Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast Evergreen Podcasts

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve a global challenge: helping field sales sell more and faster. My guest is Zach Barney, Co-founder and CEO of Mobly.
Zach Barney is an experienced SaaS sales leader and entrepreneur. He has been building and leading SaaS sales teams since 2010 at companies like Vehlo, Nearmap, Teem, and HireVue. Over his career, he has personally closed over $4 million in ARR, and his teams have closed over $40 million. 
In 2023, he co-founded Mobly to reduce the high percentage (+25%) of sales activity that never gets logged into CRM systems.
Their mission: To redefine lead capture and qualification for event marketers.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Zach to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the lead generation process at in-person events. Zach explains his journey with Mobly to solve this problem - and elaborates how this fits in a much broader vision. He elaborates on the big lessons he learned around gaining traction and using pricing as a lever for growth. Lastly, he elaborates on how he's building a moat around his product.

Here's one of his quotes
We learned that we needed to change our pricing model. Our first handful of customers we were grossly under-charging them and it was largely due to the fact that we were pricing based on the number of seats. Somebody would openly tell us 'Yeah, well this person can share the license with this person.' So, we realized 'I guess we made a mistake on how we price this because this should be like a $20,000 contract and you're telling me that you're gonna pay 2000…'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How he and his co-founder managed to get very comfortable doubling down on building a product without hardly spending anything.

What he changed to his pricing strategy to increase average deal-size AND make grow each customer account from there onwards.

What strategic choices he made around phasing his product strategy to ensure they got traction as early as possible - and keep growing it.

Why he's decided to build defensible differentiation around data and not features. 



For more information about the guest from this week:

Zach Barney

Website: Mobly




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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to outcompete everyone in the category. My guest is JJ (Projjal) Ghatak, Co-founder & CEO of OnLoop.
JJ (Projjal) is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He held business leadership roles across technology (Uber), management consulting (Accenture Strategy) and corporate development (Essar Capital). Besides that, he's a proud naturalized Singaporean, SMU Scholar, Stanford MBA, and awarded World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2022.
In 2020, JJ founded OnLoop in an attempt to solve a problem he'd experienced throughout his career: How hard it is for managers to turn high potential individuals into high performing teams. 
Their mission: Convert every manager in the world into a great manager. 
And this inspired me, and hence I invited JJ to my podcast. We explore the broken world of employee & team performance. JJ shares his journey of solving this problem by driving everyday habits and feedback rather than mere documentation. He shares his biggest lessons on creating product market fit, demand generation, and how to strategically prioritize your focus as a CEO as your company evolves. Lastly, he elaborates on his approach to challenge the status quo and outcompete established players. 

Here's one of his quotes
Most enterprise software is built as a System of Record. So if you look at employee engagement software, what it is, is a quarterly survey, which is then creating dashboards and data. And so it's a System of Record, not a System of Action. 
What you need to drive behavior is a System of Action. So if you think about it from another analogy, people understand is, you don't get fit by doing an annual health checkup every three months. You get fit by going to the gym. And actually 10,000 steps is the best thing that happened to fitness because it made it very easy to drive a system of action. And we think about team health and team performance in the exact same way

During this interview, you will learn four things:

The framework JJ is using to help him ensure he's focused on the most impactful priority on his list - every day.

That founders should focus on creating value, and salespeople on capturing value. And why it will hurt you if you mix this up.

His perspective on identifying their ideal customer segment to capture value and scale revenue in a predictable, repeatable way.

His first principles when it comes to building remarkable products.



For more information about the guest from this week:

JJ (Projjal) Ghatak

Website: OnLoop




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My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.



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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to win the global content plagiarism battle. My guest is Jon Gillham, CEO of Originality AI. 
Jon Gillham is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. Before he started his SaaS business, he ran a content marketing agency. 
Having been one of the earliest adopters of generative AI through his agency, he understood the wave of plagiarism problems that was coming, even before Chat GPT and GPT-4 were released.
That became the founding idea behind Originality AI - a company he founded in November 2022.
Their mission: help Web Publishers be sure they are producing Original Content and can hit publish with integrity.
This means: publishing unique, Human-Created content ... the kind Google and we, the readers wants!
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of AI-generated content -and how this impacts trust. Jon shares the challenges he's faced on his journey to solve the problem. He also explains why he decided to focus on a very specific niche and not education, while he was offered contracts with brand names as big as Harvard and Purdue. Lastly, he elaborates how they are able to build extremely competitive products with just 1 simple organizational tweak.

Here's one of his quotes
We built and ended up launching the weekend before Chat GPT launched. And when Chat GPT launched it kind of blew things up. We had people coming from all different parts of the world. Academia was coming our way. User-generated sites were coming our way to say - this is now a problem that we need to wrestle with.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

What to do / not to do when you want to create defensible differentiation with your product.

Why he turned away very big sales opportunities - and why that was a critical, but right choice.

How he maintained a good work-life balance (and what he learned from that in hind-sight).

How to outperform all your competitors on review sites.



For more information about the guest from this week:

Jon Gillham

Website: Originality AI




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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to tackle a very challenging industry problem and scale impact. My guest is Theo Saville, Co-founder and CEO of CloudNC
Theo is a Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineer (M.Eng, University of Warwick), with a background in defense, laser-based metals 3D printing research at Warwick Manufacturing Group, and sales. 
He entered metals 3D printing expecting to be able to harness a technology ready to disrupt manufacturing but gradually became disillusioned with the state and future applicability of the technology.
When he was exposed to CNC machining, he quickly realized its disruptive potential if it could be automated to the same degree as plastic 3D printing. 
And that led him to co-found CloudNC in 2015.
Their mission: to make single-click manufacture a reality.
And this inspired me, and hence I invited Theo to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's manufacturing world and how that's growing to a $400 billion industry. Theo shares his journey of solving a complex problem in a very unusual - but effective way. He elaborates how they're looking for leverage in everything - and how that's led to using video marketing to get over 10M+ impressions a month - showcasing software to automate machines. Last but not least, he stresses the importance of setting clear objectives - especially as your startup scales. 

Here's one of his quotes
The idea was to first build software that makes it automatic to program these machines. And we raised our seed rounds on the basis of that. We realized after, I think, two or three years that it would take 10 years to actually build software that was capable enough to be saleable to any factory with these machines, there's just too much variation from factory to factory. So we went, I know, let's reduce the complexity of the problem. Let's build our own factory, make it really simple and standardized, and then copy and paste factories, and in that way, disrupt the industry. 

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How they pivoted from selling a new platform to individual manufacturers to a model where they simply plug in what they already use.  

What made them decide to move from a product-led sales approach to an eco-system-led sales approach?

How they created defensible differentiation and a unique value proposition in the very crowded market for manufacturing software.

What unusual opportunities niching down has provided them.


For more information about the guest from this week:

Theo Saville

Website: CloudNC




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My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve the non-trivial testing problems of some companies that we all blindly rely on . My guest is Harpreet Singh, Co-CEO of Launchable.
Harpreet is an entrepreneur, innovator, developer, creative product leader, and seasoned DevOps leader who has dedicated his life to building new solutions for software teams. He's got extensive product marketing & Product management experience at Sun Microsystems.  Then helped CloudBees find product market fit and create a business based on OSS that scaled to multi-millions in ARR. Then moved to Atlassian where be became the GM for Atlassian Bitbucket, where he helped set the blueprint of what became the strategy at Atlassian to embrace DevOps tools in the market.
In September 2019 he co-founded Launchable and shares the CEO role.  
Their mission: Help dev teams launch fearlessly. Their point of view: 80% of software tests are pointless. We’ll help you see the 20% that matters most.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Harpreet to my podcast. We explore what's broken around software testing these days. Harpreet provides his vision of how to address this. He elaborates on the journey of building an AI-powered software delivery platform and shares his most valuable go-to-market lessons - particularly why he didn't opt for a product-led growth motion and how he avoided getting stuck in red oceans. Last but not least, he shares his advice to peer SaaS CEOs on scaling their businesses while staying true to their core mission.

Here's one of his quotes
I spent a year and a half at Atlassian. They are the Gurus of product lead growth. So I got to see that close enough. And I came in and said we should probably do this. And I came to the realization that it's not one size fits all. Different teams have different needs, and the kinds we are serving have very different needs, then this product led growth.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

His lessons on how to simplify customer communication so it resonates optimally. 

His advise on how to go beyond the obvious and find the biggest possible problem to solve for your ideal customers.

How to choose your Go-to-Market model and what specifics to look for 

How he landed BMW as one of his early customers and what that taught him.


For more information about the guest from this week:

Harpreet Singh

Website: Launchable



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My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to create meaningful global change by making problem creators responsible for solving it together through technology. My guest is Oscar Rundqvist, CEO of eComID. 
Oscar is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. A massive mission. He's founded and led multiple companies since 2010 - and has also gained experience as an investment analyst and head of growth and digital experience in online retail. 
In September 2023 he co-founded eComID - based on negative trend he saw developing after COVID in online retail: A rapidly growing global returns problem.
Their mission: To help the fashion industry reduce online product returns, shrink the environmental footprint, and guide shoppers to discover and buy products they'll truly love.
This inspired me, and hence, I invited Oscar to my podcast. We explore how online shopping is broken and created a massive global retail returns problem - both in cost, waste and emissions. Oscar explains his vision of how to solve this with technology and by getting an entire industry to work together in new ways. He then shares his first principles for building a lean SaaS business that moves the needle impact-wise. Lastly, he elaborates on his lessons learned to stay nimble and avoid making fatal mistakes.

Here's one of his quotes
Coming from the industry, we managed to take the right decisions often. But we did it by taking a lot of bad decisions, but we found them really fast. So, what we do is that we explore a lot of different things. When we have something, for example, a feature idea, let's imagine that we explore 50 different ideas at the same time, but then we always keep the retailers very close. So we have weekly meetings with all of the retailers that we work with right now to always validate and align the need. 

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to get an entire industry to collaborate on solving the same problem. 

Why he doesn't fear competition, and is actually cheering them to take on the opportunity.

His first principle on keeping the focus on moving the needle in the leanest possible way.

Different ways to build trust with organizations that are 1000+ times the size of your startup.


For more information about the guest from this week:

Oscar Rundqvist

Website: eComID





Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection
Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here
Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed
(Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say)
My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable.

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