability, scalability process in early days. Early days is about grind. Founders should be knees deep in the sales process. They should be talking to as many prospects, if not all prospects, in those early days. They should be looking at revenue almost as secondary to learning. Have a goal, have an objective on the revenue side, but understand that you don’t really know anything yet. A bunch of hypotheses. Once you use that period to get to that point, then you need to obsess on scalability. You need to obsess on repeatability. How do you take everything you learned, getting to that first 10K, find a way to impart it on everybody that is involved in the sales process and make it something that can scale without you?

[00:33:33.110] – Joran

Yeah, because that’s going to go into my next question. We took the 10K MR, so let’s assume we passed that 10K. We’re going to grow to 10 million AR. Scalability, that’s one part. What else can you advise us from this here?

[00:33:47.240] – Gary

Yeah, scalability, repeatability, I think is the next part. I think probably an obvious thing should be at every milestone, there will likely be changes in that process that gets you to the next milestone. You’re going to win a ton of customers in that first tranche getting to 10K. That when you’re at 2 million and you’re selling deals, you would never even want to talk to those people that you sold when you were getting to 10K. I guess mentally separate the idea of a repeatable, scalable sales process from what the ICP or the persona is or the price point. I guess that’s actually the biggest piece of advice. Realize that your price will and should change immensely on this journey. I love it.

[00:34:39.370] – Joran

Let me try to summarize the podcast episode in, let’s say, 30 seconds. Sure. Start off with, Find joy in your work because winning is fun. A great way to start a SaaS is based on your own challenges. You need to be willing to sacrifice a lot. You need to learn to let things go and keep saying no to avoid burnout. Leverage a network, peer community, so start sharing challenges with other founders. For example, we discussed with SaaS, the founder membership. The future of SaaS is going to be including services. Go to market. Content is still a cheap way to get leads, but do quality over quantity. Outbound only works with a multi-channel approach. Get to know your numbers. Don’t lie to yourself about them and start comparing them to benchmarks. Leverage AI to do things faster or better, but make sure it helps customer to get value sooner and your pricing It should change immensely over time.

[00:35:32.030] – Gary

Wow, that’s a lot of value in one podcast.

[00:35:35.520] – Joran

Exactly. No AI was used to generate this summary.

[00:35:38.930] – Gary

Zero AI. Zero. Yeah, that’s awesome.

[00:35:42.280] – Joran

for people listening, if you love this podcast, make sure to rate the show. Give us a review. We’re going to add a poll to this podcast episode as well. So I love to hear your thoughts about that. Gary, thanks again for coming on and sharing all your wisdom.

[00:35:56.890] – Gary

Jorin, it was my pleasure. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me again.Cheers. Thanks.cheers..

[00:36:02.830] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reddit, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.