SaaS Breakthrough

Meet Len Markidan, the CMO of Podia, a platform for creators to sell online courses, membership sites and digital downloads. In this episode we talk about the journey Podia went through from their early name Coach to the amazing online platform they are today. You'll hear about the importance of early customer research and the reminder of why these foundational principles are so critical in marketing. You'll find out about the three primary channels that have been extremely effective for growth for Podia, how to create content with a perfect balance of art and science, and finally about partnerships, influencers and events. Len provided lots of actionable content that you can learn from and take away from!

Meet Daniel Twigg, the marketing manager at Cyclr, an integration platform for SaaS. Daniel is a "Jack of all trades" digital marketer, with over 9 years experience working in B2B marketing in areas including tech and IoT. In this episode, you'll hear exactly what Cyclr has done to find product-market fit and the early stage pivot that changed their business. You'll find out how they use direct partnerships and reach out for validation and direct revenue growth early on. Finally, you'll learn about the SEO and awareness driven content that Daniel helped create and how Cyclr uses a unique system for it and their live events strategy and what worked at SaaStock. Enjoy this episode!

Meet Maria Willoch, VP of Sales and Marketing at the video creation platform VIBBIO. Maria has spent her career in customer acquisition, the past five years in the video marketing space alone. In this episode, you'll learn how to set proper expectations coming into a VP role in an early stage SaaS company, how you should think of a Beta process to get feedback and how to actually get valuable feedback. You'll hear about the struggles to find your ICP early on, how not having an ad budget didn't deter the VIBBIO team at all from finding great growth strategies and the testing mentality needed to fail fast and find winning channels. This is a really interesting episode taking us through an early stage phase to an acquisition phase of this company.

Meet Miles DePaul, Head of North American Marketing at Mailjet, the email service provider for teams with customers like Product Hunt, Avis, MIT, and more. Miles oversees the growth of the Mailjet brand across the US and Canada, including content marketing, events, branding, and demand generation. On this episode, you'll learn about the expansion of Mailjet from Europe to North America and how they made that journey, how the core of product can help you grow the business and really dial in your marketing language, how marketing conversations can influence the product in a way that creates amazing marketing initiatives back to the team, engineering as a marketing concept and what they're doing in Mailjet, new products launching soon and the challenge for us all in 2019. This was a really fantastic episode, lucky I got to meet these guys at SaaStock in Dublin. Enjoy!

Meet Olivia Milton, CMO, and Lucy Literado, VP of Marketing, at Reply.io - an email platform that automates one-to-many communication, dramatically scaling your outreach capability, while keeping it 100% personal. In this episode, you'll hear about the growth of Reply and the constantly evolving ideal customer profile and how as a marketer, you should be looking to educate yourself and the company on that evolving profile. You'll hear how the Reply team has grown to over 50 team members using acquisition channels like content marketing, webinars, and PPC campaigns. You'll learn how they view education in the funnel and how it's part of that acquisition process and finally, we discuss where they believe marketing is going in 2019. It's a fun episode with 2 guests interviewed together so we get to hear different perspectives and I think that gave so much more clarity to how they feel and what they're doing. Enjoy!

Welcome to this special SaaS Breakthrough episode with our host, David Abrams of Demio. In this episode, David takes on a Journey inside of Demio over the past month and the top lessons Demio took away from SaaStock 2018 in Dublin. In this episode we go behind-the-scenes of the release of one of the biggest features ever at Demio - Automated Webinars. David goes through the entire launch, covers the launch strategy, what worked well, and the lessons taken from it. Then we move into the 4 Top takeaways they got from attending SaaStock 2018 in Dublin and how they impact the future for SaaS companies and SaaS Marketing.

Meet Adam Tanguay, Head of Marketing at Webflow, a web platform that gives designers and developers the ability to design, build, and launch responsive websites visually while writing clean semantic code for you. In this episode, you'll learn about their challenges as a web builder in a competitive space, how they tell their unique story, the channels that have been incredibly successful to bring them to over 1 million users, and how they've optimized Youtube and referral channels to maximize acquisition. It's a wonderful episode full of thoughtful insights, you'll definitely want to take down notes on this episode!

Meet Neil Roy, Head of Marketing for FusionCharts, a JavaScript charting library for Developers. Neil has 6 Years in Marketing, with a deep focus on Digital & SaaS marketing. This episode has a unique format and is a bit longer than usual. The goal set for this episode was to outline what FusionCharts' marketing plans are for the next 3 or 4 months, so you get to see the process that went into thinking and organizing these objectives and then we'll circle back later on, on another episode, to go back through experiments run, all the wins and losses and any major lessons learned. Neil brought so many details and so much transparency to what they're doing, that you're absolutely going to love this episode.

Meet Ronii Bartles, the Director of Marketing at VROOMRes where she leads overall branding, marketing planning, and strategy. Her strong background in consumer behavior research gives VROOMRes an edge on understanding its customers to meet organizational goals. In this episode, you'll learn about the critical things that you need to think about when starting an early stage SaaS company in a crowded and competitive marketplace and the long term and the marketing choices VROOMRes had to make. You'll hear about the SEO strategies that have produced direct ROI to their business and how they are using Instagram to reach a unique customer persona for their business, outside of their primary persona, to generate MQL's. Finally, you'll find out about the really exciting things coming up for this company in the next few months. Ronii brought a ton of great energy and enthusiasm and we go through a ton of great information. It's a really cool conversation to hear!

Meet Andrew Guttormsen, recently the VP of Growth and Marketing at Teachable for the last three years and currently transitioning to a new role working on special projects to launch a brand new business unit at Teachable. On this episode you'll hear about the steps, the growth pains and the growth strategies that Teachable went through to take their company from $10,000 a month when Andrew joined, to 15 Million ARR. You'll find out what the one growth strategy they leveraged early on and how now they're using online summits to generate up to 60,000 leads at a given time and get an insane influx of annual sales. You'll love to learn their framework to run profitable summits and what is the one thing that matters the most to ensure success with summits. We end the episode talking about where the Teachable system is headed to revolutionize the membership marketplace, exciting times ahead!

Meet Kira Mondrus - a multi-award-winning recognized industry thought leader and CMO at QASymphony, a company that helps enterprises prioritize quality, develop more reliable software and increase speed to market. Kira's nearly 20-year B2B technology marketing track record of success includes companies ranging from start-ups to multi-billion-dollar enterprises. In this episode, you'll hear about the buyer centric demand generation machine that Kira was able to set up, how multi-touch point marketing qualification is the most essential part for them to go through that process and how networking can be a powerful middle of the funnel relationship builder (plus the brilliant way they use it). You'll also hear why webinars are the most powerful content mechanism for marketing and why they're so powerful in that middle of the funnel area. Enjoy!

Meet Carolyn Mumby the CEO of Eledecks which helps HR managers get their life back by decentralizing HR and enabling managers across the business. Carolyn founded it in 2004 and pivoted in 2016 to a SaaS model for customers to contract with via subscriptions. On this episode, you'll hear how Eledecks had to find a distribution channel when first starting out and how they did that by finding value added resellers or VARs and how they can be an insanely powerful marketing channel to lean on early. You'll learn how webinars and micro funnels will scale the referral process up and how you can implement them as well, how social proof may change the way businesses connect online and also about Carolyn and Eledecks' biggest marketing win after 14 years of running an online company. Carolyn is a regular listener of the SaaS breakthrough show and we discuss her favorite episode and what she has been implementing from it. It's an amazing, amazing episode.

Meet Jake Braly, the VP of Marketing at Highspot. Jake is responsible for market development and global growth. Highspot is a sales enablement solution loved by sales reps. Previously, Jake led product marketing and go-to-market strategy for Apptio’s top grossing products through to its successful IPO. In this episode, you'll learn why understanding market awareness is essential for the perfect product-market fit. Jake also tells us how to use your own product to showcase results and get great product innovation ideas. You'll hear how a combination of Account Based Marketing and direct mail has produced amazing results for Highspot. We go into detail about how they create powerful call to actions with those direct mail campaigns. Finally, you'll find out how marketing is evolving for Highspot in a competitive and changing marketplace, and what's their focus for the rest of the year. Enjoy!

Meet Chris Davis, the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign. Chris is responsible for creating and organizing content that helps business owners use marketing automation properly. In this episode he breaks down the amazing journey that ActiveCampaign has gone through to become a leader in email marketing. You'll hear what Chris did to set up and launch an extremely effective education department from scratch, and the secrets he discovered while building it. We talk about the internal vs external education methods, and why as a SaaS company you need to double down on both. And you'll learn the winning formula that ActiveCampaign has used in a very, very competitive market to push growth forward and do it quickly. Chris is an extraordinary speaker and educator and you'll learn a lot just listening to him. Enjoy!

Meet Kasey Byrne, a software-engineer-turned-marketer, currently leading marketing at Postman - the only complete API development environment and an invaluable tool for every developer working with APIs. In this episode, you'll learn how Postman started their journey and their insane organic acquisition. We also talk about the birth of the paid program out of that organic growth and the challenge it has brought to marketing. We discuss how Postman considers education to be the most powerful channel for revenue growth, and what the future of education inside of SaaS actually looks like. You'll hear about education from a different standpoint, in the case of a tougher market, when acquisition isn't really where you put all your effort. Instead you look at revenue expansion, growing lifetime value and increasing product usage. Kasey also talks about the biggest changes coming to marketing that you need to know. It's a really, really powerful episode. Enjoy!