S6E20 – Scaling Product, Scaling SaaS: Product Management Lessons from $0 to $100M+ with Oji Udezue and Ezinne Udezue.

What does it take to scale a B2B SaaS company from zero to $100 million in ARR? In the final episode of Season 6 of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, we explore this big question with two standout guests: Oji and Ezinne Udezue. They’ve worked with top tech companies like Typeform, WP Engine, and Twitter. They also co-wrote Building Rocketships: Product Management for High-Growth Companies. Beyond their resumes, they bring a unique perspective as a married couple with 20 years of partnership, both in life and in product leadership. This episode is full of sharp insights and practical strategies for anyone looking to build and grow successful SaaS products.

Understanding Product Management

Right from the jump, Oji and Ezinne break down what product management really is. It’s not just backlogs and feature specs. To them, product management is both an art and a science. It’s about bringing clarity to chaos, turning uncertainty into value, and aligning customer needs with business goals. The best product managers don’t just build features—they solve real problems and create experiences people love.

The Importance of Product Management for SaaS Founders

Why should SaaS founders care about product management? Because at its core, it’s about strategy. Product management helps founders make sense of complexity, prioritize with purpose, and scale the right way. Instead of chasing shiny objects or reacting to random feedback, founders with a product mindset focus on what really matters: delivering real value to the right users.

Common Misconceptions About Product Management

One of the most refreshing parts of the episode is how Oji and Ezinne challenge common myths about product management. It’s not about organizing meetings or writing specs. It’s about making smart decisions. AI can take care of admin tasks, but the human side of product work—judgment, creativity, and focus—is still critical. That’s what drives real growth.

Scaling from Zero to $100 Million ARR

The core of the episode is about how to scale a SaaS product to $100 million ARR. Oji and Ezinne explain that it all starts with solving a real customer problem. To grow, you first need to earn product-market fit. That means building something people actually want and staying focused. Don’t get distracted by shiny features or trends that don’t last.

The Role of Virality and Network Effects

Virality and network effects can help your product grow faster, but they work differently. Virality helps early by turning users into promoters, which lowers customer acquisition costs. Network effects become more powerful when your product hits a certain scale. Think of how Calendly spreads through teams or how Slack becomes more useful as more people join. These tools are key growth drivers when used right.

The Impact of AI on Product Management

AI is changing how we build products. But it’s not just about writing code. The real value of AI is in how it can support better decisions, simplify workflows, and give teams more time to focus on strategy. Product leaders who treat AI as a teammate, not just a tool, will be better positioned to lead the future of SaaS.

Key Takeaways for SaaS Founders

Oji and Ezinne share practical tips throughout the episode. Whether you’re just getting started or already growing fast, the message is clear: stay focused on your customers, hire the right people, and keep your strategy sharp. Great SaaS companies don’t just build fast. They build smart, with systems that scale and teams that adapt.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode ends, Oji and Ezinne highlight the power of community and continuous learning. They invite listeners to join their Substack and explore more tools from their book. The biggest takeaway? Success comes from clear decisions, strong strategy, and a deep focus on customer value. With AI and good product thinking, the future of SaaS is wide open.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – Knowing Your Ideal Customer Profile
• (0:09) – Most Important Task for Founders
• (0:59) – Closing Off Season 6 with a Bang
• (1:46) – Guest Welcome
• (1:53) – Diving Into Product Management
• (2:02) – Product Management as a Craft
• (3:19) – The Importance of Sharp Problems
• (4:44) – Why SaaS Founders Need Product Management
• (6:22) – Founders Thinking as Product Managers
• (7:54) – Misconceptions in Product Management
• (8:32) – Admin Layer of Product Management
• (9:27) – AI’s Role in Product Management
• (10:19) – Calculated Decisions and Customer Needs
• (10:52) – AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement
• (11:13) – Scaling from Zero to $100 Million ARR
• (12:29) – Finding a Sharp Problem
• (13:46) – Sharpening Your ICP
• (16:05) – Building and Refining Your Product
• (18:13) – Signals Before Investing in Growth
• (19:38) – The Fundamentals of Product-Market Fit
• (20:36) – Creating a Unicorn vs. a Small Business
• (22:32) – Product Strategy Across Revenue Stages
• (25:41) – Strategic Moats and Distribution
• (26:11) – What is Product-Market Fit?
• (27:18) – Customer Investment as a Sign of Fit
• (28:23) – Phases of Growth in SaaS
• (30:56) – Virality vs. Network Effects
• (32:54) – When to Think About Virality and Network Effects
• (35:02) – AI as a Risk and Opportunity
• (36:18) – AI’s Impact on Workflows
• (39:15) – Rethinking Business with AI
• (42:34) – Advice for SaaS Founders Starting Out
• (45:10) – Growing Towards 10 Million ARR
• (49:03) – Making Decisions When Not in the Room
• (51:01) – Summary of Key Points
• (51:26) – Building Rocketships Pro Edition
• (53:21) – Building a Community of Product Managers
• (53:57) – Closing Remarks and Call for Feedback

Transcription

– Ezinne Udezue

Knowing your ICP, your ideal customer profile, knowing who you’re serving, knowing their shop problem, and being able to create some learning mechanism is critical.

– Oji Udezue

The most important thing a founder can do is build a product. Now, we know founders are a strict thing. They got to raise money if that’s an issue, and they have to hire people. But by far, the most important risk, even as an investor, is build risk. This is the thing that knocks off 90% of startups. Work management is the function, the responsibility to build something that people love. And even that is a very important word because, first of all, you have to find something that they value, something that they find irresistible, something that accelerates their lives, hopefully ethically. And then you have to make it in a form and a function that they find compelling and attractive.

– Joran

Today, we’re Closing off Season 6. We’re going to do it with a bang. We will discuss how to scale your PDB SaaS going from a zero to $100 million ARR. I won’t have one guest today, but I’m actually joined by a power duo, Oji Udezue and Ezinne Udezue. They both work at massive PDB SaaS companies, which include Typeform, WP engine, Procore, Canada Lead, Twitter, and many more. They will have insights that only come from being at the top of a product organization. Currently, they help leaders and PMs on how to leverage AI capabilities to create compelling solutions solutions to shop problems and building a strategic advantage from there. They also wrote a book together which is called Building Rocketships: Product Management for High-Growth Companies. One personal fact about my guests, they have been married for 20 years. Welcome to the show, Oji Udezue and Ezinne Udezue.

– Oji Udezue

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much, Joran. We are glad to be here.

– Ezinne Udezue

We’re happy to be here.

– Joran

We’re just going to dive right in. What does product management mean for you or mean for the both of you?

– Ezinne Udezue

I start. I know. Do you have opinions? At the heart of it, we think product management is a craft. We often get this question, is it art or science? A craft brings the best in both worlds, and you’re always improving. But it’s a craft that really is about orchestrating uncertainty through others and oneself into compounding value. What exactly do those words mean? It is that there are sharp problems out there. The job of product management is to take all that chaotic ingredient, all the chaotic ingredients of problems, of people, of technology, and create something that creates a clear path to value in a way that serves the user and the business. We think about it through three core things: identifying a sharp problem and solutionate for it. That’s the first piece. The second piece is getting that product or solution to the hands of your customers. The third is that transformation and discovery that has to occur that allows you to evolve the product through a learning mindset and creating true feedback loops. That’s what we think of product management holistically.

– Oji Udezue

The only thing I want to sprinkle on top of that is I love the word to use, sharp problems, which is a really important idea in the book, but also that we use for consulting and helping people to better outcomes. Well, the thing that I wanted to add is people who build companies, look, they’re trying to create generational wealth, they’re trying to help humanity, they’re trying to help businesses, whatever it is. Product management is the function, the responsibility to build something that people love. Even that is a very important word because, first of all, you have to find something that they value, something that they find irresistible, something that accelerates their lives, hopefully ethically. And then you have to make it in a form and a function that they find compelling and attractive. And if you can do that, usually involved in distilling a workflow, imagine a new workflow for something that people have always done, then the next step is, how do we get it to 10 people, 10,000 people, a million people, a billion people? And what is our business model? Or making money from it because we’ve created something that people want.

– Oji Udezue

And product management is really the bridge of those two. Create value for our customers and then create value for business by making sure that the business model executes. Nice.

– Joran

Our audience are B2B SaaS founders, so maybe specifically towards them, why is it so important for SaaS founders to do product management?

– Ezinne Udezue

I love the fact that you said for founders to do product management because it tends to be this idea of product managers are the only ones who do product management. And being able to separate that is actually a really interesting thing. I think that product management often gets misunderstood as the admin layer of prioritizing features, et cetera. But when you look back, it really is about clarifying best. It is being really specific about there are multiple paths that one can go down, multiple options people can take. And that is the essence of what a founder has to do. I have opportunities in front of me, and I could choose this, that, or the other. I have a few developers, and we can build this, that, or the other. So having that mindset where you are sure that you are compounding the right things, solving durable pain, not just sharp, but something that’s also durable, building systems that allow you to scale, and then serving the right customer. So Founders need product judgment as well so that they can actually not get seduced by the noise that many folks tend to do or shallow feedback, knowing your ICP, your ideal customer profile, knowing who you’re serving, knowing their sharp problem, and being able to create some learning mechanism is critical.

– Ezinne Udezue

And why I believe that founders should be thinking as product managers if they want to be successful these days.

– Joran

And when we talk Can you talk about product management before we, I guess, really dive into going from zero to $100 million ARR? What is one of the biggest misconceptions you, here,/she, I guess, SaaS founders or teams have regarding product management?

– Oji Udezue

The most important thing a founder can do is build a product. Now, we know founders are a strict thing. They got to raise money if that’s an issue, and they have to hire people. But by far, the most important risk, even as an investor, is build risk. This is the thing that knocks off 90% of startups. Are you building something that’s valuable in a form and function that people want? Founders have to address work management very early. They have to change and pivot according to the customer. In the beginning, it’s just customers, customer satisfaction, customer pool, customer attraction. It’s a mixture of building it and also telling a story about how you built it so that you can tell the thing. Basically, founding is product management early on. Product management is a responsibility. Often, the people who do it, aka founders, don’t have that title. Some of them have never done it before, but they’re good at it. But someone must be doing product always. What happens is eventually the founder times out, has too much on their plate, and then they have to think about hiring people to support them. But there’s always someone doing product.

– Oji Udezue

If you don’t do it, you won’t be able to make the thing that’s valuable. Even if you do the first version of that, the second version may suck because you don’t have time to spend to your customers and understand this stuff. The biggest misconception is related to what Isina said, which is it’s about the necessary but drudgery work of front management, which is like having meetings. Setting objectives, sitting down people, proving the backlog. But the most important thing a founder can do is cultivate your customers, understand what makes them tick, understand how you can translate that into bits and bites, and get it to them. We think that people get distracted much by some of the more tactical stuff.

– Ezinne Udezue

Let me say this. The biggest misconception, again, is prioritizing features, writing product requirement documents. The reason I wanted to underscore is that when AI and what LLM’s thing, do, came up, because people don’t realize that is simply the administrative mix, the job really being clarifying, et cetera, and making decisions. People mistook the writing PRPs and prioritizing as the job. With AI, people were like, Wow, the sky is falling. Product management is going away. It is so embedded in the entire system that that is what PM is such that it created this fear. But again, if you really elevate it and think about it as making decisions, being very clear on your bets, and all that is simply the administration, the documentation of what those bets are, et cetera, then you are as afraid of what AI does, because AI only does the admin layer of what a PM should be doing or founder should be doing as they do product management.

– Oji Udezue

Joran, let me give you an illustration. You hire 10 developers. They all cost you $100. What’s that? $1,000, right? They make something. And about 30% of your customers buy it for X amount, you make some money. Now, you hire nine developers at 1 PM. They also cost you $100. They make something. But with the product manager, if they’re any good, they’ve increased the customer attraction of the thing by 50%. And so now your take rate, your adoption has gone up by maybe 20%, and you’re charging the same amount of money. You just made more money, basically. This is the logic of product management, of the product thinking, if that makes sense. It actually returns on capital. It actually gives you more money in your pocket as a founder. It’s done correctly.

– Joran

Because in the end, you make calculated decisions. The needs of your customers, you’re going to bring them to the product.

– Oji Udezue

They adopt more, you make more money, basically.

– Joran

Exactly. If you’re going to have AI do all the work, then you end up with a huge product which is going to work for everybody or nobody at the same time.

– Oji Udezue

Ai is just a tool. It doesn’t replace anything. There’s still someone who’s thinking, What do I build? Ai is not going to do that for you. We use AI all the time at product mind at Phalanx, and it never replaces our creative thinking. It just doesn’t have the ability.

– Joran

Got you. Today, we’re going to talk about how to scale a product from zero to $100 million ARR. We’re going to start at the complete in a row, I guess. When somebody is just starting out, no customers, no traction, what are the non-negotiables? What are the things they need to do to get a good product strategy in place?

– Oji Udezue

Oh, wow. The first thing we tell founders is, and this is hard to hear because this is almost minus zero, is you got to find a sharp problem. This is the first mistake founders make. Work on a problem that if you solve it, and if you solve it maybe two, three times better than the current incumbents, people will need it. That’s what a sharp problem is. The counterpoint is an unsharped problem. I’ve worked on unsharped problems in my life. I think I worked on a startup where I was trying to get people to meet physically. It turned out not to be a sharp problem. It’s just that people overestimated the ability to do it, that they didn’t care, that they made it better. You have to work on a sharp problem. This is important because founders They tend to gravitate to problems they experience. Founding is a very me-centered, often me-centered, but it should be completely customer-centered. You can work on a problem you’ve never experienced if you understand it well enough. The first thing is find a problem that if you solve it, people will buy it. That’s the first thing. I would say that a lot of startups, 50% of startups we see die because of this, because no one is listening.

– Oji Udezue

They’re still like, Oh, I experienced this. This is a pain I have. I’m going to work on it, it doesn’t really work because not everyone, not a million people experience it, not in that very specific way. I’ll start with that.

– Ezinne Udezue

One of the things I noticed is for you to find a startup problem, you’ve identified an area you want to work on, like some space. But people also lose sight of who they are solving a problem for. So just making sure you have that sharp problem identified and continue to finesse and sharpen even your ICP. Who is this for? Because you’re going to encounter who you should be serving, but not quite. But you gain clarity, continue to gain clarity on what are you solving for? When you see someone that is using a product that is not quite the person, being honest about that and saying, well, they use it in this case and not… And then shave that off. Because I’ve seen so many founders that I advise to get distracted by the second customer who comes in and is who they wanted to serve, but not quite. And then you start building this extra service layer for them. That’s a place people get lost and start looking for dollars. The dollars are good now, but it prevents you from building something that is sustainable for a repeatable group of folks that could truly allow you to be that rocket ship that goes from the 100 to a thousand.

– Ezinne Udezue

That’s the piece I want to level in. Sharpen your person, check on the problem again. Sharpen who you’re solving for, check on the problem. It’s this little loop of refinement that I think is required.

– Oji Udezue

One of the noisy things is people Who will listen to the wrong customers? Also, one of the noisy things that people don’t define their customer narrow enough, they’re like salespeople or salespeople at work. That’s not a definition. Find a narrow version of your customer, the one that has 10,000 people in it, and try to make sure you lock that down. Eventually, your customer definition will get to a million people and so on. You have to have a narrow definition. The next thing you got to do is, let’s get to… For instance, we’re building some companies right now, so we’re really in this right now. Let’s try to get to 10K MRR, 20K MRR, whatever that is, the next thing you have to do if you have a sharp problem, you have the right customer definition, and you’re not focused on everybody because people can throw money at you and distract you, is you have to build something important and useful. This is where you apply classic product management, define the product, design it, build it with developers, which is very hard. It’s hard to marshal those people to do this thing. Ai makes it easier today, but it doesn’t make it any less hard because the bringing it together is very difficult.

– Oji Udezue

You got to build that stuff, and you’re going to build it very quickly. Don’t be distracted. We talk about simple, lovable, and complete, not MVPs. The reason is, viable depends on your market. If you’re building to compete with Adobe, you might build for two years like Figma. If you’re building something new where there’s nobody, which is, by the way, dangerous, then your viable is smaller, if that makes sense. But what we really want, it’s not just viable, we want simple, lovable, and complete. You get your first 100 customers. You go out, you recruit them. Even if they don’t actually pay for the product, even if all the growth mechanisms are not in the product, in fact, you should email them invoices once they start using it more than once. That’s how you do the very quick validation. Actually, approach a decent MRR. Your first product, simple of a look complete, doesn’t have all the growth mechanisms, expresses the value you want to create, get it to your beta customers very quickly. That process has to be fast. Some people take two years to do this. You shouldn’t do that a year. You shouldn’t do that.

– Oji Udezue

Try to do it in 3-6 months. That’s how you do that. If people spend weekly time in the product and they talk to you and they’re very invested You’re off to the races because they will pay for it, usually. Some of them will pay for it. That’s a good way to validate your direction.

– Joran

I think now the point of a zine will come back. You now have your first users. You need to keep sharpening the problem in your ICP because you have more users coming in. If we talk about the book or your process, what in your case would now be the next step if you have the simple, lovable, and complete solution out there?

– Oji Udezue

Because you’ve designed something for maybe 10,000 people on the planet. Because you are very specific. You didn’t try to boil the ocean. People are spending time in it. It’s rough, but they’re actually spending time because hopefully, you found some of the most motivated people for this particular workflow. Now, they’re telling you what they need. If you segmented and to listen to the right people amongst them, one of the things that anti-patterns is an enterprise gets interested. Now, they make you their outsource dev team because they have a very specific need. What in B2B SaaS, you want scale. There’s no money in it, or the sales size for too long. Now you refine. You essentially open up… There’s a chapter on customer listening. You open up the aperture and you absorb what people are saying. You filter it for what people need versus what they want, and then you build more product. At the same time, you’re gearing up for growth, meaning you’re adding and sending down the first part of the product, the thing that gets people in. You’re identifying what is a critical path and journey that makes people stick around. You’re figuring out how to get people to pay as seamlessly as possible.

– Oji Udezue

We talk about payments, and it is just payments, but payments is psychology. Payments is basically the intersection between What’s what happens in the first moment of a product? How does it solve my problem beyond the first moments? And what is my value equation in my head that makes me give up a dollar? You have to refine that. And I think that’s the next step.

– Joran

When you talk about user behavior, you talk about psychology of paying, are there any other signals that founders should look for before really investing into growth?

– Ezinne Udezue

Protocol market fit isn’t loud, it isn’t big, it’s consistent. Before scaling, there are two core problems I see founders do. One is a common one, which is premature abstraction. I’m ready for scale and I’m building for scale. Yeah, I have your buddy. But I’m thinking of scale from the beginning. One of the Another thing I’ve noticed is that founders are now using road hacking a little too early. Let me explain. You can’t really know if you have landed a true problem, if you solve something, if you’re playing these of games with people, of nudging and trying to do these inbound calls, et cetera. If you really, really are seeking product-market fit, you really want people who are using your product. No matter how janky it is, repetitively, they will talk about it. You want to go back to the core fundamentals of people literally loving this thing and including it into their workflow so much so that when you change a pixel, you’re pissed because it’s part of it. It’s You want them in their workflow. You want them using it without nudging. You want them to want to ask, Hey, when can I get this and how can I pay?

– Ezinne Udezue

That is truth. That is clarity. That is pure. Then you know who it is you’re serving, how you want to serve them because they’re using your product in a very fundamental way. Then you can begin to scale. We tend to start using these tricks a little too early, and we tend to start to use the scaling mindset of, Yes, Let’s build on this particular Kubernetes system, et cetera. Just back up on that and get to ground truth first.

– Joran

I feel like you both are focusing super heavy on the fundamentals. I think it’s super important if you’re building not on the right sharp problem, as you call it, and you’re not actually building something people need, then you’re probably going to end up with a problem later down the line. This is probably the fundamentals on how to actually get to 100 million AR There are many companies that I always talk about, do you want to be a small business SaaS company like SMB?

– Ezinne Udezue

Just stay there. Or do you actually want to be a unicorn? Both are good answers. None is bad because you can actually create a good SaaS company, make money, change your family’s future for a long time with your company. But we’re always looking at what is it that takes people off the track of truly being a unicorn versus not. It’s just trying to distinguish it. You can still do all the things I said, prepare for obstruction and scale prematurely. You can also not necessarily pay use all the half, and you will still build a decent B2B SaaS company. This is figuring out who stays on which lane to get to what outcome. How do you bring people on board How do you keep the strategy clear? How do you communicate, build organizations that allow you to grow?

– Oji Udezue

I think from a product perspective, there is basically chase product market first, then tack on growth and scale and the payment psychology on top. The founder is also doing other things that will secure their future. I think this is the time to use an example. I like using Calendly because Sophie is a good friend of mine. He found a niche scheduling which was underserved. Lots of salespeople lost meetings because 50% of meetings don’t happen before something like Calendly. So salespeople make a lot of money. They make millions in our economy. And so he knew because he was a salesperson, so he found something that he was connected to. He dissolved it and made it more efficient, and you could get it to zero mess meetings. It would be valuable because there’s money behind it. Once he found that Calendly was free for a year, he just focused on getting it right. Once they did, they added a freemium engine, converting people and getting people paid. People literally sent checks in the early days of Calgary, so that’s a good example. They didn’t They didn’t do anything like that too early. They didn’t waste time doing it.

– Oji Udezue

They just wanted to get it right. But the other thing that’s important at this stage is your focus on talent, meaning that the selection of your development team, the selection of your people, your captains, people who are solving the big problems. Finance. Not finance, not finance, but just collecting invoices, reducing the sales cycle, making sure the smartest people are in the door that you can find. Also working on that is huge. As this startup in Australia that that I worked with, and it was the same thing. In their case, they didn’t nail a sharp problem. This problem wasn’t sharp enough. Actually, the reason this sharp problem works is it gives you insurance, it gives you resiliency, because you make a mistake. If you have a sharp problem, people stick around. If you don’t, they will just leave. But they had a sharp problem problem. But in this case, they were really focused on talent. So they had very good people in the door to solve problems as they came up. So beyond the product, it’s also like really smart companies make sure that they have smart people within it. They obsess about that very early.

– Ezinne Udezue

I think across the board, the founder is responsible and it’s part of the growth solution. But one of the things is from zero to one male, you’re really PMF obsessed. That’s what you’re focused on, high touch, no automation, and get back to fundamentals. From one to 10 is what I’ll say, be segment-led, ICP-focused, ICP-clarity, repeatable sales, get clarity on. Just earn that right to experiment with a particular group and be so clear on how you’re solving a problem. Then from, I would say, the 10 million to 30 million, you’re working on worldwide, worldwide alignment. What are what we call product systems? How are you putting and how are you hiring leaders? How are you finding them? How are you instilling processes that you need? How do you communicate strategy? How are decisions made when you’re not in the room? How are metrics used to shape decisions? That’s the area. That’s what we’re building out. The last is where you get to 30 to 100 million. Obviously, you’re thinking about this from the beginning, but moats and distribution. That’s your strategic modes and distribution. In the book, we talk about your strategy, knowing that you must create a moat.

– Ezinne Udezue

If you want to get to that unicorn level or you want to go beyond 30 million, you have to be different and unique. What are the platform bets that you’re taking? How are you using AI? Is AI just on the edges or forward to your product? How are you going to market? Are you finding partners? So really thinking fundamentally, are you going to exploit economies of scale? Are you going to exploit scope? Are you going to be a true platform and do the whole two-sided benefits you get from having a true distribution model that includes a platform? Zero to one is PMF focus. One to 10 is worldwide alignment, getting your segment focus and ICP focus. Third is worldwide, really trying to scale your people. Last is being truly strategic and differentiated and getting clear distribution.

– Joran

I hope that helps. Are you struggling to find a cost-effective and scalable marketing channel? Check out Reditus. We help you to have other people recommend your SaaS, and you would only pay them when they deliver you paid clients, making it a very cost-effective and scalable marketing channel. Want to learn more? Go to getReditus.com. It’s a super basic It’s a big question. Everybody has a different answer. When you say zero to one million product-market-fit focus, what does it actually mean for the both of you? What is product-market-fitting in your opinion?

– Ezinne Udezue

I talked about this earlier. What it looks like to me is that somebody is willing to use my product regardless of how janky the thing is. Really, it is that. And honestly, I have been in situations, even if consulting or even at my company, where the minute I change something, I get a call. I was like, Why did you change that? Because it is so fundamental to how that person is using it. It is part of how they’re making a bet on me with their own bets, their own business. They are repeating this product, using it without any single nudge. They call me and tell me that a dev has changed one thing or the other because they’re so in the product. They’re telling me how to sell my product. You could say it this way because I found out how I could use it this other way. One of my mentors said, It isn’t about anything. It’s just this consistent drag or pull from your customer. You’ll know you have it because they’re using it, valuing it, talking about it, and seeing invested in it.

– Oji Udezue

Product market fit is when people start to live and do their work closing your product, and they prefer it to whatever alternatives they had before, and they’re taking it super seriously. How you know is If you break something, they shout. That’s product-market fit. The opposite is they don’t live in it, don’t come back, don’t bet on it with their time. And that’s it. It’s when you get a few people to bet on with their time. And real product-market fit really is when that number starts to increase and it keeps increasing. Because people are not sharing what it is. In the book, we try to say startup phase, mid phase, and scale phase. At every point, the problem’s changed dramatically for founders. It’s It’s like raising teenagers. If you’re not perceiving how they’re changing, you can’t solve the problem. You can’t do it. Some people take a startup mentality and hit 20 million era, 25 million era, and they fail, even if they did really well. Some people hit 20, 50, and then they can’t get to 100 and fail. Founders have to understand this is a phase journey. It’s all things you did before. Don’t translate.

– Oji Udezue

The thing that translates the most is talent, getting good people in. Even the organization shape changes. We You consult with lots of companies between 20 and 100 million, and the problem is always different. In the first phase, get the product right and understand your business model. In the next phase, scale, distribute, find ways to get your product out there in your market, in foreign markets, translation, make sure the growth engine works. There’s a self-sustaining cycle. One thing that they mentioned is virality and network effects. Huge. There’s something called platform effects. There’s something called network effects, which is, by the way, the biggest and most substantial power in building technology companies. If you have no network effects, there is no big company that has a network effect. If you use Word, Microsoft Word, you’re going to need Word on the other side to decode it. And so boom, a billion people are using Word. And I was there at Microsoft when some of these things happened. And so network effects, which virality helps you get to network effects. Within that middle ground, you have to think about how to engineer it. It takes time. But if you do it consciously, by the time you get to 80, 100 million, you can keep going.

– Oji Udezue

But if you don’t do it, you stall. If that makes sense.

– Joran

Let’s dive deeper into the network effect. You gave the word example, but I candidly had a network effect as well, right? Virality.

– Oji Udezue

I built some early network effects. We were very viral, thank God. But network effects wasn’t actually there. Because word of mouth is not the same as network effects, it’s just virality. Network is not going to differentiate. People mistake them. Virality Virality is when you spend zero money on marketing because your customers are pulling you forward. They can do it through just talking to each other because it’s so amazing, or you’ve built in ways, let’s call it synthetic virality, ways for people to share easily. That’s virality. Network effects is when one more person in the product is added, everyone benefits immediately. Going back to Word, I have Word, I created I’m creating a document in Word. Now, if one more person creates a document in Word in Mongolia, I suddenly have one more person who can read my document. That’s network effects. So currently, it didn’t have initial network effects. It had a lot of virality. But one of the things that happens, and there’s more that they’re going to build, is now if both of us have Calendly and try to schedule each other, when I pull up Calendly, I can see your schedule beside mine.

– Oji Udezue

I don’t have to look at my calendar anymore. And so all of a sudden, every time one more person joins Calendly, I’m spending less calories comparing calendars. That is network effects.

– Ezinne Udezue

They basically built features. First of all, it was virality. Each person had its own, and they were telling each other, but it didn’t benefit. But the minute they started adding collaborative sharing, the ability to see other calendars, that’s when network effect is in place, because now the ability for me and Ajay to look at our joint calendars, to see more, there’s just more value. Then you, myself, Dora and you two, you’re added. That actually is where we’re networking, but they basically layered it in over time.

– Oji Udezue

Let me give you a weird example. Slack didn’t have network effects. It had virality. If I use Slack, and you use Slack upstairs in a 10, 400 different office, at lunch, we’re like, Oh, this amazing tool. What’s that? What amount? Virality. But for the longest time, it didn’t matter that you had it and I had it. I didn’t benefit. My office benefited from it. There was intra office network effects, but not cross-company network effects, which is what you want. Email has network effects. Anytime one more person gets an email address, there’s one more person you can email. That’s network effects. Flux, they’re getting network effects when they’re fully built out their inter-org stuff that people take for granted today. Network effects, they connect. Or connect is network effects, which is slightly different. But now, slack can become as ubiquitous as email. Anytime one person gets Slack, there’s one more person eating Slack in the world. So that’s different.

– Joran

When we talk about virality or network effect, when should SaaS founders think about this? Should it already… Do they need to think about it from early days, or should they take the approach, for example, for Slack, where they did the network effect, really later down the line?

– Oji Udezue

That’s a good question. I’ll try to answer it briefly. Think of virality as early as possible. Meaning, don’t build to do this for yourself. Build it to do app for your team and yourself. Make it so good that people talk about. Typeform was viral because it was so beautiful conversation or form making. It didn’t really have network effects, and I don’t think we still do, or it was completely viral. Virality should be designed in as early as possible because it makes your CAC, B2B SaaS, as I understand this. The cost of acquisition cost will be way your profitability will be super high. So think about it from jump. Even when you’re designing the product, be thinking about virality, prioritize those things, unless they’re distractions. Sometimes you have to wait to get product market fit first. So that’s what I would say. Network effects is a weird thing. If you have 10,000 customers and you start building network effects, there’s not enough critical mass for it to matter. The first time, hit It’s like 4 million people before we start thinking on network effects. And think about all the people that can schedule, like 100 million, a billion people.

– Oji Udezue

So 10,000 over a billion people, network effects doesn’t really matter that much. Virality matters much more. But once you hit a critical mass, 4 million, 5 million, whatever, then network effects starts to matter. People start to notice it because they’re encountering other people who use your product. So network effects is different. Virality is very early. Network effects, think about it, but understand that it’s not effective unless there’s critical mass. And so you have to be… It’s a number of customers gain. When I built it, I can’t really… It was early, but I knew that our growth rate was such that it will start to matter very quickly. Does that make sense?

– Joran

Makes a lot of sense. Let’s look at the future before we start wrapping things up. What do you see as the biggest risk or maybe even biggest opportunity now for SaaS product teams, product managers, and I guess especially with also AI reshaping a lot of the things?

– Ezinne Udezue

For the world as a whole or just our industry as a whole, one of the biggest risks I think of, and we can say necessarily for SaaS PMs, or E2R AI, but first off, it’s just a lot of waste. I just see a lot of code sitting around, unfinished, not meaning anything. It just gives me concern. I think about this idea of the fast fashion of tech, and AI is creating all these features and factories of things that are not going to be useful. Some beauties, it’s cold. We can clean it up, we can break down. If you have things, you can just close things down. But it costs us energy. It was waitful to get there. The big risk on product management side is people focusing more on hatching their AI prompts from vibe coding and just a lot of energy more on fixing and bandating that actually owning the end-to-end user journey. I’m seeing a A lot of people waste time there, a lot. They’re not spending the time really backing off and saying, What journey do I want to create? What solution do I want to offer? Starting from that, back in the day when I did computer engineering, pseudo coding was really important.

– Ezinne Udezue

You step back and pseudo code it. You don’t just start writing code. You step back and ask, How do you want to construct this thing? That’s one of the risks. People gain these plump janitors, cleaning up things, we’re actually truly owning solutions end-to-end. I’m excited about AI in spite of it all. I’m really, really excited about AI. I’m excited about reimagining of our workflows. We haven’t even started scratching the surface because I think that AI is going to let… If we really allow it and take full advantage, a seven-step workflow, basically B2B SaaS, can become one step. I’ve seen how AI has changed how I do work, how much it give me back the time for my family. I’m just 100% thrilled as an opportunity. I think it’s going to rewrite the system of work, allowing us to move basically, instead of AI being a tool, it could truly be a teammate of all sitting right next to us, doing a lot of the heaviness thing, allowing PMs and founders to truly think a little above, a different structure.

– Oji Udezue

I’ll take a different tack. What’s happened in the last two, three years since GPT-3 came out is that it’s almost like the cloud coming out. If you hosted your own data center, it became untenable. The economics of having AWS was so good that you couldn’t do better until you were worth billions of dollars. Facebook hosts its own stuff and own data centers, but you can’t get there below that economic scale. Ai is like that. At Typeform, we met with the other founder. David and I tried to build the business inside Typeform. That was AI. We expected to be disrupted by AI. We prepared for that future by building the next future version of Typeform inside Typeform. One of the ideas we talk about is AI at the edge and AI at the core. Every SaaS founder has to… If you started in 2019, you have to re-imagine your entire business built around this new tool, this new thing. The technology level has changed dramatically. Things built on static code type script, React, they’re not going to make it in this next iteration, even if they’re very customer-focused. Because what your competitors will come and do is that they will apply this new tool, and if you deliver this workflow and you can get it down to five minutes, they will do the same thing and get it down to 30 seconds.

– Oji Udezue

And that 4X gap in speed, inconvenience, will disrupt you. So people have to re-imagine. Now, this is harder than it seems. When I was at Microsoft and we were the internet browser wars. I started working being a PM supplier. I’ve been a PM for over 25 years. One of the things that Bill Gates did was that he bought Internet Explorer and built it into the OS, which created problems for him later with the US federal government. But we spent so much time thinking about the Internet as browsing the Web, the worldwide web, that we missed many innovations. We missed Twitter, we missed even We miss Facebook, we miss Google. Basically, those guys were like Napoleon. They stopped fighting on the desktop instead of fighting elsewhere, and we didn’t know where the battle was. It’s a good thing, I guess, for the world. These people create trillions of dollars. The thing about this on certain time is that even B2B founders who are very close, who are very savvy, we’re not sure where all the battles would be. We’re not sure where all the value is. What I would tell B2B founders is, don’t be fake.

– Oji Udezue

Get into outfield intelligence, all the tools if you’re using them every day. You should be talking to people who understand how to do proofs. If you listen to builders who are building AI, they’re using terms that we’re not using today. That you should be familiar with. I’m working with a startup in Clickstream. They’re one of those people in product management to watch what your customers do for you so that you can see the problems with the website, with the app, and so on and so forth. It’s like a Click I don’t know, it’s like full story, right? Something like that. But those products, because of the era of technology we’re in, they could only tell you there’s a problem. In the future, products like that will watch your customers, identify the problem, identify the top five. If you’re paying attention, it’s like the traffic, the problem identification, filtering. They’ll know your existing code base, they’ll write the PRD and write the code to fix it all automatically. With these tools, founders can be more ambitious. They can only do a little bit of a thing. The things you couldn’t do, you’re going to be able to do.

– Oji Udezue

I think hard about getting to what people actually want. I don’t want people to watch my traffic. I want to watch my traffic, identify problems, and fix them. That’s the new startup. Clickstream watching is no longer enough. Get fundamental, paint natively, or you’ll be disrupted over the next 10 years. Even then, stay frost, keep your head on swivel. There’s so much going on we have to keep up with.

– Joran

There’s a lot of things you need to be catching up and being part of, I guess, nowadays to keep up on things. Let’s start wrapping things up. We’ll dive into famous questions of the podcast. When we talk about in general, regarding growing a B2B SaaS, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who’s just starting out and to 10K money recurring revenue?

– Ezinne Udezue

First, AI. Everything wants to be AI. But again, think of it as a tool. A toolkit, actually, more. For Focus on the core problem and then power it with AI. But the one that I think is enduring, that is really important is that no matter what you think, the people you surround yourself with are going to be critical for your success, period. Culture is a compounding engine for you, and you need to guard it early. You’re only one person, and you can only do what one person can do. As a result, who you bring on board to help you bring this stream to be is critical because two people can do way more and three people can then… It’s just a compounding effect. To be thoughtful about bringing your first partner and all the other folks that come alongside. I know it’s not a tech response, but that’s the heart of where I am. I really think that your culture and your people are truly your compounding engine, and you need to be thoughtful, guarded early, and plan well for it.

– Oji Udezue

My advice is super simple. To get to 10K MRR, the only thing that really matters is product-market fit. What you should be doing is you should be building and listening. You should be building with your customers as much as possible. Try not to trust your taste-making yourself. Build and listen to get to 10K MRR. And the money part of it, the 10K part, is a little connected to the science of growth. You don’t have to be a full-on growth organization. Well, you do have to pay attention to the first 5 minutes, 10 minutes, the journey into your main product to get to 10K MRR. I think that number-I would say earlier on, Growth is the main thing. But to get to actually 10K, you have to get the product market fit, and then you have to pay a little bit of attention to the journey in. I think that’s the thing I would ask you to focus on. Now, to enable that isn’t as in as right, you have to marshal a team that’s paying attention to the right things and ignoring the things that you can defer. And they have to be some of the smartest and most motivated people that you have.

– Oji Udezue

And it’ll be great if you have a co founder to help you think about problems, and whether it’s emotional, organizational, or otherwise, I think that’s very important.

– Joran

Let’s assume now we pass the 10K MRR and we’re going to make a huge step. I know we’re going to grow towards 10 million AR. What advice would you give here?

– Ezinne Udezue

I think your product system matters. In order to get to 10 million, you’re going to have to be obsessed. Obsessed. Obsessed. So build something worthy of obsession. I think that where a lot of people get tripped up about is that they have a plan. They now have ICT, and they’ve built a roadmap. So I think that My advice is don’t fall in love with your roadmap. Fall in love with your customer and their messy life. All the things they’re doing, the things around them, the things that distract them from their job, know that intimately and be able to design around that. In order for you to go from 10K to 10 million, you’re going to have some level of obsession. So make sure you’re working on things that are worthy of obsession. You have to be your obsession, their obsession. So just make sure you’re finessing or finding and taking a look at that roadmap in a way that just makes sense. And it’s worth waking up every single moment to go work on because that’s what it’s going to take.

– Oji Udezue

Tell me on AI, a lot of it is knowing what and what not to do. Your revenue engine must be tuned. Your growth engine must start to really take shape because that’s basically the path, especially for B2B services, collecting money. Internally, you have to start to design an organization that can repeat innovation. How many people do you have? What do they do? How to keep that small without overgrowing? Because otherwise, you’re just relying on investors, and you’re not relying on getting profitable as soon as possible. There’s this idea that we talk about, it’s also in the book, about work it on things that are the hardest part of what your customer finds the hardest always. Work on things that have no good workaround. Accountly, we didn’t give you a way to send a link. We could have built it into the product. Send link, put email, send. We didn’t do that because we knew that people could copy the link and send it themselves. They had email, they had slack, and so on and so forth. We didn’t want to replicate the communication part of it. We wanted to replicate the scheduling part, which was very difficult.

– Oji Udezue

People was like, Why can’t you do this? I’m like, People know how to do it, and so we won’t work on that problem. Work on the hardest parts of the workflow that you can, not the ones that just deliver mere convenience. Obs is good, but not if you haven’t worked on the hardest parts people still experience for the core workflow you’re working on. And this goes back to the roadmap. I’m thinking about the revenue side of this because you’re talking about ARR. And so those are the things that I would say that you have to focus on. I’m sure there’s more where that occurs to me at the moment.

– Ezinne Udezue

The other one I need to My core is the DO, decisions when you’re not in the room. In order for you to actually go from 10K to 10 million, you’ve got to figure out. Honestly, and this is where we talk about product system, your decisioning, your strategy. How is it that you are clearly communicating where it is you want to go so that everybody in your building, everybody in the company, knows that I can make decisions and allow you to get to that 10 million? That’s a piece that I mentioned around culture, but it truly comes to life here in terms of being your compounding engine in how you communicate the way you’d like decisions to be made. And that comes down to being clear about your strategy and ensuring people can make decisions based that strategy when you, the founder, are not in it.

– Joran

Nice. I’m going to try and summarize. When we go all the way to the beginning, product management is a craft. Create a product that people love, and more specifically, people need. So starting out, find a sharp problem, solve it so people actually need it. Good thing, it doesn’t have to be your problem, so it can be anybody’s problem, as long as it’s a sharp problem. And keep sharpening the problem in your ICP from the beginning. But listen to the right customers when you actually do so. When you do this, next, build a product, keep it simple, lovable, and complete, and really filter for what people need versus what they want. Don’t charge too early. You gave the Calendly example, really build a user base first. When we chop it up into revenue stages, going from zero to one million, product-market fit focus, be part of their workflows. They care about your product, build and listen, and try to build variety as soon as possible. It will definitely help you decrease your customer acquisition cost, going from 1 million to 10 million ARR. Be clear on solving your problem and who are you focusing on, so to make sure you keep refining your ICP and fall in love with your customers, not your roadmap.

– Joran

And then design an organization to repeat innovation. Going from 10 million to 30 million AR, focusing on building processes, building a great team, and of course, check if you can have a network effect where it is when a new user comes on board, everybody else benefits it. But it only becomes important when you hit critical mass and we’re going from 30 million to $100 million AR, create a moat. Of all these phases, you can’t have the same mentality. So going into different phases, make sure that you know that what worked before won’t work in the next phase, probably. Looking at AI, have it become your teammate? If you haven’t built or if you have built your product before the AI phase, rethink your product strategy because otherwise you’re going to be disrupted.

– Oji Udezue

Oh, my God. That’s a SaaS product right there. That your summarization engine is an actual product. When can we see that?

– Joran

We’re going to sell it soon. If people love this story, if people love this episode. I talked about one book, but you, at the beginning, actually mentioned you wrote a second book. So you have one book called Building Rocketships: Product Management for High-Growth Companies. What is the second book called?

– Ezinne Udezue

It’s still the same book. It’s called the Pro Edition. So we wrote that book, and it has the core of what it is that we speak of. But we chose to create worksheets, templates, all the tools that we, Oje and I, have collectively used throughout our entire career. It’s a great because some founders have actually never worked in product management in companies that have these tools. We have this thing that is on this book. It’s on Coda. You can actually download templates. We have step-by-step guides. We We teach you things like how you calculate a fit factor? What are the step-by-step guides for having a strategic meeting and getting alignment across the organization? We go into that type of depth. That’s what we call the Building Workerships Pro Edition. Available online through Coda, and you can get it at productmind. Co/brpro, correct?

– Oji Udezue

Yes, brpro.

– Joran

We’re going to link to it, so I’ll make I’m sure that the link is correct. If people want to get in contact with both of you, what is the best way to do so?

– Oji Udezue

You can hit us up. If you go to productmind. Co, the CEO, you’ll see us. We write important things for founders and product managers on Substack. It’s called the productmind Substack. Linkedin. Social. But honestly, the best way to substract is substack. One of the things that we’re trying to create a community, a Slack community of product managers and builders is growing slowly. And just as a time. Our heart is to help founders and product managers build important things in the world. That’s really what it is. We don’t like the fact that a lot of product manager knowledge is locked up in the Bay Area, locked up in Seattle. And even We want the world to drown in really good advice, just like your podcast does. That’s what we’re trying to do.

– Joran

Nice. As you mentioned, things compound. You mentioned, a subsect might be small now, but who knows? It is going to compound over time, and we’re going to make it more famous now. Check out the subtext. We’ll make sure to link it for product managers and builders out there. Thanks again for coming on. For people listening on Spotify, I’m going to add a poll again to this episode, so please answer the poll so I know what you thought of this episode. And of course, if you haven’t, give us a review, please do so so we can boost the algorithms on all the platforms. Thanks again for coming on, OJ and Azeen. Thank you. Thank you.

– Oji Udezue

I really appreciate it.

– Ezinne Udezue

Thank you for having us.

– Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the 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 Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.